Sites of Consciousness in George Eliot's Early Novels

Abstract

In my thesis George Eliot's Natural History of Common Life I examine Eliot's working method for viewing human nature, a method which evolved out of her interests in contemporary developments in philosophy and science. Eliot's method attempts to identify a moral sense as the product of specifically human intellect and feeling. For Eliot, the development of a moral sense is the ideal end of human and individual development. However, the possibility of regress is inextricably linked to the inevitability of progress, and she imbues the landscape with this conflict at several points in her early novels.