A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

39.
creature can exist in isolation. The realisation that there was constant
competition f'or territory and food led to the coining of' the phrase
"survival of the f'ittest. tI
The merging of' these basic concepts. the formation of habitual
patterns of response and the importance of environment in determining
experience. produced an evolutionary psychology which claimed that anoestral
patterns were laid down in the nervous system and accordingly
could be transmitted f'rom one generation to the next. We are thuB born
with fixed tendencies which dispose us to act in certain ways. On the
surface this may seem to be a return to a belief in the theor.y of
innate ideas but writers such as Lewes and Spencer stressed the experiential
origin of these inherited tendencies. The learning theories of
the association psychology still apply; they have just been set further
back in time so that it is not we ourselves but our ancestors, whether
animal or human, remote or proximate, who have learnt responses to situations.
and passed them on.
If we turn to George Eliot's novels, we can see very clearly that
she was familiar ,nth these different psychological developments. Association
psychology provides the theory of psychological determinism and
governs George Eliot's conception of how to delineate systematically a
character's moral growth or decline. The emphasis, on environment. or
"medium, n becomes increasingly important in the novels. Middlemarch,
for instance, vdth its sub-title. ! Stud~ ~ Provincial Life, can be
regarded as a socioloq~cal document. The tenets of evolutionary psycnt1'tt\\
ology appear in two(\late works, ~ SpaniSh Gyps~ and Daniel Deronda.
The next three sections offer more substantial evidence of the relationship
between the mid-oentury psychological assumptions and the
novels of George Eliot.