Abstract
This chapter calls into question the still widely held view that her novels promote a particular moral agenda and indulge in ‘preaching’ and argues that such views are untenable. Critical scrutiny of Middlemarch in particular strongly suggests there is no commitment to any moral system and that she anticipates Bernard Williams’s moral philosophy with its emphasis on ‘the ethical’ rather than on morality as a set of principles or a system. Also Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the relation between ethics and undecidability is useful in providing insight into the ethical aspect of Eliot’s fiction. The critical emphasis in the chapter is on detailed readings of certain scenes, especially involving choices and dilemmas.
An earlier version of this chapter was published in Essays in Criticism: ‘George Eliot and the Ethical’, 63:3 (2013), 298–316.
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Notes
- 1.
‘She regards her novels as means to the extension of our sympathies. But they also show why sympathy is an unsuitable foundation for morality’ (Irwin 2016, 289–90).
- 2.
See Thomas Pinney , ‘More Leaves from George Eliot’s Notebook’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 29 (1965–66), 365.
Bibliography
Carol Christ, ‘Aggression and Providential Death in George Liot’s Fiction’, Novel 9 (1975–1976): 130–140.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, eds. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999).
Graham Handley, Middlemarch (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985).
T. H. Irwin, ‘Sympathy and the Basis of Morality’, in A Companion to George Eliot, eds. Amanda Anderson and Harry S. Shaw (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).
Andrew Latus, ‘Moral Luck’, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
George Levine, ‘Introduction: George Eliot and the Art of Realism’, in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. George Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–19.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
Jack Reynolds, ‘Jacques Derrida’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Daniel R. Schwarz, The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989).
Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
———, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
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Newton, K.M. (2018). Eliot and the Reinterpretation of the Ethical. In: George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_4
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