D.Litt. et Phil. (English) / This study investigates George Eliot's approach to the existential dilemma of her times, the collision of the individual with the general. It takes into account the historical context in which political radicalism and religious controversy threatened the stability and continuity of the individual and of society. The novels fictionalize the philosophical ideas expressed in earlier writings in terms of the individual experience of the characters. Each of the eight chapters is devoted to one ofthe novels and is discussed in chronological order of publication. Reference is made to George Eliot's letters and essays where relevant. The affinities of George Eliot with Auguste Comte and with Wordsworth are also considered. The nature and extent of a protagonist's rebellion is defined as it appears in each specific novel. The forms of active and passive rebellion are diverse. An utterance, usually an extended speech act made in complete sincerity, is a visible sign of the shift of consciousness which occurs when the individual moves from a state of rebellion to one of continuity of being. The two main categories of utterance are those of confession and those of commitment. The continuity of being towards which the individual strives consists of a belief in the innate goodness of the individual and trust in another sympathetic human being to release the good. Chapter One, Scenes of Clerical Life and Chapter Two, Adam Bede, emphasize the ceI,ltral role of a confessional utterance in the attainment of coherence of self. Chapters Three to Six focus on the novels published between 1860 and 1866 that are marked by key utterances of commitment and belief, arising from a sympathetic feeling towards another person. In The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Romola, the pervasive Antigone theme is evaluated in which there is an opposition of two equally valid claims proposed by characters uttering contrary points of view in their expression of a rebellion against accepted norms. With the novel Felix Holt in Chapter Six, a political dimension appears and is further emphasized in the criticism of contemporary mores of the last two...

A mid-nineteenth century feminist anxious to enlist the support of the illustrious George Eliot in her cause would have found in the novelist a curious blend of progressive and conservative responses to the "woman question." Marian Evans' own struggle for a literary career coupled with the materialistic world view which she adopted from Ludwig Feuer-bach gave her an acute understanding of the oppression women endured under a patriarchal system. But at the same time she felt that women had a distinctive psychological makeup which meant they could exercise a special beneficent moral influence in social life. She would not admit woman's full equality with man because she felt that the complete emancipation of her sex might coarsen the feminine nature. George Eliot's contradictory attitudes to the position of women are reflected in her fictional writing, often marring the unity of her presentation of female characters. In The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda brilliant analysis of the effects of male supremacy turns into blind worship of the Victorian vision of woman as "the angel in the house." My argument is not with the traditional view of woman per se; but that in George Eliot's work it is in direct opposition to a stronger and more aesthetically satisfying radical interpretation. The presence of stereotyped images of women in otherwise brilliant novels reduces complexity to artifice, realism to idealism and hard-edged irony to facile sentiment. In The Mill Maggie Tulliver is clearly struggling for some personal identity other than the strictly "feminine" one her brother Tom insists on. However, by the end of the novel Maggie has apparently found fulfilment in passive submission to Tom's male superiority. Similarly In Middlemarch Dorothea's quest for some greater meaning in her life than the cloistered position of a gentlewoman usually allows for is answered first with an idealized marriage to Will Ladislaw, and second with Vague references to her goddess-like perfection. One of Eliot's greatest achievements as a novelist is her determination to take the bitch seriously. With both Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth she probes the usual stereotype of the evil woman to show that these two are as much victims of a repressive patriarchal society as are the more attractive characters such as Dorothea and Maggie. But she does not carry through her sympathetic understanding of the bitch character. Rosamond is finally declared to be the unregenerate evil woman who "flourishes wonderfully on a murdered man's brains." Gwendolen does change but as is implied by the comparison to Mirah Lapidoth, it is only to be removed from one role, the bitch and placed immediately in another, the good woman. This pattern is repeated in Felix Holt the Radical by measuring Mrs. Transome against Esther Lyon. The ambiguous treatment of the female personality does not arise in George Eliot's other novels because none of the women characters is ever lifted far enough above stereotype for there to be any question of a departure from realism. However Adam Bede, Silas Marner and Romola are briefly discussed with Felix Holt in Chapter IV. Although this thesis dwells largely on certain aesthetic weaknesses in the fictional writing of George Eliot, I am not suggesting that her reversion to traditional images of the feminine character destroys the novels. On the contrary recognizing and exploring these obvious areas of failure dramatically points up the brilliance of the initial feminist perspective (i.e. the recognition that much of what is called the female character is in fact a response to patriarchal values) which George Eliot takes in introducing her women characters. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Part of Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1934. / Photolithographed. "Private edition, distributed by the University of Chicago libraries."

The Mill on the Floss, by Victorian novelist George Eliot, is a polylinguistic novel in Bakhtine's sense of the word in that it integrates the linguistic diversity of the society which it depicts. This novel published in 1860 was translated six times into French but never enjoyed a great reception in France. We examine three translations in this thesis: the first is by Francois D'Albert-Durade (1863), the second is by Lucienne Molitor (1957) and the last is by Alain Jumeau (2003). / D'Albert-Durade's translation evacuates the linguistic diversity in order to shape the novel to the requirements of the target literary polysystem. Molitor, by homogenising the eliotian prose, turns the canonised English novel into a French popular novel. Jumeau, for his part, by rehabilitating the peasant sociolect in his translation, marks the beginning of a rehabilitation movement of George Eliot in France. This study, through the analysis of the voice of a few key characters, attempts to follow the French "translative journey" of The Mill on the Floss.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2003. / Bibliography: p. 250-270. / Introduction -- Female subjectivity, abjection, and agency in Scenes of clerical life -- A questionable Utopia: Adam Bede -- Dystopia and the frustration of agency in the double Bildungsroman of The mill on the floss -- Abjection and exile in Silas Marner -- Justice and feminist Utopia in Romola -- Radicalism as Utopianism in Felix Holt, the radical -- The pursuit of what is good: Utopian impulses in Middlemarch -- Nationalism and multiculturalism: shaping the future as transformative Utopia in Daniel Deronda. / Within a framework based on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, this thesis investigates how Utopian impulses are manifested in George Eliot's novels. Eliot's utopianism is presented first by a critique of dystopian elements in society and later by placing such elements in a dialogic relationship with utopian ideas articulated by leading characters. Each novel includes characters who are abjected because they have different ideas from the social norms, and such characters are silenced and expelled because society evaluates these differences in terms of its gender, class and racial prejudices. Dystopia is thus constituted as a resolution of the conflict between individual and society by the imposition of monologic values. Dialogic possibilities are explored by patterned character configurations and by the cultivation of ironical narrators' voices which enfold character focalization within strategic deployment of free indirect discourse. -- Eliot's early works, from Scenes of Clerical Life to Silas Marner, focus their dystopian elements as a critique of a monologic British society intolerant of multiple consciousnesses, and which consigns "other" voices to abjection and thereby precludes social progress by rejecting these "other" voices. In her later novels, from Romola to Daniel Deronda, Eliot presents concrete model utopian societies that foreshadow progressive changes to the depicted, existing society. Such an imagined society incorporates different consciousnesses and hence admits abject characters, who otherwise would have been regarded as merely transgressive, and thus silenced or eliminated. Abjected characters in Eliot's fiction tend also to be utopists, and hence have potential for positively transforming the world. Where they are depicted as gaining agency, they also in actuality or by implication bring about change in society, the nation and the wider world. -- An underlying assumption is that history can be changed for the better, so that utopian ideals can be actualized by means of human agency rather than by attributing teleological processes to supernatural forces. When a protagonist's utopian impulses fail, it is both because of dystopian elements of society and because of individual human weaknesses. In arguably her most utopian works, Romola and Daniel Deronda, Eliot creates ideal protagonists, one of whom remains in the domestic sphere because of gender, and another who is (albeit voluntarily) removed from British society because of his race/class. However, Romola can be seen as envisaging a basis for female advancement to public life, while Daniel Deronda suggests a new world order through a nationalism grounded in multiculturalism and a global utopianism. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / v, 270 p

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Part of Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1934. / Photolithographed. "Private edition, distributed by the University of Chicago libraries."

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1921. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

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