The Victorian Literature Paper-6

Topic

George Eliot as a novelist.

Paper 6 The Victorian Literature

Name Devendra A Joshi

Class M.A. Sem-1

Submitted To Prof. Dilip Barad (Head of English Dept. M. K. S. Bhavnagar University)

George Eliot as a novelist.

The Regional Novel: it’s Nature

       A regional novel is one that deals with a particular region or locality. The regional novelist is completely absorbed in this particular locality and describes the various, distinct characteristics of that region, its physical features, customs, traditions, etc…, which separate and differentiate it from other regions in other words. The regional novel is a novel about a particular setting or locality and the great originator in England of this type of novel was Miss Maria edge worth. She published her short novel castle rack rent in the year 1800and this year is of great importance as the novel made a great impact not only on the history of English fiction but also on world fiction.

George Eliot: Formative Influences-

English regional novel reached its peak during the nineteenth century. The novelists were encouraged by the example of Maria edge worth, Sir Walter Scott, and others to write about the country side they knew intimately. George Eliot was a voracious reader and she read the novels of Maria edge worth with great delight. She relished her tales about the Irish Peasants, their manners, ways of life and traditions. She was also influenced by Sir Walter Scott, whose love for natural scenery, tradition, history, folklore etc…, prompted him to write about his beloved Scotland and the Scottish people. His aim was to present men rather than manners had he wanted to include the peasantry in his novels. He wonted not only to depict life of the nobility but also that of the humble Scottish peasants. These were also the aims of George Eliot and there is no wonder that she cherished Scott all her life. Her novels abound in low and humble peasants of the English midlands. She loved the rustics and not only does she draw her minor characters from them, but her novels reveal that her hero and heroines also belong to this class.

Industrial Revolution and its impact

       The industrial Revolution played a major role in the development of the regional novel in England. There were better and improved modes of communication, and so people could travel to other parts of the country and know about the different customs, habits, speech and living conditions of their neighbors. The industrial revolution began encroaching upon the countryside and poets like wordsworth disgusted by the industrial encroachment wrote strongly against it. They wrote about the beauty of the countryside and humble life. Which was threatened by industrialization. George Eliot in her novels also shows the evil effects and the misery which it caused to the simple village folk. Silas marner is a story of spiritual rebirth. Marner, “the Methodist weaver, pallid, undersized a child of the dark, satanic mills of the industrial revolution, losed his faith when he is accused of, and found  guilty, by his fellow Methodist of a particular mean theft.” He leaves lantern yard and settles down in raveloe, a village which has not been touched by the industrial revolution. Here the bitter lonely man undergoes a rebirth with the help of a child and kind neighbors who at frist were afraid of him. In this way is highlighted the distintegration of the rural community caused by industrialization.

Contrasted ways of life

       The influence of the poet words worth on George Eliot was profound. In the preface to the lyrical Ballads words worth stresses the choice of country life as the theme of poetry and his views can very well be applied to George Eliot’s practice as a novelist says Henry Auster. “in her constant reading of words worth she must have been impressed by his description and exploitation of the literary values of rural circumstances.” George Eliot writes about provincial characters. Scenes and experiences she was familiar with. She does so, for she wants to reveal the life of the rural working class to the other half of society. Like other regional novelists, she writes not only about the life in the country but also contrasts the rural world, with its rustic beauty and simplicity, with the sophisticated and more affluent outside world. The outer world has its own values and its own advantages, but a regional novelist like George Eliot, brings out the fact that the humble pleasant is rich in wisdom born out of simplicity and his working close to earth. He is wiser and also happier.

Intellectualized the English Novel

George Eliot (1819-1880) is one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian age.” She stands at the gateway between the old novel and the new, no unworthy heir of Thackeray and dickens and no unworthy forerunner of hardy and Henry James.” She was essentially a novelist of intellectual life and her psychological insight into human motives and springs of action is deep and profound. She intellectual shed the English novel and ethical bias, which it had not yet possessed in the hands of dickens and Thackeray. She contributed to the English novel an air of sobriety, sternness and seriousness which it had not attained in the hands of the early Victorian novelists, Addm Bede, silas marner, Middlemarch, Romola mill on the floss, etc are among her greatest novels.   

A Great Psychological Novelist

       George Eliot is a psychological novelist. In her (novelist) novels she lays bare the very souls of her characters. Like Browning, she attempted to represent the inner struggle of a soul, and hereditary influences which governed human action. David cecil, rightly remarks that “she tried to pierce behind the show of things and to reveal the forces by which they are controlled.” She was a great analyser of motives. “Her mind was always (activity) active; experience set it immediately and instinctively analysing and generalizing, to discovering why and how things happened. And when she turned her attention to the world around her, it was this analysis that started her creative imagination working.” She was a retionalist and philosophic thinker and she brought to bear on the novel a highly skilled intellect, a probing mind, and a searching analytic faculty.” If the novel is a mirror lighted up by the mind, it was of no small moment that the red to philosophic ways of seeing. Her sence of responsibility deepened, and her novels grew more and more introspective and theoretic as time went on until with the exhaustion of her earliest and most vivid impressions, they were that and nothing else, and in the last, Daniel deronda, she buits upon a scaffolding od abstract thought.” As  a psychology novelists it was her endeavour to represent inner life. As W.L.Cross puts it,” all (happiness) happenings, she showed. Are but the meaning and the intermingling of courses of events that have their source in the inner history of mankind.”

 Philosophized the novel

       Another great contribution of George Eliot to the novel is that she imparted seriousness, gravity, solemnity and loftiness to the novel. It was no longer an instrument, but in her hands it become a medium for the discussion of highly complicated philosophical and abstract throughts.” Again and again it has been pointed out that fiction in her hands is no longer a mere entertainment; it strikes a note of seriousness and even of sternness; it is turned into a searching review of the gravest as well as the pleasantest aspect of human existence, reassuming the reflective and discursive right and duties pertaining to the novel at its beginning, without however sacrificing any of the creative and dramatic qualities that had developed in the intervening centuries.

       George Eliot achieved her greatest success in drawing complex characters, novelists who concentrate on the outside aspects of character generally fail in the portrayal of complex characters. George Eliot being a psychologist could successfully draw complex charcters like. Maggie tulliver and Tito. “it is the habit of my imagination,” said George Eliot,” to strive after as (well) full a vision of the medium in which a character moves. As the character itself.” Her characters are fully integrated with their social environment.

       George Eliot men and woman are usually drawn after her relatives and friends. Hence their peculiar vividness and truth to life. She reveals herself and her relatives through her characters. Dinah morris in adom bede is drawn after her aunt. Mrs poyser, Hetty’s aunt is said to shown some traits of george eliot’s mother. Adam bede is drawn after her own father the picture of maggie tulliver in the mill on the floss is her own personal study.

Style

       George Eliot’s style is lucid, and to begin with simple, but latter, in reflective passages. It is often overweighed with abstractions. Her dialogue is excellent for the revelation of character, and her command of the idom of ordinary speech enables her to achieve a fine naturalness. Only rarely does she rise to the (impa) 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.”

Conclusion

       “george Eliot is of 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 inner consciousness, did much to determine the future course of the english novel. The twentieth 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 ten or twenty years to surprising degree.”