The Morality Under The "religion Of Humanity" In The Novels Of George Eliot

George Eliot is an outstanding and influential English philosophical novelist in Victorian era, when the traditional idea conflicted with the new technology and the new thought. By calling her a philosophical novelist which means not merely that certain ideas find expression in her fiction, or that her work reflects a particular philosophy, but that she use her fiction as a means of thinking about philosophical and moral issues. Influenced by Feuerbach's philosophy, Darwinian's Theory of Evolution, as well as the philosophies of Charles Hennell, Auguste Comte, Strauss and Spinoza, George Eliot gave up the conventional religion and founded her own proof as to religious morality and set up her Religious Humanity in combination with the social morality in Victorian era with the redefinition of the essence of religion and a constructive criticism of the doctrine and practice of the traditional Christianity. She thought of her novels as experiments in life and she was searching for a view of life that would give modern man a sense of purpose, dignity, and ethical direction. Her characters and plots reflect the philosophical views that she finds compelling; her narrator often directly imparts George Eliot's beliefs; philosophical issues are often matters of discussion among her characters and the novels also become a ground for developing and questioning her professed philosophical views, often in ways of which she herself may not have been fully aware. This thesis is an attempt to study George Eliot's morality quests under the Religious Humanity through the textual analysis of three of her major novels:The Mill on the Floss, Romola and Middlemarch. Her morality quests embed within certain themes in George Eliot's novels in four major areas, ranging from love, marriage, domestic to social morality concern. In the love and marriage morality, she deems that true love and marriage ought to be mutual attraction, equality, concern, respect as well as understanding and support instead the enforcing love of two persons with no appealing feeling to be immoral. In terms of domestic morality, George Eliot consent that such moral relationship exerts a great deal on the members in the deep hearts with the mysterious, authentic, delicate feeling. If the family members conform to the right moral principles, shoulder its responsibility and duty, there will be harmonious moral relationship in family. Here, George Eliot highlights that the domestic morality is of significance in family life. When it comes to the social morality, her plots rely heavily on the moral struggle between altruism and egoism, between self-interested desire and sympathy for and responsibility for others. Undoubtedly, the artistry of Eliot's works serves to embody her moral principles in a way that makes them both more vivid and more appealing than any philosophical work.