The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner

 Reseña de un libro en el que tengo un capitulillo:

Jansson, Siv. (U of London). Rev. of The Mill on the floss and Silas Marner: New Casebooks, dir. Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder.  The George Eliot Review 34 (2003): 60-61.*

         https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1441&context=ger

         2024

 

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The Chains of Semiosis ... and the Female Stereotypes in 'The Mill on the Floss'

 

Edición en red de un libro con un capítulo (fragmentario) mío:

José Angel García Landa. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Selection. In The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. Ed. Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder. (New Casebooks). Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002. 73-82.* Amazon Online Reader:

         http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/033372805X/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link

         2008

    

Está aquí en red mi capítulo en la web de Springer:

         https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bfm:978-0-230-21296-1%2F1.pdf

         2020

 

Pero el artículo entero original, que escribí en Providence (RI), aquí:

José Angel García Landa. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Sterotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Papers on Language and Literature 27.1 (Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991): 32-50.*

https://www.siue.edu/pll/

2020

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." iPaper at Academia.edu 19 July 2010.*

         https://www.academia.edu/267223/

         2014

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Online PDF at Social Science Research Network 21 July 2010.*

         http://ssrn.com/abstract=1645219

         2010-07-19

         English and Commonwealth Literature eJournal 21 Jul. 2010.*

         http://www.ssrn.com/link/English-Commonwealth-Lit.html

         2013

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Online PDF at Zaguán 8 Oct. 2011.*

         http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/6550

         2011

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." ResearchGate 3 May 2013.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228174273

         2013

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Humanities Commons 29 April 2018.*

         http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6PZ81

         https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:18929/

         2018

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Semantic Scholar.*

         https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Chains-of-Semiosis%3A-Semiotics%2C-Marxism%2C-and-the-Landa/cfbe35364c8befbca105f17476991fbf9b3cba13

         2019

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Featured CORE upload!

Aquí:

http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6PZ81

 

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The Chains of Semiosis

This paper puts forward a theory of literary writing as a practice of ideological transformation. The example analyzed is the representation of the sexes in George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss, a representation which is intertextually mediated, metafictional, and transformative, rather than merely "realistic" or spontaneous. This view of writing as a practice of material production in the intertextual field is theorized on the basis of V. N. Voloshinov's (or M. M. Bakhtin's) materialist linguistics, and of Peirce's semiotics. The methodological kinship between these researchers is asserted (as it was ignored in the 1980s, when this paper was written).

 The Chains of Semiosis: 

Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss

http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6PZ81

Author(s):

José Angel García Landa (see profile)

Date:

1991

Group(s):

Narrative theory and Narratology

Subject(s):

George Eliot, Victorian novel, Semiotics, Intertextuality, Women's studies

Item Type:

Article

Tag(s):

Representations of women, Stereotypes

Permanent URL:

Abstract:

Notes:

Written in 1989.

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Sterotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Papers on Language and Literature 27.1 (Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991): 32-50.* http://www.siue.edu/PLL/

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." iPaper at Academia.edu 19 July 2010.*

         https://www.academia.edu/267223/

         2014

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Online PDF at Social Science Research Network 21 July 2010.*

         http://ssrn.com/abstract=1645219

         2010-07-19

         English and Commonwealth Literature eJournal 21 Jul. 2010.*

         http://www.ssrn.com/link/English-Commonwealth-Lit.html

         2013

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Online PDF at Zaguán 8 Oct. 2011.*

         http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/6550

         2011

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." ResearchGate 3 May 2013.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228174273

         2013
_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Humanities Commons 29 April 2018.*
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6PZ81
    https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:18929/
    2018

_____. "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss." Selection. In The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. Ed. Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder. (New Casebooks). Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002. 73-82.* Amazon Online Reader:

         http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/033372805X/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link

         2008

         Introduction by Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder at Palgrave.com

         http://www.palgrave.com/pdfs/033372805X.pdf

         2014

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'Middlemarch' by George Eliot (BBC drama) ~ Episode 1. Miss Brooke

Rebecca Mead on "Middlemarch"

George Eliot (Jo McDonagh)

Cita en Japón

Según la web de citas de Google, me citan en Japón:


 

         Yoshimura, Eri. (Kobe College).

     ヴィクトリア朝理想の女性像へのジョージ・エリオットの挑戦--『フロス河の水車場』のマギーの場合 (特集 ジェンダー平等への課題)  [George Eliot's resistance to the Victorians' ideal woman: Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss — in Japanese]. 含 英語文要旨 [Women's Studies Forum, Kobe College] 25 (March 2011): 147-62.*

 

 

http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110008792026/

2017

Hay un pdf aquí: http://doi.org/10.18878/00002418

Lo que citan es una versión reducida de esto que apareció en un libro de Palgrave Macmillan:

"The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss."  Social Science Research Network 21 Jul. 2010.*

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1645219

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Reading with Hindsight

Cita Simon Dentith, en este libro, NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE THEN AND NOW: READING WITH HINDSIGHT, mi artículo sobre George Eliot y Voloshinov. En el capítulo "The Mill on the Floss and the Social Space of Hindsight."

The Chains of Semiosis

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Citas de mi artículo de 1988

Hace más de 25 años escribí un artículo sobre The Mill on the Floss de George Eliot, y veo a través de Google Scholar que lleva adelante su mediocre carrerilla de artículo académico; además de aquí, lo citan otros cuatro autores, tres si consideramos que Kathleen Blake lo cita dos veces.

Blake, Kathleen. "Between Economies in the Mill on the Floss: Loans Versus Gifts, or, Auditing Mr. Tulliver's Accounts." Victorian Literature and Culture 33.1 (2005): 219-237.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=291735&fileId=S1060150305000811

         2014

Blake, Kathleen. Pleasures of Benthamism: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.* Preview at Google Books:

         http://books.google.es/books?id=mTeT0_vD6SwC

         2014

Sandler, Sergeiy. "The Kierkegaardian Sources of Bakhtin's Philosophical Motivation." Fourteenth International Bakhtin Conference 2011 (U of Bologna,  4-8 July 2011).

         http://www.bakhtinconference2011.it/Def_Prog.pdf#page=72

         2014

Wen, Pi-ch'un. (Department of Applied Foreign Languages, Nanya Institute of Technology). "Challenges, Struggle, Compromise: A Sociological Reading of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss." South Asian Journal 25 (2005). Taoyuan Tech Institutional Repository (2011).

         http://ir.lib.tiit.edu.tw/handle/987654321/125

         2014

Teniendo en cuenta que la mayoría de los artículos académicos (la mayoría de los míos desde luego) nunca llega a citarlos nadie, muchas veces ni a leerlos... no lleva éste mala carrera. 

También apareció como un capítulo en esta colección de artículos sobre George Eliot:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/033372805X/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link

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Middlemarch

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, a novel by George Eliot, published 1871-2.

The scene is laid in the provincial town of Middlemarch, Loamshire, during the years of the agitation immediately preceding the first Reform Bill [1832]. It has a multiple plot, with several interlocking sets of characters. Dorothea Brooke, an ardent, intelligent, idealistic young woman, under the negligent though affordable care of her eccentric uncle, marries the elderly pedant Mr Casaubon, despite the doubts of her sister Celia, her neighbour and suitor Sir James Chettam (who later marries Celia), and Mrs Cadwallader, the rector's outspoken wife. The marriage proves intensely unhappy; Dorothea realizes during a disastrous honeymoon in Rome that Casaubon's scholarly plan to write a great work, a 'Key to all Mythologies', are doomed, as are her own aspirations to share and aid her husband's intellectual life, and her respect for him gradually turns to pity. She is sustained by the friendship of Casaubon's young cousin Will Ladislaw, a lively, light-hearted, goodnatured young man, detested by Casaubon, who begins to suspect that Dorothea's feelings for Ladislaw are questionable; his irritation is increased by the fact that he fears he has acted justly but not generously by his impoverished kinsman. Shortly before he dies,with characteristic meanness, he adds a codicil to his will by which Dorothea forfeits her fortune if she marries Ladislaw.

Meanwhile other threads have been added to the remarkably broad canvas of the novel. We follow the fortunes of Fred and Rosamund Vincy, son and daughter of the mayor of Middlemarch; the extrovert Fred, unsuitably destined to be a clergyman, is in love with his childhood sweetheart Mary Garth, a practical, shrewd young woman, daughter of Caleb Garth, a land agent. Mary, who at the opening of the novel is nursing her disagreeable and aged realtive Mr Featherstone, will not pledge herself to Fred unless he abandons his father's plan for him to enter the Church , and proves himself stable and self-sufficient. Rosamund, the town's beauty, sets herself to capture the ambitious, idealistic, and well-connected doctor Tertius Lydgate; she succeeds, and their marriage, wrecked by her selfishness, insensitivity, and materialism, proves as unhappy as the Casaubons'. Lydgate finds himself heavily in debt, and and against his better judgement borrows money from Mr Bulstrode, the mayor's brother-in-law, a religious hypocrite; Lydgate's career is ruined when he finds himself in a scandal concerning the death of Raffles, an unwelcome visitor from Bulstrode's shady past. Only Dorothea, now widowed, maintains faith in him, but she is severly shocked to find Ladislaw and Rosamund together in what seem to be compromising circumstances. Rosamund finally rises above self-interest to reveal that Ladislaw has remained faithful to the memory of Dorothea, though with no prospect of any happy outcome. Dorothea and Ladislow at last confess their love to one another; she renounces Casaubon's fortune and marries him. Fred, partly sobered by the spectacle of Lydgate's decline, and encouraged by Caleb Garth to enter his own prfoession, marries Mary, Lydgate is condemned to a successful and fashionable practice and dies at 50, his ambitions frustrated.

Through the histories of these characters, George Eliot analyses and comments upon the social and political upheavals of the period, contrasting the stauch Tory attitudes of Chettam and the Cadwalladers with the growing demand for Reform, somewhat unsatisfactorily espoused by Mr Brooke, more satisfactorily by Ladislaw, awho in the last chapter becomes 'an ardent public man' and a member of Parliament, with Dorothea's support. The importance of marital loyalty is also widely illustrated, not least in Mrs Bulstrode's support of her husband in his disgrace.

George Eliot's reputation reached its height with Middlemarch, despite some complaints that the action was slow or the tone didactic; H. James found faults in its organization, but concluded, 'It sets a limit . . . to the development of the old-fashioned English novel' (1874). Its status as one of the greatest works of English fiction was confirmed by Leavis (The Great Tradition, 1948), despite his doubts about the indulgent portrayal of Dorothea.


_____


Middlemarch: Online at Project Gutenberg

_____

And a TV adaptation by the BBC:

Middlemarch. Dir Anthony Page, Screenplay by Andrew Davies, based on George Eliot's novel. Cast: Rufus Sewell, Jonathan Firth, Juliet Aubrey, Robert Hardy, Peter Jeffrey, Caroline Harker. Prod, Louis Marks, BBC, 1994. Online at YouTube (LadyLewly):
    http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL27D3BC341FBEE65E&feature=plcp
    2012 DISCONTINUED


Episode 1 (restricted access) here: https://search.alexanderstreet.com/preview/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C3562505
 

Middlemarch (In Our Time):

 

George Eliot bibliography

 

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George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans, born in 1819 in Warwickshire, a keen student, gave herself a varied education, frequented the centres of advanced thought, translated the Leben Jesu of Strauss (1846), the Essence of Christianity of Feuerbach (1854); contributed to the Westminster Review, knew Spencer, and Lewes whose life she shared and who encouraged her to write works of imagination. She published, under the name of George Eliot, novels: Scenes of Clerical Life (in Blackwood's Magazine, 1857; in a volume, 1858), which had a great success; Adam Bede, 1859; The Mill on the Floss, 1860; Silas Marner, 1861; Romola, 1863; Felix Holt the Radical, 1866; Middlemarch, 1871-2; Daniel Deronda, 1876; poems: The Spanish Gypsy, 1868; The Legend of Jubal, etc., 1874; essays, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879, etc. After the death of Lewes (1878), she married J. W. Cross, and died the same year, 1880. Her correspondence was utilized by her husband for her biography (Life and Letters, 1885), Works, Warwick ed., 1901-3. See study by M. Blind, 1883; Cooke, 1883; C. Thomson, 1901; L. Stephen, (English Men of Letters), 1902; Olcott, 1911; Gardner (Inner Life of George Eliot), 1912; Deakin (Early Life of George Eliot), 1913; M. L. Cazamian (Le Roman et les Idées en Angleterre), 1923; S. Pfeiffer, George Eliots Beziehungen zu Deutschland, 1925; E. S. Haldane, George Eliot and Her Times, 1927; A. Paterson, George Eliot's Family Life and Letters, 1928.

_______

George Eliot: A Scandalous Life. A BBC documentary (2002).





George Eliot (Mary Ann, later Marian, Evans) (1819-80), the youngest surviving child of Robert Evans, agent for an estate in Warwickshire. In her girlhood she was particularly close to her brother Isaac, from whom she was later estranged. At school she became a convert to evangelicalism; she was freed from this by the influence of Charles Bray, a freethinking Coventry manufacturer (a development which temporarily alienated her father), but remained strongly influenced by religious concepts of love and duty; her works contain many affectionate portraits of Dissenters and clergymen. She pursued her education rigorously, reading widely, and devoted herself to completing a translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus, which appeared without her name in 1846. In 1850 she met J. Chapman, and became a contributor to the Westminster Review; she moved to 142 Strand, London, in 1851, as a paying guest in the Chapmans' home, where her emotional attachment to him proved an embarrassment. She became assistant editor to the Westminster Review in 1851, and in the same year met Spencer, for whom she also developed strong feelings, which were not reciprocated, though the two remained friends. In 1854 she published a translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity; she endorsed his view that religious belief is an imaginative necessity for man and a projection of his interest in his own species, a heterodoxy of which the readers of her novels only gradually became aware. At about the same time she joined G. H. Lewes in a union without legal form (he was already married) that lasted until his death; they travelled to the Continent that year and set up house together on their return. He was to be a constant support throughout her working life and their relationship, although its irregularity caused her much anxiety, was gradually accepted by their friends. 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton', the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857, followed by 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story'  and 'Janet's Repentance'; these at once attracted praise for their domestic realism, pathos, and humour, and speculation about the identity of 'George Eliot', who was widely supposed to be a clergyman or possibly a clergyman's wife. She began Adam Bede (1859) in 1858; it was received with great enthusiasm and at once established her as a leading novelist. The Mill on the Floss appeared in 1860 and Silas Marner in 1861. In 1860 she visited Florence, where she conceived the idea of Romola, and returned to do further research in 1861; it was published in the Cornhill in 1862-3. John Blackwood, son of William Blackwood, was unable to meet her terms; by this time she was earning a considerable income from her work. Felix Holt, the Radical appeared in 1866. She travelled in Spain in 1867, and her dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy (conceived on an earlier visit to Italy, and inspired by Tintoretto) appeared in 1868. Middlemarch was published in instalments in 1871-2 and Daniel Deronda, her last great novel, in the sameway in 1874-6. She was now at the height of her fame, and widely recognized as the greatest living English novelist, admired by readers as diverse as Turgenev, H. James and Queen Victoria. In 1878 Lewes died. Her Impressions of Theophrastus Such appeared in 1879, and in 1880 she married the 40-year-old John Walter Cross, whom she had met in Rome in 1869 and who had become her financial adviser. The marriage distressed many of her friends, but brought the reconciliation of af a congratulatory note from her brother Isaac, who had not communicated with her since 1857. She died seven months later.

After her death her reputation declined somewhat, and L. Stephen indicated much of the growing reaction in an obituary notice (1881) which praised the 'charm' and autobiographical elements of the earlier works, but found the later novels painful and excessively reflective. V. Woolf defended her in an essay (1919) which declared Middlemarch to be 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people', but critics like David Cecil and Oliver Elton continued to emphasize the division between her creative powers and supposedly damaging intellect. In the late 1940s a new generation of critics, led by Leavis (The Great Tradition, 1948), introduced a new respect for and understanding of her mature works; Leavis praises her 'traditional moral sensibility', her 'luminous intelligence', and concludes that she 'is not as transcendently great as Tolstoy, but she is great, and great in the same way'.

As well as the novels for which she is remembered, she wrote various poems, including 'O may I join the choir invisible' (1867), 'Agatha' (1869), Brother and Sister (1869), a sonnet sequence recalling her happy childhood, 'The Legend of Jubal' (1870), and 'Armgart' (1871), also the short stories 'The Lifted Veil' (1859) and 'Brother Jacob' (1864). Her letters and journals were edited by Cross (3 vols., 1885); her complete letters were edited by G. S. Haight (9 vols., 1954-78), who also wrote a life (1968). A Writer's Notebook 1854-1879 and Uncollected Writings were edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth (1981). See also George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton (1996).





George Eliot

By Louis Cazamian, from A History of English Literature (1937):

George Eliot is a writer whose fame is menaced. She is a victim of the discredit which opinion to-day throws upon her generation, and which will pass with time. Graver, however, are the reasons for disfavour which concern her personality. The upholders of tradition have never forgiven her bold ventures in philosophic thought, nor excused that act in her life which, though it agreed with the ethics of the heart, jarred with the principles admitted by custom. Critical spirits, or lovers of pure art, are not without resenting either the moderation of her thought, or the weightiness which her intellectuallity often gives her prose. Some have always looked upon her with mistrust, while many would be tempted to think that she was too prudent in her opinions. Even among her admirers, there are few who do not find in her work a faint suspicion of heaviness. In the study of her novels, therefore, one must keep oneself immune from a prejudiced hostility which, undoubtedly, is unjust, and at the same time not be influenced by the intemperate zeal which might be aroused by the feeling that one was pleading a cause.

It is perhaps best to divide her work in two parts. There is no question of leaving the first entirely aside, altough very probably much of it must be given up. George Eliot had of necessity to pay for the crisis which brought about her emancipation, which raised her from the status of a young country girl to be the equal of the most scholarly minds of the time, and transformed the daughter of Puritan parents into a pupil of Spencer and Comte. Her independence, won after a long and strenuous struggle, was to leave its mark upon her for life. It gave her a taste for discussion, awakened the desire in her to explain her own conduct, or that of the beings she created, in the most explicit and logical manner; it inspired her with the familiar love and respect of formulated principles. All the intellectuality and fondness for reasoning which seemed to be part and parcel of her very being, deprived or tended to deprive her of a certain happy spontaneity, afforded her less scope for the play of instinct, and made purely artistic creation less natural to her, while rendering more natural the painstaking efforts of artificial labour. Since her vocation was to write, and to be a novelist, she did much during the first thirty years of her life to direct what was to be her gift of invention towards lucid and dry forms of expression.

Although her imaginative resources were thus impoverished, she gained in other respects. There is always a strengthening virtue in the conquest of one's own personality. The moral nobility of her inner development with its honesty of purpose, its courageous determination, not only lent a deeper spiritual quality to her thought, but imparted to all that she wrote a fragance of ardent sincerity which compensates for many failings of her aesthetic judgment.

Thus it can be said that her realism was conscious and systematic; all the gifts of her intellectual culture contributed to it, while in it the influence of science,which she had thoroughly imbibed, is everywhere manifest. She had made a study of history as of exegesis; she was acquainted with the psychology of the Utilitarians, and had accepted the doctrine of evolution as soon as it was first explained. As an inevitable result of the mental discipline of her youth, she felt the need of precision and objectivity, and dwelt upon the idea that any object of study, no matter what it be, has its own infinite value. The construction of her novels, the substance of her analyses, and much of her imagery, recall this scientific schooling of her thought. But realism to her is much more than a mere method, or even an intellectual necessity; it is an emotion and a creed, and this she has explained with perfect clearness. All the modest virtues and vices of humble folks, hover mediocre or ill-favoured they may be, become attractively interesting to her, and the source of this interest is love. Her words ring with the supreme appeal of a common brotherhood and common sufferings, and whatever stress she may lay on the solidarity between men which nature enforces and which intelligence comes to recognize, her ethical beliefs spring from that spontaneous gift of the heart: sympathy.

It is no easy task, therefore, to divide what is fresh and natural in her work from what remains dry and lifeless, or rather to distinguish between the causes which give rise to these conflicting elements. Besides, they are often combined. The most barren wastes in her prose are not without some oases, just as the vistas of refreshing green are broken by flat stretches of stony dreariness. But, upon the whole, a great number of her arguments, of her intentions, and most of the expressions which these naturally called forth, are more directly related, no doubt, to dialectics than to poetry, in the sense in which every artist is a poet. The bare framework of her ideas is often too much in evidence; not infrequently, the situations and characters allow the reader a glimpse of the inner architecture which backs and supports them; and her style, through many a page, through whole chapters and episodes, has the indefinable quality that suggests a lesson in psychology, ethics, or history.

The value of the philosophy imparted in the deliberate teaching of George Eliot's novels, and the literary intentions which she enunciates most openly, have and will retain their particular merit, even if we prefer to find in other parts of her work its most precious assets iand its most vital interest. In Adam Bede she expounds the doctrine granting each of us the initiative which works out our moral and religious destiny; The Mill on the Floss is devoted to a study of the collaboration of character with circumstances in the fulfilment of fate: Silas Marner treats of all the hidden forces which shape man's personality through the contact of his fellows; the subject of Felix Holt is the prominent part played by the education of the individual in any matter dealing with social reform, etc. Such are the main themes of the novels; but there are others which form, so to speak, the background, and which are really of deeper significance as well as more substantial; the interdependence of all human beings; the intricate workings of consequence which propagate the influence of a given act, for good or for evil, beyond our visible horizon, in ever-widening circles; and more esspecially, the pathetic quality of the most common human emotions.

All this, undoubtedly, has its value. But this doctrine is not transmuted completely enough into the silent preconceptions of creative imagination itself; it is not sufficiently dissolved into the plastic elements of her art; it remains a doctrine, asserting and expressing itself as such. And it is just in these avowed assertions that the weakness of George Eliot's work is to be found. Similarly, the laboured exertions of her will have added no supreme achievement to her fictions. The scholarly historical setting of Romola may be estimable, but it leaves us cold; Daniel Deronda is a strong but unsuccessful attempt, because it is almost entirely artificial. Even in the most vigorous and spontaneous among her novels, there are passages, and features, which explain these partial failures.

The other part of her work bears the stamp of true imagination. It is no less rich in persuasive ideas, for it breathes the communicative ardour of fraternal sympathy, the keen and kindly perception of the inner life of souls, and a powerful sense of that hard-won heroic virtue, to the height of which we all have, some time or other, to rise. All the doctrine of George Eliot is here, implied in the very facts of her stories. But at the same time it allows of artistic creation, and even expresses itself through it. The touching Scenes of Clerical Life, almost the whole of Adam Bede, much of Silas Marner, the main part of The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, belong to this order of spontaneous and concrete invention. It is more than enough to guarantee the fame of a great writer.

For in works such as these there is a livening and animating force at the base of the writer's art. From her experience of life, from her knowledge of self, or from an intuitive revelation, she draws the material for an imaginary world, which has in it the essence of reality. And this world is ample enough to allow for all possible contrasts, and call forth smiling amusement as well as loving compassion; it can even arouse a feeling of angry irony. The humour of George Eliot is not the least of her qualities; it is a salutary and pleasing element, which introduces an invigorating freshness into her prose. More often of a tender, playful, even delicate nature, it grows satirical at times, and acquires then a sharp edge which contradicts, as in the portrait of the Dodsons (The Mill on the Floss) the general lesson of symphathy; but none among her readers will object to this. The study of Mrs. Poyser in Adam Bede is an unalloyed source of joy; in Silas Marner there are lively scenes of rural realism.

The world in which the imagination of George Eliot finds itself at greatest ease is that of the provinces, the home of her early years; and, no doubt, her creative faculty is not to the same degree dramatic; she is essentially a revealer of self. But the beings she creates represent, as it were, imaginary aspects or developments of her ego, and acquire the quality of truth by reason of this vital bond. Some are women, such as Dinah Morris (Adam Bede) and Dorothea (Middlemarch), some are men, as Amos Barton, Silas Marner, and Philip Wakem (The Mill on the Floss), but it is plain that they take after the authoress herself, and that her personality passes into them all.

Once, however, she has taken herself as the direct object of study, and created her masterpiece in Maggie Tulliver (The Mill on the Floss). The first two hundred pages of this novel are, probably, the most nearly perfect she has written; for the faithful evocation of scenic detail as well as of manners, and the astonishing acccuracy of the psychology, are the outcome of an immediate and infallible impulse, translating into words the ever-present wisdom of the past.

From Scenes of Clerical Life to Middlemarch, George Eliot is an incomparable painter of the lower circles of English provincial life, and of a whole order of souls who, simple as social values go, are nevertheless spirtually complex, torn by scruples, and by the anguish of moral conflicts. In this sphere, her art derives its value from its truth as much as from the emotional interest it creates, and indissolubly from both.

No doubt she was aware of this, or, at the end, she recognized it. Her intellectual zeal, and already cautious and open to all human feelings during the years of her ardent youth, grew still more tempred, gentle, modest, and tender in the course of her life. She preserved the religion of truth without retaining its dogmatism. The philosophy of The Mill on the Floss left ample scope to what is inexplicable, to the hazards which cannot be avoided by every upright and sincere thinker. In Middlemarch, the psychology tends more clearly towards an intuitive idea of mind and consciousness. Her most powerful novel, even if it is not the most inspired or the most harmoniously constructed, is the last in which the activity of her courageous, ever-moving mind has been expressed in terms of scenes and figures familiar to herself, and thus endowed with artistic reality.




To be consulted: E. Bouvier, La Bataille réaliste, 1914; Brunetière, Le Roman naturaliste, 1884; Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiii, Chaps. IX, X, XII; M. L. Cazamian, Roman et Idées en Angleterre, 1923; J. W. Cross, Life and Letters of George Eliot, 1885; W. L. Cross, The Development of the English Novel, 1899; David Sauvageot, Le Réalisme et le Naturalisme dans la littérature et l'art, 1890; Elton, Survey of English Literature, 1830-80, 1920; R. Las Vergnas, W. M. Thackeray, etc., 1932; Phelps, Advance of the English Novel, 1919; Philips, Dickens, Reade, Collins, Sensation Novelists, 1919; F. T. Russell, Satire in the Victorian Novel, 1920; Sadleir, Excursions in Victorian Bibliography, 1922; Saintsbury, Trollope Revisited, 1920; Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era, 1910.


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From The Oxford Companion to English Literature:

Adam Bede, a novel by George Eliot, published 1859.

The plot was suggested by a story told to George Eliot by her Methodist aunt Elizabeth Evans of a confession of child-murder made to her by a girl in prison. The action takes place at the close of the eighteenth cent. Hetty Sorrel, pretty, vain, and self-centred, is the niece of the genial farmer Martin Poyser of Hall Farm. She is loved by Adam Bede, the village carpenter, a young man of dignity and character, but is deluded by the attentions of the young squire, Arthur Donnithorne, and is seduced by him, in spite of Adam's efforts to save her. Arthur breaks off relations with her, and Hetty, broken-hearted, agrees to marry Adam. But before the marriage she discovers she is pregnant, flies from home to seek Arthur, fails to find him, is arrested and convicted of infanticide, and saved from the gallows at the last moment, her sentence commuted to transportation through Arthur's intervention. In prison she is comforted by her cousin Dinah Morris, a Methodist preacher, whose strong, serious, and calm nature is contrasted with hers throughout the novel. In the last chapters, Adam discovers that Dinah loves him; his brother Seth, who had long and hopelessly loved Dinah, resigns her to him, with a fine unselfishness.

The novel was immediately acclaimed for its realism, for its picturesque portrayal of rural life, and for its humour; Mrs Poyser was greeted as a comic creation on the level of Dickens's Sam Weller and Mrs Gamp. Some critics objected on its insistence on the 'startling horrors of rustic reality' (Saturday Review) and its 'obstetric' details. H. James in 1866 found Hetty Sorrel 'the most successful' of George Eliot's female figures.


The Mill on the Floss, a novel by George Eliot, published 1860.

Tom and Maggie, the principal characters, are the children of the honest but ignorant and obstinate Mr Tulliver, the miller of Dorlcote Mill on the Floss. Tom is a prosaic youth, narrow of imagination and intellect, animated by conscious rectitude and a disposition to control others. Maggie in contrast is highly strung, intelligent, emotional, and, as a child, rebellious. From this conflict of temperaments, and from Maggie's frustrated sense of purpose, spring much of her unhappiness and the ultimate tragedy. Her deep love of her brother is thwarted by his lack of understanding, and she turns to Philip Wakem, the deformed son of a neighbouring lawyer, for intellectual and emotional companionship. Unfortunately lawyer Wakem is the object of Mr Tulliver's suspicion and dislike, which develop into hatred when Tulliver is made bankrupt as a result of litigation in which Wakem is on the other side. Tom, loyal to his father, discovers the secret friendship of Maggie and Philip, and forbids their meetings: Maggie reluctantly complies. After Mr Tulliver's death, accelerated by a scene of violence in which he thrashes the lawyer, Maggie leaves the mill for a vist at St Ogg's to her cousin Lucy Deane, who is to marry the handsome and agreeable Stephen Guest. Stephen, though loyal in intention to Lucy, is attracted by Maggie, and she by him. A boating expedition on the river leads, partly by Stephen's design, partly by accident, to Maggie's being irremediably compromised; Stephen implores her to marry him, but she refuses. Her brother turns her out of the house, and the society of St Ogg's ostracizes her. She and her mother take refuge with the loyal friend of her childhood, the packman Bob Jakins. Only Lucy, Philip, and the clergyman Dr Kenn show sympathy. The situation seems without issue, but in the last chapter a flood descends upon the town, and Maggie, whose first thought is her brother's safety, courageously  rescues him from the mill. There is a moment of recognition and reconciliation before the boat overturns, and both, locked in a final embrace, are drowned.

The portrayal of childhood, of rural life, and the subsidiary characters of Mrs Tulliver's sisters, the strong-minded Mrs Glegg and the melancholy Mrs Pullett, with their respective spouses, delighted most critics, though the book was felt to lack the charm of Adam Bede; Maggie's lapse into passion, the character of the lightweight Stephen, and the arbitrary tragedy of the denouement enraged others. It remains, however, one of the most widely read of her works.




Romola, a novel by George Eliot, published 1863.

The background of the novel is Florence at the end of the 15th century, the troubled period, following the expulsion of the Medici, of the expedition of Charles VIII, distracted counsels in the city, the excitement caused by the preaching of Savonarola, and acute division between the popular party and the support of the Medici. The various historical figures, including Charles VIII, Machiavelli, and Savonarola himself, are drawn with great care, as well as the whole picturesque complexion of the city, through the novel is generally held to be overloaded with detail, and has never been one of her most admired. The story is that of the purification by trials of the noble-natured Romola, devoted daughter of an old blind scholar. Into their lives comes a clever, adaptable young Greek, Tito Melema, whose self-indulgence develops into utter perfidy. He robs, and abandons in imprisonment, the benefactor of his childhood, Baldassare. He cruelly goes through a mock marriage ceremony with the innocent little contadina Tessa. After marrying Romola he wounds her deepest feelings by betraying her father's solemn trust. He plays a double game in the political intrigues of the day. Nemesis pursues and at last overtakes him in the person of old Baldassare, who escapes from imprisonment crazed with sorrow and suffering. Romola, with her love for her husband turned to contempt, and her trust in Savonarola destroyed by his falling away from his high prophetic mission, is left in isolation, from which she is rescued by the discovery of her duty in self-sacrifice. The novel was illustrated by Leighton, much to George Eliot's satisfaction.










Middlemarch

The Chains of Semiosis: Marxism, Semiotics, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss

The Chains of Semiosis

Otro artículo más subo hoy a la red, en el protracted hanging de mis Obras Completas. El de hoy lo publiqué hace veinte años en una revista de Illinois, y me lo pidieron para reimpresión en un volumen de Palgrave Macmillan sobre George Eliot.  Ahora va a la web, por donde no había pasado aún, y eso que se inventó a la vez que él más o menos.

Se titula "The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss"—y sus palabras clave podrían ser George Eliot, estereotipos femeninos, intertextualidad, semiótica, Bajtín, Voloshinov, Charles S. Peirce, materialismo cultural... etc.  Aquí está en Academia, y aquí en el Social Science Research Network.   Donde pronto la incluyen en el English and Commonwealth Literature eJournal, fecha 21 Jul. 2010. (Aquí en Zaguán).

Recomiendo además la lectura de la obra de George Eliot que analizo allí, The Mill on the Floss, excelente novelón victoriano.

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Observo por cierto que en Academia se han "bloguificado", y que ahora aparecen en primera página, al menos para tus contactos tus cambios de status o "qué estás haciendo ahora"—como en Facebook— y que los artículos han pasado a ordenarse inversamente, el más reciente primero (una sugerencia que les hice ya hace tiempo y que me dijeron que iban a aplicar).

Lejeune-do diarios

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