Content area
Full Text
The issue of moral judgment is a preoccupation with George Eliot. She wants to be fair to the persons in her fiction, to do right by them in keeping with an attitude often described by readers as sympathy or fellow-feeling. This is why in Chapter 29 of Middlemarch, after casting Mr. Casaubon so unfavorably for so long, she announces "For my part I am very sorry for him" (193) and goes on to show why. However, the injunction to avoid hasty or excessively harsh judgment carried with it the risk of excessive tolerance, of being too good to a character, and of thus compromising the moral fairness and realism to which she was committed.
Her treatment of Fred Vincy illustrates such risk. Of the novel's principal characters, he has the most help and the easiest time in getting where he wants to go. So unambiguous is the impression we receive of him that it appears that someone much more influential than Mary Garth, her father, or Mr. Farebrother--namely George Eliot herself--is working hard to protect his positive image and good end. However she may have scaled down her original intentions for Fred (Millet, 33, 57; Homans, 143), his presence in the novel is both highlighted and troubled by this favoritism.
A few nineteenth-century readers did wonder in passing why George Eliot cared so much for Fred or made life so easy for him (see James and Colvin). More recently, though, he has been said generally to merit that care and ease: either as a necessary part of the novel's generalized study of egoism and a yardstick to measure both its more and less culpable characters (Hardy, 76-7) or as an "everyday" indicator of George Eliot's ambivalence toward the "transcendental" ambitions of others in the novel, notably Dorothea and Lydgate (Miller, 122, 145; cf. Homans, 144-5).
It is my contention, though, that the treatment of Fred cannot be explained away so easily, and that it constitutes a compromise of the values central to the novel and, indeed, a symptom of problems within its ideological center. Repeatedly in Middlemarch George Eliot invokes the image of the web, to suggest that the individual does not live in a moral or social vacuum, that we humans are bound together...