ABSTRACT
This chapter devoted to Eliot’s sixth novel Middlemarch focuses first off on the egoism of the characters who, like the characters in Adam Bede, regularly project their own subjective needs and wishes onto other persons and the world. And in this novel too, Eliot implicates herself, her narrator, and her fiction in a similar egoism as that of her characters. She suggests that in conceiving and writing Middlemarch, she too has imposed for subjective, egoistic reasons a particular order, particular patterns, and particular web-like structures onto an objectively unstructured, disordered universe. However, in a remarkable series of chapters set in Rome, she abruptly breaks with these patterns and structures, and momentarily acknowledges the essential heterogeneity and flux of the universe and human history. This break represents not only an epistemological insight on her part, but the realization of an important moral imperative: to recognize and respect the otherness of other persons and the universe from oneself and one’s own consciousness.
