A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

60.
introduced into the novel and do not detract from her main preoccupation,
the treatment of individual lots. George Eliot picks up the same web
image as an analogue to the novel in the Finale when she warns us that
"the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even
web. II 7
If George Eliot has the sense that, in v.rritine; a novel, she is unravelling
a complex web, we will scarcely be surprised to discover that
her method of presenting character ShOV1S a similar awareness of complexity.
As early as ~ ~ ~ ~ Floss, which, as I have indicated,
provides us with the first example of her "ecological II 8 or "organicist It 9
approach to character, George Eliot dismisses the notion that out fate
is dependent only on our character. ''You have knol'm Maggie a long while, II
she tells us, II and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her
history, which is a thing hardly to be predicted even from the completest
knowledge of her characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not
created entirely from within. tCharacter,~"says
questionable aphorisms, tcharacter is destiny. t
Novalis, in one of his
But not the whole of
our destiny. II 10 And to emphasise this point more fully George Eliot
provides us with a different set of circumstances for the play Hamlet
and a different possible ending.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and
we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had
lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early de~l,th,
we can conceive Hamletts having married Ophelia, and got through
life with a reputation of sanity, not~~thstanding many soliloquies,
and some moody sarcasms towards the fair daughter of Polonius, to
say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law. 11
Different circumstances produce different effects and no-one can
entirely esca~ from the pressure of ~cternal
conditions. In the concluding
section of Middlemarch, George Eliot says of Dorothea that
IIthere is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not
greatly determined by what lies out~ide
it." 12 Dorothea., she ~tJuggests,