The Painter of Rural Life: Narrative Complexity and Imaginative Sympathy in George Sand and George Eliot

Roderick Cooke

doi:10.1086/713872

Myth, Exorcism, and Maggie Tulliver

Browning Institute Studies ◽

10.1017/s0092472500002121 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 16 ◽

pp. 101-122

Author(s):

M. da Vinci Nichols

Keyword(s):

George Eliot ◽

Rural Life ◽

Matthew Arnold ◽

The Novel ◽

Religious Expression ◽

Nature And Culture ◽

Mill On The Floss ◽

As If

Pater speaks here for a perception shared, differently, by George Eliot and Matthew Arnold. Deep respect for Greek learning as the font of humanism led Arnold to suspect that myth held more truth than did mere philosophy. As if in agreement, Eliot's novel, The Mill on the Floss, asks what that more might be. Is myth a religious expression? an illustration of fate? a model of nature? or of some irreducible essence within the grain and texture of reality eluding definition? All may apply. The gross sum of rural life in the novel, a “grovelling existence which even calamity does not elevate” (238; bk. 4, ch. 1), nevertheless possesses an obscure power that Eliot both dignifies and parodies through sustained allusions to the Ariadne myth. In addition and more particularly, Ariadne expresses Maggie Tulliver's otherwise mute impulses and suppressed motives, the same function it performs for Eliot's later heroines in conflict. This evidence of the myth's extended hold on Eliot's imagination strongly suggests that it spoke for personal as well as fictional experience. Here in her bildungsroman, myth begins to provide her with a vocabulary to express antagonism between nature and culture – to put this roughly – or between passion and idea that Eliot herself confronted and returned to time and again in her novels.

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Entre la hoguera y la sabiduría. Escritoras religiosas del mundo hispánico

Análisis ◽

10.15332/s0120-8454.2006.0070.07 ◽

2006 ◽

pp. 131

Author(s):

Betty Osorio

Keyword(s):

George Eliot ◽

George Sand ◽

Sor Juana

La literatura femenina; si entendemos por esto la escritura de mujeres,se ha caracterizado por ocultarse en muchas ocasiones tras la potestadde los hombres. Claro ejemplo de esto son las escritoras George Sandy George Eliot, que tras su seudónimo esconden su ser femenino paraparticipar del mundo literario de la época. Con Sor Juana Inés de laCruz y la Madre del Castillo tenemos, en el mundo hispano dos clarosejemplos de conciencias agudas y con una destacada inteligencia quese tenía que ocultar tras los temores de la inquisición. Sus confesoresirán a ser la clave fundamental que acalle su vivacidad de pensamientoy la manifestación de ello en su escritura. La monja jerónima empleó,para salvaguardar un poco su autonomía, algunas claves que ratificansu perspicacia e inteligencia; por su parte, la Madre del Castillo, fueacallada fácilmente por su confesor. Así, el presente artículo pretendeesbozar el problema de estas dos escritoras religiosas en un mundoque se debate entre la inquisición y la inteligencia; "entre la hogueray la sabiduría

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George Eliot’s Spot of a Native Land

Land and Literature in a Cosmopolitan Age ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198852148.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 145-178

Author(s):

Vincent P. Pecora

Keyword(s):

George Eliot ◽

Rural Life ◽

Religious Revival ◽

Life World ◽

Native Land ◽

Daniel Deronda ◽

Promised Land ◽

Adam Bede

George Eliot reimagines what it means to belong to the land. In Adam Bede, Eliot explores both the importance of attachment to a rural life-world and the religious revival of Methodism. The too-earnest preacher of Adam Bede, Hetty Sorrell, is transformed into the too-earnest Daniel Deronda of Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda. Here Eliot embraces the idea of a Promised Land for the diasporic Jews, with Daniel as a new Moses. But she also explores, in the novel’s competing plot lines, autochthonous attachments to the soil that emerge through blood continuities and long tenure on the soil. Eliot works out in parallel plots the moral deracination of Gwendolyn and the geographical deracination of Mirah. Daniel is the link between them. He has lived half his life as a spoiled, aimless English aristocrat, but then suddenly plans to live the second half as a migrating leader of his newly found people.

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