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.

This dissertation begins from the problem that is built into realism as a literary genre: its commitment to capturing the unfiltered circumstances of human life will always be at odds with the artifice of its representational constructs and its fiction. In this study, I consider visuality as a central, productive part of this problem and seek intensely visual moments within realist novels where realism wages its own struggle with itself as it attempts to navigate its limitations and push forward its possibilities. These moments pause the narrative as they prioritize picture over action. As descriptive moments work to render visual images through words on the printed page, they are fraught with realism’s struggle to use the artifice of fiction as a means for approximating an ostensible reality. Facing this difficulty, realist practitioners take up vastly different strategies. In this project, I investigate why and how visuality is deployed so differently by those who chose to write in this mode. I seek that which is piercing in the nineteenth-century realist novel by locating moments of crisis and tension, both within the plot and also within the strategies of the stories’ delivery. These are moments where the novel becomes troubled by the visual, revealing the potential and limit of the image. In realism, visuality encompasses a broad and varied array of strategies, including instances of enargeia and ekphrasis, passages that seek to evoke a sense of place or milieu through a rich catalog of visual detail, expressive self-renderings in the dialog and inner monologs of the characters, explorations of the embodied act of seeing, and moments where perception fails or visual description exposes itself as insufficient. I consider a small group of canonical authors: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, who are of critical importance to this genre and to nineteenth century realism, as it moves towards modernism. By examining moments in their novels where descriptive imagery is at its most acute, I seek to explain how moments of intense visuality are crucial nodes where each author, using unique and distinctive methods, negotiates the problem of realist representation.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate George Eliot's literary indebtedness to the Bible by isolating, identifying, and analyzing her various uses of Scripture in her novels. This study is an attempt to demonstrate in some detail George Eliot's literary indebtedness to the Bible, to show that in the course of her fictional career she made virtually every possible use of the Bible. She at times presents Bibles themselves as significant objects, she refers to the Bible-reading habits of various characters, and she quotes, paraphrases, and alludes to the Bible. She employs biblical words, passages, narratives, characters and objects for purposes of scene-setting, symbolism, authorial commentary, characterization, and presentation and underscoring of basic themes. Sometimes she uses the Bible to achieve a serious tone; at other times, she uses it with humorous intent. Sometimes she sounds traditionally Judaeo-Christian and employs the Bible to exhort the reader in homiletic fashion, but just as often she uses biblical material to preach her own Victorian gospel. The purpose of this study is to isolate, identify, and critically analyze these various uses of the Bible which together produce the recurrent Biblical overtones so notable in the novels of George Eliot.

My dissertation, Understanding the Gray:Aging Women in Victorian Culture and Fiction, explores the cultural construction of aging for middle-class Victorian women and how aging was experienced and then depicted within novels. Chiefly, I work from midcentury to the end of the century in order to understand the experience of aging and ways women were ascribed age due to their position in society as spinsters, mothers, and progressive women. I explore how the age of fictional women reflects and contributes to critical debates concerning how Victorian women were expected to behave. Debates over separate spheres, how women were perceived in British society, and how women’s rights changed during the 19th century highlight how aging affected women and how they were treated throughout the century. Victorian fiction illustrates the ways women achieved different roles in society and how age and the perception of age affected their ability to do so. Understanding how aging was experienced, understood, and ascribed to Victorian women who fought in various ways for new terms of citizenship and mobility helps us begin to trace how we treat and respond to aging in women today. The first chapter outlines the social status of unmarried women and spinsters, considering how age affected women’s ability to lead professional lives in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). The second chapter, on George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, explores older motherhood through Mrs Transome and illustrates how the novel seeks to teach younger women of the pitfalls of unequal marriages. The third chapter builds a cultural understanding of how aging was linked to progressive, anti-domestic womanhood and racial impurity through the New Woman and in H.R. Haggard’s She.

<p>Because of the many similarities between the life of George Eliot and the lives of Maggie and Tom Tulliver in <em>The Mill on The Floss,</em> Eliot’s novel has been understood as an autobiographical novel. The aim of the essay is to, by using a psychoanalytical perspective, examine if the fictional characters could be said to be engaged in an incestuous relationship even though they do not engage in a sexual relationship. Though their relationship never becomes sexual, there are factors which could support a claim that brother and sister are engaged in an non-sexual incestuous relationship.</p>

George Eliot filled her novels with discussions of art and references to specific paintings and sculptures. Though this element of her fiction is easy for the contemporary reader to overlook, it was well loved by her Victorian readership, and is invested with a great deal of thematic content. This thesis analyzes representations of the visual arts in Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, investigating the way that art becomes inseparable from Eliot’s larger moral themes of sympathy and historical consciousness.

"Sounds of Terror" explores the interrelations between discourses of sound and the ghostly in Victorian novels and short stories. Narrative techniques used by Charles, Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, and Charlotte Mew are historically and culturally situated through their use of or reactions against acoustic technology. Since ghost stories and nvoels with gothic elements rely for the terrifying effects on tropes of liminality, my study consists of an analysis of an important yet largely unacknowledged species of these tropes: auditory metaphors. Many critics have examined the visual metaphors that appear in nineteenth-century fiction, but, until recently, aural representations have remain critically ignored. The aural itself represents the liminal or the numinous since sounds are less identifiable than visuals because of their ephemeral nature. My study shows the the significance of auditory symbols becomes increasingly intensified as the century progresses. Through analyses of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and short stories by Henry James ("The Altar of the Dead" and "In the Cage")and Charlotte Mew ("Passed" and "A White Night"), I argue that Victorian writers using gothic modes employ metaphors and symbolism as an alternative to frightening visual images--what could be heard or not heard proved terrifying and dreadful.

This thesis proposes to demonstrate the representation of women in the 19th-century fiction through an analysis of the characters in George Eliot&rsquo / s Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy&rsquo / s The Return of the Native and Tess of the D&rsquo / Urbervilles. The study starts with an outline of the intellectual and industrial transformations shaping women&rsquo / s position in the 19th century in addition to the already existing prejudices about men&rsquo / s and women&rsquo / s roles in the society. The decision of marriage and its consequences are placed earlier in these novels, which helps to lay bare the women&rsquo / s predicaments and the authors&rsquo / treatment of the female characters better. Therefore, because of marriage&rsquo / s centrality to the novels as a theme, the analysis focuses on the female subordination with its educational, vocational and social extensions, the women&rsquo / s expectations from marriage, their disappointments, and their differing responses respectively. Finally, the analogous and different aspects of the attitudes of the two writers are discussed as regards their portrayal of the characters and the endings they create for the women in their novels.

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

This thesis examines the professional identities of three Victorian novelists, George Eliot (1819-1880), Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901) and Florence Marryat (1837-1899), all of whom worked as editors between 1850 and 1880. I explore the practices that these women adopted as journalists in order to survive, and indeed thrive, within a male-dominated literary marketplace, revealing a number of strategies in common as well as some important differences. I also consider how these author-editors represented the experience of the female artist-professional in their fiction, demonstrating that each woman figured the mid-Victorian ideal of domesticity as useful when seeking to negotiate a public identity within a challenging professional climate. Working in the press during a period which has been described as a ‘golden age of women’s journalism,’ these writers nevertheless faced numerous challenges. The purpose of this thesis is to examine why George Eliot, Charlotte Yonge and Florence Marryat found useful the particular practices they chose when editing and writing fiction within the context of this rapidly changing climate. By examining this very diverse sample of writers, I demonstrate how women responded to the demands of the mid-Victorian periodical press, and their role within it, through the practices of anonymity, male pseudonyms, signature and posing as amateurs. The Introduction examines the nature of the professional/amateur divide at mid-century, and demonstrates how women could usefully subvert domestic ideology to position themselves as amateurs and thus covertly enter the public sphere. I offer an overview of research into the periodical press, as well as the position of the woman journalist. In the second part of my Introduction, I introduce the magazines that Eliot, Yonge and Marryat edited, describing a typical issue and offering important contextual information. Chapter One looks at George Eliot’s editorship of The Westminster Review (1852-1854), arguing that while Eliot adopted the tactic of anonymity and pseudonymity she nevertheless developed the persona of an ‘editress’ through her private correspondence. Chapter One examines the ideal of women’s literary professionalism that Eliot developed through the articles she published in The Westminster Review, based upon the values of hard work, training and excellence, and how this was then reflected in her representation of the female artist-professional in her fiction in texts as diverse as Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Chapter Two explores Charlotte Yonge’s editorship of The Monthly Packet (1851-1899) and the lesser-known privately circulated magazine The Barnacle (1863-1867). I examine Yonge’s practice of signature and posing as an amateur, as well as her editorial character of ‘Mother Goose,’ arguing that Yonge shared many of Eliot’s ideals of literary professionalism and that this is reflected in novels such as Dynevor Terrace (1857) and The Clever Woman of the Family (1865). In Chapter Three, I examine Florence Marryat’s editorship of London Society (1872-1876). I explore Marryat’s practice of signature, posing as an amateur when new to her profession and her editorial character of the ‘spiritualist editress,’ arguing that like Yonge, Marryat’s vision of women’s professionalism was similar to that of Eliot and that this was reflected in her representation of the female artist-professional in texts such as Her World Against a Lie (1878) and My Sister the Actress (1881). Despite writing for very different markets, what emerges from the fiction of all three author-editors is an idealised combination of posing as an amateur and skilful performance as an artist. Drawing on original archival research, this thesis recovers their hitherto under-researched editorial work, prompting a reconsideration of the canonical work of George Eliot, stressing the significance of the more familiar work of Charlotte Yonge and introducing Florence Marryat as an important but neglected literary figure.