The reader and the space-in-between

Alan Palmer's essay Social Minds is a very interesting contribution to understanding how literary works enable us to understand the social nature of Here, I concentrate on just the part of Palmer's essay entitled construction of the Middlemarch mind. I accept Palmer's characterization that, as he puts it: within the Middlemarch storyworld, the town actually and literally does have a mind of its own. I have pointed out (Oatley, Best Laid Schemes) that, in Middlemarch, George Eliot sets up a space in which there are four principal elements: events of characters' inner worlds (which Palmer calls intramental), settings, happenings and behavioral events that include direct speech and descriptions of actions, and the voice of the narrator. It seems to me that Eliot creates what Winnicott has called a space-in-between. My argument in 1992 was that Eliot does this to invite the reader to become another element in this space, another mind, taking part a dialogue in a way discussed by Bakhtin. Palmer points out that the passage of 50 lines that he cites contains no free indirect thought. There are, however, some references to intramental elements: for instance it's said that Dorothea's mind yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world. There are also no direct depictions of speech or action, though actions are described indirectly, for instance, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings [than Dorothea]. So, in the passage that Palmer cites we are working with one element, the narrator's thoughts as if spoken to us, the readers. Eliot's skill is, however, entirely sufficient to create a space-in-between with just this one element. She does it by splitting the content of the cited passage into two. One part, as Palmer shrewdly indicates, is the mind of Middlemarch. The other includes the narrator's pointers to intramental and behavioral events, which become important in Eliot's promptings to us, the readers, towards an understanding of Dorothea. This splitting into two parts offers Eliot the opportunity for an irony that enables the 50-line passage to come beautifully alive. Although, in the collective mind of the literary academy, Eliot's reputation is for earnestness, this passage has a delicacy of irony every bit as engaging as passages one can find in Jane Austen. And how should Dorothea not marry?--a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. What does this irony suggest for the question of the distributed social mind? Two kinds of process, I think. First, the reader is being invited by Eliot to build a mental model of Dorothea, and not just of her as an individual, as psychologists build models of people's personalities. A mental model of a fictional person is called a and, in a novel, character is always (or so I assert) the fictional person in relation to other characters. So the proposal which Palmer makes, that one of the characters in this novel is the town of Middlemarch, is very apposite. As social beings, one of our important mental activities--perhaps our most important mental activity--is to make mental models of others in the group with whom we interact (Dunbar). Otherwise we could not be social in the human way. The irony in the cited passage requires that we recognize the Middlemarch mind, see its coercions and small-mindedness such that we can imagine how these impinge on an intelligent and independent-minded young woman. …

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