George Eliot's Middlemarch:The Crowd And Spatial Construction

George Eliot is one of the literary giants of her age,and her masterpiece Middlemarch presents a vivid picture of the provincial town in the Victorian England.This novel is valuable not only because of its profound themes,but also because of its detailed representation of the crowd and of its spatial construction of the text.Therefore,it is important for critics to pay serious attention to the issues of the crowd and of space in order to show the true strength of the novel.The “crowd” means a gathering of individuals—individuals with diverse backgrounds.There are so many crowds in the novel.What they represent is demonstrated through spatial construction of the text.With the rise and development of serious critical studies on the “crowd,” some important scholarly works have been published,making the crowd a significant concept in today's critical discourse.However,it seems that the issue of the crowd has seldom been probed into from the perspective of spatial theory.Therefore,the present thesis sets out to investigate George Eliot's treatment of the crowd in Middlemarch with the analytical framework of spatial theory,on the premise that descriptions of various crowds in the novel are closely interrelated to spatial construction of the text.Moreover,crowds are gathered always for certain purposes,such as political election,religious worship,family reunions,etc.This means that the crowds cannot be analyzed in isolation,but should be scrutinized in connection with relevant realistic problems in society.That is,the crowd writing in the novel can be viewed as a kind of historical spatial construction from the political,economic or cultural perspectives.Various crowd gatherings prove to be ways of constructing social space.Crowd gatherings are also related to the moral space of society,and they provide occasions to filter moral teachingsand discipline to the public.To conclude,viewed from the perspective of spatial theory,crowds are gathered through the working of various social cohesive forces and they in turn further strengthen such forces.Interpretation with the analytical framework of spatial construction helps to illuminate the true power of George Eliot's fiction.