A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

191.
Metaphoric Frame.
The world that George Eliot portrays in her novels is determined
and bound by a universal causality. Vlhat freedom there is, consists in
an adjustment of attitude and in an aoceptance of the hard necessity
laid upon us. It is our responsibility to find within the strict laws
of antecedent and consequent narrow loopholes through which it is possible
to co-operate with those same laws, and thus manipulate them to
our advantage. It is instructive to compare this situation, as George
Eliot describes it, with the example of the dog chained to the moving
chariot, a favourite analogy used by Stoic philosophers to illustrate
their understanding of the position of man in the universe. As the
chariot moves, the dog can either resist and be dragged against his will
or he can accept the inevitable, consent, and thus appear to run with
the chariot of' his own free will. For both the dog and for man, it is
a question of adopting the right attitude. One aspect of morality for
George Eliot is the capacity to recognise the reality of forces in the
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world, and to be able to co-operate with such,as further human progress
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even at the cost of saorifice to ourselves. This means learning not to
waste valuable time and energy struggling to chaqge what cannot be
changed. Knowledge of self is a correlative of knowledge of the Vlorld,
as my analysis of Lydgate and his moral failure has indicated. Ignorance
of the laws is no excuse or protection as transpires very blatantly in
the story of Gwendolen Rarleth who, in fact, is the "single lot" of the
following quotation. It is her "mistaken soul" which is being precipitated
on destruction. nAnd looking at life parcel-wise, It George Eliot
asks us, "in the growth of a single lot, who having a practised vision
may not see that ignoranoe of the true bond between events, and false