Adam Bedeに関する一考察 : Dramatic Powerの追求
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概要
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When George Eliot began to write her first novel, she was anxious about her deficiency of dramatic power, though rather confident of her descriptive ability. She made efforts to make up this gap, especially in her early novels ; and when her novel gained dramatic power in addition to excellent description, it became great. This paper is to examine her process to becoming a great novelist with reference to dramatic power in her early three novels. Her novels are not at all dedactive, but what she hoped was to arouse the reader's sympathy to her characters, to their sorrow as well as their pleasure. It was to make the same influence as Greek tragedies made upon their audience. She learned much from them and other classical dramas like Shakespeare's. The dramatic power of her novels, therefore, depends much on classical dramaturgy: Her novels have dramatic construction of double plots, and her heroes are independent and free from the fixed way of thinking. Their actions are apt to be condemned by others, because they cannot compromise with the fixed ideas of society at first. Gradually, however, they became sympathetic to others through sorrow and renunciation; they find a new life of resurrection. George Eliot was much concerned with that process. In Scenes, however, she does not show the heroes of that type, and each of three novelle has a single plot. Adam has double plots, and she creates Dinah of that type. Mill has these two characteristics of a classical tragedy. Maggie is the first heroine of that type, and George Eliot here succeeded in making a dramatic tragedy in its full force. Adam is very important to think of her dramatic power. Though it is less dramatic than Mill, it shows her process to becoming a great novelist who later wrote Mill and Middlemarch. If she wrote Dinah as a heroine, and put as much stress on her action and psychology as Adam's and Hetty's, Adam would become more dramatic and moving. The fact that Adam was praised only by its natural description was caused, it seems, by this miscasting.