George Eliot's Dialogue with John MiltonIn George Eliot's Dialogue with John Milton, Anna K. Nardo details how Eliot reimagined Milton's life and art to write epic novels for an age of unbelief. Nardo demonstrates that Eliot directly engaged Milton's poetry, prose, and the well-known legends of his life--transposing, reframing, regendering, and thus testing both the stories told about Milton and the stories Milton told.In Romola and Middlemarch, Eliot's contemporary audience would immediately have recognized in her heroines' stories the plight of Milton's daughters--enlisted as readers for a blind poet and scholar. By evoking the well-known legends of Milton's life in these novels, Eliot places Milton in dialogue with himself in order to imagine new possibilities. In Romola, a daughter uses what she has learned from one Miltonic father to liberate herself from subjugation to the other, and in Middlemarch, Eliot tests Milton's fundamental assumptions about gender and knowledge by evoking, then reframing scenes from his life and his epic Paradise Lost.This strategy for establishing a dialogue with authoritative discourse, which Eliot evolved in midcareer, is complex and elegant. Eliot's first full-length novel, however, poses a direct challenge to the pastoral assumptions of Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso"--a challenge that she extends to the theology of Milton's epic of a lost pastoral paradise. In Adam Bede, Eliot summons Miltonic patterns into situations that expose their absence, leaving not the denial of these patterns, but their echo. Having separated Milton's characteristic patterns of choice from his theology, Eliot then began to experiment with transformations of the Miltonic hero. By reimagining the story of the virtuous Lady of Comus, Eliot discovers the possibility for a heroic deliverance for the beleaguered heroine of The Mill on the Floss. In Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, she first characterizes a male protagonist as a Miltonic hero, and then confronts her female, rather than her male, protagonist with the trials faced by that hero.In these complex transformations, we see Eliot's strenuous and lifelong dialogue with Milton--a dialogue that liberated Eliot's imagination. The author shows that Eliot opens the authoritative discourse by and about Milton to new possibilities envisioned by a towering female intellect. Scholars of both seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century British literature, especially those specializing in Eliot or Milton, as well as theorists engaged in the ongoing debate about intertextuality, will find this book of great interest. |
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Page 61
... Women to learn ” —far “ More Proper for Young Women than Hebrew , Greek , & c . " But even the most sympathetic of the early biographers do not get beyond imagining the tedium of the daughters ' labors and what seemed a justifiable ...
... Women to learn ” —far “ More Proper for Young Women than Hebrew , Greek , & c . " But even the most sympathetic of the early biographers do not get beyond imagining the tedium of the daughters ' labors and what seemed a justifiable ...
Page 205
... woman , as did the biblical Samson , Eliot's modern Samson sets out to convert one , exhorting Esther , " I can't bear to see you going the way of the foolish women who spoil men's lives . Men can't help loving them , and so they make ...
... woman , as did the biblical Samson , Eliot's modern Samson sets out to convert one , exhorting Esther , " I can't bear to see you going the way of the foolish women who spoil men's lives . Men can't help loving them , and so they make ...
Page 207
... women with a fine spirit so that they can " feel more triumph in their mastery . What is the use of a woman's will ? —if she tries , she doesn't get it , and she ceases to be loved . God was cruel when he made women " ( FH , 316 ) . Mrs ...
... women with a fine spirit so that they can " feel more triumph in their mastery . What is the use of a woman's will ? —if she tries , she doesn't get it , and she ceases to be loved . God was cruel when he made women " ( FH , 316 ) . Mrs ...
Contents
Testing the Ways of Milton in Middlemarch | 111 |
Eliots Challenge to Milton in Adam Bede | 135 |
The Freedom of My Mind | 166 |
Copyright | |
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Adam and Eve Adam Bede Adam's allusion angel Areopagitica Bardo beauty become blind Casaubon characters choice Christian Comus Corinne critics Daniel Deronda daughters death Deborah dialogue Dinah domestic Dorothea early Eliot's narrator enchanted epic erotic Esther Eve's evil fantasy father feels Felix Holt Fiction Floss gaze George Eliot God's Grandcourt Gubar Gwendolen Gypsy hero heroine heroism Hetty Hetty's husband ideal imagines ironic John Milton Keightley Knoepflmacher knowledge Lady language learned legend live Lydgate Lydgate's Maggie Maggie's marriage married Mary Ann Middlemarch Mill Milton's poetry mind Mirah never nineteenth-century novel Ogg's Paradise Lost Paradise Regained passion pastoral pattern poem poet Poyser Puritan reader reading Milton rejects rescue Romola Rosamond Rufus Rufus's Samson Samson Agonistes Satan Savonarola scene scholarly seems soul Stephen story struggle temptation Thomas à Kempis thou tion ton's Transome trial truth Victorian vision Whereas wife Will's woman women young