“Dwell on every detail and its possible meaning":The Subjective Particulars of Middlemarch

This essay examines the engagement with details in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) as a conduit for capturing emotional interiority. Details in Eliot’s novels—and in nineteenth-century realism in general—are identified with empirical observation and scientific objectivity. However, for Eliot, the representation of details signifies the advent of a modern subjectivity that closely attends to details and infuses them with emotion and significance. I trace Eliot’s enlivening of details to her engagement with nineteenth-century aesthetics, specifically Hegel’s Aesthetics (1835), which describes the profuse details of genre painting and poetry to be generated and animated by a reflective, inward modern subjectivity. Hegel’s thought converges with Eliot’s use of details to represent the growing inner complexity of her heroine, Dorothea Brooke, through her increasing engagement with details of the everyday world. Dorothea’s passionate, if misguided, perception and charging of details with emotion reflects her inner subjectivity, enacted by Eliot’s third-person narrator through metaphorical images that diffuse details into felt experience. In this scenario, Eliot’s diffusive metaphorical details render palpable an emotional interiority and complexity that eludes direct representation.