Chapter 5 - Seeing the Divine in the Commonplace: George Eliot’s Paranaturalist Realism (1856–1859)

Summary

Chapter 5 focuses on the “paranaturalist realism” of George Eliot’s early career, including her journal sketches “Recollections of Ilfracombe” and “Recollections of Scilly Isle & Jersey” as forerunners of her early fiction: Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede (1859). Situating Eliot’s emerging turn to realism and fiction amidst two summers of seashore naturalizing with George Henry Lewes, who was writing Sea-Side Studies, the chapter argues that the most resonant connections between Eliot’s fiction and a persistent theology of nature from natural history is her choice to a) write about commonplace everyday human subjects and ordinary particulars, and b) employ descriptive amplitude to appropriate reverence to those subjects. Eliot realizes the aesthetic potential of paranaturalism, borrowing the capacious descriptive practice of reverent natural history in the service of a realist delineation of a human community and natural world. The period 1856-1859 constitutes what I term Eliot’s “naturalist phase”; the chapter deeply explores the biography by way of illuminating the formal elements of Eliot’s emergent realism.