Medical issues in Middlemarch consist of three subjects: scientific research, professional reform, and clinical treatment. Lydgate is at the leading edge of medical research for 1830. He successfully distinguishes between typhus and “typhoid” fever, a hotly debated subject at the time. He studies pathological anatomy in Paris, the specialty that contributed more than any other to the scientific reform of medicine.^[18] And he performs his own scientific research and institutes scientific procedures of observation and record-keeping at the New Hospital, which he hopes to turn into a research center for fevers. His education at Edinburgh and Paris, rather than London, further suggests that he has received the best medical training available at a time when the English schools were more interested in turning out gentlemen with broad, classical training than scientific practitioners.^[19] The backward state of medical education in England—which Middlemarch describes in chapter 15—was due to the powerful London professional colleges, which controlled the structure and practice of medicine and resisted the introduction of new techniques. Lydgate is a partisan in the historical campaign for professional reform that sought to end the division of medical practice into the three branches of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries. The campaign grew during the 1820s into an important force within the profession, although the London colleges maintained their division until 1858. Lydgate’s opinions are based on the reformist Thomas Wakley’s editorials for the time in the Lancet, and his decision not to profit from the sale of drugs is particularly topical.^[20] However, the new scientific medicine, though it significantly improved diagnosis, did not generate effective therapies until much later in the nineteenth century, and Lydgate’s cases demonstrate this. He can recognize typhoid fever in Fred Vincy, for example, but without antibiotics he can do little actively to cure it. The public gives him credit for Vincy’s recovery, but Lydgate himself is uncomfortable with the “trash talked on such occasions” (M, 45:440).^[21] His superiority as a practitioner is that he abstains from poisoning patients with unnecessary drugs or weakening them through a ritualistic practice of venesection. Lydgate practices a form of therapeutic nihilism, relying mainly on bed rest, dietary control, and close observation. Because he assists rather than hinders the healing process, he is presented as a more effective practitioner than his rivals.

Scientific research and its insights into the body most clearly distinguish Lydgate’s medicine from the heroic practice of the provincial medical men in the novel. Lydgate is interested in what is unseen, in hidden mechanisms and physical laws; he seeks a firm basis of knowledge on which to act. The older medicine concentrates on appearance, on visual, readily perceived surfaces. They practice a client-based form of treatment, catering to the whims of their often hypochondriacal patients.^[22] Their medicine has an exaggerated, theatrical quality that appeals to patients. The old practitioners engage in the broad gestures of treatment, as though playing to the balconies and trying to compensate in appearance for what is lacking in substance. To the patients, those gestures are all-important. The patients of Toller, a popular surgeon-apothecary, for example, “commonly observed that Mr. Toller had lazy manners, but his treatment was as active as you could desire:—no man, said they, carried more seriousness into his profession: he was a little slow in coming, but when he came, he did something” (M, 45:438; italics original).

Stressed is the simple, reductive quality of action itself. He acted, “did something,” something that is left undefined because it is insignificant except as a gesture. His laziness suggests an indifference to the outcome; he is “slow in coming” and thus either disinterested in the sufferer’s illness or unconvinced of his own ability to ameliorate it. This implication is lost on the naive patient, who is more concerned with the dramatic surface of the “heroic” treatment than with its substance. All that matters is the degree of apparent activity, that treatment be “as active as you could desire”—that is, that it be clearly seen or felt. Patients admire the tangible, visible procedures, the “bleeding and blistering and starving,” for which Toller is particularly known (M, 45:438). The same emphasis on visibility can be seen in the leading therapeutic, prescribed compounds. Their effectiveness, or substantive quality, is clearly subordinated to their mere tangibility. The narrator points out that “since professional practice chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred that it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic” (M, 15:143). Undifferentiated quantity is the notable factor about these drugs, the “large cubic measure,” without regard to their substantive qualities or effects. When Mrs. Mawmsey declares, “what keeps me up best is the pink mixture, not the brown” (M, 45:437), her attention is focused on the colorful aesthetic surface of the compound, suggesting an ignorance of its deeper characteristics. Such drugs, like the highly visible procedures of bleeding and blistering, are apparent enough in their form (though not in their effects) to constitute “active” treatment—that is, something worth paying for.

Ultimately the older medicine, with its emphasis on what is visible or tangible, on the drama of treatment, on the color and bulk of physic, is less grounded in the mechanism of the individual physical body than in the subjective and unreliable experience of the patient. Hence, George Eliot’s descriptions of the older medical work focus more on the public perception of it and its practitioners than on the caricatured men themselves or their theories of treatment. As the narrator explains:

For everybody’s family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to have immeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish or vicious diseases. The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher intuitive order, lying in his lady-patients’ immovable conviction, and was unassailable by any objection except that their intuitions were opposed by others equally strong; each lady who saw medical truth in Wrench and “the strengthening treatment” regarding Toller and “the lowering system” as medical perdition.

She claims not that the doctors have “immeasurable skill,” only that they are “understood” to have it; her claim that “everybody’s” doctor is “remarkably clever” is a commentary on “everybody’s” judgment, not on the doctors themselves. She directly describes the perception of medical practice, concentrating on its visible surface and on the public response to that surface. And people’s naive perceptions, which misappropriate the work of nature to the skill of the physician, are noticeably free from any connection to the reality that the treatment is at best ineffective.

Thus, in the older, client-based medicine, the doctor’s practice lives and dies in the breath of popular opinion, for when effectiveness is illusory, a practitioner’s “management and treatment” of his reputation is a more substantial part of his work than the management of disease. The unsolicited advice of Rosamond to Lydgate for reviving his failing practice—“It cannot answer to be eccentric; you should think what will be generally liked” (M, 64:637)—merely reflects the social context for medical practice in Middlemarch. At the same time, although it cannot be ignored, public opinion is notoriously inaccurate. Describing the various reactions to the new doctor in town, the narrator points out: “For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown—known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors’ false suppositions” (M, 15:139). Reputation thus is a distorted product of the public’s mind, not a reflection of deeper qualities within the object itself. It is within these fickle waters of social prejudice that the older medicine swims. This narrative emphasis on the falsity of public opinion and on the lack of correspondence between popular belief and reality suggests that the older medicine is Sir James Paget’s worst nightmare, for it floats, free of any material referent, in the fancy of its patients. Instead of medicine as science, the older practitioners perform medicine as theater.

Whereas the older practitioners can only gesture wildly over the body’s surface, Lydgate is able to penetrate that surface and perceive the “finely-adjusted mechanism in the human frame” (M, 15:141).^[23] Underscoring this difference is the fact that he corrects the mistakes of the other practitioners: He correctly diagnoses typhoid fever in Fred Vincy after the surgeon Wrench sends “just the wrong medicines” (M, 26:255), and he sees in the charwoman Nancy Nash a cramp that Dr. Minchin has mistakenly perceived as a tumor (M, 45:441).^[24] The older practitioners equate Lydgate’s medicine with charlatanism precisely because it dives beneath that visible surface, leading to new forms of treatment.^[25] The surgeon Wrench, for example, denounces Lydgate’s “flighty, foreign notions” and calls his new treatments “worthy only of a quack.” “That cant about cures,” he concludes, “was never got up by sound practitioners” (M, 26:257). Toller clarifies the definition of charlatanism at work among the provincial practitioners when one of his simpleminded patients recollects a wonder worker who, she believes, was a charlatan like Lydgate:

“There are so many of that sort. I remember Mr. Cheshire, with his irons, trying to make people straight when the Almighty had made them crooked.”

“No, no,” said Mr. Toller, “Cheshire was all right—all fair and above board.”

Indeed Cheshire’s treatment is literally “above board,” consisting entirely of observable surface activity, and it is for this reason, and this reason alone, that it is “all right.” The true charlatan, Toller explains, advertises “cures in ways nobody knows anything about: a fellow who wants to make a noise by pretending to go deeper than other people.” Because it literally goes “deeper,” Lydgate’s medicine epitomizes “the essence of the charlatan” in the eyes of the older practitioners (M, 45:446).

Lydgate’s ability to “go deeper,” to penetrate the sentient body’s surface, can be divided into two categories. The first includes various forms of sensory penetration, such as listening through a stethoscope. Second, by means of a specifically imaginative penetration, Lydgate draws on his conceptual understanding of the body to infer its interior condition. Each of these forms of penetration, sensory and imaginative, needs to be considered separately.

Although the senses are barred from the interior of another’s body by its surface, Lydgate is able to “see” further into the body’s interior than others by extending the range of these senses with the recently improved microscope and newly invented stethoscope and thermometer.^[26] His attendance on Borthrop Trumbull, for example, consists wholly of sensory penetration; he monitors Trumbull’s body, and it becomes “a beautiful example of a disease with all its phases seen in clear delineation” (M, 45:443). The body “furnished objects for the microscope,” which gives Trumbull a sense of “the dignity of his secretions,” as they are transformed by Lydgate into scientific evidence of the body’s interior state.

Each of these forms of sensory penetration, though challenging the body’s physical boundary, nonetheless leaves it intact. The sounds Lydgate hears with his stethoscope, though originating in the interior, are heard at the surface of the skin; the “secretions” are, by definition, already part of the exterior world at the moment they are secreted. Thus, although calling these procedures a form of penetration, in fact each of them respects the material integrity of the body’s shell. Each is a mediated form of reaching into the body, so that Lydgate is inevitably stationed at one remove from the interior.

The shell of the body preserves its biological life by keeping the interior hidden, inaccessible and safe from the external world. In Middlemarch, the sentient body cannot be physically opened without destroying the life that resides inside it. Although the modern context of safe, effective surgery makes it difficult to imagine the skin as an impassable boundary, this was still the reigning view in George Eliot’s time. Anesthesia was not introduced until 1846, fifteen years after the novel’s historical setting, when Eliot was in her late twenties. By 1870 it was still rudimentary, commonly consisting of chloroform on a rag. Though anesthesia greatly increased the use of some surgical procedures at mid-century, the unsolved danger of septic infection meant that open surgery—“cutting” operations in which the protective skin is broken—remained a course of last resort.^[27] It was not until 1872, the same year Middlemarch was published, that Joseph Lister introduced the use of carbolic acid spray to produce an aseptic operating field. His ideas, however, were embroiled in the controversy over Pasteur’s germ theory, on which they depended, and it was 1886 before the more advanced German surgeons, who accepted Pasteur’s theory, began the antiseptic procedures of washing their hands and sterilizing their instruments. During World War I, aseptic procedures finally met with widespread acceptance. But during George Eliot’s lifetime, open surgery was a perilous procedure, and the skin constituted a significantly more impermeable boundary than it does today. By looking at the two separate instances in the text—each crucial in Lydgate’s development—where the boundary of the body is physically pierced, the impassability of the sentient body’s surface, and the paradox it poses for scientific medicine, can be more clearly seen.

Lydgate’s love of medicine begins “under the head of Anatomy” when, as a boy, he discovers the passage in the Cyclopaedia on “the valves of the heart” (M, 15:141).^[28] The two major medical figures in Lydgate’s personal hierarchy, his “patron saints,” are Vesalius and Bichat, both important anatomists (M, 45:448).^[29] But even though anatomy penetrates the surface of the body, a corpse can only indirectly represent the sentient body. Between the two lies a temporal boundary that parallels the impassable spatial boundary of the skin and keeps the practitioner, again, at one remove from the processes of the sentient body. Popular objections to Lydgate’s practice of pathology are rooted in the idea that he allows patients to die so that he can open the body when it is as temporally close to life as possible. The vociferous landlady of the Tankard, Mrs. Dollop, suggests that he does not quite wait for the patient’s death; she refers to him as “this Dr Lydgate that’s been for cutting up everybody before the breath was well out o’ their body” (M, 71:712).^[30] Certainly erroneous as a statement of fact, her observation nonetheless possesses an ironic truth (as does much of Middlemarch gossip). Because Lydgate’s object of interest is not the corpse but the still breathing body which it imperfectly represents, he is in fact trying to look inside the living body.^[31] That he cannot is a testament to the physically impassable nature of the sentient body’s boundary at that stage in medical history.

Yet in one crucial instance the novel does indeed represent the physical penetration of the living body. This unique image is carefully bracketed at several removes from the ongoing action of the story. It takes place in the past, far away in another country, framed as the action of a play. The story of Lydgate’s first romance, in Paris with Laure, is itself a digression from the main action in Middlemarch, and the story of the play is a digression within the digression. Further attention is drawn to this elaborate framework (if any were needed) by the introduction to the chapter in which it occurs; the narrator distinguishes her concise narrative project from the “copious remarks and digressions” of her predecessor, Henry Fielding. “All the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed,” she says (M, 15:139). The doubly digressive nature of the episode of Laure thus indicates its importance, for the narrator must make a major effort to weave this distant event into her purposeful “web.”

Laure is “the actress whose part it was to stab her lover” (M, 15:148). Nightly assuming her role in the melodrama, Laure on stage is an emblem of penetration to which Lydgate repeatedly returns. Thus, the young student’s first experience with love is coupled with the image of opening the boundary of the skin. As a young medical student pursuing anatomical studies at the Paris school, Lydgate also experiments with animal bodies, subjecting “frogs and rabbits” to galvanic shocks, experiments that are “over and above his other work.”^[32] He works at a grueling pace and some nights becomes frustrated. “Tired with his experimenting, and not being able to elicit the facts he needed” from the intellectually impenetrable bodies of his animal subjects, he returns again and again to Laure and her representation of direct penetration. This idealized image of the woman who succeeds where he fails rejuvenates his flagging spirits. As we are told, the interlude is “without prejudice to his galvanism, to which he would presently return.” Thus the play has a beneficial effect on Lydgate, for it rekindles his enthusiasm, inspiring him to continue in his scientific pursuit. But the image remains positive only as long as it remains idealized—that is, as long as Laure remains “a woman with whom he never expects to speak.” As will be considered later, this restorative dynamic reverses after the old drama’s “new catastrophe,” in which Laure “veritably stabbed her husband.” Laure’s motives are famously enigmatic.^[33] But Lydgate’s response is quickly summarized. He falls immediately in love with the actress and, in the pandemonium at the theatre, rushes to the stage, takes her in his arms, and begins a lone crusade to defend her against charges of murder. This personal obsession temporarily destroys his medical studies.

In the story of Lydgate’s love for the actress, then, the penetration of the body benefits Lydgate’s science as long as it remains idealized. But, as in the practice of anatomy, at the moment it becomes real the work of science ceases and the question of murder emerges. In both cases, the boundary of the skin cannot be physically crossed without transforming the object of study, the sentient body, into an insentient corpse. By definition, then, the skin of the sentient body must remain inviolate, for once it is broached the body loses its sentience. This categorical impermeability poses the central epistemological problem for Lydgate’s scientific medicine. The interior of the living body, by its very nature, is necessarily hidden. The body’s life—which is the source of the body’s meaning to the physician, who seeks to preserve it—depends absolutely upon the boundary’s integrity. But, paradoxically, that same boundary prevents the physician from knowing that meaning, for the skin bars him from access to the body’s interior, where its meaning resides. Thus, although the work of medicine requires the penetration of the body’s surface, the goal of medicine is to preserve the very surface that prevents this penetration.^[34]

Because of this paradox, the most significant aspect of Lydgate’s penetration of the body is imaginative rather than sensory. The impassable physical boundary that intervenes between the medical laborer and the object of his labor determines that medicine will be primarily a “labour of the imagination” (M, 16:161), for the object of work can never be directly reached nor directly observed. Lydgate’s “daily work,” George Eliot writes, consists of “careful observation and inference” (M, 15:144). His essential task is the “observation” of the surface, which leads to his “inference” about the interior. Because that interior is inaccessible, he correlates the surface signs with an imagined interior. The interior is the “living structure” that he seeks to represent with his “anatomical conception” (M, 15:146, 144). Thus, his intellectual penetration, his “insight” into the hidden interior, depends upon that profoundly creative act of conceptualization. He describes this act as “the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space” (M, 16:161–62). Through this use of the imagination he hopes “to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes” that lay hidden in the body and thus to create his image of its living interior.

This argument on the central role of imagination in the scientific project was not original to George Eliot. It was shared within the scientific circle to which she and Lewes belonged.^[35] Among her favorite visitors at the Priory was the physicist John Tyndall, a respected scientist and popular lecturer, whose ideas Lydgate embodies.^[36] Tyndall’s 1870 lecture, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” asks: “How, for example, are we to lay hold of the physical basis of light, since, like that of life itself, it lies entirely without the domain of the senses?…We are gifted with the power of Imagination…and by this power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses.”^[37] The new tools, such as the microscope, that extend the range of the senses present a dilemma for the empiricist. For as they reveal a new world to the observer, and thereby prove the fallibility of the unaided senses, so too they suggest the unseen presence of more minute structures. Hence, Tyndall notes, “beyond the present outposts of microscopic enquiry lies an immense field for the exercise of the speculative power” because the material world possesses “infinite permutations and combinations” (Imagination in Science, 40–41). It is only through such imaginative activities as hypothesizing that one can hope to comprehend the mechanisms for the transmission of light and sound. Thus, for Tyndall imagination is an essential element of scientific inquiry, for it takes the scientist “behind the drop-scene of the senses” (Imagination in Science, 15). In Tyndall, the “real” becomes located in this extra-sensible universe of atomic structure, and so the imagination becomes the essential tool for perceiving reality.^[38]

Lydgate’s research is thus primarily a representational project, one in which he works to construct a model of the body’s unseen interior. The representational nature of this project has invited frequent comparison with the author’s own representational project. In a famous passage, George Eliot’s narrator comments on that project and on the difficulty of penetrating a different sort of barrier to perceive the material world beyond, and in it Lydgate’s representational problems reappear:^[39]

[W]e do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

The narrator characterizes the external world as a world of excess meaning; there are simply too many facts, all with their own significance, to comprehend. The human subject defends against this life-threatening “roar” of unlimited meaning by perceptual “stupidity,” by an absence of “keen vision and feeling.” She reiterates Wordsworth’s complaint against overstimulation, reducing one’s sensitivity to a state of mental torpor.^[40] But instead of limiting the complaint to the hurried pace of urban life, she uses the inescapable, sheer presence of an external world to account for the same insensibility. Silence in this passage is thus a perceptual threshold that protects the subject from the overwhelming presence of the external world (represented here in terms of sound, but impinging equally on all the senses).^[41] This threshold of perceptual “stupidity,” like the body’s skin, separates the human subject from the excess of meaning in the material world. It becomes a metaphorical extension of the skin, protecting the life that resides “inside” from the threat that exists “outside.” Lydgate seeks to penetrate the skin to understand better the unknown yet real structure of the body; similarly, George Eliot’s narrator recognizes the presence of a perceptual threshold intervening between herself and an equally unknown yet real external world. As Lydgate finds a hidden realm of signification in the body’s interior, so too the narrator sees a veiled significance in ordinary life. What unites these two views is the assertion of a threshold for the empirical powers of the observer beyond which significance resides.

It becomes, then, the task of the realistic novelist to penetrate this empirical boundary, much as the scientist must penetrate the skin. The duty of the novelist, in George Eliot’s view, is specifically to overcome this perceptual “stupidity” and to represent for others the existence of those ordinary, unnoticed tragedies as a means of furthering the understanding between individuals and social classes.^[42] “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies,” she wrote at the beginning of her novelistic career.^[43] “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot” (Essays, 271). The realistic artist must thus penetrate the drop-scene of the senses in order to expand the phenomenon of sympathy within society. This social responsibility places severe demands on the truthfulness of the writer’s representation of everyday experience. Misrepresentation, she claims, is “a grave evil” in the realistic novel because it claims to represent “people as they are” (Essays, 270). The sympathy of the believing reader becomes “perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of a true one…. We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness” (Essays, 271). To avoid this danger, the novelist must become in a very real sense a scientist. Forgoing customary ideas or sentimental doctrines, the writer must study the social body with the same sort of direct observation and attention to detail that Lydgate practices on the physical body. “[A] real knowledge of the People” is needed to “guide our sympathies rightly,” and this knowledge requires “a thorough study of their habits, their ideas, their motives” (Essays, 272). George Eliot sees this immersion in the concrete, particular details of everyday experience as a corrective to the tendency to interpret the real through the lens of generalized theories or systems of thought. Early influenced by Comtian positivism, she decries the vitiating effects of à priori knowledge and stresses reliance on gradually amassed observations.^[44] “The abstract is derived from the concrete,” she held, rather than the reverse (Essays, 150).^[45] She calls this form of intimate social study the natural history of social bodies, and her description of what such a science would look like bears a close resemblance to her own novels:^[46]

If any man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote himself to studying the natural history of our social classes, especially of the small shopkeepers, artisans, and peasantry,—the degree in which they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims and habits, the points of view from which they regard their religious teachers, and the degree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the interaction of the various classes on each other, and what are the tendencies in their position towards disintegration or towards development,—and if, after all this study, he would give us the result of his observations in a book well nourished with specific facts, his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political reformer.

In the attention to detailed observation and the avoidance of prior systematized beliefs, in the attempt to improve society by representing its hidden processes, the project of the realistic novelist resembles that of the Victorian scientist.^[47]

George Eliot’s later ideas about realism were deeply influenced by Matthew Arnold’s concept of the role of culture and the problem of expanding social sympathy.^[48] Her notion of a perceptual threshold—the “drop-scene of the senses”—is closely related to Arnold’s idea of the “ordinary self .”^[49] The primary restraint, as Arnold sees it, on the development of social sympathy is the tyranny of self-interest. The actions of individuals and social classes are determined by their material self-interests; there is no recognition of the needs of other classes or competing individuals. The “ordinary self” perceives the world in terms of its limited, day-to-day experience, mistaking this narrow and distorted vision for the larger social reality. The expansion of social sympathy depends on the development, in the individual, of an altruistic identity that can see beyond the threshold of the individual’s social experience. In their “best self,” individuals can escape the self-interests of their class, parochial interests that blind them to the common good. Thus, for Arnold, the perceptions of the “ordinary self” are bounded by a form of social relativism, whereas the “best self” penetrates the blindness of daily experience and perceives the larger set of social relations that constitutes reality.

George Eliot transcribes Arnold’s vision of culture note for note in her handling of Lydgate’s science. The ordinary self is above all the individual as determined by empirical experience and operating on the partial information available to the senses. It sees the surface of the body or admires the drama of treatment but never understands the natural laws at work. It is because Lydgate, unlike the older practitioners, is able to transcend these empirical limits, through Tyndall’s scientific imagination, that he resembles the Arnoldian intellectual, escaping the distortion of immediate experience to recognize the real presence of a deeper set of unapparent relations.

His outsider status further marks him as a representative of Arnoldian culture. Lydgate comes to Middlemarch to avoid being hampered in his scientific research by the London professional colleges that represent, in the very worst sense, the pursuit of narrow self-interest at the expense of the larger social good. Thus, Lydgate asserts his independence from the social determinants of the “ordinary,” and this independence is the necessary condition for the unimpeded pursuit of knowledge. Similarly, he resolves to stay disengaged from all provincial entanglements, political, social, or otherwise. His independence marks him as one of Arnold’s cultural intellectuals, and it points to the central element of Arnold’s thought. For “objective” thought depends on independence. In order to represent a social group, either politically or as an intellectual object of study, the individual cannot belong to the group but must be what Arnold terms an “alien.” Thus, Lydgate’s disinterestedness and aloofness are an attempt to keep his research uncontaminated by the social and material determinants that make up Arnold’s “ordinary self.”