A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

who havo selves to 10sc--ure put upon the cross. Their misfoft':j
une is that they kno,'j anci feel that their 11fe has become "a~"
lonG suicide." George Eliot bore no brief for the extraordinary
nature--for individuals like herself •••• Ofcourse it was not an
individual invention: it '1[as the aberration of the age. George
Eliot's distinction lay not so much in devising it as in coloring
and shaping it against the contours of everyday life, in
demonstrating its Glory throueh the medium of narrative. 54
A partial explanation of how this surrender of personal freedom
came to be the aberration of a whole ace is offered by',': .E. Houehton
in The Victorian Frame S!£. Mind. He al~Jo
suggests an interesting distinction
between nineteenth century morality-slanted psychology and twentieth
century amoral psychology. He mainte.ins that "the inner life of Christian
discipline is the clue to another Victorian phenomenon which now seems
so strange, the endless concern with self-improvement. Modern psychology
has led us to focus on what we are, not what we should be; and
the collapse of the relieious tradition with its fixed principles of
right and \,lrong has left us looking rather for a brosis than a ceiling
for our lives. II 55
We can see the differing emphasis between vThat we are and what we
should be in the possible interpretation of' a striking general cormnent
in Middlemarph. It emerges from an appraisal of Lydgate' s failure to
override Rosamond's will. George Eliot I'lrites that "it always remains
true that ifvrehad been greater, circumstance would have been less
strong against us." 56 'The greatness George Eliot feels that Lydgate
needs, in order to surnount the strength of the circumstances ranged
against him, is not the greatness of an autonomous self-realised individual.
It is a greatness that requires him to understand himself and
his own limitations as vlel1 as the environment that both sustains and
restricts him. In the context of George Eliot's moralistic conception
of the self, his failure in greatness signal::. a failure in moral ·worth.
But taken out of the context of t he novel and interpreted in the light