Book Description

George Moore's critics have been more than usually content to restrict their comments on his work to straightforward "influence" studies, seeing him as a mere cipher, a slate upon which all the trends of his time were written. Such criticism tends to reduce Moore's early novels, in particular, to mere pastiches, collections of borrowed passages, and generally reveals more about the originals than about the works themselves. This thesis attempts to examine the artistic value, without neglecting the "influential" value, of the three realistic novels of Moore's early period: A Mummer's Wife (1885), A Drama in Muslin (1886) and Esther Waters (1894). These three novels are fine works of art in their own right, quite apart from what they reveal about the cross-currents of literary influence between France and England near the end of the nineteenth century. A Mummer's Wife is a complex and powerful literary creation as well as the first English novel to display the influence of French naturalism; A Drama in Muslin is a richly-textured Victorian "social" novel as well as the first English novel to display the influence of French symbolism; and Esther Waters is an almost perfect blend of naturalism into the Victorian tradition to produce a novel which is both "modern" and a fine instance of English realism. This study shows, among other things, that Moore was closer to the English fictional tradition than has been generally supposed, that even in the first part of his novel-writing career he modified Zola's naturalistic formula in complex and subtle ways, that he could write a successful Victorian "society" novel complete with a sympathetic omniscient narrator, and that all three of these novels (which have female main characters, a fact which has interesting feminist implications) are comparable in artistic quality to many better-known Victorian novels. Such an independent assessment of A Mummer's Wife, A Drama in Muslin and Esther Waters is needed both to demonstrate the artistic strengths of these hitherto-neglected novels, and to place George Moore in the literary context he demands.