LAUSR

Abstract:In an effort to recover the extensive cross-fertilization between literary and visual representation in the Victorian period, I discuss the possible influence of John Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50) on George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). Bringing to bear on this connection the discourses of art criticism, evolutionary science, the higher criticism, and aesthetic theory, I see the significance of this influence in terms of what it tells us about mid-century Realism’s radical dissent from traditional representations of, among other things, women, religion, and the working classes. At the heart of this dissent—and of the outraged reactions to Millais’s painting—is the role of the flawed human body.