A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

that come vlith the revelation of his Jewish heritar.;e.
When hi 5· mother, driven by the avenging Furies, reveals to him the
secret of his Jewish birth, he does not just passively accept his heritage.
It brings with it, for him, an identity, a passionate identification
with his ancestral people and a willing assumption of any obligations
or duties that belong to the fact of his being born a Jew. He declares to
his mother, "'I consider it my duty--it is the impulse of my feeling--
65
to identify myself, as far as possible, "lith my hereditary people.' \I
Ji'ar from feeling shackled by his recognition of his new duties, "he
came back with what was better thc'1n freedom--with a duteous bond. 1I
66 His
path is the opposite in that sense to Gwendolen's; where she is shown
the futility of struggling to escape from any such "duteous bandit and
of 'wanting to declare her separateness from all such moral obligations,
Deronda is lost and adrift because he lacks the sense of purpose, as
he defines it, 1Isome social captainship, vvhich coula. come to 1lii~
duty, ancl not be striven for as a personal prize. II 67
as a
Duty can be seen, therefore, to govern both their lives, and their
final readiness to accept their obligations, eagerly in the case of
Deronda, and more reluctantly in the case of Gwendolen, reveals to us
their capacity for moral grovrth. It is not just that George Eliot in
her novels creates a morftl scale related to the ,question of duty; duty
seen as something we must perform; gladly and vvillingly if possible,
but vlith the assistance of extern'l law until such time as "duty and
love have united. II 68 Duty provides a conunitment, a pertisanship, but
what 3eems to be more important, it frees the person from the necessity
of making difficult decisions "lithout any real motivation; for example,
Deronda's fear of having lito make an arbitrary seJ:ection where he felt
no preponclerance of clesire," 69 or Romola t 3 awareness of "that burden
of choice whIch presses with heaVier and heavier weight ','[hen claims