The Ethical Vision of George Eliot by Thomas Albrecht (review)

George Eliot’s personal and literary value-system has been a topic of sustained scholarly attention. Most scholars focus on Eliot’s treatment of sympathy as the defining characteristic of her work, while others counterpose this with her assertions concerning individuality and separateness. Several scholars, such as Heather Armstrong, Rachel Hollander, and Pauline Nestor, even paint the ethical arch of her professional life as beginning with sympathy and ending with its opposite, a respect of difference. By contrast, Thomas Albrecht’s The Ethical Vision of George Eliot constructs a wider, more complex picture of Eliot’s values as evolving and competing, dichotomous from the outset and yet complementary in spite of their polarity.

Albrecht’s method is to engage most often and most closely with Eliot’s own words, mapping the ebbs and flows of her preoccupation with two overarching ethical principles: overcoming the boundaries between oneself and the other to achieve genuine sympathy and fellow-feeling (what Albrecht terms the “communion imperative”), and the separateness of each individual as distinct from, and ultimately unknowable by, all others (what he terms the “difference imperative,” 5). Albrecht maintains that all her works, from the earliest to the latest, reflect the natural tension between these two values, even serving to inform one another.

Albrecht does largely agree with the widely held opinion that Eliot’s early fiction (of the 1850s) is defined by the ethics of sympathy, or the “communion imperative.” Eliot’s expressed wish is to understand the essential human capacity to relate to another’s pain and joy, and reproduce that process in her own works. What Albrecht rather uniquely contends, however, is that even at this earliest stage Eliot treats recognition of the other’s differences as an equally important ethical imperative. Her purpose is to negate self-centered presuppositions and remind readers that the world does not reflect one’s own mind; rather, one reflects upon it through one’s own ever-subjective prisms. Many a character in Adam Bede and Middlemarch are pointed examples of what is taken for granted: that their own emotions and desires are mirrored in others, or else they divine another’s inner world as a matter of course.

Eliot’s split “imperatives,” Albrecht posits, stem from the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose essay Das Wesen des Christentums, singularly concerned with the duality of the “I” and “thou” (11), Eliot translated as The Essence of Christianity. This book espouses the belief that sympathy and love are the highest moral truth, stemming from our identification with the individual as well as with all mankind (35). By thus framing Eliot’s source for the “communion imperative,” Albrecht falls in line with a countertrend in George Eliot scholarship, one which rejects the premise that her worldview was exclusively secular. He continues the line of inquiry that examines the origins of her humanism as based in an ongoing exchange with religion and its texts (Scheinberg 2002, LaPorte 2009, Blumberg 2019). Still, Feuerbach notes (and Eliot agrees) that Christian doctrine extinguishes the distinctiveness of a person, painting all with the same brush by virtue of man’s original sin while repeatedly sacrificing the individual. Here enters the difference imperative, which, by contrast, rejects this interpretation and conceives of human beings as singularly unknowable. Albrecht suggests that Eliot calls upon the difference imperative to act as a corrective to latent fallacies in the communion imperative, and especially those wrought by the egoism of presumed knowledge of the other.

Albrecht locates Eliot’s method for providing such a corrective in her genuine commitment to realistic fiction. By contextualizing Eliot’s realism in this way, Albrecht adds nuance and purpose to the discussion of Eliot’s literary worldview. If Eliot defines art as “the nearest thing to life,” (from “The Natural History of German Life,” Albrecht 32), and believes that reflecting reality serves to deflate one’s narcissism (as in “coming face to face with reality”), then realism’s moral virtue lies in eliciting genuine sympathy for others as they are...