A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

82.
of heredity, especially ir. the form of something "biologically given ll
38
as an additional determinant in the development of hL1man personality.
I have sho\'m that ivhile George Eliot acknowledged this factor, she was
far from giving too much weight to it. To overstress its importance
would be to define human personality and the possibility of human
growth in too rigid and too static terms. And for George Eliot, human
growth means, almost entirely, moral growth. However, there is an additional
aspect of this evolutionary psychology which appears in George
Eliot's later works, The Spanish G;:{.Esy and. Daniel Deron~ This is the
concept of racial memory, v:hich does impose severe limitations on a
character t S
development and the sorts of choices he can make. I will
examine it specifically in a later chapter when I discuss .George
Eliotts concept of duty, and I ,nll substant~ate
~ claim that it constitutes
a limiting factor when I examine the implications of George
Eliot's intellectual and moral position. For the moment I will give a
brief general outline of this concept as it belongs logically to this
discussion on evolutionary psychology.
George Eliot in her "Notes on The SVanish Gypsy and Traged,y in gencrall!
discusses the theme of this long poem and says that she saw "it
might be taken as a symbol of the part which is plEyed in the general
human lot by hereditary conditions in the largest sen:Je, and of the fact
that what we call duty is entirely made up of such conditions. 1I
39 In
this poem, and age-in in Daniel DeJ:"Onda., she presents us vlith characters,
Fe.ctalmaandDeronda., whose lives are defined in terms of a racial duty,
1j.0
a "hereditary'! entailed Nemesis. II roth of them spend the early part of
their lives in exile, as it were, from their hereditary people, or at
least in ignorance of their racial background. But we are led to believe
that Deronda. t s Jewishness is present to his mind as a determi!'ling factor
even before he is told of his ancestry. The consumptive visionary,