Feeling Real in Middlemarch

Abstract

This article enters the discussion of nineteenth-century realism and ontology by considering the phenomenology of reality-perception in George Eliot’s Middlemarch . As I show, Eliot’s formal innovations display a persistent concern, allied with contemporary studies of perception, with visual limitation as the defining quality of character reality. Eliot, I argue, creates a distinctly phenomenal realism by suggesting aesthetic reality to be something we designate and engage with through phenomenal as opposed to access consciousness. In this way, I also develop a new account of realist ethics: figuring limitation as the condition of both reality-perception and agency in the realization of self as contingent part.

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