Aggression and Providential Death in George Eliot's Fiction

Abstract

People die conveniently in George Eliot's novels. Grandcourt falls off a boat and drowns at the moment when Gwendolyn finds her murderous fantasies unbearable. In Mr. Gilfil's Love Story Anthony collapses immediately before Caterina comes to the Rookery with the intention of killing him. Casaubon dies immediately before Dorothea comes to the garden to promise against her will to obey her husband's wishes after his death. By dying at the right moment, Robert Dempster saves Janet, and Tito saves Romola from their decisions to rededicate their lives to their marital duties. By falling in a brook, Thias Bede saves his sons from the burden of a drunken father; and Maggie Tulliver saves herself from a life of pain and privation and finds reconciliation with her brother in their deaths in the flood. Few of these deaths are improbable or merely accidental. George Eliot carefully leads us to expect that Casaubon, Robert Dempster, Anthony, and Thias Bede will ultimately die of the illnesses that in some way symbolize their personal failings. Through much of Romola Baldassare prepares his vengeance against Tito, and The Mill on the Floss frequently looks forward to a return of the flood that has given St. Ogg's its name. Nevertheless, there is something peculiarly providential about Eliot's location of these deaths within the plots of the novels. It is not so much the deaths themselves that strike us as strange as the fact that they occur at such propitious moments. The novelist who so repeatedly insists that providence will not save us from the consequences of our own actions nonetheless saves a number of her characters from those consequences. Is there a pattern to the situations in which these deaths occur? What function do they serve in the plots of the novels? And finally, what does the pattern of providential death indicate about Eliot's own psychology? What situations does it allow her to avoid portraying and what situations does it permit her to bring her characters to confront? The very convenience of all the deaths that I have mentioned reveals the pattern that they have in common: each effectually ends a deep and seemingly permanent alienation between the character who dies and the character most intimately related to him, usually his wife, who stands to be most affected by his death. Thus each death at one and the same time satisfies the survivor's aggressive feelings while it removes him or her from the situation that had inspired hostility. Whether the character, like Caterina or Gwendolyn, had abandoned herself to her aggressive feelings and planned to murder the man she hated, or