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Missing page 53. / A critical study which links George Eliot to George Sand is not a new idea. While considerations of social thought, art, feminism and the imagery used by the two novelists have formed much of the comparative criticism to date, this study examines another vital link between the French and the British novelist. "Two Georges and the Dragon" focuses on the psycho-spiritual evolution, the individuation process, experienced by four Sand-Eliot heroines. The nineteenth century's concern with "Soul-Making" (Keats, 334 ), its search for self and certitude in the face of social, religious and technological change, fostered a widespread artistic renovation of both pagan and Christian myth. Thus, while Carl Jung's terminology for the stages of individuation was not yet available to either Sand or Eliot, the mythic archetypes essential for a Jungian exploration of the psyche were. It is from this archetypal perspective that the sequence of "the -heroine's journey" is developed. Maureen Murdock's The Heroine's Journey (1990) depicts the twentieth century version of the feminine quest for individuation. Despite separation by a century-and-a-half, the Sand-Eliot protagonists' struggles to attain an "informed sympathy'' are strikingly similar to the contemporary "heroine's journey" toward an integrated consciousness. Murdock's archetypal sequence illustrates precisely how "history (becomes] incarnate" in these nineteenth-century heroines. A progression through a series of initiatory stages marks the individuation process. To be sure, some measure of ego deflation and subsequent renewed perspective do occur for many characters in both Sand's and Eliot's novels. In these cases, shadow aspects of the unconscious emerge and are assimilated. However, our concern is with the heroines who undergo a complete cycle of individuation. In Jungian terms, these heroines not only acknowledge personal shadow content, they also undergo an ultimate ego deflation in depth. The process involves an encounter with, and assimilation of, the collective historical values inherent in the imago Dei, central archetype of the psyche's unconscious aspect. As a result of her personal individuation, the heroine, in turn, effects an elevation of consciousness in those around her. George Sand's Consuela offers the nineteenth century's first depiction of a complete individuation process for the feminine. This study proposes that the same process marks the experiences of the heroines in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Romola and Middlemarch. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 236-247). Also available via World Wide Web.

This report modifies and re-envisions Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory as the “sympathetic umwelt,” in which sympathy is both the external object of desire and the internal means by which individual, subjective worlds are created. Through the application of this new paradigm to George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” and Middlemarch, this paper suggests that intersubjective relationships in the fictions she conceives are ephemeral illusions. Her early cognitive experiments and intellectual grappling with the nature of emotional connections culminates in the ambiguously defined concept of sympathy. Eliot’s focus on sympathy is not meant to reveal a solution to failures in human compassion and understanding, but to present it as the central problem – both in her own literature and in reality. / text

Thesis advisor: Judith Wilt / This project argues that the concept of haunting pervaded Victorian society, imagination, and thought and reflected anxieties regarding destabilized conceptions of the self and the world. It spans the nineteenth century from Mary Shelley to Henry James in order to claim that the living can invite and employ haunting in ways useful to self discovery or recovery. Rather than view haunting as a primarily one-directional relationship in which the haunter imposes itself on the haunted, I suggest that haunting can be invoked by the haunted in order to integrate new perspectives, conceptions, information, and situations vital to advancing self-perception and understandings of the surrounding world. Consequently, this study introduces a term I call "hauntedness," which amounts to the state of feeling or being haunted. Through this word, I hope to confer greater agency to the notion of being haunted than the more passive, acted-upon "to be haunted" can sometimes convey. Haunted Mind and Matter employs concepts from Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and "Différance" to complicate the question of haunting and enter the critical debate about Victorian haunting in particular. The works of Derrida and critics like Julian Wolfreys, following Sigmund Freud, reveal haunting as not restricted to bonds with spectral ghosts; it exists in every person and discourse. Using the term "haunt" in a multifaceted, flexible manner can challenge notions of the self and what is human through biological, social, and other constructs. The introduction examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in my view an inverted ghost story, to exemplify this text's employment of the term "hauntedness." The project then explores uses of terms related to haunting in texts in which mental, historical, and social haunting are infused with strong gothic and Romantic imagery: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898). I claim that these works both reveal the powerful presence of haunting in Victorian thought and society and show characters generating productive, reverberating uses for the haunting they experience in order to progress into the future. Haunted Mind and Matter demonstrates what the lens of haunting can reveal about character and social context in fiction. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

<p>This essay focuses on Maggie in <em>The Mill on the Floss</em>, by George Eliot. An examination of her life is presented which is anchored in feminist critical theory and focuses on the ordeal Maggie has to endure in a patriarchal society. Furthermore, the life of the Roma is examined through postcolonial theory and compared to Maggie’s. Many of the stereotypes that emerged about the Roma are also present in Maggie’s life. It is argued that Maggie embodies the stereotypes of the Roma through her encounters with different characters in the novel. </p>

This essay focuses on Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot. An examination of her life is presented which is anchored in feminist critical theory and focuses on the ordeal Maggie has to endure in a patriarchal society. Furthermore, the life of the Roma is examined through postcolonial theory and compared to Maggie’s. Many of the stereotypes that emerged about the Roma are also present in Maggie’s life. It is argued that Maggie embodies the stereotypes of the Roma through her encounters with different characters in the novel.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 199-212). Also available on the Internet.