The Ethical Vision of George Eliot (Video)
- [Music]
- Hello, everyone. I'm Professor Thomas Albrecht of the English Department here at Tulane University.
- I'm going to talk to you briefly about
- a recent book publication of mine entitled, The Ethical Vision of George Eliot.
- George Eliot was the pseudonym of an english writer named Mary Anne Evans,
- one of the most important novelists of the European 19th century.
- She lived from 1819 to 1880, so most of her adult life took place during what we call
- the Victorian Period. She was revered and celebrated in her time as well as in our
- own for the seven astonishing novels she wrote during the period from 1859 to 1876. The most
- well known of her novels is Middlemarch, a study in provincial life which appeared in 1872.
- George Eliot is a highly significant figure in 19th century European literature, in the
- 19th century European novel, and also in 19th century European women's writing.
- She's an important figure in the tradition of literary realism,
- and a pivotal figure in the transition from literary realism to literary modernism.
- The realism was groundbreaking in terms of its rigorous historicism,
- its panoramic social perspectives, its psychological penetration and complexity,
- its rhetorical and formal sophistication, and its compassionate humanism. Eliot is also an
- important figure in the rich creation of European philosophical fiction and in the novel of ideas.
- My book that I will talk briefly about, The Ethical Vision of George Eliot, is a study of
- some ideas about ethics that Eliot developed over the course of her career in her writings.
- My areas as a literary scholar are philosophical approaches to literature and literature and ethics.
- As you can guess, this means that I think and write about literary works in terms of how they directly
- or indirectly engage with philosophical and ethical topics. George Eliot takes up explicitly
- philosophical and ethical questions throughout her novels. And many of the questions and topics
- that she takes up correlate with the questions and topics that engage us so urgently today
- in our own time. This is just one reason among many why I'm so drawn to her writings.
- A key ethical topic Eliot repeatedly takes up is the relationship that we as human beings have
- or should have to what philosophers call "the other." "The other" means other individual persons,
- their minds that are separate from our own, and also other kinds of persons. Persons who are
- categorically different from ourselves in terms of their social or economic class, their nationality,
- their language, gender, religion, race, or age.
- In my book I show how early in her career especially,
- Eliot exhorts her readers, her characters, and herself to recognize and value a common humanity
- in other persons no matter how outwardly and circumstantially different those persons might be
- from ourselves. This attention to commonality is an urgent ethical imperative in our own time.
- For example, in the context of our divisive presidential election. A context in which so
- many of us have struggled to see any humanity at all in persons who disagree with us politically.
- My book also shows how Eliot, increasingly over the course of her career, comes to posit
- the recognition of difference or otherness. The otherness of the other from ourselves
- as an ethical imperative in its own right. And she comes to insist, increasingly, that we not
- erase that otherness, the otherness of the other, under the rubric of a common humanity.
- Rather she insists we should recognize the other's otherness from ourselves and we should respect it.
- For Eliot, respect means not presuming to know the other or to speak for the other.
- By respecting the other in this way, we not only preserve the other's otherness as an inherent value,
- but we strike a blow against egoism, the moral fallacy Eliot spends a lifetime combating
- and diagnosing in us, in her characters, and also in herself.
- The egoism we strike a blow against is our own, at least potentially.
- It is our presumption to know and to speak about the other. Our tendency, narcissistically,
- to see the other as a reflection of some element some prejudice within ourselves.
- My book shows how both these moral imperatives: the imperative to recognize a common humanity
- and the imperative to recognize and respect differences, are essential parts of Eliot's
- overall ethical vision. Over the course of her career, they mutually inform and dialectically
- develop one another, suggesting that for Eliot any genuinely ethical relationship
- to the other requires both the capacity to recognize commonalities and the capacity
- to respect differences. In her final writings Eliot concludes that genuine relationships,
- genuine connections with other persons across various differences, are indeed possible. But only
- on the hard condition of our first recognizing and respecting the differences that separate us.
- My writing and teaching about literature strive to reveal complex existential,
- psychological, and ethical insights that writers like George Eliot can give us through their
- works. Eliot herself believes that literature has a unique power to transform us morally by surprising,
- by jolting us into an unexpected awareness of both human commonalities and differences.
- I find with my students here at Tulane, that this is as true in our own time as it was in Eliot's.
- Thank you so much for listening.
- [Music]