A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

24.
system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and
the changing day." 65
In the novels we have two narrative vie-ws, the analytic and the sympathetic.
Felicia, Bonaparte comments that the treatment of Hetty Sorrel.
in ~ ~ provides the "paradigm pattern which Eliot follows through
all her subsequent novels."~he adds that "against the voice of the
analytic narrator who traces the inevitable evolution from oause to
effect, the sympathetic narrator calls for that human evaluation of the
t ; 67
events which renders Hetty s fate an object of compassion .. " In the
tension between these two narrative views lies much of the irony of the
novels. We are asked to recognise both the intransigence of the world
confronting the characters, the "hard unaccommodating Actual which has
never consulted our taste and is entirely unselect," 68 and at the same
time to feel compassion and fellovlship for those characters who fail to
see clearly, who do not take fully into account the weight of circumstances.
Later, I will deal more fully with the implications of this twofold
narrative view, with its interlocking of two planes of reality,
the subjective and the objective. vVhat, for example, does it mean in
terms of the presentation of a character like Mr Casaubon in Middiemarch?
George Eliot shifts her perspective to show him· to us in the distorting
mirror of his neighbours' sensibilities; we also see how he appears in
his own eyes and then are given an authorial overview.
This "binocular vision" 69 that she maintained in the novels, while
it is technically a projection of the philosophic conntmdrum of necessity
and free vdll, also provides a means of focussing on her belief that
the fate of any character is not dependent on either circumstanceB or
temperament, but on an interaction between the two which it may well
be too difficult to predict with any accuracy. As she tells us about