George Eliot (1819-89)

George Eliot (1819-89)

Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot was the daughter of a Warwickshire land-agent, being educated at Huneaton and Coventry. After her father's death, she took up to literature and in later life she travelled extensively and in 1880 married J.W.Cross. She died at Chelsea in the same year.

Her works

George Eliot discovered her bent for fiction when well into the middle years of her life. Her novels deal with the tragedy of ordinary lives, unfolded with an intense sympathy and deep insight into the truth of character.

Appearing in 1859, an annus mirabilis of Victorian publication, with many notable works, her first novel "Adam Bede" was a runaway success and established George Eliot "at once among the masters of the art" as written in The Times on April 12, 1859.

The basic plot of the humbly-born poetry girl caught between a decent faithful love from her own class and a more glamorous but unprincipled rich admirer (wicked baronet, squire, " gentleman", industrial magnate) was very familiar in contemporary drama and fiction (Emily/ Ham/ Steerforth in David Copperfield) but Eliot's treatment of it was characteristically original. Not only does the girl fail to escape intact in time from this imbroglio, but instead, tragically and realistically, becomes pregnant, lets her baby die and is sentenced to death for infanticide; but also the characters and motives of the girl and her seducer are explored with uncommon intelligence, inwardness, sagacity, and sympathy (which does not inhibit firm moral judgement). Henry James regarded the girl, Hetty Sorrel, as Eliot's most successful female figure. Adam Bede, her humble carpenter lover, has been less admired as a creation, though at a non-literary level his depiction was much praised by an old friend of the author's father That's Robert (vans), that's Robert to the life!" Indeed, Adam, as George Eliot recorded, has some of her father's qualities: steady, proud craftsmanship, upright character.

The novel's climatic event. The girl's conviction for infanticide-came from family memory, too. Eliot's Methodist preacher aunt, Mrs. Samuel Evans had accompanied a lass during her final night in a condemned cell and on her way to the scaffold and had received her confession to killing her child. This incident implied a seducer and, given the fictional conventions of the day, another (socially humbler but morally superior) lover. To marry the latter off to the estimable Methodist lady, Dinah Morris, after a decent interval, was as predictable as the girl's last-minute reprieve at the scaffold ("a horseman cleaving the crowd at full gallop . it is Arthur Donnithorne (the seducer), carrying in his hand a hard-won release from death").

These later events and developments carrying less conviction than the rest of the narrative where, as Eliot puts it in her famous chapter 17 manifesto, she is "dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult". Her later succumbing to temptation does not, however, negate the very substantial merits of the body of her "simple story", appropriately prefixed by an epigraph from Wordsworth, promising "clear images . Of nature's unambitions undergrowth" and "something more than brotherly forgiveness" for those who went astray. "Our supreme novel of pastoral life" V.S. Pritchett has called it, though he was irritated by what he regarded as failures in its presentation of sexuality. Eliot certainly fulfilled her promise to her publisher that it would be "a country story - full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay". Memories of rural Warwickshire were backed by typically, scholarly research into events before her life-time (the action begins in 1799 and ends in 1807). This related especially to Methodist activities, here depicted with uncommon understanding and respect. The well-named village of Hayslope with its manor and parsonage, farms, workshop, and places of assembly, is presented in loving and convincing detail. Mrs. Poyser, the kindly but redoubtable farmer's wife who is Hetty's and Dinah's aunt, became a legendary figure overnight (quoted in Parliament soon after publication data) for her fluent forthright folk-wisdom vigorously expressed in bucolic imagery.

The narrator, a more sophisticated and better informed Mrs. Payser, is equally liberal with tough-minded generalizations, and with sharp assessments of individuals. ("Yes, the actions of a little trivial soul like Hetty's, struggling amidst the serious, sad destinies of a human being are strange"). Opinions differ on how fully and fairly Eliot "sympathises" with pretty but simple-minded Hetty and high-minded grey-clad Dinch But Hetty's foolish dreams of marrying the heir of the manor and becoming a lady" with a plentiful wardrobe, and her lone suffering before and after childbirth, are splendidly rendered, as is the process whereby the fundamentally decent, but wobbly-conscienced Arthur allows himself to continue seeing Hetty and eventually to seduce her and to lost the respect of Adam (whom he much values) and eventually of the whole village (Hetty's trial coincides with his coming into his inheritance).

As often in Eliot, elements of the conventional happy ending - the novel's penultimate chapter is entitled "Marriage Bells" - are balanced by severer fates: death for Hetty as she was due for release, disappointment for Adam's brother Seth, who had unsuccessfully courted Dinah and is provided with no alternative mate, and disgrace for Arthur though he is finally granted a purgatorial illness after which he may be largely forgiven ( a frequent denouement device in fiction of the period).

Analiza: Tesuturile - tesutul epitelial, tesutul conjunctiv, tesutul nervos Eseu: Structura genomului la procariote

Her next work, considered by many her best, was "The Mill on the Floss", published in1860. The most autobiographical of George Eliot's fiction, it draws on her childhood in the Warwickshire countryside, recalled some 30 years later, her struggles to assert herself against a background of stifling conventionality, and her painful love for her brother Isaac. There are important differences: Eliot, unlike Maggie Tulliver, suffered frustration but always had enough money to pay for lessons in the subjects that interested her. She was never reduced, as poor Maggie is, to relying on church services for the only music available after the sale of the family piano. The rebellious girl-child had been invented in fiction by Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre, but the turbulence of Mr. Tulliver's "little wench" owes much to the young Mary Ann Evans, who also tried with all her might to be good.

The first chapter paints a scene of rural beauty, but the life within it is not idyllic; the second chapter opens with Mr. Tulliver's ruminations, in dialect, about giving his son an "eddication", which will fit him for business. We do not get much impression of the man's wisdom. The conversation between him and his wife is inconsequential. We learn that their daughter is more intelligent than their son and that Maggie is too cute for a woman . "

Mrs. Tulliver is unconvinced that Maggie's intelligence is not damaging while she is still small: "it all run to naughtiness". She complains the child is "half an idiot" in practical matters, and her hair refuses to curl. Clearly, Maggie's prospects of intellectual encouragement are not good. Mrs. Tulliver is concerned with cleanliness and respectability. The interaction of her and her sisters, formerly the Misses Dodson, is the comic highlight of the book. With them, Eliot creates a picture of provincial life in the early years of the 19^th century, which shows both their admirable self respect and their absurdly narrow views.

Maggie objects to doing patchwork "tearing things to pieces to sew'em together again". And she does not want to please her Aunt Glegg by doing it, because she doesn't like Aunt Glegg. Like other children Maggie cuts her own hair. She jealously pushes her pretty blonde cousin Lucy into the cow-manure, and runs away to join the Gypsies, planning to become their instructress and queen. Four-year-old Mary Ann Evans, unable to play a note of music, sat down at the piano in order to impress the servant with her prowess, and the mature Eliot ruthlessly satirizes this aspect of her younger self. Even more painful is her treatment of that lordly bully, brother Tom, secure in his conviction of superiority to any mere female, and in his right to rule. Maggie slavishly worships Tom and lives for his approval. All this childish emotion was revisited by the writer after her own brother had rejected her for living with George Henry Jewes, yet being unable to marry him.

But after Mr. Tulliver becomes a bankrupt our perception of Tom changes; he is no intellectual but he is a young man of integrity, and at 16 sets to work in his Unch Deanc's wharf, saving money and paying off his father's debts. Tulliver is reduced to working for his old enemy, lawyer Wakem. Maggie "gets religion" and decides to renounce the world and its pleasures. But one secret pleasure remains to her: she meets Waken's hunchback son, Philip, in the disused quarry, The Red Deeps. Philip is the intellectual companion Maggie needs after the family books are sold. Philip wisely tells her she is merely trying to "stupefy" herself.

Maggie has not yet grasped that "renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly" (Book 4, Chapter 3). The real theme of the novel is Maggie's attempt to come to terms with the loss of her brother's love. The story betrays unease; it says the love between the children was mutual, yet we never see Tom's affection, apart from family pride, in action - we have to take it on trust. The story slackens when Maggie and Lucy's young man falls in love and go boating, which causes Maggie, who has improbably renounced him anyway to avoid hurting Lucy and Philip, to lose her reputation. Because the love-subject is neither handsome Stephen, nor handicapped Philip, the conflict is insoluble. There is nothing to do with the brother and sister, but reunites them in death by drowning. Eliot could not invent credible lovers for Maggie or convincing reasons for her brother's, because the real reasons for the break between the author and her brother were too personal and too painful. So, she has to say good-bye symbolically to the children she and her brother used to be.

Silas Marner: the Weaver of Raveloe (1861)

It is a shorter novel, which again gives excellent pictures of village life; it is less earnest in tone, and has scenes of a rich humour, which are blended with the tragedy. Like "The Mill on the Floss" it is somewhat marred by its melodramatic ending.

Other novels are "Romola" (1863), "Felix Holt the Radical" (1866), "Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life" (1871-2) and "Daniel Deronda" (1876).

Features of Her Novels

Her Choice of Subject

George Elliot carries still further that preoccupation with the individual personality which we have seen to be the prime concern of the Brontes. For her, the development of the human soul, in the study of its relationships to the quarter things beyond itself, is the all-important theme. There is relatively little striking incident in her novels but her plots are skilfully managed. Behind all her writing there lies a sense of the tragedy of life, in which sin or folly brings its own retribution. Her preoccupation with this theme gives to her later work some of the features of the moral treatise

Her Characters

They are usually drawn from lower classes of society, and her studies of the English countryman show great understanding and insight. An adept at the development of character, she excels in the deep and minute analysis of the motives and reactions of ordinary folk. She brings to bear upon her study of the soul the knowledge of the student of psychology, and her characterization makes no concessions to sentiment. Her sinners, and she is particularly interested in self-deceivers and stupid people, are portrayed with an unswerving truthfulness.

The tone of her novels

It is one of moral earnestness, and at times in her later work of an austere grimness. But almost always it is lightened by her humour. In the earlier novels this is rich and genial, though even there it has some of the irony which appears more frequently and more caustically in the later books.

George Eliot's Style

It is lucid, and, to begin with, simple but later in reflective passages, it is often overweighed with abstractions. Her dialogue is excellent for the revelation of character, and her command of the idioms of ordinary speech enables her to achieve a fine naturalness. Only rarely does she rise to the impassioned poetical heights of the Brontes, but her earlier novels particularly "The Mill on the Floss", are full of fine descriptions of the English Countryside, and her faculty for natural description she never lost entirely.

Her Place in History of the English Novel

She is of a great importance in the history of fiction. Her serious concern with the problems of the human personality and its relationship with forces outside itself, her interest in detailed psychological analysis of the realms of the inner consciousness, did much to determine the future course of the English novel. The 20^th century has seen the rapid development of these interests and it is significant that the reputation of George Eliot, which suffered a temporary eclipse after her death, has recovered during the last decades to a surprising degree.