1 Introduction

One central but not critically-noticed moment in George Meredith’s novel The Egoist comes when Clara Middleton, the heroine, betrothed to Sir Willoughby Patterne and desperate to dissolve the engagement, remembers gazing into the eyes of a mother bird on a nest: “She had been taken by playmate boys in her infancy to peep into hedge-leaves, where the mother-bird brooded on the nest; and the eyes of the bird in that marvellous dark thickset home, had sent her away with worlds of fancy” (Meredith, 1979, p. 42). To look at an animal, specifically a bird, in this novel sets Clara free. In a world where Clara strives desperately for freedom, unable to obtain it because the eyes of most of “the world” cannot see why she would not want to marry a handsome, rich man like Sir Willoughby, this is a great gift, and an intersection of birds and the gaze, both necessary for Clara’s liberty. However, given the dense, allusive quality of Meredith’s novel, where animals appear more as metaphors than mimesis, it is easy to miss. Meredith does write The Egoist as “an episode in the vast process of natural selection, a drama which anatomizes the spiritual and physical decline of one species and the rise of another” (Williams, 1983, p. 53), and makes the metaphors that deal with natural selection and its processes in his novel so thick on the ground that literal moments might hardly seem to compete. Yet Clara’s encounter with the mother bird, although foundational, is not solitary. Other moments where Clara engages with literal birds are present in the novel, while the bird metaphors are outlining the feminist struggle for freedom that is at the center of Meredith’s text. Literal birds and metaphorical birds work together in The Egoist to empower feminist liberation and disempower the male egoism that would see them both permanently grounded.

Willoughby Patterne is ostensibly the center of Meredith’s novel, the Egoist of the title, and Meredith spends a considerable amount of time carefully, as Woolf puts it, “turn[ing him] slowly round before a steady fire of scrutiny and criticism which allows no twitch on the victim’s part to escape it” (2020). However, Buchen has pointed out that there are multiple egoists in the book (1964, p. 255), and Clara is one of them. Clara, who is actually Willoughby’s second fiancée after he has been rejected by Constantia Durham, is at first enamored of him, but becomes horrified as she learns what being the wife of an egoist would mean: the end of any separate existence from Willoughby. When Willoughby “lecture[s] her on the theme of the infinity of love,” Clara “listen[s] gravely, conceiving the infinity as a narrow dwelling where a voice droned and ceased not” (Meredith, 1979, p. 39). Clara, described a few sentences earlier as someone “with a natural love of liberty” (Meredith, 1979, p. 39), then seeks several means to break free of Willoughby without seeming inconstant, a stereotype of women she flinches from. She looks for help in Laetitia Dale, the woman Willoughby courted before her; Vernon Whitford, Willoughby’s cousin; her father, Dr. Middleton, who is too busy being seduced by Willoughby’s offer of port wine to help her; and Horace de Craye, a friend of Willoughby’s who has come to attend the wedding and who finds himself enchanted by Clara. In the end, Willoughby’s supposedly secret proposal to Laetitia and his dread of having the neighborhood find out frees Clara, and only Clara’s kinship with birds keeps up her spirits in the meantime. She manages to escape and go to the Alps, a long-held dream; the book ends with her on the journey in the Alps with Vernon, her eventual husband. The presence of birds ultimately helps to remind her of her kinship with the earth and teaches her to look beyond her egoism.

2 The Struggle to Reach Avian Kinship: Clara

I would call this discourse of birds and women that ultimately frees Clara and teaches her to look beyond her egoism proto-ecofeminist, as the discourse of ecofeminism, the “basic premise [of which] is that the ideology which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature” (Gaard, 1993, p. 1), did not begin until late in the twentieth century, long after Meredith’s publication of The Egoist in 1879. Yet Meredith was one of the first novelists to link women and nature explicitly together for the benefit rather than the casting-down of both, because he was one of the first novelists to embrace a nature-oriented view of looking at the world. Unlike some British novelists dealing with the wake of Darwinism, Meredith did not reflect grimly on the foundations of faith being destroyed; “[h]is advantage,” notes his biographer, Jones, “was that he did not need to free himself from the religious dogmas that he had easily discarded” (1999, p. 127). While Tennyson claimed that the human mind was beyond the explanatory power of evolution (Jones, 1999, p. 130), Meredith was already Darwinian and did not need to deal with the distance that nineteenth-century British Christian faith had imposed between humans and the natural world. He was also one of the first feminist novelists, responding to the movement for women’s rights in mid-Victorian England that created “not precisely the character, but the fearful situation of Clara Middleton. She appeals to us…as a human being caught in an inhuman system of commodity relationships…Meredith’s intuition of the suffocating web that can be woven about a young woman by playing on these “virtues” of hers is a tremendous imaginative achievement” (Adams, 1979, p. viii). Meredith expressed in his famous essay “An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,” which provided a large part of the inspiration for The Egoist, that “[W]here women are on the road to an equal footing with men, in attainments and in liberty…there, and only waiting to be transplanted from life to the stage, or the novel, or the poem, pure Comedy flourishes” (1980, p. 32). Meredith’s own statement, then, identifies the presence of comedy as a coefficient of women’s liberty, and The Egoist is written with the Comic Muse hovering over the book.

Constructing a world that was suffused for him with the importance of both nature and women’s liberty, Meredith’s discourse can easily be seen as proto-ecofeminist. Where it differs from modern ecofeminism comes down, perhaps, mostly to the fact that Meredith’s discourse works to liberate a single female character, Clara Middleton, from the clutches of a man, Sir Wiloughby Patterne, who despises both nature and women, who sees them in fact as the same thing. Sandilands (1999) argues that

..liberation has increasingly come to signify the ability of a social group, a collective subject position if you will, to represent itself in a way that is not simply the negative reflection of the judgments of the dominant group…A certain version of community is invoked, which frequently involves the signification of the group to be constituted in terms of their particularity…ecofeminism, in its call for women’s knowledge of nature to serve as a template for future human/nature relations, is exemplary in this respect. (p. 44)

Clara does not start a movement or feel herself as part of a collective or a community, at least in part because other women she confesses her distaste for Willoughby to do not understand her. In fact, Laetitia Dale, who ends up as Willoughby’s wife, says of Clara’s behavior close to halfway through the novel, “To me it is the conduct of a creature untamed” (Meredith, 1979, p. 145). Laetitia shrinks from the wildness she feels in Clara, and although she later changes her mind about Sir Willoughby and comes to see him more from Clara’s point-of-view, she never makes the full jump to either Clara’s gaze or Clara’s liberty. “Without [her] conceiving in him anything of the strange old monster of earth which had struck the awakened girl’s mind of Miss Middleton” (Meredith, 1979, p. 269), Willoughby sinks in Laetitia’s regard, and becomes someone she “admire[s] piecemeal” (Meredith, 1979, p. 269), splitting him into separate parts. So far Clara influences Laetitia, but she cannot bring Laetitia with her to fly free or feel as Clara does about marriage to Sir Willoughby or about birds. The most Clara can share with her closest female friend in the story is a partial gaze.

Then again, Clara is at fault herself for close to half of the novel, so focused on her own plight that she impatiently disdains kinship with the birds who are among the few literal, as opposed to metaphorical, animals in the story. When the narrator notes, “There sung a sky-lark,” Clara’s reaction is telling. ““Not even the bird that does not fly away!” she said; meaning, she had no heart for the bird satisfied to rise and descend in this place” (Meredith, 1979, p. 130). She is unable to look beyond her own disdain for Sir Willoughby’s land to realize it may be quite congenial habitat for a bird. Skylarks are highly important to Meredith, the center of his poem “The Lark Ascending,” published in his 1883 collection Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth four years after The Egoist, and mentioned in several of his early poems as well. Holmes, speaking of Meredith as a Darwinian poet, says,

Meredith’s lark, on the other hand [as opposed to Shelley’s in ‘To a Skylark’], is very much of this Earth, so he writes about it in familiar idiomatic English…Meredith too uses similes, likening the [lark’s] song to water rippling, dew trembling, rain on a wind-blown aspen tree, and so on. But the bird itself is never in doubt. It is a fellow creature. It lives in the pastoral, arable, partly wooded landscape that is its typical English habitat. (2009, p. 173)

This might be a description of the landscape of Willoughby’s grounds, which include “rolling richness of foliage, wood and water, and church spire, a town and horizon hills” (Meredith, 1979, p. 130). Clara refuses to share the lark’s eyes and see that the landscape is good no matter how withered an egoist its owner; she has “no heart” for it, and the landscape that she “gaze[s] over” as she listens to the bird is one she is blind to. Only later in the novel will she become free to share heart and eyes with birds, although the memory of the mother bird on her nest that she traded gazes with shows the potential is already within her.

In Chap. 21 of the novel, as Clara tries and fails to resign herself to either marrying Willoughby or being thought a jilt by the world, a mental crisis arrives. She tries to write a letter to a friend she plans to seek refuge with; it appears insufficient. After tearing it up, she goes to the window and looks out at the birds below,

watch[ing] the blackbird on the lawn as he hopped from shafts of dewy sunlight to the long-stretched dewy tree-shadows, considering in her mind that dark dews are more meaningful than bright, the beauty of the dews of woods more sweet than meadow-dews… That is how quick natures will often be cold and hard, or not much moved, when the positive crisis arrives, and why it is that they are prepared for astonishing leaps over the gradations which should render their conduct comprehensible to us, if not excuseable. She watched the blackbird throw up his head stiffly, and peck to right and left, dangling the worm on each side his orange beak. Specklebreasted thrushes were at work, and a wagtail that ran as with Clara’s own rapid little steps. Thrush and blackbird flew to the nest. They had wings. The lovely morning breathed of sweet earth into her open window, and made it painful, in the dense twitter, chirp, cheep, and song of the air, to resist the innocent intoxication. (Meredith, 1979, p. 169)

Clara has literal birds that give her back her strength, that have her “own rapid little steps,” that can reassure her with pure natural fact—“They had wings”—that she will somehow win free. As Clara’s gaze turns outward through the window, she ceases to be so self-absorbed, such an egoist. This is the thing that ultimately makes her different from Willoughby and the other egoists in the novel: Clara bothers to look, and when she looks, she sees. “Watch” is repeated twice in this passage, both in reference to the blackbird, and in the middle of these references comes the short passage in which the narrator renders Clara’s behavior sympathetic, “if not excuseable.” The gaze of the character and the narrator passes out through the window to the blackbird, then inward to Clara’s heart, then outward again. Though there are twenty-nine chapters of crisis still to come, this moment shows that Clara’s mental world cannot be separated from the natural world, that in many important respects she is a bird, and that running and flight will both belong to her once more.

Clara also has a confederate whose familiarity with live birds is a comfort to her: Crossjay, Willoughby’s ward and Vernon’s student, with the last half of his name marking him as one of the corvids, which come in at the top of the bird intelligence scale and are known for their curiosity (Ackerman, 2016, p. 33). Crossjay is a great collector of birds’ eggs and nests, and he goes to see a collection of stuffed and taxidermized birds that he can describe in detail: “stuffed birds of every English kind, kingfishers, yaffles, black woodpeckers, goat-sucker owls, more mouth than head, with dusty, dark-spotted wings, like moths” (Meredith, 1979, pp. 27–28). Viewing a collection of dead birds rather than live ones, he represents the collection impulse that might be viewed as separating and stilling the impulse to kinship; Ritvo argues in The Animal Estate that Victorian systems of collecting and classification are means of domination, since “they embodied a sweeping human claim to intellectual mastery of the natural world” (1987, p. 12). But Crossjay is also the one who knows the most about living birds, since “But the habits of birds, and the place for their eggs…he soon knew of his great nature” (Meredith, 1979, p. 27). That Crossjay possesses this knowledge of living birds, much more than most people in the book have, is one of the first things we learn about him. He also is the one who most sympathizes with Clara, and who gives her the means to speak her kinship to birds aloud for the first time; when she has been running with him and he tells her after the run that “And you don’t pant a bit!,” Clara returns, “Dear me, no; not more than a bird. You might as well try to catch a bird” (Meredith, 1979, p. 58). We know from the narrator that Crossjay, in fact, regularly succeeds at catching birds, so this particular moment is important not so much for its literal truth as for Clara’s recognition of the liberty of flight—the term that the narrator gives her run (Meredith, 1979, p. 58). Crossjay is her companion of the moment, the tool not of her liberation but of her recognizing her potential liberation.

Crossjay also gives Clara someone to care about when she is shrinking into herself in despair over not being able to escape Willoughby. Clara is worried that Crossjay will be ruined by Willoughby’s careless affection toward him, including taking him away from his studies to become a Navy officer and giving him more spending money than he ought to have (Meredith, 1979, p. 27). It is in speaking up for Crossjay that Clara first begins to push back against Willoughby (Meredith, 1979, p. 69), and it is also Crossjay who is the ultimate means of her liberation, by overhearing Willoughby propose to Laetitia while he is still technically engaged to Clara (Meredith, 1979, pp. 329–337). Willoughby ultimately gives up the engagement in dread that Clara will spread the story to his neighbors—something Crossjay has already begun to do.

Crossjay, who reminds Clara of her playmates who introduced her to the mother bird on the nest (Meredith, 1979, p. 58), at last settles down to study for his career in the Navy, giving up a measure of wildness in return for liberty. Neither Clara nor Crossjay are ruined by Willoughby, and they rely on each other to avoid it. The collector of birds’ nests is also a boy who promises to leave eggs in the nest where he found them; “I always do drop a couple [eggs] back. I promised Mr. Whitford I would, and Miss Middleton too” (Meredith, 1979, p. 351). Clara goes free and ascends to the heights, the Alps, that she dreamed of as a symbol of freedom before she was engaged to Willoughby; she in fact ends the book clearly heading toward Vernon Whitford, but actually unmarried, and spared from the laughter of Meredith’s Comic Muse, who “is grave and sisterly” (Meredith, 1979, p. 425) as she sits next to Vernon and Clara. The assertion of kinship with birds leads Clara, ultimately, to assertion of sisterhood with the Comic Muse herself, the controlling device of the whole book. For Meredith, assertion of kinship leads to liberation, a predictable route for him to take while so deeply rooted in Darwinian thought. According to Holmes, “Darwinism fundamentally alters our relationship with the rest of the natural world. To say that, after Darwin, we are animals does not make this transformation quite clear enough…After Darwin, it is a matter of kinship. Focussing narrowly on us, on human beings, we are now properly animals by nature as well as by kind” (2009, p. 154). Clara, from being trapped in a place and mindset that allowed her to reject a lark’s natural rising from and returning to its habitat, is now capable of seeing herself as an animal who can have that same kind of liberty of flight, and choosing her own habitat, also high, also free.

3 Avian Metaphors as Mockery: Willoughby

The other side of ecofeminism, its insight that the oppression of women and nature is shared, is represented in the book by Willoughby—again rendering Meredith’s novel more proto-ecofeminist than truly ecofeminist by taking place on the individual level rather than the societal. Still, Willoughby is backed by the societal perception that he is a good mate for Clara, and which renders incomprehensible her backing away from him. Gruen argues that, “The categories “woman” and “animal” serve the same symbolic function in patriarchal society. Their construction as dominated, submissive “other” in theoretical discourse(…) has sustained human male dominance” (1993, p. 61). Willoughby thinks of women and animals as the same. His twisted view is represented by how he ignores the similarity of his own behavior to literal birds behaving under Darwinian sexual selection and by the bird metaphors that are applied to him. Where Clara returned the gaze of a bird as a young woman and learns to look outward again, Willoughby never considers that his dominating view might not be correct, and his gaze is most often described with metaphors of the mirror. Willoughby epitomizes the idea of human exceptionalism as “the claim that humans are, merely by virtue of their species membership, so qualitatively different from any and all other forms of life that humans rightly enjoy privileges over all of the earth’s other life forms” (Waldau, 2013)—with one glaring exception. Willoughby does not account women as human, and thus enforces, without meaning to (if only because it is the means of taking another fiancée from him), the alliance of Clara with birds and her drive to freedom.

Willoughby believes he is in control of both animals and women because of his superior knowledge of science. He does not allow literal animals—except horses, and then only briefly mentioned—a place anywhere near him, but accords metaphorical animals plenty of mental space. He, however, is a man utterly trapped by the metaphors that consume him and ignorant of biological realities. He believes in sexual selection, and also that it will compel Clara to choose him. All the examples he uses when picturing himself as the superior male animal are of birds who perform a mating dance or song:

A deeper student of Science than his rivals, he appreciated Nature's compliment in the fair one’s choice of you. We now scientifically know that in this department of the universal struggle, success is awarded to the bettermost. You spread a handsomer tail than your fellows, you dress a finer top-knot, you pipe a newer note, have a longer stride; she reviews you in competition, and selects you. The superlative is magnetic to her. She may be looking elsewhere, and you will see—the superlative will simply have to beckon, away she glides. She cannot help herself; it is her nature. (Meredith, 1979, p. 33)

The “handsomer tail” directly indicates a peacock, an example that Darwin also uses in The Descent of Man when discussing sexual selection and the female’s choice of the “superlative” male; he states that “Now when the peacock displays himself, he expands and erects his tail transversely to his body, for he stands in front of the female, and has to shew off, at the same time, his rich blue throat and breast” (1875, p. 396). Darwin also spends time detailing birds’ feathers arranged in shapes such as top-knots, their songs, and their dances; birds receive four chapters in The Descent, twice as many as non-human mammals. But Willoughby pictures these ornaments as captivating the female, until “[s]he cannot help herself.” Here, he twists metaphors of birds in the service of captivity instead of liberation, and ignores the fact that females, even in Darwin’s highly patriarchal and Victorian framing of the ideas of sexual selection, still make the choice to mate.

It is possible to see the bird metaphors in criticism the same way Willoughby does. Smith, in his seminal article on Darwinism in The Egoist, “The Cock of Lordly Plume,” argues that “Willoughby woos both Clara and Laetitia by harping on his romantic vision of a love able to shut out the world and create an unchanging bower of bliss. Yet Willoughby’s “poetry of the enclosed and fortified bower” is “incomprehensible … if not adverse” to Clara…Darwin discusses the courtship and mating of bower-birds at length in The Descent as a paradigm of mutual love, yet he acknowledges that “the male is the principal workman”…in building the bower and that it is the male who entices the female inside” (1995, p. 68). This presents the bowerbird’s bower as a force of imprisonment, but in fact, it is a result of Willoughby twisting yet another metaphor, and the critic appearing to consider that version as the clearer and truer one. The bowerbird male’s bower is not a nest, much less a prison, but a hollow structure, often with an avenue leading to it, constructed “for the sole purpose of attracting mates” (Endler, Gaburro and Kelley, 2014, p. 1); the female and male mate on the ground where it stands if the female chooses him to fertilize her eggs, and one theory suggests that “The origins of bower building, however, can be best explained as a trait that attracts females because of the protection [emphasis added] it provides them from forced copulation by bower owners” (Borgia, 1995, p. 542). Female bowerbirds in the wild are influenced by the male’s display, but free, and in fact are frequent escapees into liberation. If Willoughby’s use of a bower metaphor is indeed meant to echo a bowerbird, it is not his version of it that corresponds to biological reality. The bower instead affirms Clara’s kinship with birds, and the likeness of female animals—both birds and mammals—in preferring freedom from obnoxious male courtship.

Not only do metaphors obscure the biological reality of birds for Willoughby, the avian metaphors Meredith’s narrator uses are actively hostile to him—one of the many places in the narrative that metaphorical and literal animals work together to deny that Willoughby’s version of reality is the true one. The narrator notes that Willoughby, excited by the prospect that he might keep Clara from marrying his rival Horace de Craye, “flap[s] his arms, resembling for the moment those birds of enormous body which attempt a rise upon their wings and achieve a hop” (Meredith, 1979, p. 401). The maneuver renders both Willoughby and his excitement utterly ridiculous, a bird unable to fly—which every other bird mentioned in the narrative, imaginary or real, can do—and a man striving to imitate a gesture (signaled by the word “flaps”) that is more properly avian. Meredith’s proto-ecofeminism also makes the bird metaphors that apply to other men subtly mocking, if the reader knows something about the literal species. Horace de Craye, who is convinced that Clara is really in love with him when she is in fact in love with Vernon, is “the falcon…in spirit as well as in his handsome face,” and his cleverness is of the sort that “[h]e who can watch circling above it awhile, quietly viewing, and collecting in his eye [has]” (Meredith, 1979, p. 354). de Craye here seems to unite the perspectives of the bird and the gaze as well as the moment when Clara matches gazes with the mother bird on her nest, and—as this metaphor appears when he is plotting on how to take Clara away from Willoughby and make her his own—to be the hunter who can capture Clara, as well. However, biology tells a different tale. Male falcons of all species are up to a third smaller than the female, and females are preferred in falconry because of their ability to take larger prey; in fact, “[t]raditionally, falconry reverses the sexual stereotypes. The females are considered strong and calm; the males swift and edgy and emotional” (Bodio, 2015, p. 11). de Craye is not a successful hunter, up against a woman who has more kinship to birds than he does; he misses his strike, and even on a metaphorical, stereotypical level, the comparison to a male falcon is less flattering, and far less macho, than it seems on the surface. Meredith’s dense network of bird metaphors in this book completely shuts out men who hold themselves superior to women; discussing how these men tend to refer to women, Smith notes that “In Darwin's view women are like birds, able to choose the cock of lordly plume; but Meredith shows that an alarming number of men convert women into birds only to hunt them down” (1995, p. 77), whether or not the hunt is successful.

4 Conclusion

Willoughby, along with de Craye on a smaller level, cannot see the real woman, or the real animal, for being swarmed by visions of imaginary ones. Thus Meredith’s novel, despite its elegant and relentless use of animal metaphors, ultimately mocks those who miss the real lark for the figuration of flight. Clara is the one who can see the literal animals and ally with those, like Crossjay, who love them, and follow their way to liberation. Gazing into the mother bird’s eyes is a synecdoche of the novel as a whole, and it is fitting that Clara uses her gaze to find out other birds, as well. If we “are always looking across ignorance and fear” (Berger, 1992, p. 5) when we meet the eyes of an animal, that fear does not need to control us, and does not succeed in controlling Clara the way it does Willoughby. There is “a power ascribed to the animal, comparable with human power but never coinciding with it. The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man” (Berger, 1992, p. 5). And, with the secrets of flight, to women as well.