George Eliot’s novels present a uniquely rich exploration of the late-Victorian struggle to absorb the impacts of Darwinism, Biblical criticism, and the “death of God” movement. Eliot’s fiction, like her life, captures a brief, momentous window of time during which a generation of intellectuals and artists rejected the theological certainties of a previous era, yet sought a worldview in which a transcendent ethic and a coherent, unified vision of man’s place in the world still defined human life. The faith Eliot and others struggled to maintain in such ideals as duty, love, honor, and sacrifice collapsed, for many, on the blood-soaked battlefields of World War I, and after that cultural cataclysm, a new and much more pessimistic set of ideas—of which the darkest, most anguished late-Victorian meditations of Hardy, Arnold, and Swinburne were only a foreshadowing—came to dominate culture and literature. During Eliot’s lifetime, however, the same search for transcendence and coherence that preoccupied her was the still-hopeful quest of many Victorian rationalists. The best of the new (progress in knowledge through scientific explanations and the possibility of defeating such ancient demons as poverty, crime, and war) was to be blended with the best of the old (the sense of wonder and mystery that stimulated art and imagination, and the robustly transcendent morality that, many believed, held society together and enabled it to progress).

Those late-Victorians who were philosophically or temperamentally pessimistic—Ruskin, Carlyle, and Hardy spring to mind—already believed this project was ultimately impossible, and that much would inevitably be lost in the sacrifice of the old religious worldview. T. H. Huxley, though opposing this group himself, aptly described their experience:

Such thinkers feared that the one-two punch of Darwinism (which seemed to eradicate the supernatural from the material universe) and the “higher” textual criticism of the Bible (which, by studying the Bible as a collection of imperfect ancient documents rather than a divinely inspired message, seemed to eliminate the supernatural from Scripture) had finished off any possibility of belief in a meaningful universe. Together these developments, along with other trends in philosophy and science, had created what was known as “the death of God” movement—a school of thought that considered rational belief in the supernatural no longer possible, but feared the moral, philosophical, and existential ramifications of sacrificing that belief.

Victorian optimists, in contrast, envisioned humanity on the threshold of a new age, ready to throw off the shackles that had made its progress slow and painful and achieve its moral, cultural, and intellectual potential. The progress of reductionist, materialist scientific analysis, not only of the physical universe but of human psychology and society, would give mankind power to realize all that was best in the human mind and spirit. The moral aspirations and obligations once fueled by Christianity would not vanish, but would be strengthened by a new, rationalist foundation. Science would prove the savior, not the destroyer, of human values, once integrated with and supported by ethics, education, and the arts. As Terry Eagleton explains:

This great rebuilding of the world shaped the literature of late-Victorian Britain. The novel, in particular, was reaching its artistic and philosophical apex just in time to capture the conflicts of the era and explore their effects on individuals and communities. George Eliot, who read the books and knew the people reshaping the consciousness of Europe, is an especially compelling chronicler of her time. As Gertrude Himmelfarb writes, “Eliot was the rare novelist who was also a genuine intellectual, whose most serious ideas found dramatic expression in her novels” (154). And Neil Roberts points out:

Eliot’s fiction thus captures a moment of transition in Anglo-American thought. Unlike such predecessors as Austen, Gaskell, Dickens, and Thackeray, Eliot fully incorporates into her fiction what A. N. Wilson describes as an impulse to “reconcile the advancements of modern thought with the religious instincts of human kind” (337). She weights her words, as Gillian Beer writes, “with the fullest concerns of the time—those concerns in which emotion and intellect are not kept apart but most completely imply each other” (140). Eliot thus anticipates the coming generation of novelists, for whom the most controversial ideas of the Victorian period had become unquestioned assumptions. Yet unlike such subsequent authors as Hardy and Forster, Eliot rejects the dark and disorienting moral universe that would become a hallmark of modernism. She continues to believe in the possibility of a coherent worldview, comprising both high ideals of morality and human potential, and a rigorous understanding of modern science and philosophy. Thus, her work is unsettling and complex in comparison with that of her predecessors, yet oddly innocent and nostalgic beside that produced only a few decades later.

Eliot is the last great novelist to hope for that elusive combination of transcendence and coherence, the possibility of which was taken for granted by the novelists who preceded her, and the impossibility of which was a fundamental assumption for those who followed her. After the “death of God,” thinkers and artists tended to divide into two groups. One prioritized coherence over transcendence, ultimately willing, however reluctantly, to sacrifice religious, ethical, and aesthetic ideals to a scientific materialism, which alone seemed to offer the certainty and consistency of a worldview grounded in scientific objectivity. The other was unwilling to accept what seemed to them a harsh, uninspiring worldview, and believed such intangibles as wonder, faith, and unselfish love were essential to the human spirit and must be retained even if they contradicted the true nature of the universe. Such thinkers feared that the loss of the emotional; aesthetic; and, most especially, moral undergirding Christianity had once given society would, at best, drain the color from human experience and, at worst, plunge society into unrestrained selfishness and immorality.

Eliot’s fiction portrays examples of both groups, and some of her most compelling (and, one suspects, most autobiographical) characters find themselves forced to choose between them, or to struggle for a coherent synthesis of both. In Middlemarch, Dorothea marries Casaubon because she longs to dedicate herself to his scholarly work, which for her embodies the pursuit of truth itself. Just as Dorothea begins to suspect the futility of Casaubon’s work, however, she comes to know Will Ladislaw, who not only criticizes Casaubon’s outdated methods, but rejects knowledge and systematization as ends in themselves. His declaration that it would be a loss to mankind if the sources of the Nile were discovered is the opposite of Casaubon’s and Lydgate’s determination to trace their own subjects to their ultimate sources. The young Dorothea initially believes that, as in the Christian worldview, truth and knowledge will lead to moral and emotional fulfillment, but she is forced to question that assumption and to face the possibility that human beings may have to choose between what is true and what is beautiful. Ladislaw’s fear that the ultimate tendency of scientific knowledge may be to rob the world of something human beings need contrasts with the confidence of Casaubon and Lydgate that advances in, and systematization of, knowledge can only improve the lot of human beings in every way—physically, morally, imaginatively, and intellectually. Dorothea, who desires a great, unifying narrative to give meaning and consistency not only to her ideas and beliefs but to her feelings and actions, is torn between instinctive sympathies for both views and dissatisfied with the limitations of both—unable to conform to the narrowness of Casaubon’s worldview, but unable (at least initially) to agree with Ladislaw that truth is inadequate to shape a complete life.

Another of Eliot’s most compelling female characters, Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, shares with Dorothea the compulsion to seek a defining purpose for her life. Like Dorothea, Maggie is torn between her strong affections and emotions, represented in different ways by Tom and by Stephen, and her intellectual and imaginative life liberated by Philip. The tragic end of the novel leaves it unclear what would have become of Maggie had her heroic death not cut short her struggle to reconcile the competing forces of her strong, passionate nature, which, like Dorothea’s and Eliot’s own, was incapable of doing, feeling, or believing anything halfheartedly.

It is this power of grappling with the competing claims of mind, heart, and conscience—claims which, after centuries of apparent harmony, had begun to seem like warring entities dividing, rather than uniting, the human psyche—that gives Eliot’s work its distinctive impact. Her unique perspective stems not simply from her grasp of the human longing for transcendence, or of the human need for coherence—both of which she shared with other writers of the period—but from her struggle to combine the two. She shared her commitment to intellectual honesty and inquiry with the boldest materialists and rationalists of the day, adopting the ideas of Lyell, Darwin, Spencer, Comte, Feuerbach, and others. Yet she shared a reverent tenderness toward religious tradition and a demanding ethic of self-sacrifice with those who most fiercely resisted them. It is this dichotomy, embodied in both her life and her fiction, which makes George Eliot the great voice of her age.

Thus, Eliot’s fiction explores the quest for transcendence—the longing for some great, ennobling purpose, which Eliot herself experienced throughout her life. Her poem “O May I Join the Choir Invisible” speaks of her desire to live with “scorn/of miserable aims that end with self,” and “thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars/and with their mild persistence urge men’s minds/to vaster issues” (5–9). Bernard Paris refers to “Eliot’s need for a sense of religious orientation in the cosmos” (11) and explains, “The great question for Eliot … was, how can man live a meaningful, morally satisfying life in an absurd universe” (12). Even when her abandonment of Christianity was complete, Eliot was drawn to systems of thought that resembled it in their comprehensiveness and their ethical dimension. As Oliver Lovesey points out, Eliot was “enticed” by “grand narratives and totalizing systems such as those of Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, Herbert Spencer and Baruch Spinoza” (239). Such characters as Dorothea in Middlemarch; Deborah in Adam Bede; and Romola, Felix Holt, and Daniel Deronda in the novels of the same names are driven to seek a larger life, to discover some transcendent truth to give meaning to their brief time on earth. They cannot accept the small, self-centered motives that satisfy their contemporaries; they cannot dismiss, as other characters do, moments of illumination that make them aware of larger claims upon their lives.

Yet Eliot’s most compelling characters are not satisfied with a sense of transcendence that avoids difficult truths. They are also driven by the need for coherence, for intellectual honesty and rigor, and for an informed and consistent understanding of reality. Dorothea can no more ignore the unwelcome fact of Casaubon’s failure as a scholar, Silas Marner can no more set aside the inconsistencies that shatter his early faith, and Felix Holt can no more align himself with the comfortable perspectives of his friends than Dorothea or Maggie can be content with the narrow lives of the women around them. Eliot’s greatest characters are profoundly affected by cognitive dissonance, as Eliot herself was. All her life, ideas had life and power for Eliot; she changed both her beliefs and her actions in response to ideas. Like Lydgate, who seeks the essence of the human body, and Casaubon, who seeks the common root of world mythologies, Eliot instinctively sought a cohesive understanding of the world and of human life.

The search for a worldview that combines transcendence and coherence is, then, the distinctive quest of Eliot’s life and fiction, and it is this that makes her the voice of an era. She was both a pioneer, distilling in her fiction the latest developments in scientific, philosophical, political, and religious thought, and the last survivor of an endangered species, defending a moral vision many were already rejecting as untenable. Much of her greatness lies in the uniquely transitional world she creates for us, in which the values and impulses of a dying age are preserved and celebrated, yet in which the fast-approaching disillusionment and disorientation of the next literary generation are foreshadowed.

Eliot’s fiction explores three avenues to the synthesis of transcendence and coherence: doubt, devotion, and duty, or the intellectual, the emotional, and the moral. First, then, Eliot captures the experience of doubt, portraying with unparalleled ability the impact on thoughtful minds of encountering new ideas. Her description of Lydgate’s intellectual passion for medical science and its awakening by his childhood reading is especially moving and evocative. In particular, however, her sympathetic, insightful portrayals of intellectual and religious crisis are characteristic of Eliot. She is not alone in treating a subject few novelists of her era could avoid, but, combining as she does the sympathy of Elizabeth Gaskell or the great Russian novelists with the hard-edged, clear-sightedness of Thomas Hardy, Eliot is the great chronicler of the struggle between sincere, even passionate religious belief and intellectual doubt that was so characteristic of her time.

Much of Eliot’s insight into this struggle stemmed from her own experience. As a young woman of exceptional intelligence and education, Eliot grappled with the great intellectual currents of her day in a way relatively few women could have done. Like her characters Dorothea and Romola, Eliot was concerned with far larger issues than those that preoccupied most young women. As a child, Eliot shared the conventional religious attitudes of her family, and as a young woman, she went a step further and embraced a fervent evangelical devotion that was more rigorous and more enthusiastic than her family’s Anglican belief and practice. A few years later, however, exposed through new acquaintances and wider reading to biblical criticism, free thought, and theological modernism, Eliot rejected her Christian upbringing with the same fervent, wholehearted enthusiasm with which she had once pursued it and, for a time, caused a mutually painful estrangement in her family by refusing to accompany her father to church (Jacobs par. 1–4). Ultimately, Eliot agreed to return to church and outwardly conform to her father’s expectations, on the clear understanding that she was not a Christian. Later in her life, she would regret the youthful zeal that had made her harsh and contemptuous in her attitude toward the religious belief of others (Jacobs 4). In such stories as Silas Marner and Adam Bede, Eliot portrays Christianity with a genuine sympathy and respect.

Yet Eliot’s rejection of Christianity and commitment to intellectual inquiry are fundamental to her life and work. Always in search of a grand truth about the universe, the young Eliot was strongly influenced by the quasi-pantheistic views of Wordsworth, by the positivist system and the “religion of humanity” of Comte, by the philosophies of Spinoza and Herbert Spencer, and by the theology of Feuerbach. As Roberts notes, “George Eliot was an intellectual in the deepest sense, in that she demanded the assent of her intellect before accepting any proposition about how to live and what to live for… (11). Eliot believed in making any sacrifices reason might demand. Oliver Lovesey notes that “a willingness to live in the presence of uncomfortable truths without recourse to opium—intellectual or otherwise—is admired everywhere in her fiction” (241). Eliot believed “those who have strength to wait and endure, are bound to accept no formula which their whole souls—their intellect as well as their emotions—do not embrace with entire reverence” (Letters 217–218). And she speaks reverently of “that patient watching of external fact, and that silence of preconceived notions, which are urged upon the mind by the problems of physical science” (qtd. in Roberts 14). The love of truth as an intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic concept unified Eliot’s thought, underlying not only the specific ideas but also the commitment to realism that characterized her fiction (Henry 79).

Thus, Eliot writes sympathetically of all whose intellectual struggles stem from a commitment to intellectual integrity. She is somewhat less gentle with those who abandon the struggle for truth, whether religious hypocrites, such as Bulstrode, or incompetent scholars, such as Casaubon. Eliot is far too gifted an observer of human beings to fall into the error of suggesting that most people are preoccupied with intellectual inquiry, or that it is somehow better to be an intellectual than to be occupied with one’s own work and community—as are Caleb Garth and Adam Bede, two of her most lovable characters. Indeed, Eliot makes it clear that such characters as Celia in Middlemarch and Pastor Irwine in Adam Bede, with their instinctive empathy, their common sense, and their acceptance of daily life, have a wisdom that eludes such characters as Dorothea. Yet Eliot’s major characters face confrontation with a threatening truth of some kind—some fact, idea, or insight that does not fit their current picture of the world. At this point, characters must respond by embracing, however painfully, an enlargement of their world, a shifting of the self out of the center of things—as, in their different ways, Daniel Deronda, Maggie, Romola, Dorothea, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, and Arthur Donnithorne do—or find a way to close their minds defensively against the new thought and draw their small, self-centered world more closely around them. Casaubon and Tito take this response to its extreme. Such characters as Lydgate and Amos Barton, in smaller, more gradual ways, accept the lessening of their lives’ potential in exchange for the comfort that comes with abandoning the costly commitment to truth. And such characters as Gwendolyn, Arthur Donnithorne, and Godfrey Cass must tread an excruciating road back from the denial of unpalatable truths. “The great division among George Eliot’s characters is between egoists and those who approach reality objectively” writes Paris (26).

Yet Eliot rejects the idea that life can be fulfilled or truth discovered through reason alone. Like her fellow Victorians Coleridge, Carlyle, and Butler, she was temperamentally incapable of satisfaction with the amoral, mechanistic universe of materialism and utilitarianism. As Roberts explains, “[I]t would be a mistake to call [Eliot] a rationalist. ‘The truth of feeling’ and ‘the mystery that lies under the processes’ are examples of the phrases that recur throughout her writing expressing the final impotence of ‘reason’ to explain the ends of life, or, still more important, to understand other people” (11). Characteristically, Eliot’s first important literary undertaking, the translation of an important work of German biblical criticism, was marred by her frustration at the author’s insensitivity to the aesthetic and emotional beauty and power of the Gospels, even though she agreed with most of his views (Henry 53–54). Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea, Eliot’s most compelling female characters, journey in their different ways from hope that the liberated intellect will discover truth, to a painful recognition of the limitations of the life of the mind. While her commitment to the rigorous pursuit of truth is absolute, Eliot always seems to be feeling her way toward a concept of “truth” much wider than the purely intellectual, one that includes the ethical, the emotional, and the aesthetic. Ironically, the truth for which Eliot seems to be searching is, essentially, the Christian one, in which belief and practice, intellectual and moral assent, are inseparable.

Human relationships—affection, empathy, emotion, and connection to other people—are the second avenue Eliot tries in her search for transcendence and coherence. For Eliot, “human relationships are by their very nature religious” (Paris 25), and, in a pattern common to many Victorian novelists, such characters as Dorothea, Maggie Tulliver, Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda, and Silas Marner find meaning and redemption through their connection to, first, one human being and then, more broadly, the human community. Some of these transformative relationships are romantic, but others, such as the love of Silas Marner for a mysterious orphan or the devotion of Daniel Deronda to his friend and mentor Mordecai, are not. Indeed, Henry notes that it was ties of birth, rather than the contractual obligation of marriage, which Eliot seems to have earliest and longest recognized as a primary source of obligation and object of sacrifice (51)—perhaps not surprisingly in view of Eliot’s devoted, though conflictual, relationships with her father and siblings and the long, lonely years in which she relied on intense friendships while drifting from one disappointing romantic attachment to another before her alliance with fellow intellectual Lewes, whom she loved but could not marry. For Eliot, human connection is indeed the great goal and good of life, but personal fulfillment in a happy romantic relationship is only one of several forms this connection can take and perhaps not the most likely to achieve its end.

Thus, Dorothea ultimately achieves happiness by marrying the man she loves, after a disastrous first attempt to marry out of idealism and self-sacrifice. But Lydgate, whose story parallels Dorothea’s, exemplifies through his marriage the opposite error—the mistaken belief that an emotionally satisfying relationship can exist without an intellectual and moral dimension. Daniel Deronda, who, like Dorothea, longs for a unifying purpose in life, finds fulfillment in his growing connection to the Jewish people long before he marries Mirah. Yet Gwendolen, the other main character in the same novel, is Eliot’s most complex and intriguing example of one who invests a human relationship with more power than it should have. Gwendolen can ultimately grow into her moral potential only by accepting that she must seek her duty apart from Daniel, and it is not entirely clear at the end of the novel that she will be able to do this.

For Eliot, even the most precious human relationships must connect to, not isolate from, the larger human community. Silas Marner must love Eppie not so he can be happy, but so he can return to the community. Adam Bede and Deborah must suffer through their compassion for others before they can relinquish their different kinds of separateness and find fulfillment, not only in marriage, but as part of their community. Maggie Tulliver, torn by conflicting loyalties to her brother; her cousin; her first love, Philip; and the love of her life, Stephen, must recognize that no happiness is possible in a single relationship that violates the network of connections and obligations surrounding each human being. Romola must find meaning after betrayal and tragedy by caring for those who need her most. And the redemptive meaning in Mrs. Barton’s sad story must come, like Maggie’s and Romola’s, from sacrificial commitment to an ideal of duty, compassion, and self-denial. For Eliot, personal relationships should be a reflection of and means to the sacrificial subordination of self to the love of one’s fellow human beings.

As Eliot warns through Theophrastus Such:

This, then, brings us to the third and most characteristic approach Eliot takes in her quest for synthesis: duty. All her life, Eliot longed for a transcendent morality to give shape and meaning to the universe. She had a special tenderness for the time in her life when she nursed her dying father, despite their difficult relationship and the sacrifice of her time and ambition (Hardy 138). Indeed, as many critics have pointed out, Eliot clings more fiercely to the Christian virtues of sacrifice, integrity, endurance, and duty as she rejects the historical, doctrinal basis of those ideals—becoming, in Alan Jacobs’ words, “ever more passionate about the moral life as her belief in anything transcendent evaporates” (par. 20). In this, too, Eliot is typical of her time; Himmelfarb writes “[the Victorians] affirmed moral principles all the more strongly as the religious basis of those principles seemed to be disintegrating … morality became … a surrogate for religion” (26). Himmelfarb goes on to describe as “the classic statement of this secular ethic” Eliot’s famous declaration that, while God was inconceivable and immortality unbelievable, duty was both peremptory and absolute (27). “To do and be good,” writes Henry, “and to sublimate self for the sake of others was a goal and motivation of her life, evident from her earliest letters to her late journal entries” (236); Henry also notes that, for Eliot, “Duty replaced God as the abstraction for which she would willingly suffer injury and subdue ambition” (Henry 51).

Eliot could not relinquish the idea that individuals have a purpose on earth greater than themselves—one they must sacrifice to fulfil. In George Cooke’s view, “[Eliot] stands out as the deepest, broadest, and most catholic illustrator of the true ethics of Christianity; the most earnest and persistent expositor of the true doctrine of the Cross, that we are born and should live to something higher than the love of happiness” (234–235). The characters with which Eliot compels us to identify most powerfully seek a great cause, a worthy sacrifice, a chance to transcend self. Dorothea, Lydgate, Maggie Tulliver, Romola, Felix Holt, Deborah, Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda—all share this sense of duty.

Dorothea learns to understand herself and, eventually, to find love and happiness, yet only after passing through an agonizing struggle to commit herself to carrying on her husband’s work—work in which she no longer believes. His death delivers her from the life of drudgery she envisions, but her self-sacrifice to this perceived duty is real and is a transformative moment for Dorothea. Similarly, Maggie Tulliver spends a night of desperate misery wrestling with the temptation to accept a happiness to which she does not feel entitled. This time, it is her own death that delivers Maggie from the prolonged sacrifice she has brought herself to face. And Adam Bede endures what is, for him, the ultimate sacrifice—the choice to forgive, to pity, to endure, and to accept, when he longs instead for action, revenge, and hope. Only through this devastating experience can Adam achieve his potential and find his purpose. Eliot rejects both heavenly reward and the example of a historically incarnate God, both the mandate of a divinely inspirited Scriptural command and the reality of a supernatural rebirth, as foundation for her passionate commitment to duty and sacrifice. Yet the Scriptural resonances that permeate Eliot’s work are never more striking than when, again and again, she takes her characters through a Gethsemane in which the ultimate sacrifice of happiness, identity, and hope is demanded of them. And nothing is more characteristic of Eliot than the strangely fruitful conflict between her rationalist rejection of any comprehensible motive or justification for this sacrifice and her celebration of it as the truest human fulfillment.

It is no small part of Eliot’s greatness that her fiction keeps alive the moral orientation that shaped Victorian literature, even as it incorporates the ideas that were undermining it. Like Austen, Gaskell, and Dickens, Eliot assumed no human being has the right to live his or her own life for personal comfort, or happiness. Indeed, this conviction undergirds and unites both her commitment to intellectual integrity and her commitment to empathy and compassion. By laboring to give a strictly secular orientation to this ethic, Eliot prepares the way for the postwar literary generation for whom, in D. H. Lawrence’s words, all the “great, dynamic words” had been cancelled (63).Yet by creating a world in which her characters confront new struggles with old values, she builds a bridge over the chasm that separates us from a generation who believed in those great, dynamic words.

Works Cited