The difference between the two models of the body—that is, between single and multiple narratives—helps to explain why the bodies that appear in Victorian novels function so differently from those of the early century, with which this study is primarily concerned. In the early part of the century, bodies are essentially sincere. Trotter is explicit on this point: “Many external signs correspond with our internal emotions. It is a difficult task, if at all possible, to wear the smile of gladness when the heart is sad. A nervous constitution is ill qualified to disguise its feelings” (NT, 81). In Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story, Miss Milner’s bodily signs are ambiguous, but the novel situates that ambiguity in the clumsy constructions of the interpreter, not in the expression of the subject, which has a definite meaning. The preoccupation with the possibility of dissemblance, embodied in the stock figure of the rake, is itself a consequence of this fundamental sincerity.^[5] For it presumes that the body has an essential meaning within it, one that can be dissembled but is nonetheless there. With its centralized authority, the single-narrative model supports a strong relationship between the particular signs of the body and a larger, generalizing totality that they represent.

In the new model, the structure of meaning in the body is diffused. It becomes a group of specific signs without the earlier security of an assumed reference to a central source of significance. Whereas in the early part of the century observers face the problem of misconstruing the body’s truthful signs or of being misled by deliberately false signs, in the new body they face the problem of signs that, although they have meaning, are inherently ambiguous. In one of several antiphysiognomy passages, George Eliot’s narrator in Adam Bede comments on the problematic appearance of Hetty Sorrel: “One begins to suspect at length that there is no direct correlation between eyelashes and moral; or else, that the eyelashes express the disposition of the fair one’s grandmother.”^[6]

Hetty’s character cannot be read in her body, yet its attributes are not meaningless or random but “express” instead the character of her ancestry. This disjunction takes place passively, without the sense of willful dissemblance seen in male figures at the beginning of the century. Thus, the earlier anxiety about the ability to dissemble the prior truth hidden within the body’s sensations shifts, in Adam Bede, to a fear of the reverse, that this truth can never not be dissembled: “Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult…even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth” (Adam Bede, 222–23). George Eliot’s bodies are unable to express the truth of their feelings because they no longer know what it is. Sensations, which in Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Edgeworth have an oppressive clarity, in Eliot are more opaque, or elusive; it requires effort to recover their significance.

These two positions are not simply different sides of the same argument. They indicate two separate epistemologies of the body, one in which signs have a strong connection to a single central meaning, as in Cheyne, and the other in which signs have a weak connection to diffused, multiple meanings, as in Marshall Hall. These two sides suggest a realignment of terms in a larger cultural debate, a move from the question of whether the body’s signs are true or false to the question of whether bodily signs have any meaning at all and, if so, of what sort. This problem in terms of the significance of external bodily signs has an internal correlative, in which the meaning of the body’s sensations to the subject undergoes a similar realignment. In the early period, the questions of middle-class sensibility are whether or not to feel, how much feeling is enough, how much is too much? In the later period, it is less a question of the presence or absence of feeling than of confronting its uncertain significance. With the diffusion of its structure of meaning, the body ceases to function as a centralized reservoir of knowable truth, as it had earlier.

These two models of signification are closely related to the shift that takes place in the representational assumptions of the realist novel.^[7] In both the English Jacobin novels of the 1790s and the morally efficacious novels of the Regency, realism is based on the premise that significance resides in an overarching, general design. Discrete, specific details become significant through their ability to reveal this larger order. In this essentially didactic method, realism requires presenting a careful selection of details, leaving out specifics that, although they might be accurate in terms of social experience, tend to mislead or obscure those general principles that constitute the real. In the assumed connections between specific signs and the controlling design, the didactic method resembles the centralized model of the body, in which particular signs are assumed to have a strong connection to a general meaning.

In George Eliot’s writing, the strong connection between sign and meaning of the earlier didactic method is replaced with a programmatically ambiguous connection. We can see this difference even in the essentially descriptive realism of her early novels. “Nature has her language,” explains the narrator of Adam Bede, “and she is not unveracious; but we don’t know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet” (Adam Bede, 198). In this passage, particular details are not devoid of meaning; they retain a connection to a generalized truth that is revealed through them, but the nature of that truth is uncertain to the narrator. George Eliot’s strategy for representing this uncertain reality is thus to jettison the earlier principle of selectivity used by Godwin, Hays, and Edgeworth in favor of a new emphasis on fullness of details, as if realism requires heaping ambiguous sign on top of sign, trusting that meaning will emerge in the accumulation.

George Eliot, more than any other Victorian novelist, was aware of the significant changes taking place in Victorian science, and she knew of the intrinsic redefinition that had taken place in the epistemology of nerves. Because such redefinitions created new ways of imagining the body, they also raised into high relief the changing nature of scientific explanations for what was necessarily conceptualized as the unchanging “real” body.^[8] Medicine at any given moment produces an all-encompassing narrative of the body, describing its processes of growth and aging, its daily cycles and monthly rhythms. Each disease, from the onset of symptoms to termination, has its own story, case histories their own plots. Medicine, too, in its historical dimension, creates its own evolving narrative of the body, as its etiologies change and its taxonomies reconfigure. It is in this medical narrative itself, with its inescapable historical relativity, that the authority of medicine to tell the story of the body is most called into question.

In Middlemarch, George Eliot focuses not on the new medical narrative she knew so well but on medical history. Rather than embracing the medical story of the body, Middlemarch represents medicine’s uncertain relationship with bodies as objects of knowledge. Thus, this novel is less concerned with representing the meaning of the body than with representing the problems involved in knowing that meaning. She does this by shifting her focus from the body to the doctor and telling the story of him telling the story of the body.