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.

Middlemarch is the novel at the centre of this thesis. George Eliot's writing, and Middlemarch in particular, is the paradigm of what has come to be known as Classic Realist fiction. In reading Middlemarch, it seems, one is introduced to a fictional world. The characters are psychologically complex, and they are presented with moral and social problems which are created and discussed with subtlety and intelligence. Until recently, critical assessment of Middlemarch has focussed on evaluation of Eliot's achievement in just these terms. The thesis begins with a question, how, and indeed is it possible for a novel to depict a fiction in this way? The introductory chapter proposes an answer to this question which opens the way to a radical critical appraisal of the status of Middlemarch as a psychologically realistic novel. The scope of the thesis is in one sense very narrow: it is on the ways in which George Eliot creates the moral psychology of her characters, and the ways in which she develops and sustains our interest in their motives, their emotions and in general their mental states and processes. My suggestion is that the language Eliot uses is deeply coloured by her commitments in the Philosophy of Mind. The argument will be that in order to take Eliot's fiction to be psychologically realistic, we are committed to sharing her unacceptable philosophical presuppositions. The second chapter of the thesis is a discussion of Eliot's novella The Lifted Veil. This is an odd piece of fiction, both technically and in subject matter. It does not fit easily into the Eliot canon, and until recently it has received little attention. The purpose of Chapter Two is partly to redress that balance but more to diagnose Eliot's philosophical commitments. The eerie fantasy of unnatural mind-reading reveals Eliot's ideas in a very explicit way. My suggestion is that in the struggle to make this fantasy coherent, a picture of the mind emerges which is both seductive and ultimately nonsensical. Narrow as the focus is, the arguments to establish my point take us deep into Wittgenstein's later Philosophy. The fundamental insight of Wittgenstein's work on the philosophy of mind was that in order to understand how it is possible to talk meaningfully about mental states and processes, we must resist the seductive, ultimately nonsensical picture seemingly imposed upon us by the grammar of ordinary psychological remarks. And if those arguments are thought to be convincing, the thesis has important negative implications for at least one important perennial question in the philosophy of aesthetics. The starting point of this thesis takes seriously the idea that novelists can, and ought to, examine themes of deep human significance. The larger goal of this piece of work has been to open up a line of enquiry which might examine, from within the Analytic tradition in philosophy, the extent to which that task is feasible. I have sought to establish an important connection between the creation of the moral psychology of fictional characters, and Wittgenstein's later work in the philosophy of mind. I believe that the examination I have conducted of the way issues in the philosophy of mind, especially those treated in the Philosophical Investigations, bear on the way Eliot writes places much of the psychological language of Middlemarch in a new light, and discloses certain quite general limits on what is possible in creating fictional minds.

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This study analyzes the moral development of George Eliot&#039 / s characters in her novel Middlemarch according to Lawrence Kohlberg&#039 / s theory called &quot / The Cognitive-Developmental Theory of Moralization&quot / . Eliot&#039 / s moral view is characterized by man&#039 / s relation with other men, not man&#039 / s relation with God. As long as the individuals treat others with sympathy and understanding, they can develop morally. Eliot&#039 / s aim is to contribute to the creation of a happier society by presenting the harms of egoism. According to Kohlberg&#039 / s theory, individuals can develop their role taking abilities parallel to their cognitive developments. This development is displayed by three levels and at the heighest level an individual can go beyond the expectations of society with principles of justice and respect for basic human rights and dignity. However, although the characters in Eliot&#039 / s novel are sometimes in conflict with the society, they tend to find solutions to their problems within the social structure they live in because Eliot contends that the harmony of society is more important than the personal satisfaction and happiness of individuals for the welfare and happiness of humanity as a whole.

During the Victorian period marriage proved to be a dominant theme in fiction. Female writers especially focused on the topic of marriage and wrote stories of women whose first marriages were imperfect. Anne Brontë and George Eliot dedicated themselves to portraying in their stories realistic heroines who deal with their own flaws as well as those of the men they marry. Their heroines distance themselves from their expected roles, moving beyond their first failed marriages to wiser second marriages. Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall follows Helen Huntingdon as she attempts to fulfill the self-appointed role of Savior to her husband. Her rash first marriage opens her eyes to her frank inability to redeem and reform her reprobate husband. Along the same lines George Eliot warns readers in her prelude to Middlemarch that Dorothea Brooke will never fulfill all her saintly capabilities because of the unaccommodating social structure of her time. She marries an elderly scholar in the hopes of being enlightened intellectually and spiritually by the alliance. Instead she finds herself stymied in a claustrophobic marriage. Both women are liberated, in a sense, by the deaths of their husbands and regain their free will at that point. This thesis explores the psychological pathway from first to second marriage. Marriage serves as the prime educator for Helen and Dorothea. Both women move from blind adoration to despair and hatred at the failure of their first marriages. Both eventually seek a second marriage and wed men who are in turn wiser for their association with these women and who love and respect them. The treatment of marriage in the two novels hinges on the realistic portrayal of life and reflects the era the authors lived in as well as serving as a vehicle for the heroines' character development and growth. Brontë and Eliot create remarkably similar stories beginning with marriage and focusing on heroines who survive the refiner's fire and in the end attain a sense of self as well as a measure of peace.

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Victorian serial novels were bound with pages upon pages of advertisements marketing goods to readers, yet the relative inattention paid to this significant material component of the novel is surprising. This project explores the interaction between fictional narrative and commercial advertisements, and aims to recover the material context in which three Victorian novels—Bleak House, Middlemarch, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—were first published and read. These three case studies—a novel published in 20 monthly serial numbers, another packaged in the rare format of eight “books” in bimonthly installments, and the third published in a monthly magazine in three excerpts—are exemplary of a larger phenomenon in Victorian book production wherein fiction and commerce were inextricably bound. This project investigates the ways in which the advertisements can be reconceived as a significant element of the novel, mediating the reader’s experience of the text. The Bleak House chapter examines how the advertisements for hair products in the “Bleak House Advertiser” serve to highlight an aspect of Charles Dickens’s text about Victorian responses to the mass of new consumer goods and individuals’ desire to control the physical aspects of their world. The following chapter considers George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans’s) Middlemarch, finding that just as the narrator’s asides compel readers to attend to the temporal difference between the 1830s setting of the novel and the 1870s perspective of the serial edition, sewing machine advertisements in the advertising supplement of the novel serve to remind readers of their role as observers of past events. The examination of Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’s) Huck Finn, as published in three excerpts in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, demonstrates that the magazine articles, the excerpts from Huck Finn, and the advertisements all engage in a project of unifying the nation and alleviating the physical and metaphorical wounds of war. The unity of the message emerges when the excerpts are read together with the many advertisements for wheelchairs and other such implements for disabled bodies. The dissertation ends with a chapter indicating the merits of further analysis and critical discussion of advertisements in the undergraduate literature classroom. / text

This dissertation critically examines why mid-Victorian fiction often dismisses or complicates monetary transactions and monetary charity, even as it negatively portrays differences in social status and wealth. I argue that the novel uses representations of failed charity to reconstruct, however briefly, a non- monetary and non-economic source of value. Further, I examine how the novel uses techniques of both genre and style to predict, form, and critique alternate, non-economic, social models. While tension surrounding the practice of charity arises in the late eighteenth century, the increasing dominance of political economy in public discourse forced Victorian literature to take a strong stance, for reasons of both ethics and genre. This stance is complicated by the eighteenth-century legacy that sees charity as a kind of luxury. If giving to the poor makes us feel good, this logic suggests, surely it isn’t moral. Thus, while much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature remains dedicated to the ethics of charity, the practice becomes immensely complex. By discussing the works of Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, this project exposes a wide variety of responses to this deep cultural anxiety. These authors are, ultimately, strongly invested in redefining the meaning of benevolence as a valid form of social action by moving that benevolence away from monetary gifts and toward abstractly correct moral feelings, though their individual solutions vary widely. / text

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.

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.