George Eliot's Ear

This chapter argues that George Eliot recognized the advent of an age defined by new emphases on and understandings of the capacity for listening. This argument suggests that Victorian science — especially the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and his followers — at first gave substance and form to sounds that had once seemed indefinite and immaterial, and Victorian technology then fundamentally destabilized aural communication. Coming at the end of a series of works that in their breadth of perception still leave many readers in silent awe, the so-called post-realist Daniel Deronda confronts with singular tenacity the question of not only what the later Victorian novel might possibly have left to say, but also how it might say it. Eliot finds a partial answer in thematizing the exchange of speech and sound itself. Deronda acknowledges at once the frustrating challenges and newly charged power of contact in an era heralding amplified sounds, wired voices, and bottled talk.

Art · Art history · Audiology · George (robot) · Psychoanalysis · Medicine · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Psychology · Sound Studies and Aurality · Thomas Hardy Literature Studies