ABSTRACT
George Eliot’s parable of the pier glass and the candle mediates between two paradigms of cognition, that persons construct reality and that reality constructs persons. In Eliot’s fiction, seeing widely and seeing well are moral acts: because selfhood is grounded in perception, Eliot extends her judgment of character to judgment of cognitive strategies. In addition, heroic characters in Eliot’s fiction, the characters, that is, who enlarge their perceptual field to take in other selves, are, more often than not, women. Eliot explores, from a woman’s point of view—Eliot is the pseudonym Mary Anne Evans adopted when she began to publish fiction—the construction of gendered selves in nineteenth-century England. But Eliot, though she cast Dorothea in the heroic mold of Maggie, managed to spare her a life of principled renunciation, not by having her alter her outer reality but by altering it for her: just as Dorothea is ready to accede to Casaubon’s wishes, Eliot sees to it that he dies.
