Abstract
Though it has been claimed that Eliot anticipates the ‘psychological turn’ in the novel as a form, she is still widely viewed as remaining confined within Victorian conventions. Henry James, however, misses the point when he claims that Eliot neglects the opportunity for a properly psychological approach by refusing to restrict her focus to one dominating consciousness. Though still able to explore individual psychology in depth, in her later novels especially the main interest is rather in psychological interactions. She also anticipates one of Freud’s central ideas: the relation between narcissism and the unconscious. In focusing on narcissism, the unconscious and interaction between different minds and consciousnesses, Eliot is in advance not merely of Victorian but of much modern fiction.
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- 1.
See Cairns Craig, Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal Chaos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 158–80.
- 2.
For a detailed discussion of the barrister’s letter, Eliot’s response to it, and the legal issues raised by it, see K. M. Newton , ‘Another “Spoiling Hand” at Work on Middlemarch’ , in Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature: A Tribute to John Sutherland, ed. William Baker (Madison-Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015), 153–60.
- 3.
See Ricarda Huch, Blütezeit der Romantik (Leipzig, 1905), 22 (‘Sie hätte ihn beflügeln sollen und zog ihn, in der Meinung, sein Wohl zu befördern, mit starkem Gewicht zur Erde.’). For a more detailed discussion, see K. M. Newton , ‘Historical Prototypes in Middlemarch’, English Studies, 56 (1975), 403–8.
- 4.
The implied concept of language in Laing and Pinter is one in which there is a discontinuity between the semantic and semiotic. This has certain parallels with the linguistic theory of Emile Benveniste and the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur:
…Benveniste defines semiotics and semantics against one another… In semiotics, the sign constitutes the smallest unit of the code. In semantics, the sentence or utterance fulfils this role… The semantic unit, the utterance [for Ricoeur], is thus rendered irreducible to the internal relations of the semiotic code … it is only within the instance of discourse that language has a reference, and what is more, a reference to the speaking subject… ‘Speaking is the act by which the speaker overcomes the closure of the universe of signs, in the intention of saying something to someone; speaking is the act by which language moves beyond itself as sign toward its reference and toward what it encounters.’ Sophie Vlacos , Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 46–8.
- 5.
It may be relevant that James’s brother, William , in his book The Principles of Psychology (1890) discusses associationism and has sympathy with some of its aspects but remains critical of it, and though he described himself as a ‘radical empiricist’ his form of it is significantly different from that of the Lewes-Eliot circle. For example, James tried to align it with spiritualism.
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Newton, K.M. (2018). Eliot as Psychological Novelist. In: George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_5
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