GEORGE ELIOT AND THE FETISH OF REALISM

This paper tends to explore Eliot’s realism in the world of literature, more specifically her novel “Mill on the Floss.” The novels of George Eliot may be named as the first that are adequately representative of native British realism fully matured but not yet modified by French naturalism and later European influences. In opposition to romance, in preference for domestic realism, in the exaltation of the humble and the commonplace, George Eliot is completely typical of her day; and in technique she has unusual significance. And with only small exceptions, her works, especially The Mill on the Floss can be seen as adequately representative of the meaning of experience. Like all of her works, it is thoroughly coherent and gains its coherence from a unified vision. There were elements in experience, that is, which she was never fully able to assimilate and which, as was true of most of the major Victorian writers, she was genuinely unable to see. But to think that the vision, here as elsewhere, is incomplete is a serious miscalculation. In fact it is thoroughly imbued in realism. And the variety of meanings this realism encompasses, from the moral and psychological to the historical and socio-economical, makes Eliotʹs literary portraiture richer than that of any earlier novelist in English.