George Eliot and the Sciences of Mind: The Silence that Lies on the Other Side of Roar

2013 ◽  
pp. 457-470
Author(s):  
Jill L. Matus
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
The Other

The Greeks, the Germans, and George Eliot

1982 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 91-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Wiesenfarth
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
The Other ◽  
The One

In 1947–48 Vernon Rendall wrote the first essays on George Eliot's use of the classics in her novels and supplied the first tentative list of authors she was acquainted with: Aeschylus, Aristotle, Epictetus, Homer, Nonnus, Pausanias, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Xenophon in Greek; Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Livy, Persius, Plautus, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Virgil in Latin. Rendall pointed to Sophocles and Horace as Eliot's favorites in each language. She is like the tragedian in that “Sophocles does not let himself go” in “the delineation of the passions”; and she “never lets herself go.” Horace is not only the Latin poet she most persistently alludes to but also the one she most nearly assimilates in the wit and point of her style. Of the other Greek writers, Aeschylus provided George Eliot with that concept of Nemesis which pervades her novels. The Latin writers supplied her with happy tag phrases diat punctuate the speech of feckless gentlemen – “A quotation or two adorns the whole man,” according to Heine – like Arthur Donnithorne and Arthur Brooke; in addition, they allowed George Eliot to give Politian and Scala ammunition for academic warfare in Romola. In his comments on Sophoclean control, Horatian wit, Aeschylean Nemesis, and classical allusion, Rendall initiated the study of George Eliot's use of the classics. He broke ground for others to excavate.

‘Strips of Essayism’

On Essays ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 258-276
Author(s):  
Bharat Tandon
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Periodical Essays

Taking its cue from James Wood’s now famous critique of the fetishizing of ‘information’ in British fiction (‘always breaking in to speak over their characters and tell us what to think, mummifying them somewhat in strips of essayism’), this essay takes a close look at two Victorian novelists famous for their creative deployment of what might be called an ‘essayistic’ narrative voice: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Tracing the roots of this voice in Victorian periodical culture—in particular, the tenure of Marian Evans/George Eliot at the helm of the Westminster Review—the essay explores the ways in which two contending senses of the ‘essayistic’, one based on contingency, the other on prescriptiveness, may often occupy the same space in both periodical essays and the fictions which dramatize and draw on them.

The Clock Finger at Nought

2021 ◽  
pp. 91-102
Author(s):  
Kevin Ohi
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Character System

The epigraph of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda immediately raises questions of foundation: “the make-believe of a beginning” is both the make-believe that there is a beginning and the make-believe that constitutes a beginning. It is itself the foundation that eludes it; its fiat, self-grounding and groundless. That structure enacts the topography of Eliot’s realism, which seeks to comprise a world it can also never reach. Finding in the epigraph’s sidereal clock an image both for the novel’s temporal structure (repeatedly circling back to approach its own beginning from behind, it keeps deriving its own inception) and for the groundless positing of its narrative view, it suggests that one highly abstract way to render the drama of Daniel Deronda would be to say that it involves treating questions of foundation as perspectival ones. Perspective in George Eliot—crucial to sympathy, and to her ethics and her realism—appears at the beginning of Daniel Deronda to produce character (rather than the other way around). Many of the larger movements of the novel (its character system, its narrative structure, even, at moments, its syntax) enact the sweep of the epigraph’s sidereal clock and return one, repeatedly, to its initial, initiating paradoxes of inception.

Microscopy and Semiotic in Middlemarch

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-524 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Wormald
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Water Drop ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The World ◽  
Professional Science ◽  
Natural Historian ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This paper reveals a frogotten formative influence on George Eliot. Most accounts of Eliot's debts to science examine the circle of eminent scientists she and Lewes knew in the 1860s and 1870s and his own late work, Problems of Life and Mind. Here I explore much earlier and less celebrated writing: the microscopical investigations of primitive water creatures that Lewes conducted as an amateur popularizer of science in the mid to late 1850s and the vigorous culture of microscopy to which he introduced George Eliot as early as 1856. After summarizing the technological advances in the microscope that had nurtured this culture and surveying the role of Victorian periodicals in sustaining it, I trace the significance of the discipline, particularly as conveyed in Lewes's neglected article "Only a Pond!," for the texture and structure of Middlemarch. The language of her characters' dialogues teems with details of vocabulary and metaphor first developed by Lewes to map the world of the water-drop onto the equally parasitic relationships of mid-Victorian society. More surprising, Eliot also made her narrator one of the novel's two amateur microscopists, the other being Camden Farebrother, Middlemarch's own amateur natural historian. The pater then explores the different kinds of "advantage" this interest in microscopes secures for Farebrother over Lydgate, the book's representative of professional science, and argues that Farebrother is the novelist's private tribute to Lewes's earlier enthusiams.

WAKING DREAMS: GEORGE ELIOT AND THE POETICS OF DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 483-498
Author(s):  
Beth Tressler
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
The Other ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Single Word ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Human Failure ◽  
The One

In a letter that she wrote to her childhood governess and religious mentor Maria Lewis in 1839, George Eliot describes a pervading and distressful mental anxiety – one that would come to greatly influence both the constitution and development of her fiction. Still within the throes of her evangelical ardor, Eliot laments in this letter that the “disjointed specimens” of history, poetry, science, and philosophy have become “all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast thickening every day accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations” (Eliot, Letters 1: 29). The letter illustrates more the disjointed nature of Eliot's own mind than the disjointed nature of the things occupying it. Apparently under the weight of some religious guilt, she retracts this complaint and apologizes for it; but, then she immediately contradicts her retraction and defends her struggle by expanding her own individual failure into the larger realm of universal human failure: How deplorably and unaccountably evanescent are our frames of mind, as various as the forms and hues of the summer clouds. A single word is sometimes enough to give an entirely new mould to our thoughts; at least I find myself so constituted, and therefore to me it is pre-eminently important to be anchored within the veil, so that outward things may only act as winds to agitating sails, and be unable to send me adrift. (Letters 1: 30) Possibly fearing a rebuke from Lewis, Eliot finds it necessary to call upon the evanescence of “our frames of mind” to characterize her early struggle with the painful inconsistency of her own consciousness. On the one hand, Eliot feels a sense of evangelical guilt that her consciousness can be so influenced by “a single word” that her household duties and her spiritual life suffer. She equates this aspect of her mind to a deplorable, moral failing that threatens to set her adrift from her religious foundation. But on the other hand, Eliot contradicts this sense of failure with her resentment at the household anxieties and everyday vexations that are able to smother and petrify the extraordinary workings of her mind. To prevent herself from “saying anything still more discreditable to my head and heart,” she imagines herself as a child “wand'ring far alone, / That none might rouse me from my waking dream” (Letters 1: 30). But Eliot awakes from this dream to the disheartening revelation of “life's dull path and earth's deceitful hope” (Letters 1: 30). For a time, this painful deceit compels her to remain solidly within the confines of her duty and faith, but it simultaneously begins to unravel the binding that so ardently holds her.

The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A Re-Examination

PMLA ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 66 (6) ◽  
pp. 911-918 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
The Other ◽  
Comprehensive Treatment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Tradition ◽  
The One

The position of Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus” among his own works, or among contemporary classics, has been an ambiguous one. A brief glance at current Conrad criticism confirms its uncertain status : F. R. Leavis, whose opening statement of his book, The Great Tradition (New York, 1948), asserts, “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad,” gives a comprehensive treatment of Conrad without once mentioning Nigger, even among the so-called minor works; however, Morton D. Zabel, who reprints the whole of Nigger in his The Portable Conrad (New York, 1947), states (p. 291), “The book remains, if not Conrad's greatest or most ambitious, one of his most perfectly realized and poetically conceived works.” In view of the silence on the one hand, and the somewhat lavish praise on the other, by these two important critics, a reconsideration of the novel at this time is perhaps not out of place.

scholarly journals Normal People: Kudos to Vulnerability, A Tribute to Friendship

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Fatemeh Sara Pakdaman
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Normal People ◽  
The Relationship

This paper intends to undergo a comparative study on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018). The nature friendships the characters display in the aforementioned novels are of various attributes. Principles of religious, economical, racial, and societal heritage come together to delineate the relationship the four characters experience and brandish. The theme of power struggle in interpersonal relationships and the related parameters in play will be discussed through the ideas of Michelle Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, Frank Lovett, Jacques Derrida, and Aristotle. Among the defining factors to be tended to, vulnerability, the element of time –futurity-, death, and the approach towards “the other” are dominant. An almost two century-interval between the two literary works has marked a tremendous difference in the attitude of the protagonists towards friendship and conversion. The paper attempts to explore the inevitable factors, defining a friendship, the constituents empowering it along with those reducing it to an entity of its own negation.

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