The Knowledge Of A Man's Self:Sympathy Transformed And George Eliot's Realistic Writing

As a doyenne of realism in the Victorian age,George Eliot expects to arouse the reader's sympathy through her realistic writing.Putting Eliot's understanding of sympathy in the history of human thought,this study aims to clarify Eliot's efforts for emphasizing the aesthetic implication of sympathy and its humanistic value,so as to cope with the relativity or limit when man constructing moral and epistemological experiences via sympathy.Sympathy then becomes an important psychological mechanism for people to coordinate inward and outward relationships,reconstruct inner order and achieve internal transformation,so the willed individual's inner transformation may promote a better state of social transition.The relationship between the self and society is an important topic explored in Eliot's novels,embodying the social concern and spiritual expression of her art.Along with the development of technology,the advancement of empirical science,the expansion of urbanization,and the decline of religious faith,a synergy is formed in the Victorian age and it gradually conveyed a message of determinism,which consequently and constantly compressed the space for man to fully display his individual will and subjective originality.Under this circumstance,art takes the responsibility to help man break loose from natural laws by stimulating his aesthetic nature relying on the extension of sympathy and the creativity of imagination.Man thus achieves some spiritual autonomy through knowing himself.During this process,sympathy brings man under the link of relations by emotional intercommunications and urges him to accomplish inner transformation to achieve integration with the incomprehensible other.It struggles for somewhat compatibility between external environmental determinism and human free will.Men then change from isolated individuals into the relationship-beings.Apparently,such social existence is bound to enhance the harmony of society and the cohesion of the community.Based on the above consideration,the opening section of this dissertation situates sympathy in the changing political and social contexts.After a delineation of its long evolutionary trajectory,it is not difficult to observe that interests in sympathy are always bewildered by the epistemological questions whether there is a possibility to know the other or how to construct the mental activities of an absent person.Generally speaking,before Eliot,sympathy is basically regarded as an imaginative process leading to some kind of self-evident understanding or natural identification while this dissertation argues in the first place that Eliot focuses her attention onto the way of knowing the self instead of knowing the other based on the fact that she makes a more reflective exploration of sympathy and a faithful record of the diversity,difference,and even contradiction when sympathy is operated.Sympathy is a necessary path for the subject to participate in the other's experience.As a medium of interpreting or translating emotions,sympathy allows the subject to realize the transmission of other people's emotions or the transformation of ideas based on universality and analogy of life experience,but it is impossible for him to achieve a complete reciprocal copy of the other's mind.It is for this reason that this dissertation perceives that Eliot frequently uses “transform” and its variants“transformation” or “transformative” to describe the process of reconstructing the others' experiences in one's own mind,and the course of self-transformation to generate follow-up thoughts.As the finding of this research,such transformation is precisely an exaltation of those states of mind that cannot be articulated or even comprehended.This psychological process is to transform those primitive sensory experience into sympathy,the aesthetic pleasure of sympathy into self-knowledge,and self-knowledge into the dynamic reciprocity of social meliorism,implying Eliot's unique contribution to explain the evolutionary causality from an aesthetical perspective.On the basis of Eliot's admiration toward sympathy and the ethical vision thus established in the early stages of her writing career,Eliot,in Adam Bede,promulgates the aesthetics of realism-cum-sympathy,in which sympathy as a vehicle transforms pain into sympathy,and sympathy into knowledge.This epistemological model relies upon the immediate sensation and divine imagination.This fact makes Adam Bede present the pastoral poetic scenery with the warmth of human care.The work shares characteristics of the Dutch painting stressing the detailed presentation of everyday themes and celebrating ordinary people.Novella as it is,The Lifted Veil serves as a vital turning point expressing Eliot's doubt and reflection on the reliability of sensation and feeling for fostering cognition and morality.In the third chapter,considering the introversive nature of affective and imaginative generations,Eliot realizes that sympathy of total agreement with the other will cause the loss of self,and the immediate participation in the other's experience will obliterate the rights of the other as an independent individual.Therefore,it becomes an inexhaustible theme for Eliot to explore the psychological problem of dealing with the double consciousness and the ethical proposition of treating the unknowable other as an independent entity in her realist works.Realistic writing in The Lifted Veil thus commits to presenting a psychological “reality”,at the same time,demonstrating an outlook of “cultural schizophrenia”.Since every moral choice requires the consideration of a whole that can never be quite grasped through sense,the aesthetical judgment is to provide absolutes or universals by accepting an incomprehensible other and integrating with it as a whole.In the Victorian age and as always,the unknown,the infinite,and the inexhaustible belong to the “sublime” aesthetic category.Under this circumstance,sympathy serves as a breakthrough for people yearning for self-transcendence by recovering the sovereign of the mind,expecting to demonstrate freedom for moral authority.In The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch,Eliot faithfully produces the self-shock,fear and the subsequent regulation moment when the external and internal collapse with each other.Sympathy,through raising feeling and sensation to approach the sublime level,transforms the individual into the process of self-discovery or self-renunciation,so as to explore the “realistic possibility” for social meliorism.That is the reason why realistic writing in these works presents a panoramic view of organic relations.Once it enters a broader political horizon,sympathy manifests itself as an attitude of neutrality and an action of paralysis.The fifth chapter centers on Eliot's last novel,Daniel Deronda,in which Eliot turns her vision to a broader social and political realm to reflect on the political nature of sympathy.Sympathy,now,is by no means a universal benevolence but has to legislate itself into some political community to generate a preference.It needs to evolve into a communal consensus based on the core of the national and cultural heritage.For the accomplishment of this aim,Daniel Deronda exhibits a combination of realism,epic narrative,and myth-making.The imaginative construction of the community in art will exert influence on the reader's mental experiences.The phenomenological revivification of such perceptual experience constitutes a subtle mixture between the spirit and the reality,the community and the society,which leads individuals to be aware of the transformative power of the spiritual initiative to respond to the social transitions.In short,whether it is sympathy or realist writing,it depends on some cognition of the other and the outside world.The limit of knowing not only forms the internal tension of realist writing but also causes instability for extending sympathy among human beings,so George Eliot has to adopt more openness and tolerance to invite the“non-realistic” elements into her work,then the sense of romance,mystery,and uncertainty will guide readers to form subjectivity through imaginative cognition and moral judgment,so as to demonstrate the infinite potential of art for the growth of the human mind.Naturally,these “non-realistic” phenomena also express clear and real appeals,implying the possibility of reality or the possible state of the ideal.During this process,when the epistemological function of sympathy is limited and the moral mission is relative,the aesthetic identification will be introduced in for supplementation.Such a combination may exhibit itself imperfectly,but Eliot's faithful record of this process is precisely the unique charm of her works.Moreover,sympathy makes it possible for Eliot to tolerate and respect the unknowable other,which is the very humanistic value of her realism.Therefore,in today's highly developed modern society,it is still of historic and realistic significance to study George Eliot's effort of integrating the humanistic foundation of art without sacrificing the aesthetic values of it by extending sympathies in her realistic writings.