4625103

Rice University
The Metaphorical Space of Meredith's "Diana of the Crossways" Author(s): Elizabeth Bradburn Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 43, No. 4, The Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 2003), pp. 877-895 Published by: Rice University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4625103 . Accessed: 07/02/2014 18:40
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SEL 43, 4 (Autumn2003):877-895 ISSN0039-3657
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The of Metaphorical Space Diana Meredith's of the Crossways

ELIZABETH BRADBURN
It is difficult to imagine a work more apparently conscious of its own generative processes than George Meredith's 1885 Diana of the Crossways. The opening chapter of this novel about a novelist amounts to a critical preface, complete with a series of invented Victorian "diarists" whose recorded observations provide a springboard for the narrator's exuberant theorizations about gender and genre, narrative and rhetoric, philosophy, realism, romance, politics, and the future of fiction. While Meredith critics have put this authorial offering to excellent interpretive use over the years, they have understandably tended to focus on its conscious propositions ("Philosophy is required to make our human nature credible and acceptable") ' rather than on its system of conceptual metaphors, an extraordinary mixture of the martial, the musical, and the gastronomic. In this essay I argue for the generative power of metaphor (as distinct from its thematic treatment or stylistic deployment, which has always been acknowledged) in Diana of the Crossways. To do so I draw on recent developments in cognitive science that suggest that metaphor is a central mechanism of human cognition. I read the body of the novel not as the narrative accomplishment of arguments put forth in the first chapter but as a network of interrelated metaphors. Metaphor, as one of Meredith's characters puts it, is "the Deus ex machina of an argument" (p. 300). The longitudinal trajectory of Diana's argument is short indeed. The book opens at a public ball to honor a war hero of Irish ancestry at which the center of attention is Diana Merion, a witty and intelligent young woman with a mind above the marriage
Elizabeth Bradburn is completing a doctoral dissertation on Milton and cognitive theory at Boston College. She would like to thank Judith Wilt for her generous help with this essay.
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Meredith's Diana of the Crossways
market. Her beauty and vivacity, however, attract the market to her, and the forty-third and final "Nuptial Chapter" sees her wedded to the one of the guests at the ball, the Englishman Thomas Redworth. The intervening story consists of the lateral deflections and bluntings of this matrimonial arrow, as well as the spreading suffering of the feminine bodies on its bleeding edge. Redworth is introduced to Diana by their mutual friend, Emma Dunstane. He resolves to marry her, and embarks on a plan to invest in the new railway system in order to accumulate sufficient capital to support his proposal. Redworth pays a visit to Emma to confide in her, but his prudent restraint proves his undoing: Diana has just fled Copsley, the Dunstane country home where she had intended to stay indefinitely, after Emma's husband Sir Lukin Dunstane made an unwelcome sexual advance. Diana never reveals the reason for her departure to Emma, although Emma's painful awareness of her own unhappy and childless marriage is evident throughout the story. The unprotected orphan Diana, who has, the narrator hints, had to fend off similar advances from other men, takes impulsive refuge in marriage to Augustus Warwick, an ambitious politician. Life with the egotistical Warwick is not congenial to Diana, who herself has an astute and unfeminine grasp of political matters; she forms an intellectual friendship with another politician that provokes malicious gossip. The friendship is innocent, but Warwick brings a divorce suit, and Emma and Redworth must persuade Diana that her first impulse, to flee England, will only confirm her guilt in the public mind. Diana stands her ground and Warwick loses the suit; their estrangement, however, throws her into financial difficulties. She writes novels to support herself; Redworth, now a member of Parliament, promotes her literary career. In the meantime Diana, still legally bound to Warwick, meets Sir Percy Dacier, another ambitious politician. He falls in love with her and persuades her to elope with him to Europe; this plan is thwarted at the last minute when Diana is called to the bedside of Emma, who is about to undergo painful and lifethreatening surgery. Emma lives, and Diana, determined to be responsible despite her attraction to Dacier, tries to force him to forget her. He pursues the friendship, however, and Diana strains her own financial resources giving lavish parties to help promote his political career. Just as it seems that he is about to persuade her to become his lover, he indiscreetly shares a political secret with her, and she impulsively and inexplicably sells it to a newspaper
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that opposes Dacier's party. In retaliatory wrath Dacier coldly marries a superficial young heiress, leaving Diana to remorse, humiliation, and heartbreak. While she is recovering from this emotional nadir, Warwick is killed in an accident, opening the way for Redworth, now wealthy and influential, to offer his longdelayed suit. After a "final struggle for liberty," Diana is "run into the harness" (p. 392) of marriage with the help of Emma, whose hope that she herself will live long enough to see Diana and Redworth's offspring closes the novel. Meredith's self-conscious intention to portray the emotional and practical dilemmas of the Victorian "woman with brains" (p. 337) and to create a genre for her distinct from that of the "true heroine of romance" (p. 328) is clear enough. Less transparent is the nature of the apparently inevitable forces of marriage and "mating"(p. 414) that drives the narrative, and the geography of the disputed ground between body and mind over which it travels. (Metaphors of movement are themselves central to the story, as the "run into the harness" and Redworth's railway interests suggest.) My argument here is that recent work in cognitive science emphasizing the neurological importance of metaphor can powerfully illuminate the deep structure of Diana of the Crossways. I will give a brief summary of the relevant elements of cognitive theory before going on to offer a reading of the novel. THE CONTEMPORARY THEORYOF METAPHOR Although the contemporary theory of metaphor contrasts itself with traditional theories in many ways,2 this study engages most directly with three distinguishing axioms: that metaphor is separate from language; that metaphor is an important mode of reasoning; and that the meaning of metaphor is located in the relationship between its components. Of these, the first is perhaps the most difficult to grasp. As readers we are used to thinking of metaphor as a mode of linguistic expression. As cognitive linguists have attempted to codify the workings of metaphor, however, it has become clear that what generalizations can be made apply to the conceptual realm, not to language; metaphors are "mappings across conceptual domains."3 To understand this notion, consider the CONDUIT metaphor, first identified by Michael Reddy,4 and contextualized by Mark Johnson and others.
Johnson explains that the CONDUIT metaphor provides us with
CONDUITmetaphor,
our understanding of what language is and how it works. According to the ideas are objects contained by
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Diana of the Crossways Meredith's
language; the speaker sends a sentence through a conduit to the hearer, who then retrieves the idea from its linguistic container.5 Although this metaphor gives rise to many linguistic expressions (e.g., "Ican't put my idea into words"), it is important to note that the metaphor itself is not a linguistic expression, but a mapping across conceptual domains: the ideas of containment and movement through a conduit allow us to conceptualize what is happening when we speak to each other.6 The difficulty of thinking outside this metaphor-it seems to us that the transfer of ideas just is what happens when we speak-attests to how close metaphor theory comes to the root structure of our experience. Indeed, cognitive linguists argue that metaphorical mapping is what allows us to structure our experience in the first place, and that it plays a significant role in reasoning. Metaphor theory tends to emphasize the nonpropositional nature of thought; thus, the idea of containment and the reasoning processes it enables (deciding whether, for example, a given object is "in"or "out"of a
category) is not "an abstract subject-predicate structure .
..
that
specifies truth conditions or other conditions of satisfaction." It "exists, rather, in a continuous analog fashion in our understandJohnson, George Lakoff, Mark Turner, and others suggest ing."'7 that a few crucial image schemata provide the analogical basis for much apparently propositional logic; they might say with Emma Dunstane that "a metaphor is the Deus ex machina of an argument." To give another example of the analogical basis of reasoning: the ideas of causation and agency are generated by a series of metaphorical projections moving from EVENTS ARE ACTIONS
to ACTORS ARE MOVERS AND MANIPULATORS to THE MIND IS A BODY MOVING THROUGH SPACE.8
My reading of Diana of the Crossways will center on the notion that we conceptualize the mind by metaphorical projection from the body. The phrase "metaphorical projection"is a bit deceptive in that it suggests that metaphors are unidirectional processes, "algorithms that mechanically take source domain inputs and proARE duce target domain outputs."9 (In the metaphor WORDS CONTAINERS, containment is the source domain, language the target domain.) This view is consistent with the classical theory of metaphor, which regards metaphors as linguistic expressions; "containers," in that case, would simply express the meaning of "words." Cognitive linguists argue, however, that metaphorical meaning is in the mapping itself, as "an open-ended class of potential correspondence across inference patterns."'0 To grasp this distinction, consider the implications of the "mapping"metaphor
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itself. A Massachusetts roadmap does not "mean" the state of Massachusetts; the meaning of the map is the set of fixed correspondences between the map and the terrain, activated when the two stand in analogical relation-that is, when the map is put to use. This claim has led Turner to develop a theory of meaning as arising in a dynamic "blended space" (an elaborate version of metaphorical mapping) connecting two or more mental spaces. Turner elaborates this theory at length in The Literary Mind,1" but the principles of blending most relevant to this study are: blends "exploit and develop counterpart connections between input spaces," which may be conceptual domains or may themselves be metaphors; blends "develop structure not provided by the inputs"; "the recruitment of a conventional metaphor to the blend is in general partial, selective, and transforming";and blends "can reveal latent contradictions and coherences between previously separated elements."'12 Like mapping, "blending" is itself a metaphor, covering a range of relationships from chemical reaction to tossed salad. Diana of the Crossways provides us with an excellent example of a creative blend. In a sustained metaphorical projection, Meredith analogizes the state of Diana's accounts to a marriage: Debit and Credit sides presented much of the appearance of '"The male and female in our jog-trot civilization. They matched middling well; with rather too marked a tendency to strain the leash and run frolic on the part of friend Debit (the wanton male) ... Mrs. Credit was requested by him, in a courteous manner, to drive her pen the faster, so that she might wax to a corresponding size and satisfy the world's idea of fitness in couples" (pp. 218-9). This metaphor might be interpreted on a linguistic level as an effort to use one idea (marriage) to convey the meaning of another (finance). The inadequacy of such a reading, however, becomes clear as soon as it is put forth: "Meredith wants to tell the reader that Diana lives beyond her income. She has grave financial troubles and is forced to carry on her literary work. The two sides of debit and credit in her account-books appear as a married couple ... Such is Meredith's handling of an abstract situation: he renders it concrete by a full psychological interpretation, which furthermore deepens the problem."'3This interpretation misleadingly suggests that Meredith has a didactic intention regarding the workings of account books; but what on earth have we learned about finance that we did not know already? A slightly more plausible case might be made that Meredith is making a
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point about marriage; but even then, he tends to draw on merely conventional understandings of that institution to elaborate his analogy. The meaning of the marriage/finance metaphor is in the blend. Meredith wants to show us the complex social and psychological structure that emerges when the domain of marriage gets mapped onto the domain of finance. His meaning is as much about the incongruities of that mapping as about the correspondences; as Turner says, the working of a blended space may "involve The site of this blend, disanalogy between the source and target."'14 moreover, is the contentious space between the woman's sexual body and her creative mind. She must "driveher pen the faster" (an allusion to Diana's novel writing) in order to "wax to a size corresponding" to her husband's "wantonness." Notice that the analogy between physical size and sexual desire subtly draws eating into the metaphorical space. Intellectual life, social institutions, the appetites of the body, and material needs never fully map onto each other; they can only exist in an incongruous blend. Their relationship can properly be termed "dynamic,"as the blend gives rise to metaphors of movement as well ("jog-trot civilization," "strain the leash," "drive her pen"). When the "Mrs. Credit" passage is read as a blended space, rather than as a conventional metaphor in which marriage stands for accounting, it becomes complex enough to incorporate most of the novel's major themes. Indeed, the novel itself may be understood as a manifold blend of blends. The narrative is a succession of three marital "spaces." The first is Diana's union with Warwick, who brings to the blend both social approval and financial stability. (Diana meets Warwick because his family has been tenanting Diana's childhood home, the Crossways, which she has rented out of financial necessity.) The inputs of intellectual and sexual appetite are provided, respectively, by Lord Dannisburgh and Sir Lukin, whose relations with Diana bracket the marriage. When Diana becomes involved with Dacier, the blended space is transformed: Dacier provides both sexual energy and intellectual stimulation, but Diana's separation from Warwick renders these elements incompletely mapped onto legal marriage and financial necessity. The marriage to Redworth constitutes the novel's final redistribution of these four elements. Social legitimacy is restored as Diana's conscience tells her that she brings "no real disgrace" to the union (p. 408). Material needs are provided for: not only has Redworth grown rich from his railway investments, but he has
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also secretly purchased the Crossways and its furnishings in order to restore them to Diana. Mutual desire is hinted at before the wedding, as Redworth exerts "masculine pressure on [Diana's] throbbing blood" (p. 407), and afterwards inferred by Emma from Diana's letters. And what of Diana's desire for "external life, action, fields for energies" of the intellect (p. 41)? The "individuality" that "had seemed pointing to a straighter growth" (p. 409) has turned to spread itself in a different kind of field. The story closes with Emma's hope that she will live to see Diana and Redworth's child, "and so have proof at heart that her country and our earth are fruitful in the good, for a glowing future" (p. 414)-a transformation of the idealistic hopes for future political good that had previously fueled the conversation of the reformminded Diana. Diana of the Crossways, then, is a blended space in that it activates four input domains of marriage (money, social legitimacy, sexuality, intellectual drive), rearranging their geographical boundaries to achieve the most comfortable (or least incongruous) fit. The dynamics of this redistribution constitute the narrative movement of the novel. The key to reading the crucial scene of Diana's betrayal of Dacier is, as I will show below, understanding Diana as a story about the difficulty of fully mapping the "inputs" of marriage onto each other. One could say, the the inputs; the metaphor of marriage might difficulty of "marrying" indeed capture the concept of the cognitive blend at least as well as the metaphor of blending does, were it not that most people think of marriage as occurring between only two entities. But surely Meredith wishes to suggest in Diana that the sheer complexity of human subjectivity makes marriage more the product of many factors than the union of two individuals. The role of metaphorical space in Meredith's conception of subjectivity is the topic of my next section. DIANAOF THE CROSSWAYS AS A THEORYOF METAPHOR Gillian Beer has observed that in Diana Meredith works out a theory of subjectivity, exploring his heroine's "attempt to reconcile her individual identity with her inescapable instinctive beAt the (literal) center of the novel is a passage intertwining ing."15 Meredith's theory of the subject with a theory of metaphor: "Metaphors were [Diana's] refuge. Metaphorically she could allow her mind to distinguish the struggle she was undergoing, sinking under it. The banished of Eden had to put on metaphors, and the
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common use of them has helped largely to civilize us ...
Espe-
cially are they needed by the pedestalled woman in her conflict with the natural" (pp. 231-2). Metaphorical space accommodates conflict. Gayla McGlamery points out that Meredith's rendering of Diana's subjectivity "tests the reader's ability to handle apparent contradictions of fact and human nature without reducing the complexity of Diana's character or straining too eagerly after simple meanings"16-a description that calls to mind Turner's model of the creative blend. Critical interpretation of Meredith's metaphorical theory of the subject has, however, remained at the level of linguistic analysis. This is largely due to the influence of deconstructionist and dialogic literary theory; Diane Elam, for example, interprets the "metaphors were her refuge" passage as the culmination of a series of "conjugation[s]," in which Diana finally "vanishes within the the text's metaphoric dissemination," disclosing draws on the of feminine.17 McGlamery unrepresentability inof Diana the first Bakhtinian theory to argue that chapter structs us to read dialogically, offering an ideal of "true wit" toward which the nation may evolve.'8 Similarly, Donald D. Stone claims that Meredith demonstrates a "polyphonic principle" that parallels Mikhail Bakhtin's thinking: "Meredithremains commitStone must insist ted in Diana to the ideal of verbal dialogue."'19 on this last point because he perceives Meredith's ambivalence about language and interest in nonverbal thought. "It is imprecise," writes Stone, to say of Meredith's characters "that they use ideas; rather, ideas use them."20 This concise description lends itself to a model of subjectivity as a mapping across conceptual domains ("ideas");part of my argument will be that the creative blend model from cognitive linguistics squares better with the way Meredith thematizes subjectivity in Diana than the dialogic model does. It is almost as though dialogic criticism, invited by Meredith's emphasis on verbal exchange, has made for a sort of provisional approach to a novel really awaiting an adequate theory of metaphor. No critic has missed either the thematic or the stylistic importance of metaphor in Meredith'swork; systematic treatments of metaphor in Meredith strive to integrate the thematic with the stylistic. Thus Judith Wilt argues that Meredith's "perpetual, dazzling, in a sense desperate dependence upon metaphor" amounts to an insistence that the reader train her mind to "move with facility and clarity between ... metaphor and the difficultto-name reality to which metaphor points," in accordance with
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his conviction that "metaphor and mind could put man together again."21This is Meredith's use of metaphor analyzed under the rubric of classical theory, which assumes that a metaphor is a linguistic expression referring to a difficult-to-name reality. In a more sporadic way, various critics have noted the importance of metaphorical thought (as opposed to metaphorical linguistic expression) in Diana. Susan Morgan argues, for example, that the novel valorizes judgment that trusts in analogical images, articulating Meredith's "belief that there is a level of reality in which connections between people consist of these sudden moments which catch their imaginations." Unlike Redworth, who maintains his initial vision of Diana to the end, Dacier fails Diana through his inability to sustain his image of her character.22 In a similar vein, Margaret Conrow points out that Diana keeps her memory of Lugano as a symbolic "touchstone" scene that she later uses to interpret and reason about her own motives.23 To these instances of analogical reasoning in the novel I would add a small but significant reference to mental activity. As Dacier sits wondering who could have betrayed his secret, "he glanced at Diana. She?" (p. 319). Out of context it may not be apparent that Diana is not in the room at the time; the narrator is describing a mental glance by Dacier. The same curious figure of speech recurs ten pages later; after learning of Diana's betrayal, Dacier thinks "How many other wretched dupes had she dangling? He spied at Westlake, spied at Redworth, at old Lord Larrian" (p. 319). This quirky phrasing suggests a mode of reasoning based on images rather than linear logic.24 In the novel, not only internal judgment but also interpersonal communication can occur through analogical images. In Dacier's burning of the unread final letter from Diana, we witness the destruction of her words, but this very destruction replaces the verbal message with a metaphorical one: "[a]s[the letter] was thick, it burned sullenly, discolouring his name on the address, as she had done ... Diana's letter died hard. The corners
were burnt to black tissue, with an edge or two of discoloured paper. A small frayed central heap still resisted, and in kindness to the necessity for privacy, he impressed the fire-tongs to complete the execution" (pp. 335-7). Although Dacier refuses to read Diana's written explanation, he is shown her state: consumed by burning passion, moving toward death, a blackened and discolored version of the "whiteradiation of Innocence" (p. 331) to whom Dacier has just proposed marriage. The scene recalls an earlier one in which Diana communicates metaphorically with Dacier as
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Meredith's Diana ofthe Crossways
she boards a train for London after her night watch with the dying Lord Dannisburgh. "[R]equir[ing]a course of lessons in Irish," Dacier cannot "take[] the explanation" of Diana's social and economic status; she must act it out for him by getting into the third-class carriage (p. 196). Bodily acts and physical states, then, are a kind of metaphor in Diana. Consider the often-noted series of images in which the narrator describes Diana as reddening, blushing, or burning. Clearly this imagery is connected with the name Redworth and signifies the physical passion that Redworth will eventually succeed in kindling in Diana. But the reddening/Redworth connection is no mere play on words. The "red"metaphor takes Diana's body itself as its medium. Metaphor is for Meredith a space in which the mental domain (including language) makes contact with the physical. This is apparent from Meredith's dominant metaphors for mental and linguistic activity, as I argue below, but seeing it does depend on separating metaphor from language. It is a mistake to take at face value Meredith's opening chapter with its apparent privileging of verbal analysis over bodily response-"you are entreated to repress alarm" (p. 11). Body states are actually a valued mode of response and reasoning in Diana. Even some of the least sympathetic characters show an aptitude for making somatic judgments. When Lady Wathin visits Emma, the narrator tells us that "[t]hepreliminaries to the matter of the interview were brief between ladies physically sensible of antagonism" (p. 223); both women, in other words, correctly assess the situation by referring to their body states. Dacier performs a similarly accurate analysis of Diana's behavior toward Hepburn: "Judging by the absence of any blow within, he [Dacier] saw not a sign of coquetry" (p. 278). And of course, as Wilt has shown, Diana's difficulties stem largely from her misreading of her own bodily responses, and her consequent omission of them from her
judgment.25
ARGUMENTIS WAR ROOT METAPHOR: One way around the trap of reading Meredith's theory of metaphor solely at the level of linguistic expression is to consider the metaphors he uses for linguistic expression. The opening chapter of Diana figures words (spoken and written) as weapons: English culture is still "in the fisticuff stage of the art of condensing our purest sense to golden sentences" (p. 2). In this stage, "smart A remarks have their measured distances, many requiring to be
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brfile pourpoint, or within throw of the pistol, to make it hit; in other words, the majority of them are addressed directly to our muscular system, and they have no effect when we stand beyond the range" (p. 1). Although the initial chapter seems to suggest that language can and shall move beyond this "fisticuff stage," the novel never entirely loses, and, in fact, elaborates considerARE WEAPONS metaphor. (An ably, as I describe below, the WORDS interesting side note to Meredith's use of this metaphor is that Meredith's contemporaries responded to it in their reviews of Diana. One writer claims that Meredith's style is "painful"; another, that it may cause readers to "cry out"; a third reviewer compares Meredith's phraseology to "the prickles of the pineapple.")26 Why does Meredith analogize words to weapons? Norman Kelvin's classic study of Meredith provides an excellent psychobiographical answer to this question in a chapter whose title, "Society Is a Battleground," could easily have come out of a recent cognitive linguistics text.27 Meredith's deep interest in military affairs, his experience as a war correspondent, his fascinated ambivalence toward dueling, his idealized image of the soldier as embodying the qualities he most desired, and his perception of his own social world as a conflicted sphere-all "found expression in the imagery, themes, details, values-and even overarching forms-that are elements and aspects of Meredith's work."28There is, however, another possible approach to the question: one that centers not on Meredith, but on metaphor. If biographical research explains what in Meredith sought expression, cognitive linguistics can help explain how it is that the expression was there to be found. Among the significant conceptual metaphors identified by
Lakoff and Johnson is the metaphorical ISWAR. concept ARGUMENT
This concept gives rise to a number of ordinary English expressions ("Shedefended/attacked my position";"Ilost the argument"); the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor, however, is not just a way of referto a way of understanding what we do when but ring argument, we argue. That we even conceive of ourselves as winning or losing arguments shows that ARGUMENT IS WAR is a cultural "metaphor we live by ... it structures the actions we perform in arguing."29
IS WAR Furthermore, ARGUMENT depends on an even more basic con-
ceptual metaphor mentioned above: THE MIND IS A BODY MOVING IN SPACE. Thanks to this metaphor, language and ideas can both be conceptualized as objects manipulated by the mind; when they are conceptualized as a specific class of objects, namely weapons, the
ARGUMENT IS WARmetaphor
becomes available-along
with
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a number of other structuring metaphors for linguistic exchange. (Consider, for example, the structuring concept that underwrites to someone's pointed remark.) your reply of '"Touch6!" Meredith's fascination with military matters, then, did not so much create a complex of imagery as select a set of culturally available metaphors to be artistically elaborated. For the purpose of analyzing Diana of the Crossways, I shall refer to the relevant root metaphor as THE MIND IS A BODY WIELDING A WEAPON. It should be clear that this metaphor both combines and is consistent with all of the following basic conceptual metaphors: THE
MIND IS A BODY MOVING IN SPACE, WORDS ARE (MANIPULABLE) OBJECTS, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, ARGUMENT IS WAR. THE MIND IS A BODY WIELDING A WEAPON,
shall argue, is a structuring concept in Diana without which Meredith's theory of subjectivity in the novel cannot be understood. The power of this root metaphor owes much to its versatility. If one mind can be understood as a weapon-wielding body, then any social or cultural entity even loosely functioning as a collective mind may be imagined to have a large arsenal at its disposal. At the other end of the scale, if a mind can be functionally partitioned (recall that one of Diana's novels is titled The Man of Two Minds), internal mental processes may also be conceived of in military terms. THE MIND IS A BODY WIELDING A WEAPON ties together an enormous range of imagery that occurs throughout Diana of the Crossways. Psychological and social processes figured as battles include: Inner mental life: "'Atwar with ourselves, means the best happiness we can have'" (p. 40). "Dacier buried his face, thinking many things-the common multitude in insurrection" (p. 191). Interpersonal communication:"[Diana'sletter] fired its shot like a cannon with the muzzle at [Emma's] breast" (p. 54). Similarly, anticipating an intimate conversation, Diana sits "armed to meet" Emma (p. 108). Courtship:After Sir Lukin's advances to Diana, his house becomes "a hostile citadel" (p. 47). An earlier suitor attempts "'breaching the fortress'" (p. 24). Society and its media: "[A]snub was intended, and was foiled; and foiled with an apparent simplicity, enough to
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exasperate, had there been no laughter of men to back the countering stroke" (p. 129). Diana "d[oes] battle with the hypocrite world" (p. 97). Chapter 33 "exhibits the springing of a mine in a newspaper article" (p. 315). Politics: "The leaders are terrible men; they fascinate me. They appear to move with an army of facts"' (p. 285). Of Lord Dannisburgh, Diana tells Emma, "Youhave seen him as he always is-except when he is armed for battle" (p. 68). These examples and many others work together systematically under the root metaphor. Moreover, Meredith joins THE MIND IS A BODY WIELDING A WEAPON seamlessly with other sets of imagery in the book. The novel's hunting metaphors, which have received ample critical attention, include the element "weapon," so that institutions such as the legal system may be brought under the rubric of THE MIND IS A BODY WIELDING A WEAPON. Thus Diana flees England "to escape the meshes of the terrific net of the marital law brutally whirled to capture her by the man her husband" (p. 135). While the war imagery draws on a general cultural metaphor, the hunting imagery draws on the mythology associated with the name Diana; the two intersect at the common element "weapon."The goddess Diana is herself a wielder of weapons, of course; the exchange of shots in Diana Warwick's "brutallest tussle with the world" (p. 97) is prefigured in the novel's opening paragraph. A "general fling" at women, the narrator tells us, "we may deem pardonable, for doing as little harm to womankind as the stone of an urchin cast upon the bosom of mother Earth." "[I]nanimatenature" will eventually have her revenge, however: the "urchin" of mankind will later be subject to "a strange assault of wanton missiles, coming on him he knows not whence" (p. 1). But the most important weapon wielded by a collective mind in Diana is not really a weapon at all, at least not in its literal function. Medicine as well as law falls under the rubric of the root metaphor here, so that the "cynical surgical knife"with which Diana metaphorically "cut[s] at herself' to "taste of her powers" finds its literal counterpart in the surgeon's instrument that cuts Emma's body to save her life (p. 231). The institutions of marriage and medicine both wield this knife; Emma's husband Sir Lukin declares: "'But, oh, good God! she's in their hands this minute. My saint is under the knife ... It's my doing-this knife!
Macpherson swears there is a chance. Thomson backs him. But
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they're at her, cutting! ... And women fear blood-and her own!"' (pp. 246-7). At this moment, the weapon-wielding body that has metaphorically stood for the mind and its collective social elaborations makes contact with a literal body. The result is blood. Many readers of Diana have pointed to blood as Meredith's metaphor for the body and especially the sexual body.30In terms of metaphor theory, it is important to recognize the image as a metonym; blood is a part of the body for which it stands. Like THE
MIND IS A BODY WIELDING A WEAPON, THE BODY IS BLOOD
makes use of an
already available cultural metaphor. The OED cites, for example, several uses by Shakespeare of "blood"to mean bodily emotions or sexual passion. Lakoff and Johnson remind us, however, that the purpose of a metonym is not just to substitute a part for the whole; the choice of a particular part calls attention to a particular aspect of the whole.31 In Diana Meredith makes literary use of the BODY IS BLOOD metonym to call attention to a certain aspect of the body: its vulnerability to weapons and especially to weapons that cut. The specific choice of "blood"to stand for "body"provides a link to the root metaphor THE MIND IS A BODY WIELDINGA
WEAPON.
The result is a complex blended space entailing two important concepts: the relation between mind and body is itself metaphorical (THE MIND IS A BODY), and Meredith's metaphor for the relation between mind and body is a weapon wielded by the mind. I suggest that we should locate Meredith's theory of the subject in this blended space. A self, for Meredith, consists of a mind (broadly understood as the medium for societal influences as well as intellectual activity) metaphorically mapped onto a body, in a dynamic relationship of unequal power. The metaphor is topheavy; the mind is too much for the body to handle; the mind and all it holds weigh on the body with cutting force, metaphorically realized as a weapon. At the same time, this weapon serves to keep open the space between mind and body; to keep them in relation, however unequal, rather than collapse them together and cause the metaphorical space of the subject to disappear. DACIERAND THE COLLAPSEOF METAPHOR Bearing all this in mind, I now turn to the critical moment in Diana and Dacier's relationship, the night when Dacier reveals his political secret to Diana with the expectation of a sexual reward: "Asto the secret communicated, he exulted in the pardonable cunning of the impulse turning him back to her house after
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the guests had gone, and the dexterous play of his bait on the line, tempting her to guess and quit her queenly guard. Though it had not been distinctly schemed, the review of it in that light added to the enjoyment. It had been dimly and richly conjectured as a hoped result" (p. 316). Whether or not Dacier's behavior provides a psychologically credible explanation for Diana's betrayal, it works on the level of metaphor. Dacier has tried to map their "marriage,"saturated as it is with politics, social activity, intellectual exchange, and domestic investment, too literally onto their sexual attraction; he thinks that his political news is equal to a sexual favor. In doing so, he collapses the complex blended space in which their relationship actually exists; that relationship is, for a time, destroyed for Diana. Diana's sale of the information might be read as a contemptuous mirroring of Dacier's mistake-she also trades the secret for a crude material reward. A more complex interpretation suggests itself, however: that Diana sells the secret with intention of putting it back where it belongs, restoring its dynamic distance from the body by reintroducing it into the world of the mind, of politics, and intellectual exchange. Several moments in the story foreshadow Dacier's metaphorical incompetence. During their time together in Lugano, Diana tells Dacier of the symbolic difference, for her, between wild and cultivated flowers. "'Isuppose they don't carry the same signification,' said Dacier, in the tone of a pupil to such themes" (p. 153). The pupil doesn't make much progress; later on, he puts Diana off by (in her view) inappropriately comparing a half-open crocus to "the famous tiptoe ballet-posture, arms above head and fingers like swallows meeting in air, of an operatic danseuse of the time" (p. 157). Significantly, Dacier's mistake here is to analogize a flower, one of the novel's symbols of imaginative and mental freedom, to a body. Later we are told that he has "a wretched tendency under vexation to conceive grotesque analogies, antipoetic" (p. 185). It seems that this tendency emerges even when he is not "under vexation," as his attempt to exchange politics for sex amounts to a "grotesque analogy," unbearable for Diana. This reading, in which marriage in the context of the life-ofthe-mind-in-the-world can have no one-to-one correspondence with any merely material or sexual exchange, helps explain the ambivalence of Diana's marriage to Redworth. It is not that Redworth emerges as a hero of metaphor; indeed, he dislikes ithis "bluntness killed the flying metaphors" (p. 352). This marriage, too, will exist in dynamic distance from the body. But perhaps Redworth at least will not collapse the metaphorical space;
892
"'hedoes not supply me with similes,'" says Diana, but "'hepoints me to the source of them"' (p. 366). The source of similes, as Lakoff, Johnson, and Turner would agree, is the body itself; and Redworth points to it by evoking the redness of its rising blood. THE MIND IS A BODY WIELDING A WEAPON: the weapon holds the mind at a powerful distance from the body at the same time as it keeps them in physical contact. The subject exists in the dynamic space created thereby, but the mind could not be so construed if the body were not first available as the source of metaphor. Redworth, too, offers a potential transformation of the metaphor for metaphor, the weapon itself. At the ball for Lord Larrian that opens the novel, Redworth offends Diana: "'Thinkwar the finest subject for poets?' he exclaimed. 'Flatly no: I don't think it. I think exactly the reverse"' (p. 30). At the same event he exerts himself to prevent a duel; his dislike of war and fighting continues to surface throughout the story. Toward the end of the novel, however, Redworth participates in a contest that substitutes a "solid bat" for the rapiers, darts, and guns that have figured human linguistic and social exchanges in Diana. Even as Sir Lukin praises Redworth as a cricket player, he expresses exasperation with Redworth's anti-war politics: "'[H]owa nation with an atom of self-respect can go on standing that sort of bullying from foreigners! We do ... And Tom Redworth says, they may bite their thumbs to the bone-they don't hurt us. I tell him, he has no sense of national pride. He says, we're not prepared for war ... Says, we're a peaceful people"' (p. 376). I suggest that Meredith offers in this scene his tentative vision of what "the fisticuff stage" may yet evolve into. The peaceful contest still keeps open the dynamic metaphorical space of the subject while taking off the dangerous edge of the weapon. Of course this process may be one more of domestication than of evolution. Redworth's wealth has come from his investment in the railways, which Emma construes as England's self-wounding weapon: '"Thoserailways! When would there be peace in the land? ... And the English, blunt as their senses are to noise and hubbub, would be revelling in hisses, shrieks, puffings, and
screeches . . . [T]his mania for cutting up the land does really
cause me to pity those who are to follow us. They will not see the England we have seen. It will be patched and scored, disfigured" (p. 50). The nation, like the novel and its heroine, is a blended region whose forward progress is really a painful internal dynamic generated by the reconfiguration of input spaces-a "circulat[ion of] gumption," to quote Redworth's retort to Emma's
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lament over the railroad (p. 50). Redworth's investment, in England's infrastructure and in his future marriage, stimulates internal circulation, and in the end Diana responds to the "weight of the novel masculine pressure on her throbbing blood" (p. 407). Domestication seems to be necessarily accompanied by a blunting of the senses, an imperviousness to the assault of sounds. As Diana submits to Redworth, Dacier becomes nothing more than "atolling name," disengaged from her sensual world (p. 411). This "tolling"is a faint echo from the scene of their initial attraction, in Italy, where they are kept awake by the bell of a local campanile that "smote their pillows a shattering blow" (p. 147), sounding midnight like an "executioner" and forcing them to "shoulde[r] all the weapons of black Insomnia's armoury" (p. 148). In this extradomestic setting, sleep is "one of the warlike arts, a paradoxical thing you must battle for and can only win at last when utterly beaten" (p. 146). The bell's tolling, like the human voices in this novel, is a weapon. Has Diana's war with voices internal and external, which she has paradoxically won by being beaten first by the incisive diplomat Dacier and then by the blunt instrument Redworth, in the end gained her only the right to sleep? The novel's last movement, an "involuntary little twitch" of Diana's fingers, seems to suggest so. The material and social body has successfully smothered Diana's progressive intellectual ideals in the sleep of domesticity. When it is understood as a metaphorical space, the narrative
of Diana of the Crossways
sion than as a dynamic trace of the configurations and reconfigurations of that space. It rearranges, but does not think outside, its marriage of metaphors.
NOTES
'George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 16. Hereafter, all references will be to this edition, cited parenthetically in the text. 2 See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999), for a systematic elaboration of these differences and their implications for Western philosophical conceptions of language, meaning, and reason. 3 Lakoff, "The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor" in Metaphor and Thought, 2d edn., ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 202-51, 203. The main tenets Lakoff elaborates in this essay are similarly treated by Johnson in The Body in the Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987); by Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:
can be seen as less a driving progres-
894
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980); and by Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996). My own understanding of metaphor has been gleaned from all these works; a reader interested in the contemporary theory of metaphor might begin with any of them. As I introduce concepts in metaphor theory, I will cite the most helpful material, but all the sources offer explanations and examples in common. 4 Michael Reddy, "The Conduit Metaphor," in Metaphor and Thought, pp. 164-201. In this essay I will follow cognitive linguists' convention of identifying metaphorical mappings in small capitals. 5Johnson, p. 59. 6 Johnson further explains that the idea of containment itself is a metaphorical extension from the domain of bodily experience (pp. 21-3); the experiential basis of such metaphorical concepts is the central theme of The Body in the Mind. 7Johnson, p. 23. Johnson and others name ideas such as containment "image schemata," and note that although image schemata are cognitively real, they are not the same as visual images. 8 For a full elaboration of this series of projections, see Turner, pp. 38-44. 9 Lakoff, "Contemporary Theory," p. 210.
10Ibid.
I See especially Turner, chap. 5, "Creative Blends," pp. 57-84. 12Turner, pp. 83-4. '3Renate Brilckl, Structural and Thematic Analysis of George Meredith's Novel "Diana of the Crossways" (Salzburg: Institut ffir Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1978), p. 105. 14Turner, p. 66, my emphasis. Turner defines irony as a blend whose structure emerges from just such disanalogy. A Change of Masks (London: Athlone, 1970), p. 15Gillian Beer, Meredith. 140. 16 Gayla McGlamery, "In His Beginning, His Ends: The 'Preface' to Meredith's Diana of the Crossways," SNNTS 23, 4 (Winter 1991): 470-89, 475. 17 Diane Elam, "'WePray to Be Defended from Her Cleverness': Conjugating Romance in George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways," Genre 21, 2 (Summer 1988): 179-201, 196. '8McGlamery, p. 473. 19 Donald D. Stone, "Meredith and Bakhtin: Polyphony and Bildung," SEL 28, 4 (Autumn 1988): 693-712, 705. 20 Stone, p. 700. 21 Judith Wilt, The Readable People of George Meredith (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 77-8. 22 Susan Morgan, "Dumbly a Poet: Lost Harmonies in Meredith's Later Fiction," HLQ 47, 2 (1984): 113-28, 120. 23 Margaret Conrow, "Meredith's Ideal of Purity," ELWIU 10, 2 (1983): 199-207, 199. 24 It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from these examples that analogical thought is fundamentally visual. The "image schemata" that Johnson posits as the basis for reason "have a certain kinesthetic character-they are not tied to any single perceptual modality" (p. 25).
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25Wilt, "Meredith's Diana: Freedom, Fiction, and the Female," TSLL 18, 1 (Spring 1976): 42-62. 26 F. V. Dickens in Spectator, 18 April 1885 (pp. 270-4, 273); unsigned review, Pall Mall Gazette, 28 March 1885 (pp. 265-8, 266); Arthur Symons in Time, May 1885 (pp. 274-9, 277); rprt. on pages indicated in Meredith: The CriticalHeritage, ed. loan Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). 27 Norman Kelvin, A Troubled Eden: Nature and Society in the Works of George Meredith (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1961). 28Kelvin, p. 15. For further comment on Meredith's interest in dueling, see Joseph Moses, The Novelist as Comedian: George Meredith and the Ironic Sensibility (New York: Schocken, 1983), p. 86. Waldo S. Glock discusses the extensive military imagery in Diana in '"Themeand Metaphor in Diana of the Crossways," DR 65, 1 (Winter 1985): 67-79. 29Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p. 4. 30 See for example Robert S. Baker, "Sanctuary and Dungeon: The Imagery of Sentimentalism in Meredith's Diana of the Crossways," TSLL 18,1 (Spring 1976): 63-81. 31 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p. 36.

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SEL 43, 4 (Autumn2003):877-895 ISSN0039-3657

The of Metaphorical Space Diana Meredith's of the Crossways

Meredith's Diana of the Crossways

Diana of the Crossways Meredith's

Diana of the Crossways Meredith's

Diana of the Crossways Meredith's

common use of them has helped largely to civilize us ...

Meredith's Diana ofthe Crossways

Diana of the Crossways Meredith's

Meredith's Diana of the Crossways

Meredith's Diana of the Crossways

can be seen as less a driving progres-

Meredith's Diana of the Crossways

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