Many selves, one life

The moral act described at the end of the previous chapter – the crossing of a threshold from egoism into altruism, the acknowledgment of other centers of living subjectivity, the release of sympathetic emotion – is no doubt the fundamental gesture of Middlemarch, as it is the fundamental gesture in George Eliot's ethical vision. But that fundamental gesture is not easy for anyone to make. For George Eliot, it is not simply the product of a strong resolve, or a firm decision, or a decisive act of will. The moral life for her is enshrined because it is moral but no less because it is a life, because it develops in time – or, as the narrator tersely puts it, “character too is a process and an unfolding” (II, 15). This thought is refined in an important exchange between Dorothea and Farebrother on the question of Lydgate's alleged role in Bulstrode's murder of Raffles. When Dorothea begins to defend Lydgate by saying that “there is a man's character beforehand to speak for him,” Farebrother responds tellingly that “character is not cut in marble – it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.” Then, answers Dorothea, “it may be rescued and healed” (VIII, 72).

Bulstrode is the novel's strongest example of the slow disease that eats away moral character.