The Religious Outlook In George Eliot’s Novels

In my dissertation, I intend to combine the social and cultural context of the Victorian era with George Eliot’s personal religious development. The religious concepts in Eliot’s novel are the basic points to explore her painstaking constructed secular humanistic view of religion. The first chapter deals with the crisis of the intellectual conscience and the process of religious secularization in Victorian era. As a first-rate novelist, Eliot’s painful and courageous exploration of faith reflects the universal spiritual crisis of the Victorian intellectuals. The second chapter focuses on the religious outlook of Eliot’s works, which she made the emotional morality as the keystone of her belief. She cleared away the dogmatism barriers and had secular emotion instead. In the novels, she analyzed the conflicts of emotions and obligations, emotions and dogmatism to shed light on her emotional morality. The third chapter in-depth analysis the following two as the emotional and moral dimensions:benevolence and sympathy. Eliot regarded the two innate virtues as the highest faith. The last chapter further explains the ultimate point of Eliot’s religious views in her novels, that is, to carry forward human personage and beckon the sound of human nature. Eliot is dissatisfied at the double alienation of people in Victorian era under the industrial civilization and religious dogma. Therefore saving the lost human spirit and building the spirit of the Victorian culture is deemed as her responsibility. The embarrassing situation of religion in modern civilization would inevitably trend towards humanization and secularization. George Eliot’s sincere exploration represented the voice of the century.