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MALIGNANT FAITH AND COGNITIVE RESTRUCTURING: REALISM IN ADAM BEDE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2010

Jon Singleton
Jon Singleton*
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
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Extract

I begin this essay by quoting two books that deeply shaped George Eliot's thinking because I want to draw attention to the problem of “faith” in her writings, which I believe illuminates an important aspect of her realist project. I am not so much interested in her well-documented personal loss of faith, or her deconstruction of Victorian Christianity into religious humanism (Knoepflmacher 44–59; Wright 173–201; Dolin 165–89), as I am in her positive theorization of faith, throughout her early writings, as a cognitive structure that shapes perception, interpretation, and action. Faith materializes as beliefs shape perception, perceptions shape belief, in hermeneutical spirals coiling out to exert benign or malignant force on believers’ material lives. For Eliot, Christian faith enables social violence, and literature must both expose this malignant relationship and instill more benign (and less totalizing) cognitive patterns for bringing one's faith to bear on materiality. Among other effects, such a transformation changes the way the Bible itself can be read. The realism Eliot articulates in Adam Bede (1859) and elaborates for the rest of her career is modeled on her understanding of the cognitive structure of faith – and calculated to infiltrate and eradicate it.

Type
Work in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 239 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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