Cloud-Borne Angels, Prophets and the Old Woman's Flower-Pot: Reading George Eliot's Realism alongside Spinoza's 'beings of the imagination' In J\1emoriam Mary Patricia Patton Moira Gatens A lthough enormously popular in her lifetime, by the early twentieth century George Eliot's novels had fallen from favour. It was ER. Leavis, in his influential 1948 monograph The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, who revived interest in her work and guaranteed her place in the British canon as a great realist novelist. However, by the last quarter of the twentieth century it was this very achievement that made her a prime target. Poststructuralist literary theorists came to question what they saw as Eliot's naivety in supposing that language could be a transparent medium for the representation of reality. 1 By insisting on the materiality of language, and the production of subjects within and through language, they ventured that Eliot's realist novels were no more or less constructed than a Dadaist poem. What could realism mean if all reality is constructed in and through language and other signifying systems? Colin MacCabe, for example, criticised Eliot for assuming that her narratives offer a kind of 'transparent window onto an evident reality' (15, 37). Other critics complained that this window afforded little more than a partisan bourgeois perspective on nineteenth-century British culture and as such Eliot's view from the window is heavily tinged with conservative values (Gallagher). Feminist criticism of Eliot added to this accusation of bourgeois See, for example, Belsey. On the other hand, J. Hillis Miller posits Eliot's complex use of metaphor in Middlemarch as anticipating crucial aspects of deconstruction. For a comprehensive account of the great diversity in critical literary responses to Eliot from 1970 to the present see Atkinson (83-91).