A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

178.
vanity and her longing for social status are also factors in her do\vnfall.
Yet we feel that with the "trivial soul II 36 George Eliot has given her,
she is made to endure too much. The account of her wanderings in the
chapter called "The
Journey in Despair" ends with a rhetorical question,
"What will be the end?--the end of her objectless wandering, apart from
all J,.ove, caring for human beings only through her p1"'ide, clinging to
life only as the hunted wounded brute clings to it?" 37 This question
mainly describes Hetty's situation in realistic terms and emphasises her
extreme suffering. But moral emphasis is not lacking. The oomments that
she cares for others only though her pride and that she has an anxious
desire not to lose face remind us of earlier remarks about her lack of
feeling for the family who have brought her up as a daughter, and her
indifference to her young oousins. George Eliot has told us that she
has shallow roots. 38 The severance of Silas' roots almost destroys his
human personality. Hetty, likewise, loses human stature. She is compared
to a "brutel! 39 or an "animal" 40 but it is she herself who.:-haa;:,diacarded
her roots.
In various ways, then, the importance of the past and of the charaoter's
relationship with that past enters into all George Eliot's novels
as a oonstituent of selfhood. Alienation from one's fellows leads to a
breakdown of mental stability and is a depersonalising, dehumanising condition.
Health is restored or stability is maintained by the aoceptance
of a bondage and a duty towards onets fellow creatures. If the self is
defined in such social terms, it is inevitable that it vl'ill be presented
vl'ithin moral boundaries; moral and psyohological functions are seen as
inseparable in the total functioning of the self.
Ian Watt sets George Eliot firmly in the tradition of Puritan writers
with their intense moral preocoupations. Such v~iters
as Defoe, Richardson,
George Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence, he claims,