A Signature Immateriality: Materiality and Interpretation in the Advertisements and Text of Middlemarch
By Owen Bromley
Kate Flint begins her chapter “The Materiality of Middlemarch” by arguing “reading is a physical activity. More than a response to the words on the page, more than the firing of the imagination… it entails a particular individual’s engagement with a particular object in a specific space or sequence of spaces” (65). Not only does this quote disprioritize traditions of oral history, it is fundamentally untrue. A certain physicality does exist in relation to all reading, inclusive of listening, but it has little to do with what the act of reading is. We must acknowledge first that words have no absolute meaning in themselves because they cannot replicate the signification of what they are a sign of. They instead approximate a signification by standing in for the signification a series of signs points towards; signs which themselves undergo the same process: the “incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier” (Lacan 419). The process of reading interprets and attempts to replicate this approximation. Every act of reading then is an act of writing, in that it must create pathways between signifiers and signifieds in order to begin any form of comprehension. As Derrida says “pure perception does not exist: we are written only by writing” (113). While a book is something physical and something which we must receive physically, the act of reading is necessarily a “system of relations between strata: of the Mystic Pad of the psyche, of society, of the world” (Derrida 113)—the "Mystic Pad" Derrida is referring to is Freud's Mystic Writing Pad, which is a model Derrida uses as he explains his conception of memory.
This is not to dismiss the many important instances of scholarship on materiality in relation to texts, I simply seek to highlight a unique property of language that separates the materiality of a text from materiality in a text. When Flint argues “what Middlemarch ultimately accomplishes… is to offer a clear rebuff to any temptation, whether in her time or ours, to separate the world of things from the life of the mind” (85), she misses that property of words that Casaubon, who she quotes (78), had understood: “mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to reconstruct it as it used to be” (Eliot, Middlemarch 13). Though language is always in a mode of trying to reconstruct something which has physically been lost, what Casaubon equally misses is that “since the transition to consciousness is not a derivative or repetitive writing, a transcription duplicating an unconscious writing, it occurs in an original manner and, in its very secondariness, it is originary and irreducible” (Derrida 93). Language, then, is absolutely originary in its attempt to reproduce: always in the form of a supplement which Derrida calls the signature of an individual (93).
In this paper I will examine how the relationship between interpretation and materiality of a series of advertisements that were originally printed before Book 1 of Middlemarch would have primed the reader to conflate interpretation with materiality. Performing such an analysis further will elucidate the novel’s own relationship to materiality, and I will argue that a distinct and important aspect of Middlemarch is how the novel prizes moments of interpretation that necessarily exist beyond material existence.
In her paper “What’s Not in Middlemarch” Gillian Beer does not only analyze advertisements which surround the text of Middlemarch, she also provides the important distinction that the style of Middlemarch is distinct and in contrast to the rural location Middlemarch: “the writing of Middlemarch is urban, cosmopolitan even” (17). This distinction instigates a tension between the text and the supposed materiality of a town. The difference evoked by this tension—which is not limited to the spacial, but the temporal as well (Derrida 103), and is equally present in the difference between when the novel is set and when it was written and when it is read, as well as the difference of power in life and death (as in James Eli Adams’ analysis “The Dead Hand”)—becomes the point at which a supplement can occur: “always already: repositories of a meaning which was never present, whose signified presence is always reconstituted by deferment, belatedly, supplementarily” (92).
The supplement’s evasive relationship to materiality ensures that we must equally look at what is supplementary to Beer’s text. That is to look at what is not materially present; we must look for what is not in “What’s Not in Middlemarch.” While Beer notes that inclusive in the many advertisements that begin the individual Middlemarch books (these ads that promote “Jewelry, chocolate, pens, fabrics, dyes, medicines, candles, indigestion cures, mourning clothes” (Beer 18)) is a self-reflexive advertisement for “Prose and Verse, Selected from the Works of George Eliot” (18), she ignores the larger topics of books being advertised at the beginning of Eliot’s book. In the advertisements which come at the start of Book 1 of Middlemarch (Eliot, “Miss Brooke,” frontmatter pp. 1-16 , there are only around two and a half pages of ads which are not advertisements for other books (on pages 3, 15, and 16 of the frontmatter). One who reads Middlemarch in its original printing might be expected to read these ads before having any encounter with the actual Middlemarch as if to prime the reader to put the text down in order to read something else if they ever get bored. While the genres and types of books within these many pages are diverse and beyond the scope of this paper, we shall still examine one.
The advertisment provided above is for a serial work which includes both illustrations and written text to accompany the illustrations. The ad itself, however, is entirely textual. The subject of this series is London, advertised as “a world in itself.” The virtues of this world, or rather the selling points, are the great deal of variety in its images: “it abounds in strange and marvelous contrasts…. Between Regent Street and Ratcliffe Highway there are pictures of light and shade, of night and morning, of men and manners, which present an endless and everchanging variety of subjects for artistic study.” Within these virtues we’re reminded of many similarities and differences to Middlemarch. Most notable is the setting, which is quite at odds with that of Middlemarch. The metropolitan world in itself of London contrasts the particularity of Middlemarch which is only “A Study of Provincial Life” as the subtitle suggests. Accompanying this distinction is the variety of subjects of London; and while Middlemarch is abounding with characters, the importance the advertisement places on contrasts within its characters, which opposes “men” to “manners,” implies it will heavily deal with a contrast in class and economic standings. The characters of Middlemarch instead share a relatively comparable class, and while there is the inclusion of more working class and even common labourers throughout the book, who often thwart and derail the ambitions of Middlemarcher’s (such as in the case of Mr. Brooke’s speech (Eliot, Middlemarch 342-6)), their inclusion, especially in book 1, usually comes from the distinct perspective of that common Middlemarch class. One can see this when Dorothea remarks “I think we should be beaten out of our beautiful houses… all of us who let tenants live in such sites as we see round us” (22).
In this quote we can see Derrida’s notion of deferment. While what is being spoken of is expressly the material conditions of different classes, the novel presents such distinction through the opinion of Dorothea, it has been deferred from its material condition and realized in an excessive supplement: “which seems to be added as a plenitude to a plenitude, is as well that which compensates for a lack” (Derrida 93). It gives a plentitude of opinion to an interpretation already present by reading the material conditions of the labouring class. The interpretation here becomes less of an interpretation of class, but a signature of Dorothea. This is not a criticism of Dorothea, nor the novel, and it is an integral method for contemplation. On this topic, I further note that Dorothea too, in her disavowal, suggests such a reading; upon her sister saying “she likes giving up” Dorothea replies “if that were true Celia, my giving-up would be self-indulgence, not self-mortification” (Eliot, Middlemarch 13).
The advertisement we’re examining would rather hide this conception of a supplement by trying to present the mode of contrast in one singular material visual artifact, wherein the perspective is uniform, and thus no supplement or signature can exist. It advertises the very idea of positioning, or “engraving,” the act of interpretation into a material reality, which has dominated the Middlemarch scholarship we have reviewed. The illustrations are positioned relative to the artist's experiences making “periodical pilgrimages to London… for the purpose of this great work,” and indeed the language is prized for the writer's “intimate knowledge of London.” While the act of reading a painting is no more material than reading a novel, the inclusion of this advertisement (in addition to the general preoccupation with selling more texts, wherein the book is conceived as a means to sell more books, rather than a singular item for which to interpret and re-interpret) would predispose the reader, and scholar, of Middlemarch to interpret the prevalent concern with materiality within the text as equivalent to the materiality of the text. It thus goes against the actual content and particularity of the novel.
Given our preoccupation with signatures in this paper, we might wish to examine an advertisement found in the frontmatter of book 1 for monograms. Monograms undergo the same process which we have just examined in the distortion of reading’s relation to material under the ideological force of capitalism. They mistreat the signature—which is by nature an act of surplus for the sense of “I” (otherwise called the ego) is not inherent to consciousness but a late formation of the psyche, required in the act of interpretation, but not to life—as something which can materialize the subject; a subject that Derrida claims would not exist apart from this ideological formation (113).
The inclusion of this advertisement, does not just reinforce our previous analysis, it is extremely intertwined with the text of book one. Though, as Beer notes, the advertisements were not selected by Eliot (18), they afford new avenues of interpretation, and alter how readers encounter the text. The monogram of this advertisement, with its illustration of a figure on horseback (likely a man, given they are riding astride and not side saddle, I note this, but believe it does not detract from the path we are taking), is deeply intertwined with Dorothea. For her, “riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of her conscientious qualms; she felt she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way and looked forward to renouncing it” (Eliot, Middlemarch 7). She is always looking forward to giving up riding, thus she is always deferring giving it up. What Dorothea is enjoying is her signature: the contradiction within her assertion of the sensuous nature of riding that would make it pleasurable to give it up along with her refusal to do so. The monogram advertisement, which appears before the novel begins, would prime us to think that the signature of Dorothea is related to horseback riding, when in fact it is the repetition and the dissonance between Dorothea’s feelings opposed to her actions that actually constitute a signature within the text of Middlemarch.
The signature is not the name “Miss Brooke” nor is it the particular feelings of a person by that name. It is instead a relationship of interpretation between characters, ideology, and materiality, done first by George Eliot, and then by the reader. We must then understand that Miss Brooke does not lose her signature by losing her name (Miss Brooke for Mrs. Casaubon), nor by her no longer being the central character, as she was in Book 1; it is rather the conflation of interpretation as material that hides the signature from us.
This stationary paper ad (that is the “Mourning Stationary for Ladies”) is yet another example of this. Gender essentialism (which the advertisement promotes as it implies that men and women mourn differently and might need different stationeries) crumbles under interpretation but can be supported as materiality obfuscates the need for interpretation. But there is more going on than just this, as Beer notes “these advertisements as often encode distress as they do greed” (34). There are two letters that appear inside the text of book 1 of Middlemarch, the first is Casaubon’s to Dorothea asking her to marry him, the second is her response accepting the offer.
From a contemporary perspective a marriage proposal in a letter is a strange thing. Whether it was considered strange in the 1830s does not concern us, for while normalization plays a large role into what is considered strange, we are able to analyze why it might be strange now to learn things about the letter’s relation to materiality which are not confined to shifting trends and biases. The first thing that we should note is that Casaubon is not being forced out of circumstance (such as distance) to use the letter for his proposal, he chooses to. Second, Casaubon’s letter reads as much as a job offering as a marriage proposal: “for in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need… the preoccupations of a work… towards the completion of a life’s plan” (Eliot, Middlemarch 30). And while Dorothea interprets this as love (31), Casaubon doesn’t use such a word. Quite contrary to Derrida’s conception of logocententrism, the letter has become the grounds of obscuring interpretation as the material gesture is misinterpreted as an act of love itself, even when its contents suggest something different.
This advertisement, then, once again influences readers to avoid interpretation through equating it to a material process: mourning becomes accomplished through purchasing; but the ad additionally expresses anxieties of gender differences which when analysed are able to deconstruct these initial avoidances. Further, and perhaps more notably for our specific contexts, the advertisement primes the reader of Middlemarch to connect the letters of book 1 to letters of mourning, and thus to mourn the loss of Dorothea’s own signature as a material loss, rather than a loss of interpretation.
While I have confined my analysis to the text and advertisements of Book 1 of Middlemarch, I believe this instance and regard for the signature and its realization in interpretation beyond materiality is a theme which occurs throughout all eight books. I have tried to demonstrate in my brief analysis how love, though it may have material deliveries at times, must ultimately be an act of interpretation. And this is certainly pushed to the extreme at the novel’s conclusion when Dorothea determines she cannot philanthropically help the people of Middlemarch and decides to relinquish her economic position by marrying Will Ladislaw in Book 8, allowing her to escape materiality’s obscuring of the signature. While labour and materiality are essential aspects in the Middlemarch people's lives and an integral lens through which they might interpret, there is also something originary in the act of reading that is beyond material confines, in both love as well as in the novel, which risks being hidden by treating the material as more real than the text.
Works Cited
Adams, James Eli. “The Dead Hand: George Eliot and the Burdens of Inheritance.” Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies, edited by Peter J. Capuano and Sue Zemka, Ohio State UP, 2020, pp. 128-47.
Beer, Gillian. “What’s not in Middlemarch.” Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Karen Chase, Oxford UP, 2006, pp. 15-35.
Derrida, Jacques. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Yale French Studies, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, vol. 48, 1972, pp. 74-117, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2929625.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Edited by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Norton Critical Ed., W.W. Norton, 2024.
---. Mrs Brook, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1871, Web. Vol. 1 of Middlemarch: A Story of Provincial Life. 8 vols. 1871-2.
Flint, Kate. “The Materiality of Middlemarch.” Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Karen Chase, Oxford UP, 2006, pp. 65-86.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, W. W. Norton, 2006.