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Conscience and the Internalised Bond Conscience and the Internalised Bond
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Self-Knowledge and the Ethics of Realism Self-Knowledge and the Ethics of Realism
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Bad Faith: The Lie of the Self Bad Faith: The Lie of the Self
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The Point of View of the Character The Point of View of the Character
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40 George Eliot and Character
Get accessYi-Ping Ong is Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her book The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2018) examines authority, freedom, and self-knowledge in the history and theory of the novel and in existentialism. Other work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and literature has appeared in PMLA, Philosophy and Literature, Comparative Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Post45, nonsite, and The Harvard Review. Her current project explores the power of literary form to illuminate structures of oppression, inauthenticity, and dehumanisation.
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Published:20 March 2025
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Abstract
This chapter argues that George Eliot transforms the moral imaginary of the novel through her creation of a new kind of character that displaces the traditional role of the villain. Characters such as Arthur Donnithorne in Adam Bede, Tito Melema in Romola, and Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss are represented not in terms of the violation of objective social and moral norms but increasingly through the inward failures of self-knowledge that constitute bad faith. Bad faith eventually pervades the full range of characters in Eliot’s novels, suffusing the representation of protagonist figures such as Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch, and reflecting Eliot’s commitment to the fundamental moral ambiguity of the human condition.
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