A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

188.
of more recent psychological theories of indivic1uation (-lung), selfactualisation
(Maslow), or learning to be free (Carl Rogers), this
statement of George Eliot could serve as a warning against.loss of autonom;y
and a submergence in the banal. Greatness in these terms is not the
achieving of fame or notoriety but is defined as a capacity to keep on
striving (in the Goethean sense celebrated in the character of Faust).
It expresses the refusal to be at the beck and call of countless small
and trivial circumstances, the refusal to accept anonymity and mediocrity.
But such an apotheosis of psychic strength, of the separate individuality
of her characters is not for Geo~gg
Eliot. Calvin Bedient suggests something
of the sort when he says that "it ,vas in morality that George Eliot
believed; (gf life itsei!J in the sense of spontaneous self-expression
she was shudderingly skeptical." 57 rfe are left regretting, therefore,
that the possibilities she offers us of selfhood are so one-sided and
reductionist. Service, subwission, duty; these are the watchwords of her
novels. The self is defined and revealed to us only through relationship;
identity as identity is morally suspect and therefore the novels contain
no situations which lead to the glorification of individuality for its
ovm sake. The kind of moral absolute discussed in the chapter on moral
development operates strongly here.
George Eliot's conception of the self is undeniably authoritarian.
She allows her characters only a limited range of possibilities, and
exarts inflexible control over their freedom to do anything original.
Her "struggling erring human beings" 58 are oonstrained by a moral
absolute. In addition, they have to submit to the inexorable laws, the
"hard non-moral outward condi tiona. II 59 What effect do such preoccupations
have on George Eliott s narrative technique? Let us now discuss the
"binocular vision" 60 which results from George Eliot t s need to show both
the individual characters and the inexorable forces ranged against them.