Art Of The Control Of The Aesthetic Distance In The Mill On The Floss

George Eliot, one of the distinguished representatives of English literature in the 19th century, was also an enormously intelligent and prolific English Victorian female writer who had tried to conceal her female status with a male pseudonym. Her novels are well-known for her profound philosophic thoughts and the detailed description of her characters'psychology. Her early novel The Mill on the Floss, published in 1860, is regarded as a semi- autobiographical novel."Aesthetic distance"is one of the most influential theories in aesthetics formulated by Edward Bullongh. Modern literary critic Wayne C.Booth introduces the theory of aesthetic distance into the analysis of novels. In a novel, the writer can apply different rhetorical devices to control the reader's feelings of involvement in a work, which results in various vivid aesthetic distances in time, space, psychology and emotion between the work and the reader. Then the reader can examine and comment the characters and the circumstances objectively in a more wide view, and then a sense of aesthetics can be acquired when reading the work.The present thesis is going to analyze and study the aesthetic effect in George Eliot's masterpiece The Mill on the Floss and the author's art of controlling aesthetic distance by applying W.C.Booth's theory of aesthetic distance. George Eliot is ingenious in controlling the aesthetic distance through revelation of the characters'inside view, narrator's statements, intercommentary of the characters and profound imagery and intricate plot in her The Mill on the Floss. It helps to reflect the unique aesthetic experience in the novel to the readers. The ideal aesthetic distance controlled by George Eliot shows its immortal artistic quality to the readers. The whole thesis is divided into three chapters:Chapter One studies the control of the aesthetic distance through the revelation of the characters'inside view, mainly through the protagonist Maggie's inner view. George Eliot controls the readers'judgment and sympathy on Maggie through the description of her inner view. Chapter Two discusses the control of the aesthetic distance through the narrator's statements and the characters'intercommentary. Through the use of ironic narrative and implicit or explicit commentary, the readers can perceive the reality surrounding her through the shifting of point of view on Maggie. The author skillfully manipulated the distance between the implied author, narrator and characters ingeniously and successfully portrayed Maggie's unique character and the reality in her life. Each character is a spectator, their point of view helps to locate and illustrate the protagonist and the characters in the novel. Chapter Three deals with the control of the aesthetic distance through imagery and plot. Combining the archetypal meaning and we can try to find the novel symbol of the imagery. Readers can be involved in the novel completely to laugh and cry with the characters in the intricate plot while reading, and meanwhile they can view the novel as a work of art with more objective attitude, which enables them to have a deeper understanding of the work and at last reach a full communication with the implied author.Numerous critics have explored it from various angles and have reached different conclusions. Although the research works on the novel have involved all-round approaches, there is still void of full and systematical study on the aesthetic distance in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss in particular. This thesis is a tentative study of the different distances in this novel, to find her ways of the control of the distance change and the rhetoric devices George Eliot used to control proper and variable distances and many different effects can be achieved with the variation of aesthetic distance. George Eliot controls the aesthetic distance in the novel very properly by different the rhetoric devices. By analyzing The Mill on the Floss from the perspective of aesthetic distance, this thesis enriches the study of George Eliot and broadens the field of studying George Eliot's novels.