The Ethical Vision of George Eliot by Thomas Albrecht (review)

Reviewed by: The Ethical Vision of George Eliot by Thomas Albrecht Summer J. Star (bio) The Ethical Vision of George Eliot, by Thomas Albrecht; pp. x + 207. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020, $127.50, $39.71 paper, $37.06 ebook. Thomas Albrecht's 2020 monograph The Ethical Vision of George Eliot comes at a timely moment in Eliot studies. While anniversaries of George Eliot's life and novels have prompted numerous conferences, special editions, and books in recent years, scholars also find themselves at a high and interesting watermark for debates on a particular issue: ethics. Albrecht's book is ambitious in its foray into this subject, particularly in its broad embrace of Eliot's writing (not limited to novels, but including essays, letters, [End Page 323] reviews, and translations as well). Even more impressive—and helpful—however, is the way he addresses the specific landscape of ethical criticism of her works. Albrecht's view of Eliot's ethical thought is, as he writes, "dialectal" (20). Over the course of her career, two imperatives, as Albrecht claims, define Eliot's vision of ethical motive and action, and can be critically used to assess how that vision develops over time. These are the communion imperative and the difference imperative. The former is defined "as an ethics of connecting and communing with other persons across differences and apartness" (4). Such connecting—of, say, Dinah Morris with Hetty Sorrel in her cell, Dorothea with Rosamond, or even the reader with characters in the text—is grounded in the conceit of a general shared humanity, "the assumption that there is fundamental continuity between one-self and what is outside of oneself" (54). Counterpart to communion is the difference imperative. Albrecht describes this as "a love and potential connection based on recognizing and reverencing … the other's insularity, his or her essential remoteness from oneself, and recognizing one's own inability ever fully to comprehend his or her thoughts and feelings" (11). If these two imperatives resonate with readers from the start, it is for a critical reason that interests Albrecht as much as the tracing of these ideas through Eliot's writing. The communion and difference imperatives also correlate with two tendencies in Eliot studies, among critics from F. R. Leavis to the present, who have sought to define the nature of Eliot's ethics. While readers might take issue with some of Albrecht's sorting of scholars, even this arguability seems important. Just as Albrecht is claiming a movement toward the difference imperative, but still in relation to communion, so the ethical critics he considers fall into more general than hardline camps. What is helpful about the distinction between these critical tendencies (which is also mapped in a fairly linear way, over time) is the way it allows readers to see dialectic in action, as well as how trends in readers' perspectives are conditioned by changes in scholarly atmosphere. Albrecht himself quite clearly leans toward the difference imperative—not only as the most dominant interest of ethical critics currently, but also as the imperative that Eliot's later fiction and essays represent most prominently. The linear-if-also-dialectical movement between imperatives is mirrored in the structure of Albrecht's book, particularly the chapter focusing on Eliot's early writings (primarily Adam Bede [1859] and the Westminster Review [1824–1914] essays). The discourses on realism's aesthetic and ethical obligations in these texts are well known; Eliot's appeal for widening the boundaries of sympathy, and the (artistic and social) danger of idealization, are foundational to the communion imperative for Albrecht. What is interesting in these chapters, however, is the way Albrecht shows the beginning of Eliot's own uneasiness in solely aligning with communion. That production of wider sympathy as the realist's goal is balanced by what Albrecht sees as Eliot's understanding that this happens not simply through mimesis, mirroring the world-as-it-is, but through the mediating perspective, the already sympathetic perspective of the artist. As Albrecht writes in his discussion of Adam Bede, there is "an ambivalence that emerges, as I have been arguing, in the figure of the defective mirror. This ambivalence casts a more...