Q. 3. Examine Dorethea.

s widowed condition in the light of the issues raised by the ͞Woman Ques-

tion͟ in Middlemarch.

Ans. It is often believed that George Eliot had rejected religion. Even Lord David Cecil says that she was not

religious. But it is not visualised that what she had rejected was doctrinal Christianity and not

religion as such. And very aptly says David Daiches– Before George Eliot the English novel had been almost entirely

the work of those whose primary purpose was to entertain. Not that earlier novelists had lacked moral purpose;

Richardson taught the passions to move at the command of virtue, and something similar might have been said of

Goldsmith in his Vicar of Wakefield. Of Thackeray s moral feeling, we are never left long in doubt and Dickens, too,

worked within a clearly suggested framework of values. Nevertheless, no English novelist from Defoe to Thackeray

could have been called a man of great philosophical power and unusual erudition; their presentation of the human

scene was never in any degree conditioned by the depth of their intellectual penetration or the profundity of their

moral speculations still less by the vastness of their learning. Their job was to construct stories moving, edifying,

entertaining, or something of all three–not to exhibit new ideas. George Eliot was the first English novelist to move in

the vanguard of the thought and learning of her day, and in doing so added new scope and dignity to the English

novel.

Thus, she says in one of her essays– The best minds that accept Christianity as a divinely inspired system,

believed that the great end of the Gospel is not merely the saving but the educating of men s souls, the creating within

them of holy dispositions, and the perpetual enhancing of the desire that the will of God–a will synonymous with

goodness and truth–may be done on earth.

To quote David Daiches again, George Eliot was one of the Victorian sages as well as a novelist, one of the

those who worried and thought and argued about religion, ethics, history character, with all the concern felt by those
most receptive to the money currents of new ideas flowing in on Victorian thought and most sensitive to their

implications. A sage whose moral vision is most effectively communicated through realistic fiction was unusually at

that time when George Eliot began to write. If it has become less unusual since, that is because George Eliot by her

achievement in fiction permanently enlarged with scope of the novel.

George Eliot says .

In Janet s repentance, the last of the three Scenes of Clerical Life– Evangelicalism had brought into palpable

existence and operation in Milby society that idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the

mere satisfaction of self, which is to the moral life what is the addition of a great central ganglion to animal life.

In fact, she did not reject outright any form of religion and accepted the utility or benefit of each in its own

sphere. She felt that Evangelism taught that there was a divine work to be done in life, a rule of goodness higher than

the opinion of their neighbours; and if the notion of a heaven in reserve for themselves was a little too prominent yet

the theory of fitness for that heaven consisted in purity of heart, in Christ-like compassion, in the subduing of selfish

desires .... The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence. And this

latter precious gift was brought to Milby by Mr. Tryan and Evangelicalism.

We should mark with interest what E.A. Baker says, George Eliot possessed a singularly wide and reflective

interest, a union of keen sensibility with a thoroughly tolerant spirit, a desire to appreciate all the good hidden under the

commonplace and narrow, lively sympathy with all the nobler aspirations, a vivid insight into the perplexities and

delusions which beset even the strongest minds, brilliant powers of wit, at once playful and pungent, and a rather

melancholy view of life.

It should be borne in mind that George Eliot s conception of Duty is Wordsworthian, and the epigraph of Chapter

80 in Middlemarch is the stanza from his Ode to Duty :

Stern lawgiver, yet thou dost wear

The God-head s most benignant grace :

Nor know we anything so fair

As is the smile upon thy face :

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,

And fragrance in thy footing treads :

Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong :

In a letter she wrote to Madame Bodichon in 1862–

I have too profound a conviction of the efficiency that lies in all sincere faith and spiritual blight that comes with

no-faith, to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact I have very little sympathy with Freethinking as a class,

and have lost all interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only to know ..... the lasting meaning that

lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now.

R. Brimley Johnson refers to the ethical truths in her novels and to her living picture of Victorian domesticity.

Like her great feminine predecessors, she was realistic and parochial; but Charlotte Bronte s first bitterly proclaimed

views on a few passionate topics became with George Eliot a definite philosophy universally applied. She insisted that

women should dare to think for themselves, establish their own moral standards, follow their own conscience, and

even demand man s acquiescence. No writer of fiction has illustrated with greater power the ultimate ethical truths of

life, the tragic pathos of continual backsliding and the external significance of the choice between good and evil. Her

passionate faith, indeed, called for more than reason could give to doubt. Her message was not final. But she left an

unrivalled revelation of much that our forefathers were feelings, thinking, and striving for a living picture of Victorian

domesticity, the farmer, the tradesman and their womenfolk.

Regarding man s acquiescence to a woman s will, there can be no better example than Lydgate s final bending

to the nature of Rosamond in Middlemarch when he had to abandon Middlemarch according to her will, abandoning

all his altruistic ambitions and despite Dorothea s assurance to go the whole hog to champion his cause.

J.W. Beach says in this connection: What is most striking in George Eliot s ethical treatment of character is her

strong sense of continuity within the moral life, her studies in the progressive improvement or deterioration of character

as present deeds determine future action (as with Romola and the Tito Melema in her laboured historical novel), and

his often stated doctrine of moral determinism ... of, the irreversible laws within and without, a knowledge of which,

governing the habits, becomes morality, and, developing the feeling of submission and dependence, becomes religion.

It is to be noted that there is discernible strain of humanism in all her works. Thus she says, My own experience

and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by degree in which we

sympathise with individual suffering and individual joy.

She frankly says about her works– My books have for their main bearing a conclusion ... that the fellowship

between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions
of what is not man ; and that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a

goodness entirely human. ...

George Eliot s humanism is vividly objectified in his view of art when she says– If art does not enlarge men s

sympathies, it does nothing morally. I have heart-cutting experience that opinions are a poor cement between human

soils, and the only effect I long to produce by my writings is, that those who read them should better able to imagine

and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything, but the broad fact of being struggling,

erring, human creatures.

According to Elto, She is apt to Miss the spirit of. Life itself this, according to F.R. Leavis, is an absurd

judgement. By the side of George Eliot, says Leaves, Meredith–appears as a shallow exhibitionist and Hardy as a

provincial manufacturer of gauche and heavy fictions that sometimes, have corresponding virtues. George Eliot

makes Leavis think of Tolstoy who was pre-eminent in getting the spirit of life itself. George Eliot, of course, is not

as transcendentally great as Tolstoy, but she is great, and great in the same way .... of George Eliot it can be said that

her best work has a Tolstoy an depth and reality.

Beyond an iota of doubt, she is able to see beyond what some hypocritical methodists cannot realize when she

sees in religion a faith which was a rudimentary culture, which linked their thoughts with the past, lifted their

imagination above the sordid details of their narrow lives, and suffused their souls with the sense of pitying, loving,

infinite Presence, sweet as summer to the houseless needy.

We should mark carefully what Daiches says– Taking as her text the words God, Immortality, Duty, she

pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second and yet how

peremptory and absolute the third. This mixture of idealism and astringence, which may sound rather terrifying in

straight philosophical discourses, can be a great source of strength, when transmitted into terms of characters doing

and suffering in a novel.

George Eliot is particularly strict about her concept of duty. This what Mrs Farebrother says to Mr. Lydgate in

Middlemarch,

Keep hold of plain truths, and make everything square with them. When I was young .... there was never any

question of right or wrong.

She (Eliot) clarifies her position in one her letters–

We cannot be utterly blind to results of duty, since that cannot be duty which is not already judged to be for
human good.

We should especially mark the words duty ...for human good.

We can specifically ponder over situation when Caleb Garth in Middlemarch acts strictly according to his

conscience and says, That signifies nothing–what other men would think. I ve got a clear feeling inside me and that

I shall follow.

Even Lydgate for quite some time remains strict to follow his conscience till he has to bend to Rosamond s

nature.

Referring to the ethical character of her fiction, Cross says– George Eliot gave prose fiction a substance which

it had never had before among any people. That her ethical system has logical inconsistencies we may admit. While

intending to keep close to empiricism, she really admits transcendentalism in what she says about the inner and better

self, and the command of duty, which she at least once calls a divine voice .... Her moral discernments, often clothed

in the language of positivism, are nevertheless embedded everlastingly in the inherited thought of the ages. With a

precision and a minuteness never possible before her time, she worked out the Hebrew formula, that they who saw

the wind, shall reap the whirl wind, which was likewise the Greek idea, that when a wrong is done, the Eumenides,

daughters of earth and darkness will awake from their sleep and avenge it.

George Eliot is the first English novelist to practise the deliberate exploration into the inexorable continuity of

cause and effect in the human behaviour. She was not content to see life as it was without knowing about the forces

which control the human behaviour. In this respect as Elizabeth Drew points out, George Eliot is the first truly

psychological novelist. According to Lettice Cooper, Her analysis of motives is penetrating and she has more

understanding than any English novelist writing before Freud of the undercurrents of mind and heart.

Her deep insight into complexities of human mind is really remarkable when we know that had not the advantage

of the knowledge of Freud as the modern novelist have in this respect her modernity is astonishing. She herself wrote

to Blackwood, My artistic bent is directed not all to the presentation of emotionally irreproachable characters but to

the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way so as to call forth a tolerant judgement, pity and sympathy.

Thus her characters are neither good, nor bad. She presents the mixed condition of things which is the sign not the

hopeless confusion, but of struggling order.

She was greatly influenced by Comte s sociological philosophy. She wrote in one of her letters, No one has

more clearly seen the truth. The past rules the present, lives in it and we are the growth and outcome of the past.
W.L. Cross thus describes her ethical creed, Her great law of conduct is the act and its consequences.

Character, in her views, is not fixed; it is an evolution. We have, as it were, two selves. From the one comes the voice

of duty proclaiming that our salvation lies in daring rectitude, in meeting bravely every circumstance of life; from the

other comes the insinuating voice of passion and egoism, which if heeded leads to destruction, which self shall be

triumphant rests with ourselves. By our deeds we are saved or lost; by them we create in our own hearts an inferno

or a paradise.

Q. 4. Analyse the relationship between the Cosmic and the Comic in A Passage to India.

Ans. There is a definite sense in which in this text there is equal presentation of material that could be considered

comic as well as as cosmic. There is definitely lots of comic material in the collision between West and East as

depicted in the attempts of the British to understand, or not understand, the Indians they live alongside and rule.

A Passage to India was more than ten years in the making, and Forster often despaired of completing it. Begun

in 1913, shortly after he had visited India for the first time, it hung fire after the early chapters. The impact of the First

World War and the experience of working in Alexandria changed his view of the world in important respects–after it,

he said, he trusted people less and was quicker to impute cynicism-and it took him some time to catch up with such

changes. When he returned to India in 1921 he took the pages of his unfinished manuscript with him, only to find that,

as he said later, as soon as they were confronted with the country they purported to describe, they seemed to wilt and

go dead. ... The gap between India remembered and India experienced was too wide' (Introduction, p. 14; see above,

p. 124). Finally, encouraged by Leonard Woolf, he completed it, but with a feeling of relief rather than triumph:

I am so weary, not of working, but of not working: of thinking the book bad and so not working, and of not working

and so thinking it bad: that vicious circle. Now it is done and I think it good. (p. 19)

The discussion on A Passage to India as a politicai fiction has for long been dominated by the followers of a

mimetic theory of literature, whose quest for empiricism tied to didacticism is achieved when they find the narrative

content to be an authentic portrayal of India and a humanist critique of British-Indian relations during the last decades

of the Empire. Since the accession of critical methods concerned with representation as an ideological construct, and

not a truthful, morally inspired account of reality, however, the politics of the novel have demanded another mode of

analysis, where the articulations of the fiction are related to the system of textual practices by which the metropolitan

culture exercised its domination over the subordinate periphery; within this theoretical context, A Passage to India

can be seen as at once inheriting and interrogating the discourses of the Raj. In common with other writings in the
genre, this novel enunciates a strange meeting from a position of political privilege, and it is not difficult to find

rhetorical instances where the other is designated within a set of essential and fixed characteristics: Like most

Orientais, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy (xiv, 154); Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malig-

nant tumour (xxxi, 276); and so on.