Abstract
In her first novel, Adam Bede, George Eliot’s sense of life is extended beyond the human to evoke ethical questions of the life of matter. Adam Bede reflects Eliot’s interest in scientific vitalism and her deep engagement with Spinoza’s Ethics in its exploration of the striving for existence (Spinoza’s conatus) that animates all forms of life. Its radical form of realism provides an imaginative basis for feeling the presence of the life of matter, nowhere more evident than in the force of the life of trees. Characters are repeatedly presented with interlaced and co-operative woodlands and strain towards the idea that arboreal life itself presents an ethical critique of the failure of humanism to value and protect existence.
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Notes
- 1.
Eliot’s translation renders this as “[t]he inability of man to govern and restrain his passions I call servitude”. In Deegan (1981, 153).
- 2.
In Eliot’s translation: “Prop. VII The effort by which every thing strives to persevere in existing, is nothing but the actual essence of that thing”; see Deegan (1981, 100).
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I would like to thank Isobel Armstrong, Judith Hawley, Mark Nesbitt and Rosie White for conversations that have shaped this chapter.
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Livesey, R. (2019). Arboreal Thinking: George Eliot and the Matter of Life in Adam Bede. In: Carruthers, J., Dakkak, N., Spence, R. (eds) Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930 . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29817-3_8
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