Violence, Temptation, and Narrative in George Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance”

Margaret Homans has written of George Eliot’s early fiction, Not only generalizing mid-Victorian middle-class qualities to other classes but also projecting them backward in time, Eliot’s early novels universalize the British middle class and, in so doing, align themselves with other efforts to consolidate middle-class hegemony in the nineteenth century. Eliot, having internalized middle-class norms, universalizes the middle class by making peculiar characteristics appear natural, generically..