A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

68 ..
that in the onward tendency of human tr~ings
have risen above thellental
level of the generat:i!on before them, to which they have been nevertheless
tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts .. II 49 Vie may doubt wr.ether
George Eliot has succeeded in winning our sympathy for Tom or even whether
he has risen "above the mental level of the generation tl before him, but
we have no difficulty in accepting her assessment of Maggiets situation.
Earlier she has told us that it is "no wonder, when there is this contrast
between the outward and the inward, that painful collisions come of it." 50
And the painful collisions reach their climax in Maggie's return to St
Ogg's. The community judges her an outcast and rejects her; she has refused
to concede to its standards. As a child she felt that the only way
to escape opprobrium was to run away to the gypsies; there is no such
solution now. She faces a life-time of penitential efforts to be reinstated
with the whole of her world and especially with Tom. However, the
flood and the reunion with Tom dispose of her so that instead of living
a life "without opium ll 51
she succumbs, as Barbara Hardy has pointed
out, 52 to a familiar childnood fantasy. By performing deeds pi' heroism,
she wins respect and admiration.
George Eliot has shown the impossibility of Maggie's ever adapting
to her environment and even if we are diverted from a full-scale tragedy
by the apotheosis of the ending, we tend to believe George Eliot that,
given her nature and the conditions of her environment, Maggie did not
have a great deal of choice. But George Eliot herself, an intelligent,
rebellious girl,with an equally oppressive, self-richteous brother,
found an alternative means of adaptation. It is quite inforIn.:')tive to
consider the possibilities confronted by Maggie in the light of the
adaptive possibilities outlined by Morris Ginsberg in his typology of
evolution.