A Tragedy of Egoism——an Analysis of George Eliot's Moral Concern in Middlemarch

George Eliot’s works are usually taken as morally didactic.But in Middlemarch,a complex and voluminous work,her moral concern seems ambiguous and hard to follow.By close reading of the text,we can find that the tragic fall of those main characters is essentially due to their egoism.This essay tries to reveal Eliot’s basic moral concern embodied in this novel,that is,to render love and understanding based on Feuerbach’s religion of humanity as against egoism,as a solution to the predicament of human existence and as a way to happiness.[