Psychological realism in the Mil on the floss

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Adam Bede
George Eliot
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 Literature Notes
 Adam Bede
 George Eliot Biography
 Book Summary
 Character List
 Summary and Analysis
 Book I: Chapter 1
 Book I: Chapter 2
 Book I: Chapter 3
 Book I: Chapter 4
 Book I: Chapter 5
 Book I: Chapters 6-9
 Book I: Chapter 10
 Book I: Chapter 11
 Book I: Chapters 12-13
 Book I: Chapters 14-15
 Book I: Chapter 16
 Book II: Chapter 17
 Book II: Chapter 18
 Book II: Chapter 19
 Book II: Chapter 20
 Book II: Chapter 21
 Book III: Chapters 22-26
 Book IV: Chapters 27-28
 Book IV: Chapter 29
 Book IV: Chapters 30-31
 Book IV: Chapter 32
 Book IV: Chapters 33-34
 Book IV: Chapter 35
 Book V: Chapters 36-37
 Book V: Chapter 38
 Book V: Chapters 39-40
 Book V: Chapters 41-42
 Book V: Chapter 43
 Book V: Chapter 44
 Book V: Chapter 45
 Book V: Chapters 46-47
 Book V: Chapter 48
 Book VI: Chapters 49-50
 Book VI: Chapters 51-52
 Book VI: Chapter 53
 Book VI: Chapters 54-55
 Book VI: Epilogue
 Character Analysis
 Adam Bede
 Hetty Sorrel
 Arthur Donnithorne
 Dinah Morris
 Mr. Irwine
 Mrs. Poyser
 George Eliot Biography
 Critical Essays
 The Dear Reader Technique in  Adam Bede
 Characterization in  Adam Bede
 Local Color and Comic Relief in  Adam Bede
 The Symbolic World of  Adam Bede
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George Eliot Biography

Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans was born in Warwickshire in 1819, the youngest child of
Robert and Christina Evans. She was deeply religious during her childhood and
adolescence, a trait she developed partially from her family background and partially
under the influence of Miss Lewis, the "principal governess" of a boarding school
which Mary Ann attended from 1828 to 1832.

After her mother died and her sister married, Mary Ann ran her father's household.
But in 1841, her brother Isaac married and took possession of the house, and Mary
Ann and her father moved to Coventry. In the city the young woman's intellectual
horizons widened and her early faith diminished; under the influence of Charles Bray
and Charles Hennell, she became interested in the "new criticism" of the Bible and
anonymously published her first work, a translation of D. F. Strauss' Leben
Jesu (Life of Jesus), in 1846. She also published a few articles and reviews in a
periodical edited by Bray during this period.

Mary Ann cared for her invalid father, who strenuously objected to her changed
religious views, until he died in 1849. After traveling in Europe for a time, she
returned to England, where she became involved with a group of rationalists, best
known of whom was John Chapman. In 1851, she became assistant editor of
Chapman's Westminster Review. While in London, she met many prominent people,
among them the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Through Spencer she came in
contact with George Henry Lewes, a drama critic and author who was separated
from his wife, and the pair fell in love. Lewes could not obtain a divorce, and he and
Mary Ann decided to ignore the prohibitions of society and live together as man and
wife. The union was a marriage in every aspect but the legal one and lasted until
Lewes' death in 1878. Two years later, Mary Ann married J. W. Cross, and she
herself died on December 22, 1880.

Mary Ann Evans did not begin writing fiction until relatively late in life. Her first pieces
were three short stories, "Amos Barton," "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," and "Janet's
Repentance," which were published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857 and reissued
collectively as Scenes of Clerical Life in 1858. They appeared under the pseudonym
George Eliot, a penname which Evans used throughout the rest of her career. In
1859, Adam Bede, Eliot's first full-length novel, came out, and her reputation was
established. The Mill on the Floss, an autobiographical novel, and Silas Marner both
appeared in 1860. Romola, a historical novel set in Renaissance Florence, was
published three years later and Felix Holt, the Radical in 1866. Middlemarch, widely
considered to be Eliot's masterpiece, came out in 1871-72, and Daniel Deronda in
1876.

Eliot's work represents a definite break with the work of her immediate predecessors
in several ways. In Adam Bede, she issued her declaration from convention and
announced her intention to write realistically. "So I am content to tell my simple story,
without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed,
but falsity." We, looking back towards Eliot, may be inclined to dispute her claim; her
work may not seem realistic when compared with more modern efforts. But we must
not lose sight of the fact that a number of the most admirable qualities in modern
fiction derive, either directly or indirectly, from Eliot; her work was revolutionary in its
own day and opened new directions for the development of the novel as an art form.

Eliot's writings are more realistic than those of her famous contemporaries in that
she habitually presents characters which are not simplistic caricatures of human
beings but complex, ambiguous, ultimately indefinable figures like those we meet on
the street every day. They are analyzed at great length in the novels, and this
psychological approach, in which the subtleties of motivation are laid bare, enables
Eliot to present human situations as they really occur; both the mental and physical
aspects of action are reproduced. She also attempted, perhaps with imperfect
success, to break the stranglehold which popular morality had on the novel by
showing that the good or bad fortune which comes to her characters is not the work
of some unseen divine hand whose laws have been either followed or violated, but is
the result of human will-choices. And finally she made the novel a more serious art
form than it had hitherto been by using it as a vehicle for the discussion of significant
moral and philosophical issues.

All of these qualities are observable in Adam Bede; indeed, as Eliot's first novel, it is
her first experiment in the new fiction. Its revolutionary aspect is generally
recognized; many scholars point to 1859, the year in which Adam
Bede, Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Darwin's On the Origin of
Species, and Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities were published, as one of the major
turning points in the breakdown of mid-Victorian certainties. Adam Bede is a test
 case for a new view of the function of prose fiction; Eliot clearly feels that the novel
need not be merely a form of entertainment for those seeking diversion from the
problems of real life, but that it could, like poetry, be a vehicle for the expression and
teaching of fine and serious ideas about the quality of the human condition. Samuel
Chew, in A Literary History of England, noted that Eliot's work concentrates on the
elucidation of moral issues and concluded: "If these issues are no longer felt to be
vital, . . . the raison d'etre of the stories . . . is enfeebled, if, indeed, it does not vanish
altogether."

It is difficult to see how the issue of man's responsibility towards himself and his
fellows can cease to be vital, and the resurgence of interest in Eliot in our own day
indicates how improbable it is that the relevance of her ideas and the value of the
books in which she expressed them will "vanish altogether" in the foreseeable future.

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