A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

186.
to do this; they ·willingly end freely choose •. And the two men who
choose somewhat unusual life-styles, manifest, for all that, a very
limited marginality. Political conservatism or gradualism on the one
hand and a well-heeled expedition to the Middle East on the other, do
not constitute any drastic eccentricity. The evolutionary typology I
quoted earlier from Morris Ginsberg's Evolution ~ Progress gives, as
an example of a more evolved person, one who has "more control over
and greater independence from the environment." 53 A moral absolute
that defines the self in terms of relationship, that defines psychic
well-being in moralistic terms, does not constitute an environment
where such evolved persons can test themselves. We seem to have been
offered freedom, but it turns out on a closer analysis to be a very
limited freedom. George Eliot characters are constrained and bound >'lith",
in the causal patterning of the universe, by the laws of association
that govern the way in which they build up their knowledge of the wprld
and their lcnowledge of themselves; they are hemmed in and th~arted
by
the pressures of their environment and whatever conditions it offers
for growth and change; they carry an hereditary vleight, a burden of facticity
which is not just a question of sex and age but governs their free
choices within their particular environment by "fixing" in their nervous
systems ancestral responses •. ~d lastly they are defined morally in such
a way that they· can never see themselves as acting in isolation. Separatism
is lethal; those few who advocate it in George Eliot's novels
always draw dOV'ffi on themselves the all-pervasive moral condemnation
meted out to those who do not conform for the good of society.
This reduction of the individual's claims for the good of society
is not merely a feature of George Eliot's novels. It pervades nineteenth
centur$pocial and moral thinking. Calvin Bedient strongly contends that
fn George Eliot's world, submission can be made sweet by affection
and easy by dullness. But the intelligent and passionate--those