George Eliot is known as a modern moralist despite living in
Victorian Age. Other Victorians did have a moral touch but Eliot had the moral
earnestness. She wrote to inculcate moral in the people. She reshapes the
perception of the people to remould the whole structure of the society. She
believes in the presence of the moral code at the heart of the universe. She
made novels the epithet of her moral ideas. In “The Mill on the Floss”, she
accuses the dominance of the self recklessness, loose-living etc and stresses
on the absoluteness of duty, renunciation endurance, etc. Her concept of
morality is based on human values and the laws of human heart.
Eliot attacks self-dominance in her novels. Egoism is at the
center of her novels. She shows the egoistic-self coming in contrast with
otherselves and leading to tragedy. Mr. Tulliver due to his obstinacy destroys
his family. Eliot wants us to hit a balance between the interest of the self
and the otherselves. She thinks that no one can be moral unless he redeems
himself from the prison of the self and regenerates. She wants us to think for
our fellow men, pity them and have sympathy for them. Even the weakest person
should be admired. To her, temperate happiness comes by keeping constant
relationship with people.
Eliot lays emphasis on the importance of sufferings and
considers them a boon, and not a bane, for life. They help us come out of the
egoistic self and develop our personalities on the right lines. She shows her
characters suffering and learning a lot. Maggie suffers and develops into a
matured lady. Adam’s sufferings widen his sympathies and he overcomes his flaw.
Eliot wants us to maintain emotional self control. She
thinks passions should always be under the control of reason; sentimentality
annihilates us. But for the sentimentality of Mr. Tulliver, his family couldn’t
have been devastated. Austen also denounces sentimental attitude.
Eliot lays stress on the absoluteness of duty. To her, one
must never compromise on duty at any cost. Maggie remains throughout dutiful.
She disconnects her relationship with Philip for the sake of her duty towards
her family and, then, breaks away from Stephan for being dutiful to Philip and
Lucy.
Endurance and renunciation are certain for happy life.
Maggie is a symbol of both. She loved Philip but on Tom’s interference, she
endured and sacrificed herself. She never objected his resolution. Tom turned
her out, but during the flood, she went out to rescue him endangering her life.
Eliot teaches us that one has to sacrifice his interest for the sake of others,
if one wants to have a happy life.
Eliot believes in freewill. To her, everyone’s character is
in his own hands to mould into the right or wrong direction, but one must
utilize all the powers to mould it right. Matthew Arnold declared conduct as
three-fourths of life; Eliot proclaimed it as four-fourths. To her, our
activities determine whole of our future life. Activities, if assist us to be
good, are right, and, if lead us to become bad, are wrong; however, some are
neither right nor wrong rather frivolous which can't interest a serious fellow.
Eliot believes in the basic value of personality and that a
fully matured personality is highly valuable and its innate qualities cannot be
denied. To her, the vital object of all the religions is to develop the
personalities on the right lines and to the maximum. She shows her characters
learning and growing into fully developed personalities. Maggie, in the
beginning, was impulsive and ill-mannered but she finally developed into a
matured and sensible lady.
Eliot believes in the sovereign importance of ones inner
consciousness, determining ones activities and ones future as well. Maggie’s
inner consciousness was that elder brothers should be obeyed and whole of her
activities were determined by this inner consciousness.
Moral conflict lies at the root of her chief characters. The
conflict is possibly between duty and love or the ideal and the real. The
characters, in a position to do right, are tempted to do wrong. Maggie thirsts
for virtue, but she finds no way to satiate her desire. She miserably fails to
please Tom and annoys him instead. Eliot’s serious characters are envisaged
exclusively in their moral aspects. She concentrates on the moral side of human
nature and her revolt has always been intellectual, and never moral.
Eliot linked ethics with aesthetics – the driving force of
her novels. Earlier, she made her stories melodramatic. As time passed on, she
attempted stories of emotional self-control.
The above points conclude that Eliot was definitely a
moralist like other novelist. Her novels were ‘criticism of life’. However, her
approach to moralization was aesthetic, and not conservative.
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