George Henry Lewes and the Interior Frontiers of Whiteness in The Spanish Gypsy

Matt Poland, “George Henry Lewes and the Interior Frontiers of Whiteness in The Spanish Gypsy” (pp. 178–207)

This essay concerns George Eliot’s poem The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and its significance for assessing the theme of race in her work. The Spanish Gypsy reveals Eliot to have been a more supple, ambivalent thinker about race than she later became in works including Daniel Deronda (1876). The essay reads The Spanish Gypsy against George Henry Lewes’s unpublished journal chronicling the Leweses’ trip to Spain in 1867. Drawing on the work of Étienne Balibar and Ann Laura Stoler, the essay reads the construction of Lewes and Eliot’s cosmopolitan British whiteness as an “interior frontier” manifested in ordinary encounters with racialized others like the Roma and Spanish in Granada. Lewes’s version of whiteness was discursively ordered according to universalizing historical and anthropological narratives and by imposing his perception of time and its frames of reference onto others. Lewes imagines these racial borders to be closed off, even as he tries to connect across them. But in grappling with her sense of the inadequacy of Victorian racial categories, in The Spanish Gypsy Eliot imagines the interior frontiers of race as porous and paradoxical, revealing an indeterminate openness that she would subsequently back away from.