Discuss George Eliot as a modern novelist.

Q 6: 

Discuss George Eliot as a modern novelist.

 Answer: 

George Eliot has a distinction of being regarded as the first modern novelist in the real sense of the word. She introduced a conception of novel which is still a continuing effect on the current pattern of novel writing. The main reason of her fame is that she is first modern novelist in English. The first period of the English novel begins with Fielding and ends with Trollope. The second period is of 

Henry James and

Meredith.

Third period started with

George Eliot and is hardly over today. Though, she was not are evolutionary genius like Emily Bronte, yet her mode of writing and her personal temperament were cautious and scholarly. Her books do have a shadow of his predecessors as she learnt a lot from them. Although, her mode of writing was very much like Victorian yet there are some important differences as well. Though, she does not break the old tradition which she inherited, yet she altered its fundamental characteristics. She used the old formulas but used them for a new purpose. Her creative impulse gave her a new inspiration. Even

George Eliot has used some of the literary ingredients as used by earlier Victorian novelists but she gives them totally different value. For instance, the theme of 

“Middlemarch” involves a description of the social life as elaborate as that of 

Trollope, but this description is not her chief interest in writing the story. The farm life in “Adam Bede” is there to provide an occasion for telling the story. The significant feature that makes

George Eliot 

a modern novelist is the separate scene and characters. The things which have primary importance for the Victorian novelists have secondary importance for Eliot.

George Eliot’s novels do not consist of a number of characters with haphazard plot imposed on them in order to keep them together. The plot did not arise from the characters, except in the case of “Vanity Fair”.

George Eliot 

started the idea of characters and situations. She did not intend to follow the standardized formula. Hence, she developed something which was quite different from the accepted Victorian notion of a plot. There was no marriage, no happy ending and no characters according to the Victorian conception of hero and heroine.

“The Mill on the Floss” 

ends badly and has no hero at all. In

“Middlemarch” 

there is no central figure of any kind and main interest is divided between four separate groups of characters and none of them approaches the

conventional heroic type. Moreover, as the action of the story arises logically from the characters, those strokes of fortunate, coincidences, sudden inheritance, long last wills which the main material are in ordinary Victorian plot, are totally absent. The great novels of earlier period had mainly been written for the entertainment of middle classes. Their subject matter was limited. But for

George Eliot the novel was medium for the discussion of serious problems. Eliot is a distant landmark in the history of the English novel. She does not regard novel as entertainment. In her hands novel becomes a fit vehicle for the highest art as well as profound criticism of life. She regards individuals more important than society. The society must come forward to add to the happiness of the individual. It must not bring hurdles in the path of individual aspirations. In short, we see that from every point of view

George Eliot can be regarded as the first real modern novelist in English literature. Her plots, her social technique, her psychological insights and her own special flavour of liberated personality makes her true representative of modern version of novel

SUBSCRIBE MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL PLEASE SUPPORT

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtFhM11xavb7BecaFHfkwMw

COPY LINK NEW URL PASTE AND SUBSCRIBE MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL