ABSTRACT
The previous chapter examined Eliot’s representations of the role of heredity, individual adaptation and personal memory in the emergence of the discrete, individual subject in her fiction. We shall now turn to a key aspect of processes within the self, to one of the ways in which the individual’s past and present experiences, and physical being, are combined, contrasted and transformed to issue into the world as thought and action. Chapter One focused on Eliot’s use of the physical images of fibres and muscles to represent the active potential of the living, developing self. The present chapter centres on emotion, a crucial part of that active potential.
