ABSTRACT
Through close readings of two important early texts, her essay “The Natural History of German Life” and her first novel Adam Bede, this chapter examines Eliot’s paradigmatic conception of literary realism’s ethical impact on readers. In both texts, Eliot defines this impact in terms of what I call communion: of characters and readers learning to feel a fundamental human fellowship that links them to other persons in the world, however distant and distinct from themselves, and thereby rupturing their own essential egoism. However, Eliot also considers that when we come to feel such human communions with others, we might inadvertently be simply assimilating those others to ourselves, to our subjective desires and needs, thereby negating their differences from ourselves. She implicates herself and her writings in this critical insight, worrying that she and her fiction might be reproducing a similarly appropriative kind of egoism as the egoism that she diagnoses and condemns in her characters, and that her readers would ostensibly overcome by means of reading her novels.
