Date of Award

2025

Degree Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

English, PhD

Program

School of Arts and Humanities

Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair

Eric Bulson

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

Lori Anne Ferrell

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

Marc Redfield

Terms of Use & License Information

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Rights Information

© 2025 Beth Ann Jones

Keywords

Daniel Deronda, Eliot, George, Silas Marner, Sublime, Sympathy, The Lifted Veil

Subject Categories

English Language and Literature

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to explore the promise and the peril of George Eliot’s sympathetic sublime in her fictional writing. To arrive at this designation for Eliot’s literary project, the dissertation synthesizes three distinct yet interconnected strands within Eliot scholarship: her emphasis on building absorbing sympathetic relationships between individuals, communities, and readers; her use of inheritance plots to develop the personalities and destinies of her protagonists; and her dependence upon the sublime aesthetic inherent in the poetry of William Wordsworth and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and Ludwig Feuerbach. Eliot’s drive to create sympathetic connections which rise above the limits of class, region, and time resembles Wordsworth's drive to create individual connections with Nature which rise above the limits of industrialized society. Wordsworth’s and Eliot’s writing thus appears similarly possessed by the power of the sublime, although their modes of expression differ in substantial ways. Wordsworth’s natural sublime is centered on the transcendence of the lone individual, while Eliot’s sympathetic sublime moves in the opposite direction, submerging the individual into the larger community, thereby transcending social isolation. This submersion frequently begins with the adoption of an abandoned and disinherited child, and ends with the formerly alienated protagonist’s sublime identification with human society through the agency of that child. To provide a critical lens for Eliot’s development of the sympathetic sublime, this dissertation begins with an introductory survey of eighteenth-century writers on the sublime including Kant, Burke, and Feuerbach. Kant connects the sublime aesthetic to a humanist approach to religion, an approach similar to Ludwig Feuerbach a century later in The Essence of Christianity, who views humanity as the possessor of all the divine qualities usually projected onto God or the gods by traditional religion. Both Kant and Feuerbach view the individual human subject as transcendent, able to rise above the limitations of human nature by embracing kinship with the divine. For Eliot, as for Kant and Feuerbach, this sublime kinship is fundamentally ethical: those who are elevated through their sublime experiences form the moral foundation which grounds their communities. For a character to attain the other-centered sympathy that is the apex of the sublime for Eliot, that character must identify profoundly with the suffering of another. In regard to the pairing of a sympathetic subject with a suffering character in need of rescue, Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a dominant influence on Eliot’s depiction of the sympathetic sublime. According to Burke, the experience of sympathizing with another’s pain ultimately leads to an overwhelming sense of pleasure, which Burke terms “delight.” This ability to derive enjoyment from another’s suffering or even death, experiencing it metaphorically as one’s own while remaining one step removed from it, calls into question Eliot’s portrayal of the sympathetic sublime as inherently ethical. Hence, this dissertation is simultaneously focused on the promise of morally transcendent community offered by Eliot’s sympathetic sublime and on the peril of delighting in human suffering on which this promise is problematically founded. After the introductory chapter, the second chapter of the dissertation analyzes Eliot’s journey as Mary Ann Evans, the daughter of a Reformed evangelical father, to the scholar Marian Evans, translator of German higher criticism, including Feuerbach, to George Eliot, the novelist of the sympathetic sublime. Within this survey of Eliot’s multifaceted writing career, the analysis of The Lifted Veil explores Eliot’s initial hopes and fears surrounding her use of the sublime to generate a captivating sympathetic connection between characters and audience in her novels. The remaining chapters on Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda examine Eliot’s sublime experiment through two inheritance narratives which advance the development of protagonists who are socially isolated, and who transcend that isolation through an absorbing sublime connection with a human community. This dissertation contributes to Eliot scholarship by demonstrating her experimentation with the sublime in her novels, leading to her use of sublime sympathy in two of her inheritance plots. Through protagonists such as Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda, this dissertation explains in detail how Eliot used the sublime to connect her characters and her audience to individuals and communities outside themselves, creating an absorbing sympathy which transcends boundaries of class, region, and time. Simultaneously, this dissertation demonstrates the limitations Eliot confronted in employing the sympathetic sublime, particularly the persistent need for the sacrifice of the Other, especially the ambitions, inheritance, and even the lives of female characters. Along with the necessity of feminine suffering, Eliot’s sublime inheritance narratives also reveal the inescapability of other Victorian cultural limitations she faced, including the antisemitism laid bare in Daniel Deronda.

ISBN

9798265476142

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