A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

Psychological Determinism.
lIConstructs l1
for the comprehension of the world are more "satis-
_ factory" if they are "characterised not by straight-line cause-effect
thinking but -by ecological thinking." 1 'fhis statement occurs in an
article, IIDarwinism and Darwinisticism" in which Morse Peckham discusses
how nineteenth~century
intellectuals assimilated the revolution­
~ ideas contained in Darwin's ~ Origin ~ Species. Obviously, he
is not talking specifically about George Eliot's novels, but his remark
becomes especially interesting when set alongside one made by a
George Eliot critic, J. Hillis Miller. He outlines the correspondence
George Eliot saw between "small- and large-scA.le structures tt which he
claims is a oontributory factor in her "rejeotion bf that straightforward
idea of single causes which had characterised, for example,
~ Bede. In Middlemarch," he continues, ''Eliot still believes in
causality, but in the psychological and social realms the causes are
2
now seen as unimaginably multiple."
I now propose to discuss the shift of emphasis detected by J. Hillis
lklller and other oritics in the light of the posstbilities suggested
by Morse Peckham. I will, therefore, endeavour to show that the progressive
awareness of oomplexity and interconnectedness apparent in the
later novels, in oomparison -with the more clear-cut, even simplistic
causal relationships traceable in the earlier novels, has a parallel
in the development of psychological theory in the nineteenth cent~.
The later Gecrge Eliot does not reject outright the simple causation
of the earlier novels; the treatment of Bulstrode, for example, offers
many similarities to the treatment of Tito Melema. It is just that she