George Eliot: Art of Characterization
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George Eliot is a great psychological novelist. She is one of the ' founding fathers' of the modern psychological novel. As a psychological novelist it was her endeavor to represent inner life. She depicts the inner struggles of her characters and thus lays bare their soul before her readers.
From the psychological point of view, in George Eliot novels, the characters develop gradually, as we come to know them. They go from weakness to strength or from strength to weakness.
George Eliot like a lot of other women writers, depended largely upon her own experience. And it is to this experience and to her life in the English Midlands that she returns again and again for her material. Although in her later novels George Eliot does draw characters belonging to the upper class. Wordsworth influenced her profoundly. She echoes Wordsworth's interest in rustic life and uses the dialect spoken by the humble rustics to make her portrayal of character more realistic.
George Eliot's full scale characters are all drawn from her family circle, close friends and acquaintances. This is clearly noticeable in her early novels. The main persons in the first novel, ' Scenes of Clerical Life' are portraits of real people whom she had been acquainted with or heard about.
George Eliot looks into the minds of these common people and reveals their thinking, feelings, sufferings and frustrations. Her portraits are all primarily portraits of the inner-man. Her novels are remarkable for their psychological realism, and this is her peculiar contribution to the English novel.
Such is her realism in the presentation of character, that after the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life in 1857, her readers of Warwickshire were astonished to find that the characters of her novels were people they had known and who were their neighbours. She had been greatly influenced and dominated by her father, and Adam Bede and Caleb Garth are strongly reminiscent of Robert Evans, the upright workman. He, like Adam Bede, was well known for his trustworthiness, high character and extraordinary strength. He had immense knowledge of plantation, timber and mines.
George Eliot spent the first thirty years of her life in the Midlands where she has enough opportunity to study the mannerism and life of the lower classes. We have it in her own words that she had lived among craftsmen, farmers, tradesmen, mechanics, farriers, butchers, gardeners and innkeepers, so her characters also belongs to the various professions. For example, Adam Bede is a carpenter, Dinah Morris works in a factory, Hetty Sorel is a pretty but vain dairy-maid.
When we glance over the whole range of George Eliot's characters, we come to the conclusion that she was exceptional in the portrayal of female characters. The rendering of Hetty Sorel in Adam Bede is a triumph. Hetty Soral is a beautiful, vain, dairy-maid who hopes to gain a higher place in society by using her beauty.
Dinah Morris is one person who penetrates through her surface beauty and perceives the weakness of Hetty's character and she tries to prepare her for the possibility of pain and trouble in her life. There have been biographical surmises that the plain looking George Eliot was punishing himself through the sins of the beautiful Hetty. There are heavy, ironical paragraphs describing the beauty of women like Hetty, and the havoc they cause in the lives of men.
The rustic characters in the early novels, especially, can be compared in their eccentricities and grotesqueness to the rustic characters of Thomas Hardy. The chorus of lively rustic characters plays an important part in her novels. In Adam Bede the community of Hayslope plays the part of the chorus. At the twenty-first birthday celebrations of Captain Donnithorne, Mr Poyser keeps referring with apprehensive irritation to the Squire, and the rumors about the mysterious tenants. All this reaches a climax when the old Squire approaches the Poysers with a proposal and is routed by Mrs. Poyser. At the same feast the Captain announces that Adam is being given the position of the manager of the woods. Adam makes a fine speech but of much greater interest are the opinions of those present.
For example, in the chapter called "A Journey in Hope, Eliot spends for more time in Hetty's poor brain and heart than Hetty spends on road in her unwise search for her runaway lover. This is psychology. Eliot is very deft in her psychological approach. When George Eliot's characters think, we share their thoughts, for example, when Adam accidentally comes upon Arthur and Hetty embracing in the woods, Hetty scurries away, and Arthur, with deliberate and elaborate carelessness, saunters forward to Adam.
The characters of George Eliot's are real, living breathing human beings. They are warm, full of vitality, with human desires and weaknesses.
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George Eliot: Hetty's Character