Lourenço Motta Veiga
Starting with the title sentence: the semantics of the word ‘otherwise’ as an adverb[1], within the syntax, can mean both ‘differently’ in the sense of imagining in a totally different way and imagining in a subtly different way than we do. “Otherwise” is a word that only makes sense in the English language, thought of in an integrated way within its context: it is used as an ‘if’ or an ‘else’; it brings to mind the hypothetical question ‘and if?’ and the more peremptory assertion ‘I think differently than that’. Debra Gettelman argues that to think differently, for Austen, Dickens, Woolf and especially George Eliot (the book is divided into five chapters and three of them are dedicated to three novels by Eliot) is a matter of specific stylistic tension. A tension between the reader thinking his own thoughts regarding the novel’s described scenery and plot, and the same reader not thinking differently than the author does or wants the reader to. This is the main crux of the book: the tension between our “subjective” and sometimes outward fancies while reading a novel and the author’s otherwise subtle and sometimes richly reflected patterned intention.
