1. Lecture 8 George Eliot: (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-1880)

3. Brief Introduction
From 1819 to1849
George Eliot--pen name, an English novelist, leading Victorian writer
Was born in 1819, Chilvers Coton , Warwickshire ,a family of a land agent ， Griff ,21years
Mrs. Wallington‘s School at Neneaton --a strong evangelical (福音教派的)piety
In 1836,her mother died-- family household.
In 1841, moved to Coventry till 1849

4. From 1849 to 1880
Charles Bray, a free-thinking Coventry manufacturer, rationalistic works influenced deeply Eliot's thoughts
After her father's death, travelled around Europe &settled in London work as subeditor of Westminster Review
George Henry Lews, philosophical & critic– a union without legal form,till1878
Two years later, John Cross, younger (20)--died

5. I. About George Eliot
1. She was in a way a philosopher, and a reformist, but her reform lies in religion;
2. Her characters were not grotesque types, but real, common men and women, whose psychology Elliot revealed very skillfully to the reader;
3. Her work marks a retrogression. She shifted the centre of gravity in the novel from the social problems to the problems of religion and morality. She believed in the sentimental “religion of humanity”, and cherished the illusion that humanity and love could do away with the evils of capitalism.

6. II. G. Eliot’s Major Works
1.Translation:
The Essence of Christianity 《基督教的本质》
2. Editor of The Westminster Review《威斯敏斯特评论》

7. “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” “阿莫斯·巴顿牧师的不幸遭遇”
Three stories:
“The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” “阿莫斯·巴顿牧师的不幸遭遇”
2) “Mr. Gilfil’s Lover Story” “吉尔菲尔先生的恋爱史”
3) “Janet’s Repentance” “珍妮特的忏悔”
3. Scenes of Clerical Life
《教区生活场景》1857

8. of rural life; moral problems; psychological studies of characters
Remarkable Novels:
4. Adam Bede 《亚当·比德》
5.The Mill on the Floss
《弗洛斯河上的磨房》
6. Silas Marner 《织工马南》
description of
rural life;
moral problems;
psychological
studies of characters
1859;
1860;
1861.

9. manuscripts 7. Romola 《罗慕拉》1863 a historical novel of
the Renaissance in Italy
problems of
religion and morality
studied more than 500 books and documents
in relation to art, antiquity(古人) and old MSS
manuscripts

10. 8. Felix Holt the Radical， 1866《激进分子费立可斯·霍尔特》
9. Middlemarch， (1871—1872) 《米德尔马契》
10. Daniel Deronda， 1876 《丹尼尔·德龙达》

11. III. Comments on some of her works
1. Adam Bede
Adam Bede is a novel of _____________ Its plot is founded on a story of a confession of ____________.
The theme of________________ is blended with the Eliot’s moralization.
Moral conflicts
child murder
social inequality

12. 2. The Mill on the floss
In this novel, Maggie’s character is tinged with the author’s___________.
The tragic doom of Maggie virtually shows the irreconcilability of a gifted and noble-minded personality with_______________.
moralization
bourgeois reality

13. 3. Silas Marner
___________marks a retrogression, believing in the sentimental “religion of humanity”(博爱，慈善) and cherished the illusion that ________ and love could do away with the evils of capitalism.
Silas Marner
humanity

14. IV. The subject in Eliot’s works
As a woman of exceptional intelligence and life experience, she shows a particular concern for the destiny of women, especially those with great intelligence, potential and social aspirations. In her mind, the pathetic tragedy of women lies in their very birth. Their inferior education and limited social life determine that they must depend on men for sustenance and realization of their goals, and they have only to fulfill the domestic duties.

15. V. The characteristics of George Eliot’s literary works
Writing at the latter half of the nineteenth century and closely following the critical realist writers, George Eliot was working at something new. By joining the worlds of inward propensity and outward circumstances and showing them both operating in the lives of her characters, she initiates a new type of realism and sets into motion a variety of developments, leading in the direction of both the naturalistic and psychological novel.
乔治·爱略特的小说为现代文学开创了道路，“是乔治·爱略特开创了这一切，是她起了实质性作用。” —— D. H.劳伦斯

16. Her critical reputation has varied; it declined somewhat after her death, her powerful intellect being considered to damage her creativity.
She was defended by Virginia Woolf in an essay in 1919, but was really re-established by inclusion in F. R, Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948).
With the rapid strides in feminist criticism in the 1980s, however, Eliot has been reclaimed as a major influence on women's writing and her works have been the focus of numerous feminist critiques, e.g.. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). George Eliot also wrote poems, but they were little regarded.

17. VI. Themes 1. Inner vs. Outer Beauty 2. The Value of Hard Work
3. Love: marriage was more of a contract than a romantic affair
4. Honor
There are two types of honor in this novel: that of females, and that of males.
5. Industry
Eliot seems to side with many poets and authors in lamenting the onset of industry insofar as it alienates people from nature. Eliot personifies the spirit of Leisure in contrast to this new industry, describing him as a portly old gentleman with excellent digestion.
6. Motherhood: Lisbeth Bede
Dinah Morris
Hetty Sorrel
7. Sacrifice
8. Female Identity and Autonomy
The most memorable characters in the novel are women with strong voices who are attached to men.
Mrs. Poyser

18. VII. Motifs 1. Natural Beauty
Eliot’s description of the natural beauty of the English countryside, especially in scenes of great sadness or evil, expresses the idea that external and internal realities do not always correspond.
2. Dogs
The dogs in the novel reflect the temperament of the characters with respect to helpless beings.

19. 3. Narrative Sarcasm
The narrator in Adam Bede butts into the story to provide ironic and often sarcastic commentary on the characters and the reader’s impression of them. The narrator pokes fun at the reader, especially the imagined, haughty reader who has a low opinion of such simple characters as Adam and Mr. Irwine.

20. VIII. Selected reading: Adam Bede
1. Brief introduction
In this novel, George Eliot shakes up life in the rural English community of Hayslope with a careless squire's seduction of dairymaid Hetty Sorrell, the love interest of plain-spoken carpenter Adam Bede. The betrayal brings on tragic consequences among the Midlands country folk, along with Adam Bede's own maturity. Told from an omniscient point of view, Eliot’s first novel emphasizes her personal philosophies of moral realism and self-control.

21. 2. Mains characters Adam Bede Hetty Sorrell Arthur Donnithorne
a beautiful but
self-absorbed woman
a local carpenter ,much admired for his integrity and intelligence
Adam Bede
Hetty Sorrell
a pretty
methodist
preacher
Arthur Donnithorne
Dinah Morris
a young squire,
Adam's best friend

22. 3. Characterization in Adam Bede
1). A flat character
a one-sided figure, a character who exhibits only one or two human traits, usually in exaggerated form. Such a character's speeches and actions are never very surprising because they always spring from the same motivations and preoccupations, and he normally does not change at all in the course of the book. An example in Adam Bede is Mr. Casson, the innkeeper. Mr. Casson is very much impressed with his own importance, and whenever he appears in the novel, he is asserting or defending his dignity. He is a man with an inflated sense of his own importance, and that is all he is. In the same way, Mr. Craig, the gardener at the Chase and another of Hetty's admirers, is a know-it-all, and whenever we meet him he is dispensing (often false) information. Real people are never as simple figures like these. The characterizations are superficial, static, "flat."

23. 2). Round characters:
On the contrary, possess the complexity which is the norm in real life. They are flexible and change in response to changed circumstances. Adam, for example, is capable of being harsh, gentle, loving, cruel, violent, shy, and so on; he has not one trait but many. And he learns a great deal in the course of the novel and changes gradually from a rather brash and immature youth to a self-disciplined and emotionally stable man. Adam is a "round" character, a fully developed and plausibly human figure.

24. 3). A central character
one who plays a major part in the story and has a hand in the shaping of events. Central characters do meaningful things and have meaningful things done to them.
4). A background character is normally not "on stage" very much, at least in comparison with the central characters. He can serve many purposes: he can help create atmosphere, as Wiry Ben and the other townspeople do; he can provide comic relief, as the men at the harvest supper do; he can provide incident, as Molly does when she drops the ale jug. But straight background characters do not affect the plot line in any very significant way; the drama moves around them.

25. 4. The "Dear Reader" Technique in Adam Bede
"With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799."
The first paragraph of Adam Bede in itself is enough to mark the novel as a pre-modern-century product. With few exceptions, modern authors accept Henry James' notion that a novel should create a world unto itself; a novelist should not take the pose of someone "telling a story" to a group of listeners but should simply present a self-contained, complete imitation of reality and let it stand on its own merits.

26. In Eliot's time, the "dear reader" technique was widely used
In Eliot's time, the "dear reader" technique was widely used. The method derives from the earlier popular conception that fiction, since it was literally "untrue," was a base deception and morally unhealthy. Eighteenth-century authors, especially Defoe, took pains to insist that their novels were really accounts of true happenings, and, although the nineteenth century gradually came to accept fiction as fiction, the custom of speaking directly to the reader, as the editor of a journal or the author of a set of memoirs would do, persisted. Probably the most celebrated example of the use of the technique is Thackeray's Vanity Fair, where the author refers to his characters as "puppets" and admits almost shyly that he created an artificial world. The impulse to separate truth from fiction was still alive; it took the novel about another forty years to take its place as a serious art form which did not apologize for its own existence.

27. The technique, then, is first of all a convention
The technique, then, is first of all a convention. Eliot pretends throughout that Adam Bede is a true story. She takes the pose of one who is merely recording events which she has heard recounted. She says in Chapter 17, for example: "But I gathered from Adam Bede, to whom I talked of these matters in his old age," and goes on to report a conversation which had supposedly taken place years after the events presented in the novel were things of the past. This, at one and the same time, has the effect of both destroying and supporting the illusion of reality which the novel as a whole creates. It destroys that illusion because the events described no longer seem immediate and present; it supports it by making us believe that we are reading an extremely detailed history of real people and things. Thus the novel hangs rather uncomfortably in the balance between fiction and reality; we know the events described are not real, but we are asked to believe that they are. The modern novelist does this too, but in a different way; he asks us to freely become absorbed in his fictional world rather than insisting that we assimilate the fictional world into the real one.

28. The "dear reader" technique also serves some practical functions
The "dear reader" technique also serves some practical functions. Because the author pretends to be "outside" her own story, she is free to comment in her own voice upon the characters and events she creates. A very large part of the character analysis in Adam Bede is handled from this viewpoint; in Chapter 5, for instance, we find the following: "On the other hand, I must plead, for I have an affectionate partiality towards the Rector's memory, that he was not vindictive."
Eliot also uses the method to ask for the reader's sympathy and understanding, to guide his reactions to her story. In Chapter 3, she begs us to use our historical imaginations to visualize what Methodism was like in 1799, and, in Chapter 17, she asks us to appreciate her realistic approach.

29. These two functions work hand in band
These two functions work hand in band. Eliot is very careful to make us see the point of her story, and so she constantly analyzes the people and issues involved in it with an eye to controlling our intellectual and emotional reactions to them. This somewhat insecure way of proceeding indicates once again that Eliot was self-consciously writing a revolutionary novel; afraid that her readers won't know what to think of her unusual plot, she tells them plainly what to think.

30. 5. The Symbolic World of Adam Bede
1). Snowfield: Dinah's home town, is located in Stonyshire; as the names indicate, this is a bleak, forbidding region in which people eke out a poor living on the rocky hills or else work in a factory.
2). Hayslope in Loamshire, on the other hand, is a pleasant spot where the farmers are prosperous and the workers comfortable; there are no factories, but only small neighborhood businesses like Jonathan Burge's workshop.

31. The "world" of the novel thus divides into light and dark, or hopeful and gloomy areas. Taking this world to represent life, we can see that Eliot is dividing experience into the pleasant and the unpleasant — giving us symbols for the "light" and "dark" sides of life. Dinah lives in Stonyshire; she is familiar with the darker side of life, accepts human suffering as necessary and inevitable, and knows how to deal with it. Adam, Arthur and Hetty, on the other hand, take a much more optimistic view of things and must learn what Dinah already knows. The crisis of the novel takes place in Stonyshire (in a town called Stoniton, as a matter of fact) and it is here that the three Loamshire people discover the meaning of "irremediable evil."

32. 3). Gates
The characters in the novel frequently linger around gates and pass through gates outside homes and in the fields. The gates suggest major changes in the characters’ lives, as when Hetty passes through the gates as she walks toward the Chase to meet Captain Donnithorne, leaving the innocence of childhood behind and walking into a very adult situation. The gates outside the characters’ homes also represent the attempt to keep the affairs of the heart private. Those who are allowed to pass through those gates are allowed into the heart of the family and into its most intimate secrets. Adam does not create any disturbance when he comes through the gates at Hall Farm: he is an accepted and beloved member of the community, and he enters quietly and respectfully. In contrast, Captain Donnithorne creates a huge ruckus whenever he enters. He loudly calls to Dinah at one point, and at other points he arrogantly makes his presence known. Adam comes quietly into the Poysers’ confidence while Captain Donnithorne brings noise, disturbances, and, ultimately, shame.

33. 4). Hearth and Home
The hearth and home are the sources of nourishment in the novel, and their images recur repeatedly as the grounding force of the characters’ lives. The most prominent example of hearth and home is Hall Farm, the home of the Poysers. Each of the scenes at the farm returns to the hearth, where the grandfather sits and around which the whole family gathers. Problems are discussed and conflicts are resolved around the hearth. In the same way, at the Bedes’ home, life revolves around the hearth in the kitchen. Lisbeth’s whole day is spent there, and Dinah is useful and praised when she visits because of her ability to clean, cook, and do chores near the fireplace. The strongest and most worthwhile characters are those who spend the most time around the hearth.

34. 5). Clothing
The characters’ choice of clothing represents important qualities of their nature, showing on the outside how they choose to represent themselves to the world. Hetty, for example, dresses in the best finery she can get, whereas Dinah dresses all in black with a simple cap. Hetty’s ostentatious dress symbolizes the shallow, flashy nature of her character, and when her dress falls into disrepair on her trip, it tracks the disintegration of her spirit. By contrast, Dinah’s black gown and simple dress symbolize her practical love of simple things. She chooses not to put herself forward but to shrink into the background and come forward only when she can help others. Characters’ clothing choices reflect fundamental truths about their natures.

35. Essay Questions:
Show how one bad choice — Arthur and Hetty's illicit love — affects the lives of Adam, Arthur, Hetty, and Dinah. How does this illustrate Eliot's theory of ethical determinism?
Who is to blame for the conflict on which the novel centers? Hetty? Arthur? Both? Do both character and circumstance play a part?
"Whereas Dickens did not forget to mix pleasure with edification, in George Eliot's hands the novel was not primarily for entertainment but for the serious discussion of moral issues." Explain.
What are the conflicts in Adam Bede? What types of conflict (physical, moral, intellectual, or emotional)?
Comment upon Adam Bede as a criticism of classed society

36. But why did not Arthur rise
But why did not Arthur rise? He was perfectly motionless, and the time seemed long to Adam. Good God! had the blow been too much for him? Adam shuddered at the thought of his own strength, as with the oncoming of this dread he knelt down by Arthur's side and lifted his head from among the fern. There was no sign of life: the eyes and teeth were set. The horror that rushed over Adam completely mastered him, and forced upon him its own belief. He could feel nothing but that death was in Arthur's face, and that he was helpless before it. He made not a single movement, but knelt like an image of despair gazing at an image of death.