The Landscape of Memories and Sympathy in George Eliot’s Country Novels
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This essay examines George Eliot’s perspective towards the past in her country novels and its ideological features. Problematizing George Eliot’s nostalgic standpoint, my research argues that the writer’s perspective works together with selected memories and sympathy for what she calls the “common people” in particular. As stereotyping is inevitable to some degree in the author’s shaping of a literary landscape, this study investigates how it is deeply related to the writer’s idealistic re-evaluation of rural England. Against the decline of the peasantry in England in the early nineteenth-century, George Eliot’s appeals to collective memories projected into the rural past evoke the notion of British nationalism in the end. Although the illusion of nostalgia is foregrounded as a landscape in her novels, such as Adam Bede and Silas Marner, the politics of memory works within their settings. This means that the signification of memories and even sympathy becomes exclusive due to their selectiveness. Therefore, this research also criticizes the limitation of the “we” that George Eliot imagines specifically when its mechanism is concentrated on building the identity of British nationalism. In spite of George Eliot’s emphasis on “our” attention to the life of the “vulgar citizen,” there appear to be other neglected or insignificantly treated “people,” like the gypsies in The Mill on the Floss, who are missing from the link created by the word “tie” that George Eliot promotes in her country fictions.
Abstract
This essay examines George Eliot’s perspective towards the past in her country novels and its ideological features. Problematizing George Eliot’s nostalgic standpoint, my research argues that the writer’s perspective works together with selected memories and sympathy for what she calls the “common people” in particular. As stereotyping is inevitable to some degree in the author’s shaping of a literary landscape, this study investigates how it is deeply related to the writer’s idealistic re-evaluation of rural England. Against the decline of the peasantry in England in the early nineteenth-century, George Eliot’s appeals to collective memories projected into the rural past evoke the notion of British nationalism in the end. Although the illusion of nostalgia is foregrounded as a landscape in her novels, such as Adam Bede and Silas Marner, the politics of memory works within their settings. This means that the signification of memories and even sympathy becomes exclusive due to their selectiveness. Therefore, this research also criticizes the limitation of the “we” that George Eliot imagines specifically when its mechanism is concentrated on building the identity of British nationalism. In spite of George Eliot’s emphasis on “our” attention to the life of the “vulgar citizen,” there appear to be other neglected or insignificantly treated “people,” like the gypsies in The Mill on the Floss, who are missing from the link created by the word “tie” that George Eliot promotes in her country fictions.
참고문헌 (34)
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