A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

4.
assume a strong possibility that she also influenced them indiDectly.
Besides, when we read such diverse works as F. D. Maurice's The
Conscience, Lectures .!2!!. Casuistry, (1868) --a copy of which he sent to
George Eliot whom he greatly admired-- and F. H. Bradley's Ethical
Studies (1874), we recognise certain similarities. It is more profitable
in such a case to assume that nineteenth-century thinkers held in
common a certain set of assumptions and preoccupations (and, as a result,
shared a common moral disco'U'se) than to try to establish that one author
influenced another. The basic problem for a philosophical approach to
George Eliot is that if we concentrate on her ideas we risk ignoring the
novels as novels, by disregarding the complex patterning of characterisation
and plot, and the blend of irony and compassion in her portrayal of
individual human beings.
A more profitable critical approach to George Eliot as a novelist can
be categorised as formalistic. Critics of this persuasion, such as Barbara
Hardy, Reva Stump, and W. J. Harvey, treat George Eliot's novels as complete,
self-contained worlds. Instead of concentrating on the relationship
between her ideas and nineteenth-century thought in general, they focus
f,
almost exclusively on the subtle interplay within the novels. Whereas a
philosophical analysis of George Eliot may lose sight of the texture of
her novels, formalist criticism which ignores or discounts the intellectual
background may be equally distorting. Patricia Beer, for example, extols
the charaoter of Fedalma in ~ Spanish Gypsy as the one instance in which
George Eliot allows her heroine to break out of the traditional womanly
role and take on the leadership of the Zincali. As this is the sole instance
of such female heroism, Patricia Beer is forced to conclude that George
Eliot permits such behaviour in a poem whereas she does not countenance
it in a novel which would roach a wider audience. 9 However, a study of
the psychological assumptions of the period reveals that in this poem,