Otherness and the quest for identity (an epitome of George Eliot s novels)

In the paradigm of the Victorian canon, George Eliot s corpus presents itself as the "voice of a century" that draws the contours of protrusive individuals marked by the difference of otherness. Being both an epitome of the Victorian literature and a refined prolepsis of the psychoanalytical debate over the individual s self, Eliot s novels remain pillars of the cultural and epistemological society, in which identity involuntarily appears as a biased construct. Thus, a prolegomena of psychological and psychoanalytical framework of the conceptualization of "otherness" and "identity" is firstly performed, in order to set a theoretical starting ground for the further analysis. After such a presentation, the portraits of the distinct typologies of identity are drawn from George Eliot s novels, with a focus on the feminist other, racial different and the socio-political alien of the Victorian society.