George Eliot’s Science Fiction

This concluding chapter focuses on George Eliot's Middlemarch. The main business of Middlemarch, formulated as the premise of its opening rhetorical question, is with a scientific project, “the history of man.” While George Eliot's literary career coincided with Charles Darwin's, she did not immediately digest his theory; her fiction activates other developmental forces besides natural selection, and deranges the scientific thought it brings into play. In doing so, it churns up the not-yet-settled, volatile currents of that scientific thought-including Darwin's, who was not always (himself) a pure Darwinist. With that, it deranges its own aesthetic protocols, so often read as an Olympian consummation of Victorian realism. “To a degree that the catchall term 'realism' obscures,” writes Lauren Goodlad, “Eliot's oeuvre is generically diverse, bold, and experimental.” The chapter seeks to recapture the unsettling force of that experimentalism: to make George Eliot strange again.