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Chapter 2 - George Eliot

Realism and Dialectics

from Part I - 1850–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2024

By
Ruth Abbott
Edited by
Rachel Potter  and
Matthew Taunton
Rachel Potter
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew Taunton
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
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Summary

This chapter takes seriously the concerns of Eliot’s early reviewers with a tension in her fiction between the devoted depiction of life later associated with realism, and a didactic impulse to which they increasingly felt she succumbed. Asking why Eliot interrupted representation with theorisation, the chapter takes as a case study her alternating dramatisation and analysis of incongruous versions of history in Chapter 20 of Middlemarch. It traces the lineage of such alternation, via an allusion to her friend John Sibree’s translation of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, into one of the notebooks Eliot used as she developed Middlemarch, which is read less as a source for either the novel’s theories or its facts than as a laboratory for its experiments in moving between them. The chapter suggests that Eliot valued the dissonance her reviewers detected when dogma intruded upon depiction. It thereby elucidates her contribution to the dialectical novel of ideas this book explores.

Keywords

facttheorydepictiondidacticHegelhistoryMiddlemarchresearchscholarshipnotebooks
Type
Chapter
Information
The British Novel of Ideas
George Eliot to Zadie Smith
 , pp. 46 - 63
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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