Thinking Of Me Thinking Of You—A Sympathetic Realist Reading Of George Eliot’s Middlemarch

In Victorian age, as the development of economy and society, and the popularity of novel, there are many critical realistic novelist, such as Dickens, Thackeray and so on. Those novelists depict the society in a realistic way and pitilessly criticize social system, hoping to awake people to concern social problems. As a realistic novelist, Eliot devotes herself to present the world as realistic as possible. But compared to critical realistic novelists, she gives humanistic concern in her works. Sympathy is never rarely seen in Victorian novels, however, Eliot is one of the most famous novelists who discuss sympathy profoundly and innovatively. Talking about sympathy people more inclined to consider it with morality, while Eliot refuses conventional concept of sympathy.Many critics talked about sympathy in Middlemarch in terms of emotion, cognition, morality and identification, while what the author is going to do with sympathy in Middlemarch is to emphasize sympathy’s function of abstracting and detaching the other’s emotion to help the self to share the other’s emotional experience and the sensation of the world so to surpass the limitation of one’s own limited personal perspectives. Thus with sympathy, the self not only gets the sense of belonging to a community but also improves his or her cognitive ability, which finally will help the self to find the reality and meaning of his or her existence in the world. While, Eliot’s attitude towards sympathy not only discernable in the content of her novels, but also from her way of narrating, In Middlemarch, the author by emphasizing the omniscient narrator’s revealing of characters’mental process leads the readers to sympathize the characters. Through feeling what characters feel, the reader may break their limited horizon caused by their spacial or chronological limitation, and form a kind of identification with them, which will make the experience of characters generalized. And this generalization is apt to produce a feeling of reality for readers. To Eliot, this is the real meaning of literature. This article is going to present an untraditional definition of sympathy by making a distinction between sympathy and empathy. Eliot’s concept of sympathy is not conventional, which can be proved by many aspects of Middlemarch. After a theoretical preparation, the author plans to explain the failure and success of sympathy in the two female protagonists, Dorothea and Rosamond, with the focus laid on their marriage, their relationship with persons having a same pursuit or similar experiences. Through a profound textual and theoretical exploration, there will arrive a conclusion that sympathy helps people to achieve a right recognition about self and world, and get a sense of belonging. Eliot infuses sympathy into many aspects of her works, such as the communicative incompetence between husband and wife, and the appreciation between persons with same pursuit. All of these reveal Eliot’s exploration of sympathy.