Literary Tourism

I have just returned from my two day research excursion at the Beinecke Library at Yale. It was extraordinary. Almost enough to make me want to get up this life plan of possible mediocrity and popular fiction to sink back into the grottoes of Academia. Almost.

Well, maybe not.

I had to continually remind myself to stop being a tourist and become a researcher: a cold, calculating research machine, looking for answers to questions I wasn't quite sure I was asking. I couldn't. Instead, I asked for boxes containing materials I didn't need so I could check out notes for a novel that was never written or ogle Charles Dickens' signature. I took sneaky cell phone pictures of the more interesting artifacts ("Began Middlemarch"). I spent time caressing diary pages (with my eyes, of course, not my hands) in a loving way, not caring so much for what was written but how it was written. The written word has always instilled a sense of wonder in me, a wonder that graduate school has done its best to beat out; but as I sat in the reading room, diving through boxes and boxes of literary treasures, I felt that wonder sneak up and then rush over me.

This is the first time I have tried so thoroughly to get inside an author's head- reading her thoughts, touching her things- and it can't be done. You can't be in someone else's head, no matter how much you like or even understand their writing.

I am not sure how beneficial this visit was to my actual research. I think it has prompted more questions than it answered and I could certainly have gleaned much of the same information from just reading published copies of Marian Evans' diaries instead of making my head ache over her tiny, cramped scrawls. But it gave me a feel for her life and her attitudes about so many things. And it has actually made me start thinking of her as Marian Evans, to the point where I kind of feel awkward referring to her as George Eliot in my work.

Why do we still call her George Eliot? It wasn't her name, after all. And she isn't the first woman to publish under a man's pseudonym and later be revealed. Charlotte Bronte originally wrote as Currier Bell, but we now call her Charlotte Bronte. It's strange that we don't do the same for Evans/Eliot, and I wonder if it has something to do with her scandalous life and the many names she lived under (Mary Ann Evans, Marian Evans, Marian Lewes, Polly, Marian Cross). Maybe it's easier to just stick with the identity she used for her books and leave it at that. But I want to call her Marian Evans.