A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

85.
never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy mysterious
moanings of its intricate structure that, under the right touch,
gives music. Something like that, I think, has been my experience.'
50
The course of Deronda's life, as he himself accepts, has been
shaped by this ever-present, but inarticulate yearning. The experiences
of his politically active Jewish ancestors have laid dovm in his nervous
system, tendencies and dispositions, which make it impossible for him
to assuage his restlessness without acknowledging his ancestry and
committing himself' to the cause of Jewish nationalism. The passage I
have just quoted provides a very succint description of the specialised
aspects of evolutionary psychology which George Eliot used to provide a
framework for Deronda's search for "some social captainship, which would
come to Chi~ as a duty, and not be striven for as a personal prize." 51
This completes my account of mid-century psy~hological
assumptions
and the relationship they bear to the novels of George Eliot. She
adapted and refined the learning-by-association of the school of association
psychology, utilised ecological theories and the concept of
~edium and converted far her purposes the tenets of evolutionary psychology.
Ii' she had lived to vlitness the new psychology oi' Sigmund Freud,
we can well imagine that she would have f'ruitfully adapted his theories
for her presentation of character. Her awareness.of the unconscious is
already manifest in the following description of Gwendolen Harleth. She
tells us that "there is a great deal of unmapped country within us which
would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and
storms. tI 52 Angus Wilson indicates the shortcomings of the mid-nineteenth
century, pre-Freudian psychology whioh provided the parameters within
which George Eliot established and defined her characters. He comments
on its failure to encompass greater depths; of psychological analysis.
IIIf we look again at George Eliot's analysis of Lydgate or Rosamond ar