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Binding the Will: George Eliot and the Practice of Promising

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.0.0017

1080-6547

Melissa J. Ganz,

Legal principles and applications

Binding the Will: George Eliot and the Practice of Promising Melissa J. Ganz Scholars have long noted George Eliot’s interest in the nature and limits of the human will, but they have paid little attention to her treatment of the practice of promising.1 In The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871–1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876), promises give rise to repeated conflicts and misunderstandings, crystallizing the tension between freedom and obligation that runs through Eliot’s work. The disputes typically occur in one of two ways. Egoists such as Tom Tulliver and Edward Casaubon attempt to pressure others into making promises that require them to act in self-defeating ways. Individuals such as Stephen Guest, Rosamond Vincy, and Gwendolen Harleth, by contrast, refuse to honor their own commitments, evincing a complete disregard for the ways in which other people construe their words and actions. Underlying both of these problems is a profound abuse of will and an unwillingness to consider other people’s feelings and perspectives. Outside the world of Eliot’s novels, moral philosophers, jurists, and social thinkers devoted considerable attention to the conflict between the individual will and the claims of others in the formation and interpretation of promises. Philosophers had been debating the nature and source of promissory obligations since at least the seventeenth century. Natural law thinkers such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke considered promises to be naturally binding; in their view, promises derived their force from people’s wills and intentions. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, philosophers’ ideas about promises began to change. Utilitarian thinkers such as William Paley and John Austin now located the source of promissory obligations in people’s expectations, privileging the reasonable interpretations of promisees over the actual intentions of promisors.2 At about the same time, jurists began to consider the nature of promissory obligations as they reformulated the law of contract. Whereas judges previously interpreted contracts in ways that affirmed communal understandings of fair exchange, now they sought to give effect only to [End Page 565] commitments that people freely and deliberately made. The new “will theory” of contract drew heavily upon natural law philosophy; according to this theory, individual promises, wills, and intentions themselves gave rise to contractual obligations. Judges, in fact, began to speak of a contract as a “meeting of minds.”3 In practice, however, they found it very difficult to uncover the intentions of contracting parties. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most judges had come to embrace an objective approach to contractual interpretation, relying upon external manifestations of intention as did utilitarian philosophers.4 In this essay, I read Eliot’s treatment of promises in the context of these changing ideas about consensual obligations, shedding light on questions that were important in her own time and that remain of deep interest to philosophers and legal scholars today. In doing so, I contribute to a debate among literary critics about the nature of Eliot’s ethical vision. A number of scholars have argued that Eliot’s novels fail to sustain the ideal of sympathetic relationships that the texts ostensibly espouse. These critics highlight the ways in which egoism, gender relations, and the indeterminacy of language undermine the fellow-feeling that Eliot seeks to promote.5 A close analysis of Eliot’s treatment of promises, however, suggests her strong commitment to an intersubjective model of human relationships. Like Paley, Austin, and Henry Sidgwick, and like a growing number of jurists in the middle of the nineteenth century, Eliot embraces an expansive conception of promises: she suggests that one becomes bound by a promise whenever one knowingly excites another’s expectations concerning the existence of an obligation, even though one does not intend to become bound. The willingness to abide by implicit promises and to honor the expectations that one raises in other minds is a crucial test of moral character in Eliot’s fiction. At the heart of this definition of promises lies Eliot’s belief in the importance of attending to the ways in which one’s words and actions affect other people. Although Eliot privileges external manifestations of intention over actual...