Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

That snap of recognition is less grand and permanent in George Eliot than it is in Austen. Rosamond Vincy’s case differs from Elizabeth Bennett’s partly because Rosamond’s world contains no secure hierarchy of virtue in which to locate but presents instead a vast range of relevancies over which even the narrator’s consciousness presides sceptically, hypothetically, and constantly seeking new extensions.

Because in George Eliot’s novels institutions only exist through individual enactments and choices, institutions never take on a life of their own, as they do in Dickens, or run like juggernauts over helpless individuals. Disembodied consciousness is more to be feared than institutions in George Eliot because of the powerful solipsism that can be engendered by those private rationalizations.

George Eliot’s narrative consciousness, unlike the one in Dickens, finds no dead ends in the world of material embodiments because for her even material embodiments are half ideas: products of human effort and tradition over time, and the essential medium of what is highest and best.

George Eliot’s novels thematize this power in various ways. Many of her novelistic agendas and crucial plot moments turn on the difficulties and powers of making public the private dialogue. The act of confessing, for example, has tremendous power because in confession the private shuttle of consciousness goes public, enlarging its context and the scope of its rationalizations.

The historical narrator is so fully achieved an effect, so far from inadvertent an effect in realism that the values maintained by this narrative medium often receive explicit thematic statement. Dickens’s novels are an especially luminous example because one of his constant themes is the saving power of mutual consciousness to overcome separation.

For most of the nineteenth century and beyond, novelists writing in the English tradition have never felt any scruples about commenting, in general or in particular, about the various scenes, characters or incidents that they evoke in their fiction.

What Flaubert in the first place, and his successors subsequently, introduced as a substitute for melodrama, suspense and larger-than-life protagonists, was the equivalent in literature of what philosophers would call determinism. Every folly that Emma Bovary commits has its roots in the circumstances in which she grew up and the temperament with which nature has endowed her.

To achieve realism, Zola decided from the start to dispense with all improbability and to maintain his hold over the reader not by surprising or intriguing him, but by drawing him into the fiction by giving him the impression of a flat, undramatized truthfulness.