Summary:
The pages of background information I read were pages 528-538. The background information mostly consisted of letters George Eliot wrote to people such as Dr. Clifford Allbutt, John Blackwood, and her author friend Harriet Beecher Stowe. There were also various collections from her personal writings and journals. One of these concerns the meaning of the word 'form' in regards to art and poetry; another is about how to judge an author's worth; the third is simply titled "Story Telling" and are Eliot's ideas about how a story needs to be told.
Analysis:
The last two pieces I mentioned, "Judgements on Authors" and "Story Telling", were the most interesting to me to read. I thought they were interesting because they were ideas directly from Eliot's mind on issues that pertain to literature and writing, which were obviously her areas of expertise. She wrote that in deciding an author's worth, "It requires considerable knowledge of what he has himself done, as well as of what others had done before him, or what they were doing contemporaneously; it requires deliberate reflection as to the degree in which our own prejudices may hinder us from appreciating the intellectual or moral bearing of what on a first view offends us" (537). I thought this comment was interesting given what we've been talking about in class about how some of the novels of the Victorian period offended readers. For example, we discussed how a lot of the public didn't like
Mary Barton or Charles Dickens' works because they dealt with themes and ideas that readers didn't want to face (i.e. poverty, prostitution, and violence). Many novels, including these, couldn't be fully appreciated in their time because the public had too many prejudices to recognize the novels' good points. According to Eliot's view, readers have to put that aside in order to decide which authors and novels are great. In "Story Telling" it was interesting how Eliot states that stories are more interesting that do not just start at the beginning and end at the end; instead, she talks about how (for example) introducing a stranger into the plot and then slowly revealing his backstory to the reader is much more exciting. I thought that was funny since that is essentially what she is doing with Lydgate. He is a newcomer to the town of Middlemarch, and it takes awhile for the narrator to say something along the lines of, 'If you want to know a little bit about Lydgate's past, listen up!' Eliot asks, "Why should a story not be told in the most irregular fashion that an author's idiosyncrasy may prompt, provided that he gives us what we can enjoy?" (538). This remark clearly stems from Eliot's preferred way of telling a story since the telling of her story is completely different and innovative for its time. She weaves so skillfully between all of the characters' lives, and (even though it can be a little confusing at times) it keeps me interested about what kind of characters I'm going to encounter next.
I also looked at the piece about "Judgment's About Authors" and found much of it very interesting. I think that Eliot stands out, not only in her work but also as her role of the author. It seems to me that she viewed life a little differently than maybe say, Dickens or Gaskell. Gaskell dealt very closely with class status, ranking, society and economy in the deliverance of her novel, and I feel that Eliot is doing the same thing, but in a very subtle manner. She is very wordy and explains most of her ideas to an extreme extent but I think that this is her way of not just telling a story but delivering a message or idea.
ReplyDeleteI like that you added the comment about how telling a story can sometimes be more interesting if you add a stranger out of no where and slowly introduce them through their backstory because Eliot CLEARLY does this with many of her characters (Lydagate or Will Lowick for example). She is definitely very clever in her work, her art. She is brilliant in many ways and thoroughly thought out every piece of her novel. Middlemarch is a difficult book to read but after seeing, reading and doing these blogs I am beginning to piece together why her writing is more difficult to comprehend. Much like Gaskell, there is an underlying purpose for all of it, but it is up to us as her readers to discover what those reasons may be!
I really like the quote you chose in regards to Eliot's life.
ReplyDelete"It requires considerable knowledge of what he has himself done, as well as of what others had done before him, or what they were doing contemporaneously; it requires deliberate reflection as to the degree in which our own prejudices may hinder us from appreciating the intellectual or moral bearing of what on a first view offends us."
When you consider that Eliot herself writes under a pseudonym, in essence divorcing herself from her accomplishments away from the pen, it's somewhat impossible to really judge her based on her own merits. Of course, the details of her personal life are common knowledge today, but I wonder if they were to her peers, too. Her affair with a married man, spanning 2 decades, for example.
Obviously, these things don't affect the quality of her writing or even the ideas in them, but I still think it's kinda interesting to think about. I probably wouldn't have given that quote a second thought without you pointing it out, so I'm glad for that!
The quotation from your blog that really struck me is this one: "Why should a story not be told in the most irregular fashion that an author's idiosyncrasy may prompt, provided that he gives us what we can enjoy?" (538). It's so modern! I think we're much more open to experimentation in form and style now than Victorian readers were. If the story is good, then why not? It makes me think of Elliot Perlman's "Seven Types of Ambiguity," which is a story told from the viewpoint of seven different--and unreliable in their own ways--narrators. Or "Time's Arrow." We're so much less put off my experimentation that it's good to have a reminder from time to time that what Eliot was doing was pretty progressive for the times.
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