A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

246.
for upper middle class society where there is a skittish wife to be
brought under control. George Eliot's insistence that Grandcourt is
evil has been deplored. This shows us that we need to be on our guard
in case George Eliot's directions to the reader by way of these encoded
messages prevent us from exercising our own judgement in the case.
With such morally reprehensible characters as Tito Melema and Henleigh
Grandcourt, we need to be alert for George Eliot's cues and reserve our
own judgement. I have already indicated with regard to Romola how we
are led to accept that the heroine is in the right in her assessment of
her husband's character because we have been previously informed of his
baseness to his father, which she is ignorant of. She justifiably feels
betrayed at Tito's sale of her father's library and in her anger, she
turns on him and accuses him of betraying someone else. She does this
on the flimsiest of evidence. She has felt that he is concealing from
her his true motives in wearing the defensive armour and she has seen
Piero di Cosimo' s painting of a Tito blanched with fear and clutched by
an escaping prisoner, whose connection with her husband she has no way
of knowing. We accept that she should thus accuse him on such scant
evidence because we alreadJr know of his relationship to Baldasarre. We
forget to allow for the fact that we are seeing him through Romola t s unflinching
gaze. The rigidity of her moral integr~ty is partly what destroys
him. He is understandably repelled by the harshness of her judgement
and their relationship is permanently damaged. If George Eliot had
intended him to be redeemed by Romola's larger nature, he would have
been brought to confess openly his misdemeanours.
In the same way we see Grandcourt often through Gwendolen's eyes and
accept, as a result, that he is as cruel as she makes him out to be. Because
she is scared of him, we accuse him of sadism. We do, however, know
that he likes to exert power (as we see very graphically in the scene