University of Adelaide, Seventeenth Australasian Victorlian Studies Conference Report

The seventeenth conference of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association was held at the University of Adelaide in February 1996. The conference theme \u27The Victorians and Science\u27 inspired several papers on George Eliot\u27s relation to matters scientific. Barbara Garlick (Senior Tutor, University of Queensland) examined passages from Daniel Deronda in her paper \u27George Eliot\u27s Optics and the Solidity of Objects\u27“. Dr. Garlick premissed her account of Eliot\u27s optics on Lewes\u27s theory of vision as a psychological act which interiorizes the external world according to intuitions and ideas. Vision was used to demonstrate how ways of seeing structure the narrative as they do the self, and how, according to Eliot, the role of the novelist is to \u27make ideas incarnate\u27. The world of Daniel Deronda seems predicated on right seeing, and it is dominated by visual metaphors. Chapter 54 alone contains more repetitions of the word \u27image\u27 than anywhere else in the novel. What Dr. Garlick called Eliot\u27s \u27highly developed pattern of techniques of seeing\u27 is especially vivid in the metaphors used in Chapter 23, where Gwendolen is \u27undeceived\u27 in her ambitions to take to the stage by Klesmer, who brings together Gwendolen\u27s surroundings which she thinks she is master of, and her inward chaos. At the chapter\u27s end the physiological condition of Gwendolen\u27s eyes allows her to see mnemonic aspects of her being as if they were objects, part of a \u27departing fair’. In \u27The Message of a Magic Touch: Middlemarch and the Ether\u27 Thomas Hoy (PhD Candidate at La Trobe University) explored the epistemology of Middlemarch. The characters all fail in their attempts to find unitary theories of knowledge, yet the narrator wants to attain a suffusive sense of interconnection. Hoy reads Eliot\u27s \u27troublous, fitfully embroiled medium\u27 in terms of nineteenth-century ether theory, which satisfied the Victorians\u27 desire for monisms. It was an imaginative construct which allowed continuity between material and non-material order. It is an arduous invention like Lydgate\u27s. Like the scientific theory of ether, Eliot\u27s web is an imaginative fiction, a working theory uniting the psychological and physical structure of the world