The Search for a Higher Rule: Spiritual Progress in the Novels of George Eliot

Abstract

Read in the context of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, George Eliot's novels depict individual spiritual progress toward full self-consciousness through an individual's conceptual relation to the objects of his faith. Comparison with Hegel's Lordship and Bondage paradigm for the origin of self-consciousness shows how Adam Bede's limited idea of himself in terms of his work, which is his religion, expands when other individuals' betrayals of his faith in them reveals that his idea of himself is also derived from his relation to them; Adam is thus baptised into a spiritual communion with a suffering humanity. Comparison with Hegel's unhappy consciousness shows how Maggie Tulliver develops in The Mill on the Floss through her awareness of her participation in such a spiritual communion and how she fails to reach full self-consciousness because she defines the object of her faith as beyond this world. Comparison with the development of Hegel's fully rational self-consciousness shows how thinking about the relation of their objects of faith to their actions enlarges Eliot's later protagonists' perceptions of themselves so that her final, ideal hero, Daniel Deronda, comes to see himself as part of an evolving world soul.