Images at an exhibition: an organic theory of imagery in Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady

Abstract

Working primarily with George Eliot's and Henry James's fictional and non-fictional works, I have formulated an organic theory of the imagination which can be used as a critical approach to any good novel. Eliot's and James's analogy between an organism and a literary work in their respective essays, 'Notes on Form in Art' and 'The Art of Fiction', conveys three important tenets of organicism: incompleteness; the interrelationship of the parts to the whole; and the synthesis of diverse materials. The emphasis which Eliot and James place upon the visual in literature has led me to consider images as the parts of a novel which display the primary concepts of organicism outlined above.An understanding of images, their genesis, form, and transformations, necessitates a closer study of their life-cycle—perception, memory, and imagination. This is the subject of the second chapter in which I begin with Coleridge's concept of the imagination and establish its affinities with Eliot's and James's theories. At the same time, I outline the important effect Eliot's and James's ideas have had on twentieth-century philosophical and psychological studies of the imagination and its affiliated faculties—perception and memory. My choice of different authorities in psychology and philosophy has been based on the fact that their insights seem but parts of a coherent whole. The interrelationships of imagination, perception and memory in a creative act and in a creative reading of a novel are also concerns of this chapter.The reader's or critic's perspective is the subject of the third chapter. Coleridge's sympathetic criticism has taken into account the primary concepts of organicism and prefigures Eliot's and James's aesthetics. My focus is on four principles of recreative or sympathetic criticism which have been adopted by modern organicists: an attempt to recapture the artist's feeling; a concentration on the excellences, not the defects of a work; a judgement derived from intrinsic rather than extrinsic rules; an oscillation from the parts to the whole. Images express Coleridge's critical concepts. Images provide the means by which the writer's, the character's, and the reader's imaginations merge. Gaston Bachelard's visual rather than linguistic approach to images seems to evolve from Coleridge's, Eliot's, andI consider images as pictures in my analytical chapters on Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady. Simultaneously, I approach the two novels as the embodiments of an organic theory of the imagination, demonstrating how from a single image, the germinal image, all other images, events, and characters evolve. Part of the chapter on The Portrait of a Lady is devoted to exploring the novel as James's recreative criticism of Middlemarch. The primary consideration in both chapters is on the imagination, its growth and refinement.