'The Natural History of German Life': Truthfulness and Sympathy in George Eliot's Aesthetics

Abstract

Before becoming a writer, George Eliot was an intellectual; as A.S. Byatt defines her, Eliot was ‘the great novelist of ideas.’1 As a matter of fact, Eliot devoted the years she spent in Germany to writing essays and reviews that will have a distinct echo in her novels, notably in Adam Bede, her debut novel. An essay in particular, 'The Natural History of German Life', seems crucial for the future development of Eliot’s narrative. In this essay, Eliot values Ruskin’s notion of realism and of faithfulness to reality criticising the misrepresentation of the working class, which has long been depicted idyllically by artists who ‘look[ed] for [their] subjects into literature instead of life.’2 This misleading artistic approach, according to Eliot, has damaging consequences on people’s perception of reality and their ability to sympathise,

[...] our social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.3

For Eliot, the main purpose of art is ‘the extension of our sympathies’ to art’s objects. Thus, the misrepresentation of the working class in art is ‘a grave evil’, since it would direct people’s sympathy towards a false object, preventing them from thoroughly understanding labourers’ hard conditions of life and, thus, from sympathising with them. The aim of my thesis is to analyse how Eliot’s ideas and essays have influenced her narrative production and are embodied in her novels.

1 Byatt, A. S., Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings. London: Chatto and Windus, 1991, p. 66. 2 Byatt, A. S. & Warren, N. (1990) George Eliot. Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, p. 144. 3 ibid.