The discussion in this thesis is designed to show reflections of George Eliot's life and philosophy in her four early novels: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Romola.

This study has been made in an attempt to illustrate how the genius that was George Eliot developed, how a magnificent intellect was driven first to achievement by emotional frustration and then was coupled with emotional maturity in person, developing emotional maturity in the creative artist and producing at last the supreme and delicate balance of intellectual and emotional maturity in the philosopher who found her medium in creative art.

This thesis argues that a ‘tradition of moral analysis’ between Jane Austen and George Eliot — a common ground which has been identified by critics from F.R. Leavis to Gillian Beer, but never fully explored — can be illuminated by turning to what this thesis calls ‘the reflective tradition’. In the eighteenth century, ideas about reflection provided a new and influential way of thinking about the human mind; about how we come to know ourselves and the world around us through the mind. The belief in the individual to act as his/her own guide through the cultivation of a reflective mind and attentiveness to a reflective voice emerges across a wide range of discourses. This thesis begins with an examination of reflection in the philosophy, children’s literature, novels, poetry, educational tracts and sermons that would have been known to Austen. It then defines Austen’s development of reflective dynamics by looking at her six major novels; finally, it analyzes Middlemarch to define Eliot’s proximity to this aspect of Austen’s art. The thesis documents Eliot’s reading of Austen through the criticism of G. H. Lewes to support a reading of Eliot’s assimilation of an Austenian attention to mental processes in her novels. Reflection is at the heart of moral life and growth for both novelists. This thesis corrects a tendency in Austen’s reception to focus on the mimetic aspect of her art, thereby overlooking the introspective sense of reflection. It offers new insights into Austen’s and Eliot’s work, and it contributes to an understanding of the development of the realist novel and the ethical dimension in the role of the novel reader.

"Minstrels in the Drawing Room" is an investigation of the representation of musical listening in the nineteenth-century novel. Theoretical accounts of the novel have tended to see it as a universal form, one that opportunistically subsumes all others as its represented content; descriptions of the novel's implied audience often interpret novel-reading as an essentially absorptive activity linking private reading to public belonging through an act of identification. For the writers I discuss here, however, musical listening is interesting because it is a rival mode of shared aesthetic experience that, before the advent of sound recording, was necessarily social. This dissertation draws on recent developments in the history of reading and media theory to describe how novels by three central figures of the European novelistic canon - Goethe, Scott, and Eliot - turn to musical listening to reflect upon the ways in which the absolutely open nature of the novel's mode of address is nevertheless prone to limitation. The dissertation thus complicates often all-or-nothing theories of novel-reading, offering instead a description of how novels model a distanced identification between reader and text.

Ao refletir sobre o seu próprio romance anos depois de tê-lo escrito, George Eliot disse a respeito de Romola que foi esse o romance que ela escreveu com seu melhor sangue, indicando assim uma predileção por esse livro. Uma análise de sua fortuna crítica, ainda que superficial, revela que Romola é o menos conhecido entre os seus romances. Ao passo que alguns poucos críticos contemporâneos, como Henry James e Robert Browning, por exemplo, publicaram elogios entusiasmados, o tom geral das opiniões contemporâneas sobre a obra é de decepção. O motivo mais comumente apresentado para isso é que o quarto romance de Eliot se desvincula da realidade que a autora muito bem conhecia e, por isso, falha ao tentar representar verdadeiramente o estado de espírito de Florença e dos florentinos ao final do século quinze. O resultado de tal fracasso seria a produção de um romance construído a partir de esforço intelectual e não de imaginação poética, com uma fuga desnecessária ao passado e a um cenário estrangeiro que teria produzido personagens e eventos improváveis. O conflito entre a apreciação de Eliot sobre sua própria obra e a opinião geralmente expressa em sua fortuna crítica é notável e prove a motivação inicial do presente trabalho. Ao resumir o foco central da crítica de Romola, a professora Felicia Bonaparte diz que George Eliot jamais desapontou seus leitores tanto quanto o fez em Romola. O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar o que considero ser os principais motivos para tal desapontamento: que, em Romola, mais especificamente do que em seus outros romances, George Eliot estava experimentando com a forma do romance e alargando os seus limites para acomodar convenções formais e efeitos estéticos que, até então, eram entendidos como pertencentes, quase que exclusivamente, a outros gêneros literários que não o romance. O efeito imediato desse experimento é uma reconfiguração do realismo e da interação entre os gêneros literários que pareceu aos contemporâneos uma junção descriteriosa de elementos soltos. Em Romola, observa-se a escritura de George Eliot progredindo para um tipo mais moderno de romance. O presente trabalho terá atingido seus objetivos se argumentar coerentemente que, ao invés de uma mistura aleatória de convenções, Romola é um precursor do romance modernista. O trabalho seminal de Georg Lukács na Teoria do Romance ilumina o potencial de Romola em conter boa parte dos gêneros literários dentro de si e a coleção O Romance, de Franco Moretti, fornece à presente reflexão um valioso suporte crítico e teórico em pontos nos quais se percebe lacunas deixadas pela obra de Lukács. O trabalho de Felicia Bonaparte sobre George Eliot e os estudos de George Levine sobre realismo embasam a reflexão sobre a literatura inglesa do século dezenove que se desenvolve aqui. / Looking back on her own novel several years after its composition, George Eliot said of Romola that it had been the novel she had written with her best blood, thus indicating a predilection for it among her other books. A survey of her critical fortune, even if a quick one, reveals that Romola is the least popular of her novels. Whereas a few contemporary critics, such as Henry James and Robert Browning, have published enthusiastic reviews, the general tone of these opinions is of disappointment. The most common reason presented is that George Eliot’s fourth novel departs too much from the reality the author knew so well and fails to represent truthfully the zeitgeist of Florence and Florentine people at the close of the fifteenth century. The result of such failure would be a novel constructed out of intellectual effort rather than poetic imagination, with an unnecessary flight to the past and foreign setting which produced improbable events and characters. The clash between George Eliot’s appraisal of her book and the general opinion expressed in its critical fortune is noteworthy and provides the initial motivation of this thesis. Summarising the bulk of criticism about Romola, professor Felicia Bonaparte states that George Eliot never disappointed her readers as much as she did with Romola. The goal of this work is to investigate what I consider to be the main reason for this disappointment: that in Romola, more explicitly than in her other novels, George Eliot was experimenting with the form of the novel and stretching its limits to accommodate formal conventions and aesthetic effects until then generally thought to belong almost exclusively to other genres. The immediate effect of this experiment is a reconfiguration of realism and of the interplay between literary genres which looked like an unselective assortment of loose elements. In Romola, we see George Eliot’s writing progressing towards a more modern kind of novel. This work will have been successful if it can coherently argue that, rather than a random mixture of conventions Romola is a harbinger of the modernist novel. The seminal work of Georg Lukács in The Theory of the Novel sheds some light on the potential of Romola for containing most genres within it and Franco Moretti’s collection The Novel provides valuable critical and theoretical support for this thesis at points in which blanks are left by Lukács’s book. Felicia Bonaparte’s work on George Eliot and George Levine’s studies on realism contribute valuably to the interpretation of English nineteenthcentury that unfolds in the present work.

Ao refletir sobre o seu próprio romance anos depois de tê-lo escrito, George Eliot disse a respeito de Romola que foi esse o romance que ela escreveu com seu melhor sangue, indicando assim uma predileção por esse livro. Uma análise de sua fortuna crítica, ainda que superficial, revela que Romola é o menos conhecido entre os seus romances. Ao passo que alguns poucos críticos contemporâneos, como Henry James e Robert Browning, por exemplo, publicaram elogios entusiasmados, o tom geral das opiniões contemporâneas sobre a obra é de decepção. O motivo mais comumente apresentado para isso é que o quarto romance de Eliot se desvincula da realidade que a autora muito bem conhecia e, por isso, falha ao tentar representar verdadeiramente o estado de espírito de Florença e dos florentinos ao final do século quinze. O resultado de tal fracasso seria a produção de um romance construído a partir de esforço intelectual e não de imaginação poética, com uma fuga desnecessária ao passado e a um cenário estrangeiro que teria produzido personagens e eventos improváveis. O conflito entre a apreciação de Eliot sobre sua própria obra e a opinião geralmente expressa em sua fortuna crítica é notável e prove a motivação inicial do presente trabalho. Ao resumir o foco central da crítica de Romola, a professora Felicia Bonaparte diz que George Eliot jamais desapontou seus leitores tanto quanto o fez em Romola. O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar o que considero ser os principais motivos para tal desapontamento: que, em Romola, mais especificamente do que em seus outros romances, George Eliot estava experimentando com a forma do romance e alargando os seus limites para acomodar convenções formais e efeitos estéticos que, até então, eram entendidos como pertencentes, quase que exclusivamente, a outros gêneros literários que não o romance. O efeito imediato desse experimento é uma reconfiguração do realismo e da interação entre os gêneros literários que pareceu aos contemporâneos uma junção descriteriosa de elementos soltos. Em Romola, observa-se a escritura de George Eliot progredindo para um tipo mais moderno de romance. O presente trabalho terá atingido seus objetivos se argumentar coerentemente que, ao invés de uma mistura aleatória de convenções, Romola é um precursor do romance modernista. O trabalho seminal de Georg Lukács na Teoria do Romance ilumina o potencial de Romola em conter boa parte dos gêneros literários dentro de si e a coleção O Romance, de Franco Moretti, fornece à presente reflexão um valioso suporte crítico e teórico em pontos nos quais se percebe lacunas deixadas pela obra de Lukács. O trabalho de Felicia Bonaparte sobre George Eliot e os estudos de George Levine sobre realismo embasam a reflexão sobre a literatura inglesa do século dezenove que se desenvolve aqui. / Looking back on her own novel several years after its composition, George Eliot said of Romola that it had been the novel she had written with her best blood, thus indicating a predilection for it among her other books. A survey of her critical fortune, even if a quick one, reveals that Romola is the least popular of her novels. Whereas a few contemporary critics, such as Henry James and Robert Browning, have published enthusiastic reviews, the general tone of these opinions is of disappointment. The most common reason presented is that George Eliot’s fourth novel departs too much from the reality the author knew so well and fails to represent truthfully the zeitgeist of Florence and Florentine people at the close of the fifteenth century. The result of such failure would be a novel constructed out of intellectual effort rather than poetic imagination, with an unnecessary flight to the past and foreign setting which produced improbable events and characters. The clash between George Eliot’s appraisal of her book and the general opinion expressed in its critical fortune is noteworthy and provides the initial motivation of this thesis. Summarising the bulk of criticism about Romola, professor Felicia Bonaparte states that George Eliot never disappointed her readers as much as she did with Romola. The goal of this work is to investigate what I consider to be the main reason for this disappointment: that in Romola, more explicitly than in her other novels, George Eliot was experimenting with the form of the novel and stretching its limits to accommodate formal conventions and aesthetic effects until then generally thought to belong almost exclusively to other genres. The immediate effect of this experiment is a reconfiguration of realism and of the interplay between literary genres which looked like an unselective assortment of loose elements. In Romola, we see George Eliot’s writing progressing towards a more modern kind of novel. This work will have been successful if it can coherently argue that, rather than a random mixture of conventions Romola is a harbinger of the modernist novel. The seminal work of Georg Lukács in The Theory of the Novel sheds some light on the potential of Romola for containing most genres within it and Franco Moretti’s collection The Novel provides valuable critical and theoretical support for this thesis at points in which blanks are left by Lukács’s book. Felicia Bonaparte’s work on George Eliot and George Levine’s studies on realism contribute valuably to the interpretation of English nineteenthcentury that unfolds in the present work.

Ao refletir sobre o seu próprio romance anos depois de tê-lo escrito, George Eliot disse a respeito de Romola que foi esse o romance que ela escreveu com seu melhor sangue, indicando assim uma predileção por esse livro. Uma análise de sua fortuna crítica, ainda que superficial, revela que Romola é o menos conhecido entre os seus romances. Ao passo que alguns poucos críticos contemporâneos, como Henry James e Robert Browning, por exemplo, publicaram elogios entusiasmados, o tom geral das opiniões contemporâneas sobre a obra é de decepção. O motivo mais comumente apresentado para isso é que o quarto romance de Eliot se desvincula da realidade que a autora muito bem conhecia e, por isso, falha ao tentar representar verdadeiramente o estado de espírito de Florença e dos florentinos ao final do século quinze. O resultado de tal fracasso seria a produção de um romance construído a partir de esforço intelectual e não de imaginação poética, com uma fuga desnecessária ao passado e a um cenário estrangeiro que teria produzido personagens e eventos improváveis. O conflito entre a apreciação de Eliot sobre sua própria obra e a opinião geralmente expressa em sua fortuna crítica é notável e prove a motivação inicial do presente trabalho. Ao resumir o foco central da crítica de Romola, a professora Felicia Bonaparte diz que George Eliot jamais desapontou seus leitores tanto quanto o fez em Romola. O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar o que considero ser os principais motivos para tal desapontamento: que, em Romola, mais especificamente do que em seus outros romances, George Eliot estava experimentando com a forma do romance e alargando os seus limites para acomodar convenções formais e efeitos estéticos que, até então, eram entendidos como pertencentes, quase que exclusivamente, a outros gêneros literários que não o romance. O efeito imediato desse experimento é uma reconfiguração do realismo e da interação entre os gêneros literários que pareceu aos contemporâneos uma junção descriteriosa de elementos soltos. Em Romola, observa-se a escritura de George Eliot progredindo para um tipo mais moderno de romance. O presente trabalho terá atingido seus objetivos se argumentar coerentemente que, ao invés de uma mistura aleatória de convenções, Romola é um precursor do romance modernista. O trabalho seminal de Georg Lukács na Teoria do Romance ilumina o potencial de Romola em conter boa parte dos gêneros literários dentro de si e a coleção O Romance, de Franco Moretti, fornece à presente reflexão um valioso suporte crítico e teórico em pontos nos quais se percebe lacunas deixadas pela obra de Lukács. O trabalho de Felicia Bonaparte sobre George Eliot e os estudos de George Levine sobre realismo embasam a reflexão sobre a literatura inglesa do século dezenove que se desenvolve aqui. / Looking back on her own novel several years after its composition, George Eliot said of Romola that it had been the novel she had written with her best blood, thus indicating a predilection for it among her other books. A survey of her critical fortune, even if a quick one, reveals that Romola is the least popular of her novels. Whereas a few contemporary critics, such as Henry James and Robert Browning, have published enthusiastic reviews, the general tone of these opinions is of disappointment. The most common reason presented is that George Eliot’s fourth novel departs too much from the reality the author knew so well and fails to represent truthfully the zeitgeist of Florence and Florentine people at the close of the fifteenth century. The result of such failure would be a novel constructed out of intellectual effort rather than poetic imagination, with an unnecessary flight to the past and foreign setting which produced improbable events and characters. The clash between George Eliot’s appraisal of her book and the general opinion expressed in its critical fortune is noteworthy and provides the initial motivation of this thesis. Summarising the bulk of criticism about Romola, professor Felicia Bonaparte states that George Eliot never disappointed her readers as much as she did with Romola. The goal of this work is to investigate what I consider to be the main reason for this disappointment: that in Romola, more explicitly than in her other novels, George Eliot was experimenting with the form of the novel and stretching its limits to accommodate formal conventions and aesthetic effects until then generally thought to belong almost exclusively to other genres. The immediate effect of this experiment is a reconfiguration of realism and of the interplay between literary genres which looked like an unselective assortment of loose elements. In Romola, we see George Eliot’s writing progressing towards a more modern kind of novel. This work will have been successful if it can coherently argue that, rather than a random mixture of conventions Romola is a harbinger of the modernist novel. The seminal work of Georg Lukács in The Theory of the Novel sheds some light on the potential of Romola for containing most genres within it and Franco Moretti’s collection The Novel provides valuable critical and theoretical support for this thesis at points in which blanks are left by Lukács’s book. Felicia Bonaparte’s work on George Eliot and George Levine’s studies on realism contribute valuably to the interpretation of English nineteenthcentury that unfolds in the present work.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, gaslight supplanted the candles and oil lamps that had brightened Europe and America for centuries, and, by 1900, electricity would attain decisive dominance over both. In their narrative figurations of lighting, however, novels of the same period often arrest this march of progress, lingering in an Arcadian past organized around the rhythms of the solar day and the agricultural year. Mining works by Frances Burney, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, and others, my dissertation argues that novelists employ obsolete lighting technologies not merely to provide historical texture, but to express narrative impulses that run counter to the realist mode, to dramatize transgressive forms of ambition within the rural communities they depict, and sometimes even to voice ambivalence about the commercial constraints of the serial form. Characters in these novels who avail themselves of artificial illumination alter the rhythm of the workday in order to satisfy desires inconsistent with the interests and pursuits sanctioned by their neighbors: by the light of lamps and candles, they pursue cross-class romance, literary aspirations, or professional goals that fall outside the parameters dictated by social class and the historical moment. For Proust’s narrator, this entails a series of adjustments to his evening schedule over the course of the Recherche, first to accommodate an aristocratic social calendar, and, later, to facilitate the nocturnal composition of his own novel. In Eliot’s case, the inclination to stay awake after nightfall—whether the illicit romantic fantasies of a Hetty Sorrel or the workmanlike resolve of an Adam Bede—constitutes a meaningful challenge to the author’s narrative realism. By examining the formal innovations these technologies provoke in nineteenth-century fiction, my research unearths a pervasive counter-realist tendency in novels often famed for their fidelity to the protocols of realist representation.

The thesis explores how readings of two nineteenth century English novels, Little Dorrit and Middlemarch, can be enhanced by using key elements of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘prosaics’ as a lens through which to examine them. Additionally, the readings are used to provide a platform from which to explore the Bakhtinian notion that language is inextricably connected to selfhood. The Introduction (1.1.) offers a brief discussion on Bakhtin and, in particular, to his formulation of a ‘prosaics’, offered in opposition to traditional linguistics (or ‘poetics’) which, he feels, is unable adequately to do justice to the social, ethical and ideological complexity of a dialogised heteroglossia, such as is found in the novel. An explanation follows (1.2.) of why the ‘word’ should not be conceived of as static lexical element but rather as an ‘utterance’. Invested with both clear and distinct meanings as well as dialogic overtones, the word forms the basis of all human communication. As the primary means of expressing the ‘self’, it cannot be heard in isolation but is always responsive and dependent upon “another’s reaction, another’s word – the two ‘interpenetrating’ the single utterance, establishing, as a result, its specific locus of meaning” (Danow 22). Likewise, it follows that the ‘self’ cannot exist purely in and for the individual but is irrevocably linked to the ‘other’. Chapter Two begins with a discussion on the way in which ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ forces work simultaneously to shape language (2.1.). It looks at the Bakhtinian idea that language cannot ever have been monologic and unmediated, being instead ever-changing and evolving as a result of numerous influences brought to bear on it such as context, ideology and the discourses of others. The nature of heteroglossia is discussed (with particular reference to ‘dialogized heteroglossia’), as is ‘hybridization’ in which, although a statement appears to emanate from one voice, another parodic or ironic voice will also be evident in refracted form. 2.2. and 2.3 engage in a detailed analysis of selected passages from Books I and II respectively of Little Dorrit with a view to exploring ways in which a Bakhtinian reading is able to provide heightened appreciation of the text. With particular regard to the overtly parodic style of Dickens, I aim to show how Bakhtin’s prosaics, which militates against privileging one ‘voice’ over another, enables the voice of a relatively neglected character, such as Fanny Dorrit, to be adequately heard. Although the emphasis in this chapter is on language, I broach the Bakhtinian notion that both the ‘word’ and the ‘self’ are inscribed through the ‘other’. In Chapter Three the focus shifts to Middlemarch and to Bakhtin’s notion that selfhood can only be properly located in its dialogic relations to ‘another’. The chapter is offered in four parts, beginning with a brief discussion on some similarities between Bakhtin’s and Eliot’s philosophical thinking, particularly in regard to the ethical nature of the self (3.1.). The next three parts provide detailed thematic analyses of selected passages from Middlemarch. Particular attention is paid to Rosamond Vincy and Tertius Lydgate, whose relationship is explored in some detail. In order adequately to chart their development in the novel I begin by situating each of these characters in his or her various ‘fields of action’, or, as Bakhtin would have it, ‘character zones’. Character zones take into account not only the characters’ direct discourses but also other aspects of their being, including their backgrounds, ideologies and the various attitudes held by both the narrator and other characters towards them (3.2.). The next section (3.3.) explores, in dialogical terms, the rise and fall of Rosamond’s and Lydgate’s difficult alliance and it is suggested that their relationship represents the antithesis of the Bakhtinian notion of ‘finding the self in and through the other’. In the final section (3.4.), Rosamond’s and Lydgate’s possibilities for ‘real becoming’ are canvassed when each enters into dialogic relation with Dorothea Brooke. The Conclusion (4) offers a brief discussion of some of the ways in which the novel, as a genre, is open-ended. As such, it affords ongoing discussion in which completeness and conclusiveness is replaced with unfinalizability because “the final word has not yet been spoken” in the ongoing search for meaning (EaN 30). / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

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