¡°We so seldom declare what a thing is except by saying it is something else,¡± said George Eliot. That our thinking is steeped in metaphor ¨C constantly making what we perceive more, or other, than it is ¨C is the premise of Freudianism. Freud, however, for all his boundary-dissolving, assumed that humans have, virtually from birth, a sense of boundaried individual selfhood. It was Melanie Klein¡¯s ¡°object relations theory¡± that elucidated the baby¡¯s initial symbiosis with the mother, and Donald Winnicott who claimed that we necessarily ¡°learn to be alone¡± by internalising the ¡°holding environment¡± that the mother at first provides.

Alicia Mireles Christoff argues that the impact of the Victorian novel on psychoanalysis, and the ¡°profound relationality¡± of novel reading, has been underestimated. Looking at Thomas Hardy¡¯s Tess of the D¡¯Urbervilles and The Return of the Native, and George Eliot¡¯s Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, in the light of psychoanalytic theories, mainly those of Winnicott, Christopher Bollas and Wilfred Bion, she delicately analyses the way Hardy¡¯s intermingling of mood and landscape (what Ruskin, pejoratively, called the pathetic fallacy) embraces not only his characters but also the reader.

We don¡¯t have to decide, says Christoff, whether the ¡°tightly-wrapped buds¡±, soft brown fern or fetid fungi ¡°belong to inner or outer reality¡±. When Tess wanders through rank, juicy grass, we lasciviously feel her damp, naked arms with our fingertips, yet simultaneously sense the sap and cuckoo-spittle as if her skin ¡°were our own¡±. We simultaneously watch and inhabit Tess, and ourselves; and this sense of observed interiority is, says Christoff, what Victorian novels and psychoanalysis have helped to foster. For Hardy, objects are often ¡°located indeterminately between the physical and metaphysical¡±. Often his characters ¡°charge¡± the surrounding air, conveying ¡°moods, views of the world, and ways of being that are palpably felt by others¡±. With Eliot, too, thought and feeling, rather than being watertight, can be pooled between two people. The joys of what Winnicott calls ¡°unintegration¡± (the baby¡¯s state) can be recovered. But equally (Christoff quotes Bollas), in aesthetic experience we relive the baby¡¯s ¡°uncanny fusion¡±.

Both Hardy and Eliot, as Christoff shows, dizzyingly shift the reader¡¯s focus from the intensely close-up (dried-up harebells whispering, motes dancing in light and the ¡°roar on the other side of silence¡±) to vast expanses of space and time. ¡°Spaces are never just themselves,¡± she says. She insists on Hardy¡¯s ¡°under-remarked geopolitical imagination¡± ¨C in charting the minute differences in soil, crops and plants across Egdon Heath, he ¡°asks us¡± to see this ¡°hyperlocal setting¡± as somehow incorporating the history and geography of Britain¡¯s empire. Eliot¡¯s Maggie Tulliver is deliberately ¡°racialized¡± by constant references to her brown skin, as is Hardy¡¯s dark-eyed Eustacia Vye, who acts the Turkish knight in the mummers¡¯ play. ¡°Colonial and decolonial struggle¡±, Christoff claims, are the unacknowledged fault-lines in Victorian fiction.

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Christoff writes beautifully and passionately, and her interpretations are fascinating, but the blurring of temporal boundaries can be anachronistic, and feels time-bound itself. Eliot is reprimanded for presenting the gypsies as alien, and Hardy for ending Return of the Native with the ¡°white nationalist celebration¡± of dancing round a maypole. Christoff is determined to extend literary criticism ¡°into a new and newly expansive ¡®we¡¯¡±, but sometimes seems to be stuck in a particular 21st-century moralism.

Jane O¡¯Grady is a co-founder of the London School of Philosophy and taught philosophy of psychology at?City, University of London. She is also the author of?Enlightenment Philosophy in a Nutshell?(2019).

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Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis
By Alicia Mireles Christoff
Princeton University Press, 288pp, ?34.00
ISBN 9780691193106
Published 17 December 2019