4 - George Eliot: “separateness and communication”

Summary

I felt that there was a life of perfect love and purity… in which there would be no uneasy hunger after pleasure, no tormenting questions.

Dino Bardi in Romola

When Fedalma, in George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy says, “I will take / this yearning self of mine and strangle it” (xxiv: 163), it is preparatory to making the difficult choice of abandoning her lover, Don Silva, for her historical and racial destiny as a leader of the gypsy people in their search for a homeland. When Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë's Villette says, “in catalepsy and a dead trance I studiously held the quick of my nature” (12), it is to steel herself against the pain of living in a society which could offer her neither satisfying love, stirring vocation, nor compelling identity. The promptings of the self for expression and fulfillment and the apparent necessity for their repression are at issue in both of these quotations and in the work of both Eliot and Brontë generally, but the differing circumstances and considerations involved in the adjudication of this dilemma indicate a central distinction in these writers' respective preoccupations and concerns. Brontë, as we have seen, is far more absorbed in wresting a personal settlement, however meager, from an intractable world ruled by fate, and brutally careless of the single life, than she is in “the growing good of the world” (MM 86) or any other of “the tempting range of relevancies” (MM 15) to which Eliot was so deeply committed. Eliot is more akin to Dickens in the scope of her concerns and commitments, as well as in her sense of the interdependence of human destinies.