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George Eliot has been widely praised both for the richness of her prose and the universality of her themes. In this compelling study, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone goes beyond these traditional foci to examine the role of aggression in Eliot's fiction and to find its source in the author's unconscious sense of loss stemming from traumatic family separations and deaths during her childhood and adolescence. Johnstone demonstrates that Eliot's creative work was a constructive response to her sense of loss and that the repeating patterns in her novels reflect the process of release from her state of mourning for lost loved ones. How then does Eliot's internalized aggression, rooted in her early life, find its way into her characters? How and why is it, in turn, denied by the author? And finally, how does the process of writing fiction help resolve it? Eliot's inner rage, Johnstone argues, was transformed into works of art and gradually dissipated as she developed her creative gifts and finally achieved her sense of identity as an artist. The Transformation of Rage explores the connections between self-disorder and aggression, anxiety and creativity, and narcissism and mourning in the full range of Eliot's novels - Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. It will appeal to a broad audience, including those interested in the nineteenth-century British novel, the life and work of George Eliot, and the interdisciplinary study of literature and psychoanalysis.
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Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone is an independent scholar in Saratoga Springs, New York. She has published essays on George Eliot in Hartford Studies, Literature and Psychology, and Mosaic.
