Endnotes

1  On the abject, see Kristeva, Powers of Horror. Jill Matus, Carl Rotenberg, and Susan Weisser use the vocabulary of psychoanalysis to analyze Eliot’s representations of trauma and the unconscious.

2  See Rotenberg (25) and Matus (n6, 75).

3  Spinoza defines affect as “affection of (in other words [sic] impingement upon) the body, and at the same time the idea of the affection” (Ethics qtd. in Massumi 92). He explains that “If we imagine a thing like us, toward which we have had no affect, to be affected with some affect, we are thereby affected with a like affect” (Ethics, III, Prop. 27 qtd. in Gatens n16, 89).

4  On the pervasive Victorian obsession with the relationship between epistemology and ethics, see George Levine Realism, Ethics, and Secularism. On the Victorian ideal of moral perfection, see Andrew Miller’s The Burdens of Perfection.

5 Rosemarie Bodenheimer suggests that this new sense of sympathy emerges from Eliot’s discomfort at being relied upon for sympathy by her admirers, in a manner similar to Deronda’s fatigued sympathy for Gwendolen (257-8). See also Dorothea Barrett on the relation between frequent boundary crossings and Eliot’s suspicion of sympathy (777), Jesse Rosenthal on the casting of typical “Eliotic ground” to the “foreign” plot (87), and Greiner on knowing too much (129).

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