A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

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GEORGE ELIOT.
Abstract:
George Eliot is undoubtedly one of our most intellectual authors.
A study of her methods of characterisation, of the kinds of choices
her characters confront, and of the solutions offered for the various
moral dilemmas discussed in the novels, reveals the basic moral and
psychological assumptions she shared with her contemporaries.
Thus, the tensions generated by her attempt to reconcile a belief
in universal causality with a belief in the possibility of exercising
the .rill and therefore of being morally responsible require her to
emphasise the inexorability of the laws of antecedent and consequent
and at the same time to retain for her characters a slight measure of
freedOm of choice.
As nineteenth century psychology gradually freed itself of its
philosophical origins, it incorporated elements from biology, neurophysiology,
and sociology. George Eliot's knowledge of association
psychology is revealed by her use of the theory of psychological determinism
which governs the way in which her characters exhibit moral
ascendancy or decline. Similarly, her emphasis on the "medium" in which
a character lives relates to the mid-nineteenth century biological and
sociological stress on environment and the interdependence of an
organism with its medium. Lastly, the emergent evolutionar,y psyohology
which held that ancestral tendencies, once established in the nervous
system, were transmittable from generation to generation, becomes a
factor in two of her later works.
George Eliotts concern for the moral development of her readers
and the enlargement of their sympathies is well documented in her