Saving The Alienated:A Study Of Consumer Culture And Ethics In George Eliot's Middlemarch

With the progress of industrialization and commercialization,19th-century Britain entered the stage of “consumer society”.Meanwhile,Victorian Britain was in the period of transformation of conflict and change,in the society where wealth and status are supreme with moral degeneration people have to face the crisis of faith.Highly sensitive to the social changes of the times,George Eliot,as a realistic writer,began to describe the Victorian middle class as influenced by embryonic forms of consumerism.She presents us a broad picture of consumer culture in Middlemarch,and portrays several alienated consumer images,such as Rosamond and Bulstrode.Based on her most influential novel Middlemarch,this thesis attempts to demonstrate how George Eliot describes the embryonic forms of consumer culture as it emerges in the 19th-century middle class and the alienated consumer images within it,then further to peep out Eliot's response to them and her view of consumption ethics to cure the alienated and overcome the detrimental consumerism.That is to step out of the ethical dilemma of consumption alienation,one should consume virtuously and establish the ethics of duty and sympathy under the guidance of religion of humanity.The whole thesis centers on the alienation of several main characters as affected by consumerism and Eliot's response to it as well as her view of consumer ethics to resist the corrosion of consumerism and to cure the alienated consumers.The thesis includes three parts: an introduction,the main body and the conclusion.Introduction is a brief overview of George Eliot's literary status and her achievements as well as scholars' research findings about Eliot's works in China and abroad and thus to indicate the research methodology and significance of this thesis.The main body of this thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter one mainly deals with the consumer culture in Victorian Age on the whole.To be specific,this chapter demonstrates that the 19th-century Britain society has already been a consumer society before it got the name in the twentieth century.And the analysis of Baudrillard's theory of Consumerism is conducive to our understanding of the specific characteristics of consumer culture and consumer society.Meanwhile the auction scene in Middlemarch just is one of the concrete embodiments of consumer culture at that time.Chapter two centers on examining several representative alienated characters exemplified in the novel: Rosamond,Lydgate,Bulstrode and Casaubon,who all are alienated in the context of consumerism to some degree in the novel.Through an analysis of their irrational and alienated behaviors it can be assumed that Eliot holds a critical attitude towards the detrimental consumerism.Chapter three focuses on the theme of Religion of Humanity embodied by Dorothea and the Garth family as George Eliot's response to the estranging universe,thus trying to reveal Eliot's view of consumption ethics and her moral obligation to resist consumerism and cure the alienated consumers.In Eliot's view,the power of renunciation,duty and sympathy under the guidance of religion of humanity are correctives to the bourgeois moral disease of egotism.In the conclusion I summarized the consumer culture and Eliot's view of consumer ethics in Middlemarch.Meanwhile,it points out that the study of the consumer culture and Eliot's attitude toward it has a certain reference value for us to rationally guide the consumption culture and construct a harmonious society under the current social reality in China.