GEORGE ELIOT Research Articles

Plato, George Eliot, and Moral Narcissism

Carol S. Gould PLATO, GEORGE ELIOT, AND MORAL NARCISSISM George Eliot in Middlemarch charts the course of various shipwrecked lives. Like many philosophers, she explores the terrain of human happiness, looking for the constituents of the good life and the properties of a character disposed to live such a life. The moral lodestar of the novel is Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic young woman who enters a disastrous first marriage to Casaubon, an emotionally paralyzed, ineffectual scholar whom she has deified. Eliot chronicles, among other things, Dorothea's moral education, which enables her to flourish socially and affectively, and not incidentally, to make a far happier second marriage. Eliot deems egoism as the greatest obstacle to human happiness. Egoism, for Eliot, not only assumes different forms, but occurs in varying degrees of recalcitrancy in her characters. As Peter Jones shows in his rich philosophical study of Middlemarch, Eliot takes egoism to involve not only ascribingvalue to things in the world, but also describing them, so that her egoist both characterizes and evaluates the world from the vantage point of his own desires.1 In part because Eliot views the human being as a member of a social organism, she thinks that the failure to transcend one's idiosyncratic perspective dooms one to unhappiness . Thus, a necessarycondition for well-being, on Eliot's account, is to try to view the world from the perspective of another person.2 She shows this not only by depicting the lives of her characters who collide and drift apart with different levels ofself-awareness, but also by having her shrewd omniscient narrator disinterestedly occupy a multiplicity of standpoints. This narrative device displays the relation between a character 's point of view and his perceptions, while providing us with a model of perception untainted by egoism. The most poignant of tragedies in Middlemarch is that of Dr. Lydgate, 24 Carol S. Gould25 whose impulsive marriage to the vacuous, ornamental Rosamond destroys his hopes for a brilliant research career. During their courtship he boasts that he never reads literature, for he had read enough as a boy to last him his life.3 Lydgate here lacks self-knowledge. Eliot often indicates the necessity of self-knowledge for virtue and of sympathy with others for self-knowledge. Ironically, self-knowledge liberates us from our egoism. This process, on her reckoning, engages our imagination . The literary artist, in whom this faculty is highly refined, can help us cultivate ours, as well. Thus, for Eliot, literature can be an effective instrument for our moral improvement. Plato agrees with Eliot that egoism is one of the chief impediments to human happiness. In the Republic he argues that the various sorts of nonphilosophical souls (who correspond to some varieties of her egoist) are nothing ifnot wretched. Given Eliot's depiction of the power of literature to release us from our narcissistic misery, one is alarmed to see Plato denouncing literature as morally harmful, and indeed to find one of his most sustained and subtle attacks in Book 10, right on the heels of Book 9, in which he vividly draws the dictatorial soul—the most unrestrained of egoists. At the close of his indictment of poetry (607e) he acknowledges its seductive beauty, but counsels us to avoid it as we should a magnetic, tormenting lover. In Books 2 and 3 of the Republic he objects to most poetry of his tradition because, as a matter of fact, it expresses philosophical falsehoods .4 In Book 10, however, he aims at the very practice of literature, arguing that it is dangerous in principle, not just in fact. He raises a question in Book 10, which, to my knowledge, commentators have not considered. This question is whether the poet's necessary attention to perspective commits him and leads the audience to moral subjectivism.5 Both Plato and Eliot are moral realists. In spite of the differences in their versions of realism, they share a belief about the nature of human flourishing. They both take perspective as essential to literature. Yet their conclusions about the role of literature in our moral lives could not be more opposed. Although a thorough examination of their competing approaches goes beyond...

GEORGE ELIOT, GOETHE, AND THE ‘PASSIONLESS MEJNOUR’

GEORGE ELIOT, GOETHE, AND THE ‘PASSIONLESS MEJNOUR’

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Middlemarch. By GEORGE ELIOT. Edited by DAVID CARROLL. Pp. lxxxvi+826 (The Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. £65 net. George Eliot and the Landscape of Time: Narrative Form and Protestant Apocalyptic History. By MARY WILSON CARPENTER. Pp. xiv+246. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. £21.25 net. ROSEMARY ASHTON ROSEMARY ASHTON University CollegeLondon Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXIX, Issue 153, February 1988, Pages 138–139, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXIX.153.138 Published: 01 February 1988

George eliot as a type of European intellectual∗

George eliot as a type of European intellectual∗

THE YALE GEORGE ELIOT LETTERS : A CORRECTION

THE YALE GEORGE ELIOT LETTERS : A CORRECTION Get access JOANNE THIELEN DEMARIA JOANNE THIELEN DEMARIA PoughkeepsieNew York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 31, Issue 1, March 1984, Pages 69-a–69, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/31-1-69a Published: 01 March 1984

GEORGE ELIOT: NOTEBOOKS—AND BLOTTER

Journal Article GEORGE ELIOT: NOTEBOOKS—AND BLOTTER Get access JOHN CLARK PRATT and VICTOR A. NEUFELDT, ed., George Eliot's ’Middlemarch‘ Notebooks: A Transcription. University of Califormia Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1979. lii + 305 pp. £16.50. DANIEL WALEY, George Eliot's Blotter: A Commonplace-Book. British Library, London, 1980. 24 pp. (no price given). JOSEPH WIESENFARTH, ed., George Eliot: A Writer's Notebook, 1854–1879 And Uncollected Writings. Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, University Press of Virginia Charlottesville, 1981. xli + 301 pp. $25.00. WILLIAM BAKER WILLIAM BAKER Sutton Coldfield Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Library, Volume s6-4, Issue 1, March 1982, Pages 80–84, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s6-4.1.80 Published: 01 March 1982

GEORGE ELIOT

GEORGE ELIOT Get access GEOFFREY BILLSON GEOFFREY BILLSON 73 Weavers Hill, Fullers Slade, Milton Keynes Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 28, Issue 5, October 1981, Pages 433-c–433, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/28-5-433c Published: 01 October 1981

Book Reviews

Book Reviews Get access GEORGE ELIOT. George Eliot's Middlemarch Notebooks: A Transcription. Ed. and intro. John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press, 1979. lii, 305 pp., illus. $27.50. AUDREY S. EYLER AUDREY S. EYLER Associate Professor of English, Milton CollegeMilton, Wisconsin 53563 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1, January 1981, Pages 99–100, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/XXXVI.1.99 Published: 01 January 1981

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Little Dorrit. By CHARLES DICKENS. Edited by HARVEY PETER SUCKSMITH. Pp. lxvi + 836. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. £25 net. The Mill on the Floss. By GEORGE ELIOT. Edited by GORDON S. HAIGHT. Pp. xliv + 472. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. £20 net. STEPHEN GILL STEPHEN GILL Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXII, Issue 128, November 1981, Pages 468–469, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXII.128.468 Published: 01 November 1981

George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

GEORGE ELIOT never proclaimed any direct allegiance to the eighteenth-century novel, which in her time had fallen into a mild disrepute. The Victorians tended to look down upon the eighteenth century and its productions as at once cold-hearted and vulgar-thus to some extent meriting what was coming to themselves in twentieth-century disdain of things Victorian. George Eliot's fiction, of course, contains many direct references to eighteenth-century habits and ideas, but she was always more overtly interested in the eighteenth century than in the eighteenthcentury novel; thus, in seeing the relation of her fiction to eighteenth-century novels, the critic must proceed on inference. That George Eliot was thoroughly acquainted with the major novelists of the eighteenth century is, however, undeniable. There are direct references within her work to the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Richardson, but to deal solely with such echoes from eighteenth-century classics by no means covers the whole case of her relation to eighteenth-century fiction. With the example of Ellen,Moers's criticism to encourage us, we should also take into account the tradition established by the Literary Women, many half-forgotten novelists of the eighteenth century. It is time to revisit some writers who rest in unvisited tombs, for it is partly owing to them that things were not so ill with George Eliot as they might

Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (review)

Jeannette King. Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. 182 pp. $15.95. "A nihilist," Nietzsche wrote in The Will to Power, "is a man who judges the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist." According to this narrow view, which Nietzsche himself did not hold, human action, suffering, willing have no meaning. The ends of human experience are contained within the bounds of limitless pathos. Although Jeannette King touches on the subject of pathos in Tragedy in the Victorian Novel, the pathos of η I hi I ism is not her exclusive concern. Her primary subject is rather the manner in which George El iot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James represent the Victorian strength of will to lay meaning into a world that is not as it ought to be. While this study is not the overview of "tragedy in the Victorian novel" which the title promises, King's little book is a fine introduction to the subject. As she notes, critics today rarely sense the incongruity of the term "tragic novel." Victorian critics, however, were aware of the "the possible conflict between the ancient concept of tragedy and the relatively new genre of the novel." King wishes to learn what we mean "when we yoke together the two terms," and whether the term tragic novel "possesses any of the formal Implications of the drama from which the term originated" (p. vii). After a brief introduction establishing the critical background to the relationship between tragedy and the novel, King outlines in successive chapters the Victorian view of a tragic philosophy, the implications of the movement from tragedy in drama to tragedy in the novel, the resultant conflicts between realism and tragedy, and the various forms which tragedy takes in the novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. King is at her best in the first three chapters of her study. There she examines the historical relationship between tragedy and the novel, noting that by the mid-nineteenth century a literary transition was taking place: "one dominant mode—tragedy—was giving way to anothei----the novel" (pp. 1-2). As this transition occurred, however, critics still clung to the Aristotelian concepts of the noble, majestic hero, poetic justice, the cathartic ending, and the rejection of low characters. The novelist who chose as the subject of his or her fiction the realistic common man was faced therefore with the problem of finding "compensating factors for the loss of the (symbolic) values that derive from the hero's identification with the fate of his people" (p. 4). Having opted for a realistic hero, the nineteenth-century author could no longer depend on the traditional concepts of hamartia, per i pétela, and anagnorisis to function in his novels In quite the way those concepts functioned in classical and neo-classical tragedy. King argues, however, that in the body of Shakespearean drama Victorian authors did have an alternative to classical versions of tragedy. Borrowing from the Shakespearean emphasis on "tragedy of character," with its focus on realistic, contemporary subjects, nineteenth-century authors could pursue their investigations of the tragic vision. It is character rather than situation which thus becomes the nexus of Victorian tragedy since the Victorians came to believe that "honour can belong to the hero not only by birthright, but by achievement" as well (p. 6). King shows how, in addition to the difficulties of portraying the tragedy of common characters, the nineteenth-century novelist must also face the problem of relating tragedy to everyday experience. "The classicist's demand was for the exceptional, the heroic gesture, the hero in active conflict with the universe," she argues. Matthew Arnold's description of situations which could offer little hope of poetic insight might thus well apply to Victorian tragic novels—"those in which the suffering finds no vent In action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be...

The Greening of Sister George

O N THE CENTENNIAL OF GEORGE ELIOT'S BIRTH, in November 1919, Virgina Woolf wrote about her for the Times Literary Supplement. Woolf had spent nearly a year in scholarly preparation for her essay, immersing herself in the novels and studying the biography by J. W. Cross: am reading through the whole of Eliot, in order to sum her up, she wrote to a friend in January 1919. So far, I have only made way with her life, which is a book of the greatest fascination, and I can see already that no one else has ever known her as I know her.' This bold claim to intimate understanding was new, and Woolf's essay was to be a watershed in criticism, a significant rehabilitation of a major figure in the female tradition after a generation's scornful neglect. The George Eliot she had inherited from the novelist's late Victorian contemporaries was a figure of colossal and absurd solemnity, a large, thick-set sybil in a silly hat, surrounded by deluded worshippers.2 Victorian women writers, not of this congregation, had regarded from afar with an admiration severely tempered by envy and with a gloomy consciousness of their own inferiority.

George Eliot's Hypothesis of Reality

HE IMAGE OF GEORGE ELIOT, bending forward, listening during one of her regular Sundays with selfless and disciplined attention to her admiring visitors, corresponds precisely to the moral and intellectual ideal that informs her novels. Such an ideal, from a very modern perspective, at least, entails the denial of the libidinal energies essential to psychic health, and we point knowingly now to George Eliot's headaches and fragile health. But the denial we may abhor was, for George Eliot, both an ethical and intellectual imperative. Ironically (especially from the perspective of contemporary feminist criticism), she believed that submission of the self to the voices of external reality'was a condition of intellectual power. The failures of Lydgate and Casaubon result primarily from the failure to submit, that is, to restrain their egoistic needs from influencing their intellectual work. It is not only that reality remains incommensurate with the desires of an aspiring self (a convention of narrative since at least Don Quixote), but that personality is an obstruction to perception. The common self is merely personality. The attentive George Eliot of the Sundays at home was, we know, a deliberate fiction; to put it another way, it was an hypothesis testing the possibility of the abolition of the common self (to which George Eliot felt herself to be humiliatingly subject), to

GEORGE ELIOT'S HOLOGRAPH NOTEBOOKS

Journal Article GEORGE ELIOT'S HOLOGRAPH NOTEBOOKS Get access WILLIAM BAKER WILLIAM BAKER Dept. of English, Ben-Gurion University of the NegevP.O. Box 2053, Beer-Sheva 84120, Israel Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 22, Issue 8, August 1975, Pages 362-e–363, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/22-8-362e Published: 01 August 1975

Hymns in George Eliot's Fiction

Research Article| September 01 1974 Hymns in George Eliot's Fiction Samuel J. Rogal Samuel J. Rogal Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1974) 29 (2): 173–184. https://doi.org/10.2307/2933290 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Samuel J. Rogal; Hymns in George Eliot's Fiction. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 September 1974; 29 (2): 173–184. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2933290 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1974 By The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

GEORGE ELIOT AND ST. PETER'S

Journal Article GEORGE ELIOT AND ST. PETER'S Get access JUNE SKYE JUNE SKYE Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 19, Issue 7, July 1972, Pages 263–264, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/19-7-263 Published: 01 July 1972

“THE STRUCTURE OF VALUES IN GEORGE ELIOT ” (ccxv. 160)

“THE STRUCTURE OF VALUES IN GEORGE ELIOT ” (ccxv. 160) Get access J.C.M. J.C.M. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 17, Issue 9, September 1970, Pages 355-b–355, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/17-9-355b Published: 01 September 1970

SOME ANTEDATINGS FROM GEORGE ELIOT AND OTHER NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUTHORS

Journal Article SOME ANTEDATINGS FROM GEORGE ELIOT AND OTHER NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUTHORS Get access ROLAND HALL ROLAND HALL University of York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 15, Issue 11, November 1968, Pages 410–412, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/15-11-410 Published: 01 November 1968

Reviews

Reviews Get access GEORGE ELIOT AND HER READERS , A Selection of Contemporary Reviews, edited by John Holmstrom and Laurence Lerner , with a linking commentary by Laurence Lerner. London : The Bodley Head , 1966 ; pp. 190 : 30s. J. C. MAXWELL J. C. MAXWELL Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 14, Issue 2, February 1967, Pages 73–74, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/14-2-73 Published: 01 February 1967

The Library

Journal Article The Library Get access THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT , by Jerome Thale . New York , Columbia University Press , 1959 ; pp. viii, 175 ; 30s. MOVEMENT AND VISION IN GEORGE ELIOTS NOVELS , by Reva Stump . University of Washington Press , 1959 ; pp. xii, 232 ; $4.50. GRAHAM HANDLEY GRAHAM HANDLEY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 7, Issue 4, 1 April 1960, Pages 157-b–159, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/7-4-157b Published: 01 April 1960