ABSTRACT
Like the previous chapter, this chapter looks to Eliot’s final published book, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, to delineate the culmination of her ethical vision at the end of her career. As before, Eliot’s ethics here balances an attention to human communion with an attention to otherness. But as in Daniel Deronda, here too she defines her ethical imperative foremost in terms of difference. In several essays in the book, Eliot inserts untranslated foreign words and phrases in order to conceive difference not only extrinsically, as another person or group of persons, but also intrinsically, as an otherness inhering within oneself and within one’s own language or discourse. She thereby fundamentally redefines the ethical relationship as such. From a relationship between a stable, knowable self and a distinct, external other, she reconceives it as a relationship between two forms of otherness, one extrinsic and one intrinsic. And she reconceives ethics in terms of the fundamental uncertainty and unpredictability that consequently inhere at both ends of any ethical relationship.
