ABSTRACT
While The Mill on the Floss charts Maggie's maturation from childhood to adulthood and her inability to survive in her environment, Middlemarch (1874) and Daniel Deronda (1876) concentrate on adult protagonists like Dorothea Brooke, Will Ladislaw, Daniel Deronda and Mirah Lapidoth who actively and productively engage in social evolution. Their ability to do so is depicted as resulting from their Schopenhauerian sense of the world. In Middlemarch, the discourse of music sets up the paradigm of angel versus siren, but it is different from the other late Victorian models that I have investigated, just as Daniel Deronda deepens the concepts of angel and demon to make them deeply plural. Like sensation fiction, both novels depict suspicion of normal Victorian courtship rituals but they also propose an alternative social model that depends on individuals constructing personal meaning, or finding a value in the world that is their own instead of living by prescribed upper-class ideals. Musical performances are one method by which this is accomplished. In these novels, George Eliot links evolutionary scientists' belief that music is performative social communication with Schopenhauer's theory that contemplation assists personal understanding about the universe.
