Poole, Kathryn and Tate, Andrew and Knight, Mark (2025) Re-Interpreting the Novels of George Eliot Through Aspects of Christian Love. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
Representations of Christian love in Victorian literature are often overlooked. However, this thesis will argue that attending to theological ideas about love gives a deeper understanding regarding how individuals put inward expressions of love into action. There are four Greek words attributed to theological love in the Bible: eros (married, romantic love), storge (familial love), philia (a love of friendship and cooperation) and agape. Agape is God’s unconditional love for humankind, which humanity can express via acts of love for one another. Alongside the concept of philia, I will also examine the Latin term, caritas, denoting how Christians put love into action. Despite the high level of scholarly attention paid to Eliot’s novels, the theological influences on her thought remain underexplored. Those who do write about Eliot and theology, such as Elizabeth Jay, Peter Hodgson and Marilyn Orr do not pay close attention to theological love. In my thesis I consider how George Eliot seeks to normalise and domesticate Christian love by interweaving theological storylines into her narratives. Eliot rarely addresses Christian love directly, but her narrative emphases on kindness, altruism and sympathy are suggestive of Christian interpretations of theological love. Using these emphases as a framework, my thesis examines how Christian love is suggested through reading Eliot’s novels theologically. My first chapter will discuss Adam Bede and evaluates Christian love as philia and caritas, developing cooperative friendships in the community. In the second chapter, I re-examine familial love in The Mill on the Floss by suggesting that it can be interpreted as storge through sacrifice, obligation, and affection. My third chapter addresses the domestication of agape in Silas Marner by evaluating the reciprocity of spoken dialogue in the expression of Christian Love. The final chapter will assess the role of eros in Middlemarch and queries whether the narrative suggests a renewed Christian understanding of the term.