A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

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reject Stephen, because it is totally in keeping with her years of longing
af:t;er "perfect goodness, II 49 effeotively disguises from us at first
that her habit of self-renunciation constrains her to perform her act of
moral courage.
This analysis has revealed that we are asked to approve Maggie for
something she cannot help but do, and that George Eliot herself feels a
vestigial uneasiness about her treatment of her heroine. Maggie is the
only one of George Eliot's morally ascending characters whose presentation
contains elements of psychological determinism, even if she is not
depicted entirely in a straightline, cause and effect way. The fact that
George Eliot rejects this technique for showing the upward movement of
her characters after The Millon the Floss supports ~ contention that
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she recognised its limitations.
George Eliot converted the learning theories of the school of as sociation
psychology into a technique for demonstrating character change.
This technique works extremely well as a means of revealing the successive
stages by which a character morally degenerates. But when it is used
to depict the moral growth of a character, it introduces a contradiction.
We are meant to feel that Maggie chooses to reject Stephen because of
the years she has spent '·longing for perfect goodness, " 50 in the same
< 51
way that Dorothea, in Middlemarch, yearns for the "perfect Right, It
subdues her own pain and jealousy, and visits RoSamond for the second
time. We have seen, however, that Maggie cannot help her choice, because
her years of practising submission make it impossible for her to assert
herself. It therefore comes as no surprise that George Eliot rejected
this technique in her presentation of the moral growth of her later
charaoters. If moral deoline is characterised by a narrowing of focus,
a rigidity and a stubborn egoism, then we can expect that moral aware-