Gifts, Ethics, and Economics in George Eliot's Middlemarch

Abstract

Abstract: George Eliot represents a remolding of the word, gift, by Victorian economic individualism in Middlemarch. As a part of private property, gifts aim at maximizing personal interests, exemplifying two ambiguous characteristics of “control” and “connection”. By unfolding the conflicts between giving and receiving, or selling and buying, the novel explores the dilemma of “reciprocity” caused by gift circulation among various relationships within the 19^th-century British market economy. The gift economy is, at times, a sort of debt economy, but sometimes it is nothing different from a veiled exchange at equal values. It is based on self-interest, and it comes with a high cost of pain, or even death. It is against this backdrop that Eliot redefines the implications of “gifts” from the ethical perspective and integrates the bonding function of gifts from the ethical economy into the novel, reflecting upon the ideas of economic individualism and making a serious attempt at building the national economy through a reliance on the culture of rural community.

Key words: George Eliot, Middlemarch, gifts, ethics, economics

Wang Haimeng. Gifts, Ethics, and Economics in George Eliot's Middlemarch[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2021, 43(3): 135-145.

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