Volume 03 Issue 06-2023
147
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
–
2771-2273)
VOLUME
03
ISSUE
06
P
AGES
:
147-151
SJIF
I
MPACT
FACTOR
(2022:
5.
445
)
(2023:
6.
555
)
OCLC
–
1121105677
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
ABSTRACT
While it may be the modern reader’s habit to skip or skim the epigraphs, their use in George Eliot’s novels generated
a substantial amount of notice. By the time, Eliot published Daniel Deronda, her epigraphs had grown substantially in
number and length, a
nd most readers found them tiresome. Critics cited the novel’s first epigraph, which relates to
the arbitrary nature of all beginnings, as a prime example of Eliot’s sententiousness. Formally, epigraphs illuminate
the difficulty of deciding where a narrative actually begins. They raise questions about the extent to which beginnings
establish the parameters of what will follow, and whether endings determine how we understand beginnings. This
article contests the assertion that Eliot’s epigraphs are inordinat
ely long, or long-
winded, Eliot’s use of maxims, quoted
as epigraphs, and her mimesis of them, in order to demonstrate the moral implications of the form.
KEYWORDS
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, concision, digression, maxims, epigraph.
INTRODUCTION
The mysterious sentences, snatched from an unknown
context, like strange horns of beasts, and leaves of
unknown plants, brought from some far-off region
gave boundless scope to her imagination, and were all
the more fascinating because they were in a peculiar
tongue of their own, which she could learn to interpret.
It was really very interesting.
In George Eloit’s novels, epigraphs are ‘a peculiar
tongue’ the reader must learn to interpret, rather than
Research Article
ANALYSIS OF EPIGRAPH AS A PECULIAR TONGUE IN GEORGE ELIOT’S
NOVELS
Submission Date:
June 16, 2023,
Accepted Date:
June 21, 2023,
Published Date:
June 26, 2023
Crossref doi:
https://doi.org/10.37547/ajps/Volume03Issue06-24
Akhmedova Gavkharoy
Ferghana State University, Uzbekistan
Journal
Website:
https://theusajournals.
com/index.php/ajps
Copyright:
Original
content from this work
may be used under the
terms of the creative
commons
attributes
4.0 licence.
Volume 03 Issue 06-2023
148
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
–
2771-2273)
VOLUME
03
ISSUE
06
P
AGES
:
147-151
SJIF
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MPACT
FACTOR
(2022:
5.
445
)
(2023:
6.
555
)
OCLC
–
1121105677
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
a tool for the efficient communication of information.
The author becomes a travelling naturalist, who has
brought back fragments from foreign lands to intrigue,
amuse, and educate the reader. Reading epigraphs is
figured both as an experience, the reader travels
beyond the boundaries of the narrative and as an
experiment, the reader must speculate on the meaning
of an epigraph and must readjust her expectations
once she has read the chapter. In Daniel Deronda,
Gwendolen claims that “women can’t go in search of
adventures to find out the North-West Passage or the
source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We
must stay where we grow”. Perhaps Eliot sought to
bring a sense of adventure to the page, refusing to
institutionalize cultural exclusion based on sexual
difference. The phrases ‘strange horns of beasts’ and
‘leaves of unknown plants’ evoke different textures,
from smooth bone to rough leaf. This suggests that
linguistic problems should be solved through intuition,
even haptic perception: the reader is invited to feel her
way among the mysterious sentences in order to
decipher them.
Inspired by Walter Scott’s use of chapter epigraphs in
his Waverley novels, Eliot first intended to use
epigraphs in her own historical romance, Romola.
Beginnings are always trouble. The difficulty of
beginning is given lengthy and serious treatment in
Daniel Deronda’s epigraphs, but Eliot first experienced
this challenge when writing Romola.
While it may be the modern reader’s habit to skip, or
skim over epigraphs, their use in Eliot’s novels
generated a substantial amount of notice. Not all of it
was positive. By the time Eliot published Daniel
Deronda, her epigraphs had grown substantially, both
in number and in length, and most readers found them
tiresome. Anyone who doubts that the long-winded
reflections taken from the commonplace book or the
unpublished works of George Eliot afford examples of
the way in which a statement that has meaning may be
overloaded by the conceits in which it is expressed,
should examine carefully the motto to the first
chapter, and consider honestly whether a rather
commonplace sentiment is not beaten out into an
inordinate number of words.
Epigraphs illuminate the difficulty of deciding where a
narrative actually ‘begins’. They raise questions about
the extent to which beginnings establish the
parameters of what will follow, and whether endings
determine how we understand beginnings. The
epigraph to Chapter 1 enacts its own assertion: the
generalization that ‘Men can do nothing without the
make-
believe of a beginning’ becomes true of the
novel’s readers. The
reader must start with this make-
believe beginning, which gives the novel’s first
paragraph, and its famous opening line, ‘Was she
beautiful or not beautiful?’ its full significance. The
epigraph calls attention to itself as ‘a make
-believe of a
beginning
’ through its marginal placement
- paratext
Volume 03 Issue 06-2023
149
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
–
2771-2273)
VOLUME
03
ISSUE
06
P
AGES
:
147-151
SJIF
I
MPACT
FACTOR
(2022:
5.
445
)
(2023:
6.
555
)
OCLC
–
1121105677
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
and text both have their own beginnings and through
its own fictional construct. The epigraph subsumes its
scientific and literary references, which include Hamlet
and Goethe’s Faust. Thus, the epigraph makes an
implicit comment about the derivative nature of
literature,
and
the
inescapability
of
literary
precedence.
On the opening page of Daniel Deronda, the precise
two o’clock ‘On the first of September, in the
memorable year 1832’ of Felix Holt has given way t
o a
vague ‘near four o’clock on a September day’. While, in
Middlemarch, Eliot expected her reader to know what
‘kind of beauty’ Dorothea possesses. She now required
the reader to make aesthetic judgements: ‘Was she
beautiful or not beautiful?’ is, arguabl
y, Daniel
Deronda’s first sentence. As we have already seen, her
use of a prose epigraph as the opening to the first
chapter leaves this open to debate. But what is clear
from Daniel Deronda’s inception is that its epigraphic
project exceeded anything that had come before it.
This is manifested in the sheer number of epigraphs,
their length, and their multilingualism. While
Shakespeare is still quoted in an important number of
epigraphs, as he was in those for Felix Holt and
Middlemarch, a larger proportion of the epigraphs are
autographic and, for the first time, written in prose.
Eliot also continued to compose epigraphs in verse and
in dialogue form. With her dialogue, she became more
playful, using both her traditional characters that
appear in her prev
ious two novels’ epigraphs and the
more unusual. Sources for her allographic epigraphs
spanned several languages and genres. Eliot quoted
poets, novelists, historians, philosophers, and religious
texts, making of her novel a true cabinet of curiosities.
Da
niel Deronda’s epigraphs illustrate the wonderful
range and extent of Eliot’s reading and the full force of
her imagination. Eliot was in some ways more playful
with epigraphs, her use of maxims underlines the grief
and violence at the heart of this novel.
Daniel Deronda’s epigraphs are often puzzling, and
readers of Eliot’s late novels are trained to be eloquent
interpreters of fragments. But Eliot, too, becomes an
eloquent interpreter. The deliberate reproduction of
maxims through their quotation and mimesis allows
Eliot to better know, and therefore to expose, what
she mimics.
Eliot’s mimesis is not a complete undoing of the ideas
that pass for the truth of human experience, but a
nuancing of this truth. In the novel’s longest epigraph,
Eliot imagines an
alternative to the maxim ‘Knowledge
is power’.
It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but
who hath duly considered or set forth the power of
Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what
Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through
patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and
makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner,
Volume 03 Issue 06-2023
150
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
–
2771-2273)
VOLUME
03
ISSUE
06
P
AGES
:
147-151
SJIF
I
MPACT
FACTOR
(2022:
5.
445
)
(2023:
6.
555
)
OCLC
–
1121105677
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its
one roast with the burned souls of many generations.
Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and
multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and
makes life various with a new six days’ work; comes
Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and
a match and an easy ‘Let there not be,’ and the many
-
coloured creation is shrivelled up in blackness. Of a
truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by
scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what
may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him
but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the
pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human
good and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried
Babylon. And looking at life parcel-wise, in the growth
of a single lot, who having a practised vision may not
see that ignorance of the true bond between events,
and false conceit of means whereby sequences may be
compelled like that falsity of eyesight which overlooks
the gradations of distance, seeing that which is a far off
as if it were within a step or a grasp-precipitates the
mistaken soul on destruction?
This epigraph demonstrates the competing impulses of
concision and dispersal that are contained within the
maxim. By keeping in mind Eliot’s interest in the study
of classical epigraphy, the field through which the
epigraph migrated to literature, her epigraphs gain
important intellectual contexts: the materiality of
texts, the archiving and transmission of knowledge,
monumentalization, and dedication. In Daniel
Deronda, we see a conflict between Eliot’s desire to
transmit knowledge and her reservations about what
might be lost in the petrification of experience into
maxims and other forms of quotation.
Indeed, Daniel Deronda’s epigraphs are less
prescriptive than those in Felix Holt or Middlemarch,
allowing the reader greater freedom amid Eliot’s own
sententiousness. Because epigraphs operate at the
margins of what can be known, readers must use
intuition and experiential knowledge, as opposed to
intellectualism, in order to decipher their meaning. This
form is at once transgressive and liberating, since it
brings to light masculine artifice and recovers the
feminine.
But as the epigraphs in Daniel Deronda demonstrate,
Eliot had already been searching for a form that could
instruct and seduce in equal measure. What she
achieved is specificity without specifics. By reinscribing
and rewriting the maxim, she made it possible to
generally love the particular, and to universally admire
the individual instance.
REFERENCES
1.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. by
Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1980), p. 130.
Volume 03 Issue 06-2023
151
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
–
2771-2273)
VOLUME
03
ISSUE
06
P
AGES
:
147-151
SJIF
I
MPACT
FACTOR
(2022:
5.
445
)
(2023:
6.
555
)
OCLC
–
1121105677
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
2.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. by Graham
Handley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 119
(Chap. 13).
3.
Letter to George Eliot, 30 April 1866, Eliot
Letters, ed. by Haight, IV: 1862
–
1868 (1955),
250. [^]
4.
Fred C. Thomson, ‘Introduction’, in George
Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, ed. by Fred C.
Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1980), pp.
xiii
–
xxx (p. xxviii). [^]
5.
David Carroll, ‘Introduction’, in George Eliot,
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, ed. by
David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
^
