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

George Eliot's early novels Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner, resist or rewrite English cultural myths that embody shame as a method of social control, especially myths from the Bible related to the doctrine of election. Eliot employs a two-level structure suggested by her reading of Feuerbach, Spinoza, and R.W. Mackay, in which the novels follow biblical plotlines, while she presents a positivist understanding of moral motivation derived from Spinoza, in which repressed shame must be acknowledged in order to attain moral freedom. In Chapter One, I argue that her favorite book as a child--The Linnet's Life--forecasts the psychic work of Eliot's protagonists. I also read Rousseau's Confessions--a book that she claimed had great influence on her--and demonstrate how Rousseau's understanding of shame as a corrupting influence shaped her treatment of shame in her novels. In Chapter Two, I discuss Scenes of Clerical Life in the context of English mythologies of the French Revolution. Deploying the gothic mode, Eliot rewrites characters from Carlyle's History of the French Revolution, and Dickens's Little Dorrit, to interrogate the tendency of the English to view all people like themselves as the elect, and to vilify and shame those who differ. In Chapters Three and Four, I argue that Eliot structures the plots of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss from the Genesis story of Cain and Abel, which is the type of election. Eliot uses this mythological structure to interrogate the power of shame to produce the very evil behavior it condemns, in Hetty, Maggie, and Mr. Tulliver. I discuss Romantic and Victorian versions of the Cain and Abel story, such as Byron's closet drama Cain compared to Eliot's own extension of the story in her poem The Legend of Jubal. I also discuss the treatment of the story of Cain and Abel in various theological treatises, by Bede, Augustine and Calvin. In Chapter Five, I argue Silas Marner's history parallels the history of the Hebrews from the flood, to the Babylonian exile and return. Eliot's treatment suggests that whether Silas is wicked or elect, the narrative is about the vindication of God, not Silas. In contrast, Silas himself is vindicated in the plot with Godfrey because of his choice to care for Eppie. Eppie represents the positive development of Christianity from the ancient Hebrew religion, as it was influenced and purified by Babylonian monotheistic religion. For Eliot (following Feuerbach and Mackay), the "Essence of Christianity" was not the shaming doctrine of election, but rather the doctrine of Christ, who offered forgiveness rather than blame and shame.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2003. / Bibliography: p. 250-270.

This thesis analyses the function of the provincial town in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and George Eliot (1819-1880). It demonstrates that the small town, far from being a neutral backdrop to their narratives, functions as a sociological space in which to appropriate or challenge the discourses of modernity with which Dostoevsky and Eliot were explicitly preoccupied. The first chapter examines how their provincial communities negotiate biblical narrative in a world in which, thanks to nineteenth-century attempts to historicise the Bible, an acceptance of the Bible's authoritative status is no longer a given. The instability of language itself is then interrogated in my second chapter, which shows that the transition from denotative, referential meaning to connotative, abstract forms causes ethical and narrative tension within the world of the novel, and which explores the aesthetics and ethics of gossip in the provincial town and novel. The third chapter details what becomes of the nineteenth-century discourse of heroism when characters seek to enact it in a provincial setting, showing that the environment of the provincial town proves hostile to heroic ambition, whilst the fourth argues that the provincial application of professional discourse (particularly that of medicine and the law) is critiqued and perfected by these authors. Through the analysis of this discourse, it is shown that Eliot and Dostoevsky's treatment of provincialism is ambivalent. As urban intellectuals who did not consent to inhabit the provincial milieu they depict, they in many respects censure the world they describe. However, this censure is not absolute, and through their chosen setting, as well as their chosen genre of the novel, they provide ethical instruction for their readers, then and now. Ethics, for them, are best tested in community, and explored in narrative.

The diploma thesis Journey of Desire: Romanticism in the Novels of George Eliot is focused on the characteristic romantic items in the novels of the important English woman writer of the 19th century using the pseudonym George Eliot. The thesis deals with just three of the novels: The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch and Silas Marner. The thesis is focused not only on the romantic items which were characteristic for this woman novelist and which were used just in those three novels, but also on the individual development and dynamics of the female characters in the mentioned novels (especially in the novels The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch). The diploma thesis is divided into the different chapters presenting topics concerning the life of the author, the period in which she were wrtiting her novels, the Victorian novel as such and the analysis of the development of the characters in Eliot?s novels.

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Análise da construção da personagem feminina nos romances Middlemarch, de George Eliot (1871-72), e The Portrait of a Lady (1881), de Henry James, observando como a exploração da subjetividade das protagonistas ao longo de suas trajetórias interfere no enredo e na concepção do romance como um todo. A finalidade última é verificar como esses autores contribuem para o nascimento do romance moderno. / Analysis of the female characters design in George Eliots Middlemarch (1871-72) and Henry Jamess The Portrait of a Lady (1881) regarding the exploration of the female protagonists subjectivity along their trajectories interfere with plot and the conception of the novels. The final aim is to discuss how these novelists contribute to the beginning of the modern novel

Análise da construção da personagem feminina nos romances Middlemarch, de George Eliot (1871-72), e The Portrait of a Lady (1881), de Henry James, observando como a exploração da subjetividade das protagonistas ao longo de suas trajetórias interfere no enredo e na concepção do romance como um todo. A finalidade última é verificar como esses autores contribuem para o nascimento do romance moderno. / Analysis of the female characters design in George Eliots Middlemarch (1871-72) and Henry Jamess The Portrait of a Lady (1881) regarding the exploration of the female protagonists subjectivity along their trajectories interfere with plot and the conception of the novels. The final aim is to discuss how these novelists contribute to the beginning of the modern novel

George Eliot's fiction is filled with mentoring relationships which generally consist of a wise male mentor and a foolish, egotistic female mentee. The mentoring narratives relate the conversion of the mentee from narcissism to selfless devotion to the community. By retaining the Christian value of self-abnegation and the Christian tendency to devalue nature, Eliot, nominally a secular humanist who abandoned Christianity, reveals herself still to be a covert Christian. In Chapter 1 I introduce the moral mentoring theme and provide background material. Chapter 2 consists of an examination of Felix Holt, which clearly displays Eliot's crucial dichotomy: the moral is superior to the natural. In Chapter 3 I present a Freudian analysis of Gwendolen Harleth, the mentee most fully developed. In Chapter 4 I examine two early mentees, who differ from later mentees primarily in that they are not egotists and can be treated with sympathy. Chapter 5 covers three gender-modified relationships. These relationships show contrasting views of nature: in the Dinah Morris-Hetty Sorrel narrative, like most of the others, Eliot privileges the transcendence of nature. The other two, Mary Garth-Fred Vincy and Dolly Winthrop-Silas Marner, are exceptions as Eliot portrays in them a Wordsworthian reconciliation with nature. In Chapter 6 I focus on Maggie Tulliver, a mentee with three failed mentors and two antimentors. Maggie chooses regression over growth as symbolized by her drowning death in her brother's arms. In Chapter 7 I examine Middlemarch, whose lack of a successful standard mentoring relationship contributes to its dark vision. Chapter 8 contains a reading of Romola which interprets Romola, the only mentee whose story takes place outside nineteenth-century England, as a feminist fantasy for Eliot. Chapter 9 concludes the discussion, focusing primarily on the question why the mentoring theme was so compelling for George Eliot. In the Appendix I examine the relationships in Eliot's life in which she herself was a mentee or a mentor.