The relationship between creator and creature

pp. 69-90

in: Saleel Nurbhai, K. M. Newton, George Eliot, judaism and the novels, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

Abstract

Golem-tales often highlight the reflexive nature of the relation between creator and golem. If the creature is flawed, it is a reflection of the flaw in the creator: if the creature reveals itself to be monstrous, it is because the creator is essentially monstrous. The idea of monstrosity did not just limit itself to fabulous creatures, but, with the advent and establishment of the Industrial Revolution, with the 1789 Revolution in France, and with new explorations in science, monstrosity as a metaphor came to be interpreted and reinterpreted throughout the nineteenth century. At the centre of this metaphor was the subject of control — of industry, of labour, of capital, of the dissemination and understanding of new ideas. Control of these areas was as shifting and unsure as control of the golem figure in Goethe's "Sorcerer's Apprentice". We have already demonstrated how Eliot reconstructed (or deconstructed) previous literary representations of Jewish assimilation; in her novels and short stories she realigned and restructured the pervasive metaphors of monstrosity and control that permeated nineteenth-century writing through further exploitation of the golem myth and kabbalistic ideas.