George Eliot and the Ethical

Abstract

IN HIS BOOK Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams attacks the assumption that there can be any tenable codification of ethics or systematic moral theory and argues that morality should be replaced by the ‘ethical’: ‘The ideals of morality have without doubt … played a part in producing some actual justice in the world and in mobilizing power and social opportunity to compensate for bad luck in concrete terms. But the idea of a value that lies beyond all luck is an illusion’.1 George Eliot anticipates his scepticism about the tenability of systematic moral theories and is more persuasively seen as an ‘ethical’ writer in Williams's sense than the stern moralist that generations of readers and critics have seen her as being. For the problem with using the word ‘morality’ and its derivatives in discussing Eliot's writing is that it has led generations of readers to see her as having a moral agenda as a writer, judging characters and actions in relation to a preconceived notion of what is morally right and what is morally wrong. This has generated negative responses to her fiction, and one can even find modern critics who describe her as ‘a preacher’2 who imposes her moral agenda on her readers. Nietzsche famously asserts in his short discussion of her in Twilight of the Idols that ‘In England, in response to every little emancipation from theology one has to reassert one's position in a fear-inspiring manner as a moral fanatic’, going on to claim that for her ‘morality is not yet a problem’.3 One benefit of seeing Eliot in relation to the ‘ethical’ is that one can undermine Nietzsche's judgement as well as the judgements of critics and readers who have been eager to translate Eliot's sense of the ethical into a rigid set of moral principles and who then proceed to project them onto her fiction. If one views Eliot as an ‘ethical’ writer, the distinction between what has been generally seen as her ‘Victorian’ approach to moral issues and how they are represented in twentieth century writing and beyond is open to question.