Realism Quotes

Question 1

James Eli Adams on the double-edged sword of realism.

Answer 1

‘a novelistic realism that depends on the evocation of private psychology necessarily emphasizes forms of alienation.’

Question 2

James Eli Adams comparing George Eliot’s realism with Ruskin’s

Answer 2

‘Eliot’s realism, like Ruskin’s, is an exercise in humility and austerity – even renunciation – which enlarges a reader’s powers of sympathy.’

Question 3

George Eliot in her review of Ruskin’s third volume of Modern Painters (1860)

Answer 3

‘The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism – the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature’

Question 4

George Eliot on the uses of art in Natural History of German Life (1856)

Answer 4

‘Art is the nearest thing to life … it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men.’

Question 5

George Eliot on the moral dimension of using realism

Answer 5

‘Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life’

Question 6

James Eli Adams on how Eliot’s sympathetic realism works

Answer 6

‘The central, recurrent burden of her realism – the struggle towards enlarged understanding through the frustration of desire’.

Question 7

James Eli Adams on the meaning behind the pier-glass quote in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871)

Answer 7

‘that the coherence of any narrative is necessarily a projection of the perceiving mind, whose consciousness organizes an outwardly chaotic world

Question 8

James Eli Adams on the central messages intended in George Eliot’s realism

Answer 8

‘She wanted to unfold before her readers the temporal actuality she believed in; yet she also wanted to assure them – and herself – that man’s inescapable subjection to the flux of time did not invalidate a trust in justice, perfectibility, and order.

Question 9

Adam Bede’s (1859) opening line

Answer 9

‘With this drop of ink at the end of my pen…’

Question 10

James Eli Adams on the secondary objective of George Eliot’s realism

Answer 10

‘Eliot rebukes the visions of “imagination” - or at least tests them against “definite, substantial” reality, which presumably will dispel the merely visionary, and enhance one’s appreciation of the everyday.’

Question 11

George Eliot’s apology to the reader in The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Answer 11

World of the Tulliver family seems one of ‘oppressive narrowness’, nevertheless ‘it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie’

Question 12

George Eliot’s apology to the reader on behalf of Amos Barton in Scenes (1857)

Answer 12

“It is only the very largest souls who will be able to appreciate and pity him – who will discern and love sincerity of purpose amid all the bungling feebleness of achievement”.

Question 13

James Eli Adams on George Eliot’s decision to set the majority of her prose in teh countryside

Answer 13

‘In such settings, Eliot was better able to explore the conjoint influence of landscape and history on human experience, and to represent society itself, as she put in her review of Riehl, as “incarnate history”.

Question 14

George Eliot’s summary of the inexorability of human action in Adam Bede (1859)

Answer 14

‘consequences are unpitying’

Question 15

What attribute in writing did Carlyle celebrate?

Answer 15

“Fact”

Question 16

What Victorian aesthetic movement was already defending/promoting realism in art?

Answer 16

Pre-Raphaelite movement - proclamation of a return to nature

Question 17

What does James Eli Adams suggest realism always involves?

Answer 17

Realism is ‘deeply bound up with the representation of causality, and realistic character is not a solitary, self-directed particle, but an ongoing transaction with the world at large, which always constrains one’s power to choose.’

Question 18

James Eli Adams on the essential differences between Eliot’s and Dickens’ writings

Answer 18

‘a novelistic realism that depends on the evocation of private psychology necessarily emphasizes forms of alienation, weakening the social and moral bonds on which Dickens wishes to insist.’

Question 19

Who was Adam Bede modelled after?

Answer 19

Robert Evans (George Eliot’s father)

Question 20

George Eliot on Dickens’ lack of realism

Answer 20

He ‘scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness.’

Question 21

James Eli Adams on realism’s necessity for self-consciousness

Answer 21

Realism nurtures ‘an increasingly self-conscious narrative stance’

Question 22

Three major strands for George Eliot’s realism which I can talk about:

Answer 22

• Moral imperatives of realism in Eliot’s social vision
• Links to psychic depth in characters and emphasize forms of isolation
• Accurate representations of causality, and therefore history

Question 23

George Eliot’s comment on social novels in The Natural History of German Life

Answer 23

The ‘unreality of their representations is a grave evil’.

Question 24

What does Eliot suggest Dickens fails to do in his representations of the poor?

Answer 24

Good at portraying their ‘external traints’, but falls short of ‘psychological character – their conceptions of life, and their emotions’

Question 25

Lydgate on his feelings toward Rosamond

Answer 25

‘He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?’

Question 26

The quote which exemplifies Dorothea Brooke’s moral center in Middlemarch

Answer 26

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

Question 27

George Eliot’s urge to artists in Adam Bede

Answer 27

‘give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things.’