A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

205.
one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final 7
pause •••• Mr Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world ••••
And accordingly, we are invited to enter the narrow circle of t hat world
inhabited by tta small hungry shivering self. II 8 We observe his loneliness,
his despair at his unfinished scholarship, his anxious concealing of his
self-doubts, and his dread of sympathy. In ~ ~ .2!!. ~ Floss our
attitude towards Tom Tulliver is strongly influenced by our sense of outrage
at his treatment of ~ggie;
this means that we have difficulty
sympathising with his undoubted suffering and the bleak narrowing of his
life following Mr Tulli ver t s "failure. tt It is a mark of George Eliot' s
matured control that despite a similar identification with Dorothea we
are capable of feeling compassion for Mr Casaubon.Actually our identification
with Dorothea is an important aspect of our compassion for Mr
Casaubon. As she painfully comes to realise that he has "an equivalent
centre of self, It 9 we also have to reconsider our assessment of him.
Our appreciation of the fineness of Dorotheats character requires of us
an attitude of tolerant sympathy towards her husband. This is one of the
ways George Eliot seeks to enlarge the sensibilities of her readers by
inducing that sympathy which, to her, is the essential mark of the
moral sense.
Dorothea's changed perspective of Mr Casaubon is presented metaphorically
in terms of the opposition between the "hard unaccommodating .
Actual tI 10 and the blurred conception of that ac,"tual offered by the
egoistic imagination. Indeed her changed way of seeing is as much a revised
perception of herself. She recognises how far she has only herself
to blame if her idealisation of her husband has raised false expectations
in her. She realises that the "new real future which was replacing the
imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view
of Mr Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was marri ed to him,