Question

How does george eliot perceive her role as a historian of society?

Answer 1

George Eliot and the ‘Social Problem : Individualism, Politics and Class
in Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda and Adam Bede.
Kay Henderson
1. Introduction
Many critics studying George Eliot’s novels acknowledge her ‘commitment to realism as a literary
genre’.1 Eliot herself emphasised the mode’s centrality to her works, writing in a letter to her publisher:
‘I undertake to exhibit nothing as it should be; I only try to exhibit some things as they have been or
are’.2 Such a distinction between the ideal and actual is not as clear cut as this self-evaluation would
suggest, however. Amigani defines realism as ‘an attempt to tell and explore the truth through the
inventive power of fiction’.3 As ‘truth’ is an abstract and often subjective concept, complex personal
perceptions may colour an individual’s understanding of what constitutes realism. As a result, Eliot’s
‘faithful account of things as they have mirrored themselves in [her] mind’, while personally realistic,
may not provide a universally accurate reflection.
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Instead, a specific realism is created, centred around
Eliot’s sympathies, allowing her to mould truth to her own emotional, moral and intellectual view-point.
The resulting world-representation is almost faithful, but with an interpretive edge that causes slight
distortion. This inescapable bias is the source of the realist’s ongoing battle: the inevitable separation
of art and life. Thus, despite Eliot’s efforts to minimise that gap, her realism unavoidably becomes a
vehicle for progressing her own moral, social and political perceptions.
In light of this, the following essay aims to explore how Eliot’s realism relates to her treatment
of fictional individuals, in turn impacting on her representation of Victorian social problems. As all of
Eliot’s novels were written with retrospective temporal settings, her commitment to realism restricts her
means of suggesting any significant social progression; if the reader understands the historically
prevalent attitudes, any incorporation of Eliot’s ideals would be easily identifiable as inaccurate. Bissell
suggests that Eliot was ‘more prepared to examine the past carefully than to speculate about the
future’.