![]() We cannot be sure that any natures, however inflexible or peculiar, will resist this effect from a more massive being than their own. ![]() Much later in the novel, the narrator explains Rosamond's behavior with a maxim that harkens back to her plastic quality: The capacity of Rosamond's intent to overpower, indeed, literally to engulf that of her father is aligned with the potential of a fluid to envelop a rock, no matter how rigid or firm. The descriptive force of the figure inheres in the lively materiality of this "white soft living substance"-its soft texture, malleable form, unexplained animacy. Consider, as an initial example, Eliot's description of Rosamond's persistence as that which "enables a white soft living substance to make its way in spite of opposing rock." Importantly, this description of Rosamond's tenacity relies not only on the reader's experience of human intentionality but also on her abstract sensual awareness of the basic properties of matter-in this case, the properties of fluids, which have the capacity to envelop solid bodies due to the sensitivity of their structure to encounter. The characterological bodies that form the focus of this essay are thus not verisimilitudinous human anatomies with faces and limbs. In so doing, I suggest that even the most notoriously "brainy" of novels-on the level of its descriptions-resists a too-easy alignment of its characters with individual human psychologies. Tracking Eliot's construction of a layer of descriptions of characters as soft matter-as liquids, polymers, and other types of condensed matter in a malleable state-I elucidate what I call a physics of character from within the pages of Middlemarch. Deidre Lynch has shown how the protocols of interiority attributed to the novelistic modes of characterization were not endemic to the novel genre, but emerged, rather, in attempts to "validate and naturalize a concept of character as representational." Extending and elaborating upon Lynch's thesis, I show how, in conversation with nineteenth-century materialist science, Eliot pushed back against the interiorized novelistic subject so often attributed to her by producing not only sympathetic and real-seeming minds but also lively and responsive characterological bodies. To elide the distinction between the human psychology and what I will refer to as its material substrate-character-however, risks overlooking the extent to which Eliot approaches subjectivity as an impersonal structure formed not just through intentional acts such as thought or speech but through physical actions and reactions as well. George Eliot's 1874 novel Middlemarch is said to both thematize and foster intersubjectivity through its psychologically rich and detailed portrait of human life.
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