SOURCE: Carroll, Alicia. “The Giaour's Campaign: Desire and the Other in Felix Holt, The Radical.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 30, no. 2 (winter 1997): 237-58.

In the following essay, Carroll discusses Eliot's use of Orientalism in Felix Holt through the character of Harold Transome, who is neither English nor Eastern.

I.

George Eliot's novels of “English life” often touch upon the outer limits of empire (Felix Holt 79). But in her hands, the English novel may be less engaged in redrawing contemporary imperialist plots than in challenging them. Featuring a heavily Byronic, Eastern exoticism or Orientalism in Felix Holt, The Radical, Eliot creates a dialogue between otherness and desire that is mediated through a presence which is neither fully English nor authentically Eastern.¹ In doing so, she complicates Victorian notions of race in provocative, unconventional ways. With its seductive British national, at once a bastard, a gentleman, a radical political candidate...