George Eliot's Middlemarch: Victorian and Modern Critical Receptions

Abstract

Cultural study today has far surpassed Leavis, who endorsed George Eliot's Middlemarch in a concept that Eliot might not have agreed with. Our critical interests in language, interpretation, and identity politics are much more in line with Eliot's concern about democracy, knowledge of reality and its representation. Today's socio-political studies of Middlemarch enhance our understanding of the book's historical construct by scrutinizing the Era of Reform in side and outside the text. Feminist criticisms, who generally go beyond earlier disappointment with Eliot, now reaffirm her progressive position. There are brilliant analyses arguing how Eliot follows, yet eventually transcends the dialectic between liberal and evangelical feminisms in her days. Yet a prevailing skepticism regarding narrative's referential possibility has also undermined sympathetic sensibility in many latter day critiques. Reading criticisms on the great works of the nineteenth-century realism these days, one no longer feels the reality the books invite us to experience. Before we make any new critical engagements, we must first get that feeling back. In comparison with post-structuralists, the earlier critics may seem naive, but their sympathetic readings retain precisely that sense of reality that we are incapable of grasping. This article traces back through Middlemarch the critical heritage of to see how far we have come along. It compares Victorian reviews with modern criticism before the 1980's, when radical skepticism gradually gained currency.