Essential Elements Of Happy Life: Impact Of Sympathy And Prudence On Individual Happiness In George Eliot's The Mill On The Floss

As one of the most famous novelists in the Victorian era,George Eliot shows a constant concern over morality.With the development of capitalism and Industrial Revolution,people faced a serious crisis of the absence of morality.Living in such a spirit wavering age,Eliot presented moral problems and explored this issue in her works, and she was trying to indicate a way towards happiness.Recently,domestic study of Eliot mainly concentrates on her "religion of humanity",equating her morality with religion,and thus lacking the systematical study about her moral views.And The Mill on the Floss,the semi-autobiography of George Eliot,also her best early work and masterpiece,stands as the initiative stage of its author's moral development,awaiting our careful study and exploration.With the critic approach of close-reading and test-analysis,this thesis states that for George Eliot, sympathy and prudence are two essential elements of happiness.Besides the introduction and conclusion,the whole thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter One focuses on sympathy,which is the key point in George Eliot's moral views.The virtue sympathy continuously gains critics' attention because of Eliot's repeated emphasis.It is in fact impossible to explore Eliot's moral views without the definition and analysis of sympathy.In Chapter Two,the virtue prudence is emphasized.With the expansion of capitalism,prudence is highly praised.Prudence runs through the whole novel,but compared to its significance,it is rarely referred to in the existing studies.Chapter Three is devoted to morality.Based on social circumstances of the Victorian age,contemporary social conventions and moral codes are indicated.George Eliot's moral ideas and views about happiness embodied in The Mill on the Floss are summed up and distinguished from the contemporary social conventions of that time.