Discuss George Eliot as a moralist.
Q 8:
Discuss George Eliot as a moralist.
Or
“Adam Bede” is dramatization of ultimate best in
man. What is your opinion?
Or
Adam Bede learns through pains. His
knowledge of suffering makes him the man of high standing. Do
you agree?
Answer:
In her youth, George Eliot came
in contact with intellectual figures of her age. When her vision widened, she
lost faith in Orthodox (Christianity, and after that she could not believe in
the supernatural concepts and immortality of human soul throughout her
life. For this reason she has been accused of being agonistic and atheist.
But she never appears as an atheist in her stories, only her approach to
religion is intellectual. She could not believe in dogmatic parts of religion,
but she had faith in its ethical preaching. She was concerned with only moral
aspects of religion. Her standards of right and wrong were exactly those of the
puritans. Her spiritual values were based on human values, not on the Bible.
She believes that anyone leading a virtuous life enjoys real happiness and is
essentially contented with life. Some critics have claimed that
George Eliot
could not be a moralist, as she herself
was immoral in her life. She was living with Lewis without marriage. But, if we
consider through the views of human values, she did not commit any immoral
act. Lewis’ wife had left him and
George Eliot
wanted to console him and second
marriage is not allowed in Christianity. Like Fielding, Eliot also wrote with
definite purpose, which was to “inject the
moral”
into people. However, her concept of
morality was quite different from that of Fielding. In fact, she wanted to vex or
reshape the consciousness of the individuals to reform the whole society. For
this reason, she used her novels as a platform for moral preaching. She gave
psychological insight of her characters, thus making them more lifelike and
acceptable. She thought them her morality through their sufferings and
experiences. Her moral belief is clear from her following statements:
“Our deeds determine us as much as
we determine our deeds”.
Egoism is the central idea of her
novels. She describes how an egoistic creates problems for himself as well as
for others. In
“Adam Bede”, she strikes at the
feudal egoism in the character of Arthur . He wanted to
overcome his flaws but it was an inborn quality, which brought the catastrophe
in the novel.
George Eliot stresses on the
balance between the interests of the self and that of the other selves. She
thinks that no one can be moral, unless he breaks the prison of the self. She
wants people to look upon the sufferings of the people around them and pity
them. She feels that even the weakest person has something to be admired.
According to her, no one get ultimate happiness unless he maintains content
relationship with human beings.
She believes that sufferings are
essential for the development of personality, because sufferings mould a man.
Through the medium of sufferings an egoistic matures. She shows her characters
suffers and learns a lot.
Adam’s sympathies are widened
through his sufferings and his feelings of self-righteousness gradually lessen.
Hetty also regenerates and matures through
her sufferings. She wants people to maintain emotional self-control. Passions
should always be under the control of reason, as sentimentality destroys man
and brings his downfall.
In “Adam Bede” Arthur’s and Hetty’s
sentimentality brought their tragedy and to which there was no remedy. Eliot in
her stories lay stress on absoluteness of
duty. To her, one should not compromise on duty at any cost. Hetty does not care for her
duty towards her uncle and aunt and in her vanity goes far away. That’s
why she suffers. Eliot thinks that endurance and renunciation are necessary for
happy and successful life.
Adam remains unsatisfied,
when he is rash and intolerant but becomes calm and peaceful when he
regenerates and through his sufferings and learns to endure others.
Dinah is also a symbol of
endurance and patience. Eliot believes in the justice in life. According to
her, virtuous people live a contented life and a sinner or an immoral man is
sure to meet his fate She is sure that one can’t escape from the consequences
of one’s own actions. Even the smallest sin will have its punishment, though
not immediately, yet in times to come.
Hetty and Arthur both are
example of her that belief. In the end, it can be said that Eliot preached the
religion of morality. However, her approach to moralization was aesthetic and
not conservative. She linked ethics with aesthetics. In fact, ethics were
driving force of her novels. In short, she was definitely a moralist like any
other novelist and her novels were a “criticism of life”.
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