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This essay purports to reveal how George Eliot’s stories provide an alternative to the dominant motivations of commercial spirit in Victorian England. Eliot’s two stories, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” and Silas Marner, present the matrix of economically oriented society where, to borrow Michel Foucault’s terms, homo economicus is governed by the ideas of interest, investment, and competition. The fundamental matrix of governmentality represented by the idea of Economic Man, however, holds the gaps which open up the possibilities of forming human relationships with reference to sympathetic affection. Eliot’s emphasis on a feeling of affection, however, does not exclude the material values. Rather, the novelist illuminates how the materiality simultaneously registers the primacy of its value in the course of the practical realization of sympathy, and loses its controlling power of economic governmentality in the process of reconciliation between the self and the other prompted by the affective feelings. In “Amos Barton,” the death of Milly, the sacrifice of a female character, is the crux of a reconciliation between the economically insensitive character, Barton, and the materially oriented parishioners in the community. In Silas Marner, Eppie, though described in terms of anthropomorphous materiality, helps Silas to free himself from the alienation occasioned by labor and the pursuit of self-interest.
