Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
¶ … Adam Bede, George Eliot observes,
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitute a man's critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character (412).
This statement contains a number of key ideas about human values, perceptions, and knowledge. It contains the idea that we should not judge a book by its cover, but it goes further than this. It carries within it the ancient argument about where character is found, whether formed by nature or nurture, by something inherent or something learned. It suggests that we are all equally complex and formed through the same sorts of interactions with our environment and with others. It is a compressed statement of these ideas because it is structured in the following manner, carrying the reader from the idea that we make choices and take actions because of who we are while being who we are because of the choices we make, that we cannot know the true nature of another person until we know the forces that shape him or her, and by extension,...
We make choices and take actions, and this process forms our character. This would seem to be a combination of the nature vs. nurture issue, suggesting that our choices first emerge from our inner nature and that the choices we make shape our character, thus influencing our character and the future choices we make. This is a circular argument, and in a sense it suggests that there is no beginning and no end but only a constant state of acting and becoming throughout our lives. The nature vs. nurture argument was always too simplistic, suggesting that only one answer was possible, when it seems more likely that both forces operate to shape us. The two forces operate without our conscious control in any case and interact to make us who we are.
This is true of everyone, for we are all formed from these same interactions, which can take place in an infinite number of combinations over a lifetime. Generally, we only see the outward behavior…
Works Cited
Eliot, George. Adam Bede. London: ElecBook Classics, 1998.
Adam Bede, George Eliot uses some of the conventions of the Romantic novel while violating others. In the end the book asks us, as readers, to answer the fundamental question posed in so many books written within the Romantic tradition: Do the hero and heroine live happily ever after? But this is not the mindlessly vacuous posing of that question that we come across in so many works, for
George Eliot Kristeva's philosophy can be applied to nearly every narrative especially in association with the body as a universal source of human language. In every narrative there are traces of description that help the reader understand the universal stance of the body, be it a description of a facial expression or the full description of a character based upon the description of his or her appearance. Eliot makes clear through
George Eliot and Feminism Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and a great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where
From these examples there is a varied sense of the realism of Eliot in both her prose and her poems. The realism of Eliot demonstrates a reflection of the era. The naturalist and realism movements were ingrained in the Victorian 19th century and yet the descriptive nature of Eliot's works make them in many ways timeless. The characters are enveloped with the reader into the surroundings of events of human
Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight. (Eliot, XXVIII) However it is worth noting the implicit paradox expressed here in the notion of a married woman's "oppressive liberty." Dorothea Brooke marries sufficiently well
Gender and the 19th c English novel The question of gender in the nineteenth century English novel is complicated by consideration of more recent late twentieth century theorizing about gender. In particular, Judith Butler's highly influential notion of "gender performativity" suggests that gender is, in itself, nothing more than a sort of act. However this becomes an interesting angle to approach the works of creative artists, as a female novelist will