Living with Illusion: Sympathy, Realist Form and Endurance in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

초록

This essay reexamines sympathy in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) by focusing on how it works within specific scenes and characters rather than treating it as a stable moral ideal. Instead of presenting sympathy as a clear ethical guide, the novel shows how it is shaped through gaps between what characters experience and what the narrator can fully explain. These gaps become visible in moments such as Dorothea Brooke’s sudden blushes, her efforts to restrain anger, or Lydgate’s recurring frustration and divided ambitions. In such scenes, feeling does not appear as clear intention but emerges through bodily reactions, hesitation, and incomplete narration. The essay reads these moments alongside the idea of melancholia to explain how disappointment, such as Dorothea’s failed expectations of marriage or Lydgate’s unrealized professional hopes, does not disappear but returns as self-criticism, anxiety, and physical tension. These responses suggest that characters are not fully transparent to themselves or to the narrator. Sympathy, therefore, does not resolve misunderstanding but helps them continue living with it. This argument is further developed through Eliot’s well-known candle and pier-glass image, where scattered scratches appear ordered only under a particular light. In a similar way, sympathy does not correct reality but briefly arranges it into something meaningful. Through figures like Will Ladislaw, whose imagination remains open rather than defensive, the novel suggests that such forms of illusion are not simply errors but ways of sustaining attachment and hope. In this sense, sympathy can be understood as a narrative mechanism that mediates between individual limitation and the demand for coherence, allowing characters to organize experience without fully resolving its contradictions. It thus functions less as a moral solution than as a formal condition through which realist fiction sustains relation and endurance under conditions of uncertainty.

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