Abstract

This work explores George Eliot's concept of the other as it manifests itself in Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. Though encouraged and initially shaped by Feuerbach, her understanding of the other developed away from some of Feuerbach's notions in the direction of an understanding more akin to those of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. Many of Eliot's most familiar and persistent concerns seem to be rooted in this understanding: her emphasis on the dangers of narcissism and egoism, her intense preoccupation with duty and responsibility. Her moral sense, which this study re-examines, is grounded in relation to the human other. ;Buber and Levinas, particularly the latter, provide a new way of looking at the texts which are the subject of this study. For example, they not only emphasize the importance of responsibility for the other, but they also point out how some relationships traditionally thought to satisfy this responsibility actually objectify the other. They help one to see the ways in which Eliot's keen psychological portraits lift into the light the hinder sides of human relations, such as the ways in which even 'selfless' sympathy for an other can be somewhat destructive. A re-evaluation of sympathy in these later Eliot works is an important piece of this study. ;The other chief contribution of this study is the way in which it demonstrates Eliot's growth beyond Feuerbach. For example, Eliot focuses increasingly in these later novels on the essential, irreducible difference between human others, and emphasizes much less the commonality of all humankind, which is one of Feuerbach's central ideas. Most crucially, she grows beyond Feuerbach's methodology which privileges objectivity at the expense of the "object" and which exults in its surety. Her criticism of this type of knowledge system, particularly in Daniel Deronda constitutes a criticism of Feuerbach