Sources of the Self and Moral Agency in The Lifted Veil, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner

Abstract

Personal memory in Eliot is an intersection of narratives of communal memory. She shares the views of several contemporary thinkers on this.¹ In her novels, communal values, assumptions and narratives need to be internalized to condition the characters effectively. The process may be carried out consciously, through the intervention of shared feelings in the process of moral conflicts, or more significantly, unconsciously, when the characters are little aware of the collective origins of their feelings. This process may be clarified with the help of Michael Polanyi’s notion of ‘interiorization’ or ‘indwelling’: ‘To interiorize is to identify ourselves with the teachings in question, by making them function as the proximal term of a tacit moral knowledge, as applied in practice. This establishes the tacit framework for our moral acts and judgments.’² In The Mill on the Floss, the family traditions of the Dodsons and the Tullivers condition the personalities of Tom and Maggie. Maggie inherits the private and introvert Tulliver traits that account for her ‘imaginative and passionate nature’ (MF, 4:2:241), whereas Tom has the Dodson sense of respectability. Facing the same kind of family misfortune, Maggie would take its impact more as guilt than Tom as shame. In Silas Marner, a certain practice passed on through history becomes a sufficient reason why it should be properly observed.

There is a loss and a waste, which can never be repaired, if we lead our lives always facing outwards towards the shared and commonplace business of the world, and always turning our backs on the intimate emotions and perceptions, which are our own peculiar contributions to the sum of human experience.

(Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, pp. 128–9)