A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

152.
way with Comte t s dogmatic assertion that no one has in any case any
82
right but that of doing .his.duty ......
but she .comes perilously close to
it. Deronda t s mother, dying paini'ully of what is probably cancer, in
keeping with the poetic justice so curiously out of place in a novel
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of such psychological realism, cries out passionately; '~1I11 had a'
right to be free. I had a right to seek my freedom from a bondage that
I hated. • II 84 But events are against her, or more accurately George
Eliot arbitrates against her. The acceptance or rejection of duty, as
we have seen, provides a sort of moral barometer, an indicator of a
character's moral growth and once we have decided where the characters
fit on this finely calib~at
scale we can predict broadly if not in
detail what "lill happen to them.
Whether we agree, tllen, with Ilhggie I s decision to reject Stephen, or
feel that Romola sacrifices herself needlessly in her caring for Tessa
and Tito's children, or that Deronda's eager embracing of his Jewishness
is quixotic or dangerously fanatical, we cannot escape the conclusions
that George Eliot puts before us. Given her premises, the conclusions
follow inexorably. We are shown no range of alternatives, only the
Itbarrenness of a fastidious egoism ••• where a fitful impulse springs
here and there conspicuously rank amid the general weediness." 85
Individualism equals egoism and is suspect, but unf'ortunately this
means that originality, creativity, and eccentricity are likewise suspect.
In all? ter discussion of George Eliot • s concept of self:. I will
examine such characters as Dorothea Brooke, Felix Holt:. and Daniel
Deronda in order to show that their claims to originality are still
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closely confined wi thin the "ordinary wirework of social forms. It 86 Ji.nd,
as I indicated earlier, Romola may have achieved marDI stature but she
is no rebel. She accepts and protects the status quo. In a George
Eliot novel, we observe the process of moral gro'l·;th but the path is