![]() ![]() Freedgood views this move as ideologically and aesthetically conservative, arguing that Eliot's narrator works aggressively to "curtail" the disruptive readerly potential of description by reducing the "infinite individual possibilities for metonymic interpretation" to "proper metaphors," a goal she achieves by exhaustively pursuing all the metonymic associations of a described object before fixing it with a dominant metaphorical (and thus "literary") meaning. 1 Although the narrator's description renders select objects highly memorable-Dorothea's poor dress, a pier-glass, the set of emeralds that Dorothea reluctantly admires in the first chapter-these items are so over-freighted with symbolic meaning, as Elaine Freedgood has observed, that they strain away from literal description and toward metaphor. ![]() Critics have noted this quality of Eliot's description, observing that Middlemarch's descriptive language typically exceeds its basic local function of creating what Roland Barthes called a "reality effect," possessing instead an excess of elements that ascend or ossify into symbolic significance rather than remaining on the denotative level of mere literal description. The described world of Middlemarch is distinguished by a surprising absence of objects that are just there, of details-especially details in descriptions of domestic interiors-that nestle in the descriptive prose solely to enhance the visibility of a fictional world, without rising to a symbolic or metaphoric plane. George Eliot's Middlemarch is unique among nineteenth-century British novels for its unusually light reliance on the modes of neutral, literal presentation that are supposed to characterize the realist novel. ![]()
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