A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

87.
Moral Development.
A belief in the possibility of moral growth is fundamental to
George Eliot's thought. It underpins the compromise she reached between
necessitarianism and a belief in the power to "will strongly."
uses the psychological assumptions of the mid-nineteenth century in
order to depict the moral growth or decline of her charaoter:;.'Any
attempt to understand the complexity of her moral position requires
us to range very widely and disouss eighteenth "century moral philosophers
such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Hume, Balguy and Price,
nineteenth-century scientists, moral philosophers and sociologists
like Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, Herbert SpenQ.er, Auguste Comte
and G. H. Lewes, as well as the humanist ethical writer, Ludvng
Feuerbach. If George Eliot had been willing to practise "cerebral
hygiene" 2 like Comte, and to a certain extent like Spence:r, it would
---, '---
stead I am forced to take her as the centre of a set of radiating
have been considerably easier to give an abstract of her position. In-
spokes. These spokes, Hume or Darwin or Feuerbach, for example, may
themselves have very little in common. But they all converge on the
central pivot of her consciousness and our understanding of that consciousness
.madiated thropgh her letters, articles, and novels. In a
defence of Daniel Deronda., she wrote that she meant "everything in
the book to be related to everything else there." 3 The same statement
could equally well apply to her moral thought, so that any suggestion
of a chronological or a linear progression is erroneous. Once
again I am moving from an account of her thought which is general and
abstract to an account of individual novels and individual characters
within those novels. The current analysis is concerned with how George
1
She