A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

231.
plains to her fiance,
Silva, it is fate. 60
Great Fate has made me heiress of this woe.
In this way George Eliot creates an iron restraint on ~edal~ and
Deronda by identifying duty with ancestral heritage. Duty is one of
George Eliot's constitutive categories, one of the encoded messages of
her novels by means of which she cues her readers in their assessment of
a character's worth. To refuse the mantle of ancestry now that it is oompounded
with duty would be to falloff badly on George Eliot t s moral
scale.
Let us now examine in some detail Deronda' s situation prior to the
revelation of his birth to see whether the two concepts are in faot so
tightly woven that he is left with virtually no choice at all.Harvey's
suggested formula for deciding about the amount of freedom granted to
a.n.v character is useful again here: what sort of chooser he is and what
range of choices is offered. 61 Of Gwendolen and her decision to marry
Grandcourt we are told that ltshe seemed .to herself to. be,. at'te.r, all, .only
drifted towards the tremendous decision:-but drifting depends on some-.'·
thing besides the currents, when the sails have been set beforehand." 62
We now need to see whether Deronda' s sails are similarly pre-set in the
direction of ancestral duties.
Deronda first enters our awareness as the ironio spectator of
Gwendolen's suocess and then loss at the gambling table. Regrettabl~ we
do not witness his quixotic deoision to redeem her necklace. It provides
the action-which binds these two characters together and illustrates the
same interfering assumption of moral superiority that Felix Holt shows
towards Esther Lyon. But the impulse to rescue is very strong in
Deronda's nature, and constitutes, in fact, what George Eliot would refer
to as a ''bias'' of his personality. We see this in his almost in-