George Eliot, Spinoza, and the Emotions

The author concentrates on traditions governing the affects and the expression of emotion available to George Eliot. There is expressive emotion in Eliot's novels. Eliot herself, in her “Notes on Form in Art,” affirmed that poetry, by which she included all literary production, consisted of “relations and groups of relations” that “are more or less not only determined by emotion but intended to express it”. “Sympathy” is less likely to explain these “emotional states,” the author believes, than an understanding of Eliot's response to Spinoza. The author turns to what Eliot's translation of the Ethics would have shown her. In the Ethics Spinoza sets up both a logic and a phenomenology of the affects. There is no unconscious in Spinoza's logic. Pleasure and pain have their counterparts in love and hatred. The final section considers form and emotional states in Daniel Deronda, with a brief preface on Middlemarch.