A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

199 ..
Antigone, fo:~'
instance, where the heroine refuses tc submit. The protagonists
of the greatest tragedies may be reduced
necessity but they do not consent to their reductior.~
why they continue to fight, however uselessly,
the dire hand of
An explanation of
their lots is
offered by George Steiner who writes that there
:.'/'l tragedy "a v.rildness
and a refusal running against the grain of rrdd{le-class sensibility ..
Tragedy, II he maintains, "springs from
conditions of life. It carries "lith it the
of disorder, for
-,
all tragic poets have something of the rebelliousness of Antigonoolt I
If freedom and rebelliousness, as ~~cY~nnon and
Steiner suggest,
are constituents of tragi'i(ly, then George Eliot;' s novels do not deserve
such a title~ But this is not to deny the umloubted elements of
many of the novels. Gwendolen Harleth ':: story
the possibility
of tragic rebelliousness. But Gwendolen ~s
purged of her defiance. Her
protest against the conditions of her 7.ife i.s shown
"moral stupidity"; 8 her final resigna.'-:ion~
evidence of her
her state of "peaceful
q
melaLcholy" J is proof of her moral grr,vrth" There if:' as 'I{ell in
Hetty Sorrelis bewildered journey. The intellectual
moral failures
in Middleme2'2h; show a tragic waste of potential "I'/b.:' -:;1'. ma.ny contemporary
readers found deeply depressing. This . 8
rem:i.niscel1' of the distinction
between the "painful It and the "tragic II offt::,;~ea
by lv:thew Arnold., The
"painful" in his terms, i3 where there is t!everyth~ l?, to be
O
no th t - d I' 10
~ng 0 De one.
George Eliot's novels may not be , but ~:iley undoubtedly
give off a m,:Hancholy resonance. She d" d not regar,':. ;'jerself as a pess-
-'l ~
imiat, preferring the description, mel:i,orir,t" " HQ·"7er, her gradualism
and her insistence on th", inexorabilit;> of eonsequc:J;es produce ~~.
V