A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

254.
stantly to the nov~ls
and to the shared mid-oentury moral and psychological
discourse~
But I have also endeavoured to provide a means of
evaluating these ideas in terms of the aotual demands of writing a
novel: the presentation of oharaoter growth and ohange, the development
of plot, the interweaving of themes, and the use of aesthetic distanoe
in the varying perspeotives offered by a oompassionate and an ironio
narrator. In this way, I have brought out both the strengths and weaknesses
of George Eliot's system of beliefs when it is applied to the
I
novels. In so far as it requires her to shift her perspective baokwards
and forwards betwe~n the inexorable laws, (the "hard unaooommodating
Actual," 2) and the individual, struggling human being, it greatly enriohes
her novels. But in other ways it militates against their free
development. Her belief in "universal causality," 3 in the effeot'of
habit as a strong determinant of oharaoter, and in the transmission of
inherited tendenoies leads her to impose restraints on the development
of her oharacters. Her moral stand also provides too rigid a set of
co-ordinates within whioh the charaoters establish themselves. Flawed
oharaoters like Gwendolen Harleth and Lydgate have spaoe within this
system, but the degenerate oharaoters die too oonveniently, and the
morally elevated charaoters appear to be granted more freedom than is
indeed the case.·· Their development is oarefully marked out within
George Eliot's moral absolutism and her hierarohical value system.
Charaoters and readers are too rigidly controlled within a world which,
no matter how internally coherent, still offers a ver.y limited range of
choices. George Eliot's system of beliefs limits the development of her
oharacters and provides too inflexible a set of parameters.