Spirit Becomes Matter: The Brontes, George Eliot, Nietzsche (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture EUP)
Henry Staten
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0748694587
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book explains how, under the influence of the new 'mental materialism' that held sway in mid-Victorian scientific and medical thought, the Brontës and George Eliot in their greatest novels broached a radical new form of novelistic moral psychology. This was one no longer bound by the idealizing presuppositions of traditional Christian moral ideology, and, as Henry Staten argues, is closely related to Nietzsche's physiological theory of will to power (itself directly influenced by Herbert Spencer). On this reading, Staten suggests, the Brontës and George Eliot participate, with Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche, in the beginnings of the modernist turn toward a strictly naturalistic moral psychology, one that is 'non-moral' or 'post-moral'.
depicted with a meticulously naturalistic eye – although in a way that frequently fails to tally with the moral discourse of the narrator that accompanies this depiction.50 Will to Power and the Social Outside In the 1980s an influential group of critics, including John Kucich, Deirdre David, Catherine Gallagher and Daniel Cottom, firmly established the view that had earlier been floated by Terry Eagleton, and earlier yet by Raymond Williams, that Eliot’s work elides the social and political in
has indeed retracted it; at most, however, there are a few ambiguous shreds of possible evidence tending in this direction.11 But if Jane does not believe in eternal life, she has no religious reason to either moderate her love for Rochester, or to forgive. There are other reasons, prudential, emotional or ethico-political, for doing either or both of these things; but when such reasons are in play the value of forgiving, or of moderating one’s loves, can no longer be deduced from doctrinal
include something like, but more complex than, repression. Rosamond: Dorothea’s Erotic Double Eliot’s astonishingly subtle depiction of the awakening of Dorothea’s erotic consciousness involves a dialectical interaction between Dorothea and Rosamond in the course of which Rosamond’s erotic consciousness is revealed as the truth of Dorothea’s, and is then ‘reflected back’ Subincision of the Ethical Subject (Middlemarch) 85 into Dorothea as the core around which it will ultimately come to
isomorphism with her own relation to him (‘And then she could not help remembering that he had passed some time with her under like circumstances’). Her perception of the impropriety of her relation to Will thus passes through an identification with Rosamond. It appears to be a purely formal social impropriety that she censures, the impropriety of Will’s ‘passing his time with Mrs Lydgate in her husband’s absence’; yet Dorothea’s reaction is too quick and powerful to be the result of such a
criticise it for its limitations, but to show how far it is pushed in a certain critical function by the writers on whom I comment. The Inward Turn of the Instincts and Ascetic Will to Power Crimsworth exemplifies the Victorian split moral consciousness at work: acutely realistic and even cynical in its understanding of the struggle for dominance that drives society, and yet subjecting this demystified perception to the morality of Christian goodness, or, as in Spencer’s notion that evolution’s