SOURCE: “The Giaour's Campaign: Desire and the Other in Felix Holt, The Radical,” in Novel, Vol. 30, No. 2, Winter, 1997, pp. 237-58.

In the following essay, Carroll discusses George Eliot's characterization of Harold Transome in her novel Felix Holt, asserting that “he is as tainted by his identity as an imperialist Englishman as he is by his participation in barbaric Oriental custom.”

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...