The transformation of rage
Subtitle: mourning and creativity in George Eliot's fiction
By: Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone.
Series: Literature and psychoanalysis ;; 7
Publisher: New York University Press; NYU Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 207
Subjects: Eliot, George, 1819-1880 -- Knowledge -- Psychology; Psychological fiction, English -- History and criticism; Characters and characteristics in literature; Psychoanalysis and literature -- England; Creativity in literature; Emotions in literature; Grief in literature; Anger in literature
Description: George Eliot has been widely praised both for the richness of her prose and the universality of her themes. In this compelling study, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone goes beyond these traditional foci to examine the role of aggression in Eliot's fiction and to find its source in the author's unconscious sense of loss stemming from traumatic family separations and deaths during her childhood and adolescence.

Johnstone demonstrates that Eliot's creative work was a constructive response to her sense of loss and that the repeating patterns in her novels reflect the process of release from her state of mourning for lost loved ones.

How then does Eliot's internalized aggression, rooted in her early life, find its way into her characters? How and why is it, in turn, denied by the author? And finally, how does the process of writing fiction help resolve it? Eliot's inner rage, Johnstone argues, was transformed into works of art and gradually dissipated as she developed her creative gifts and finally achieved her sense of identity as an artist.

The Transformation of Rage explores the connections between self-disorder and aggression, anxiety and creativity, and narcissism and mourning in the full range of Eliot's novels - Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. It will appeal to a broad audience, including those interested in the nineteenth-century British novel, the life and work of George Eliot, and the interdisciplinary study of literature and psychoanalysis.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 195-202) and index.