THE ELEMENTS OF REALISM IN GEORGE ELLIOT’S (MARIE ANNE EVANS) MIDDLEMARCH

THE ELEMENTS OF REALISM IN GEORGE ELLIOT’S (MARIE ANNE EVANS) MIDDLEMARCH

Gurra, Hyreme

This research paper is going to elaborate Middlemarch, one of the greatest works of George Elliot (her real name was Marie Ann Evans). It is one of the major pieces of the thesaurus of British Victorian period. The novel is subtitled as ‘A study of Provincial Life’ which is set in the imaginary town of Middlemarch which is thought to be at the territory of today’s city of Coventry, a little town not far from Oxford. The story takes place between the periods of 1930-1932.Elliot presents the stories of a number of denizens of a small English town on the eve of the Representation of the People Act Bill. This Reform Bill endorsed major changes in the parliament where the number of commoners increased. Middlemarch is her seventh novel, started to be written in 1869.The interruption of her writing was caused by the illness of Thornton Lewes, the son of her partner George Henry Lewes. Elliot’s resumed works; fusing together several stories into coherent whole during 1871-1872, appeared in serial form. The Volume I Edition was published in 1874 and attracted a large publicity. The novel is composed of eight books; it contains also a prelude and a postscript or a finale describing the post-novel fates of the main characters. The narrator is an omniscient third-person singular that narrates the life of ordinary people isn’t granting the echelon of heroic princes and kings. As a realistic novel Middlemarch contains multiple and different characteristics of realism such as; a slow-moving plot, emphasis on morality, casualty, foreshadowing of everyday events, emphasis on psychological optimistic tone, too much details, events are usually plausible. The research methods that have been helpful while conducting this research paper are; narrative and descriptive methods.

Article
PeerReviewed

International Burch University

2015-07

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