to ‘we’ (who used to call robins ‘God’s birds’), into ‘I’ musing in a wood, and out
again to ‘we’ the readers, Humanity. Third-person narrative melts into collective
autobiography and normative reflection. The tale ends in catastrophe: Maggie saves
her alienated brother Tom from a flood; they drown, reconciled in a final embrace.
The ugly duckling has turned into a swan, but must die. We are to identify with
Maggie in her stands against family prejudice and pride, and in the suffering caused
her by the mutual attraction between her and Stephen Guest, a handsome youth
engaged to her cousin. The drama is played out against the background of a ‘real’
social panorama, of painful choices between family, love and friendship. It is experi-
enced through the acute sensibility of Maggie, seen above in richly reflective mode.
The moral intelligence of the heroine-narrator’s commentary is characteristic of
George Eliot’s fiction. In the catastrophe, Maggie lays down her life for her brother,
a martyr to Christian family love. The moral is less bleak than those of Wordsworth’s
peasant tragedies,Michael and ‘The Ruined Cottage’.
Silas Marner
A Christian symbolic dimension dominates Silas Marner, The Weaver of Raveloe.
Silas, falsely accused of theft, is excluded from his Protestant sect. His solitary pursuit
of his craft makes him prosper, but one day his gold is stolen from his cottage. An
orphan whose mother has died in the snow comes to his door; in bringing her up,
he recovers happiness. This parable of redemptive love stands against a melodra-
matic narrative. The girl chooses to stay with Silas when the squire’s elder son
acknowledges that he is her true father. His younger brother’s body, found with the
stolen gold in a drained pond, reminds him of the fate of the girl’s mother, whom he
had never acknowledged. The rural comedy shrinks, and the themes play out more
darkly as the chosen situation evolves.
Romola seems a departure. In a picturesquely historical Florence, with the Medici
facing Savonarola and popular unrest, Tito, a plausible Greek, weaves an intrigue.
Romola,however, is one of George Eliot’s sorely-tried heroines who finds her
destiny in sacrifice. Noble in birth as well as character, this daughter of a blind old
scholar is tricked into marriage by Tito; who betrays her, her father, and his own
benefactor. A picture by Tintoretto is the source of Eliot’s next work, the dramatic
poem The Spanish Gypsy (1868).
After prose about Coventry, why Italy and poetry? George Eliot wrote poetry
because she felt that her writing lacked symbolic power.Silas Marner shows her
universalizing her concerns by using religious parable.Romola tries to elevate its
theme by using a Florentine setting sanctified by art and literature. The result,
however, is not grand tragedy but a historical novel based on research. The more
authentically historical such a novel, the less the use of a remote or glamorous
setting escapes the limits of documentary realism. Eliot’s research rebuilt the literal
prison she was trying to escape.
Felix Holt, the Radical is the most dispensible of the English novels, a historical
recreation of 1832, the eve of the Reform Bill. Esther chooses the austere idealist Felix
rather than Harold Transome, the heir to the estate. By an expedient device of the
Victorian stage, Esther turns out to be the true heir, and Harold’s father a mean lawyer.
Middlemarch
These experiments paved the way for Middlemarch, a major novel by any standard.
The historical canvas is very wide. The several storylines of the multiple plot are
THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVEL 303