SOURCE: Gallagher, Catherine. “The Failure of Realism: Felix Holt.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35 (1980): 372-84.

In the following essay, Gallagher discusses Eliot's departure in Felix Holt from the conventions associated with English realism toward a more sophisticated narrative form.

In a London art gallery in 1861, two middle-aged women stand before a painting of a stork killing a toad. The painting provokes a short, sharp argument. The older woman dislikes it intensely, calling it coarse and amoral; the younger woman admires it, explaining, somewhat condescendingly, that the purpose of art is a careful delineation of the actual. Good art, she insists, must show the world as it is. The older woman then pointedly asks whether it would be good art to delineate carefully men on a raft eating a comrade. According to the older woman's later report, the question silences her companion.¹

In itself, the exchange is hardly remarkable. It seems still...