ABSTRACT
One of the most compelling of the contradictions in George Eliot’s moral aesthetic is the fact that she turned her back on traditional religion but continues to use references to the Bible and biblical principles. Her characters who are mature in solidarity and continuity embody the genuine love and spirit of forgiveness which the Bible teaches. And she regularly employs the intervention of providence into the lives of her characters. Several of her characters provide excellent examples of selflessness in their forgiveness. Examples include Janet, who forgives her cruel and selfish husband in “Janet’s Repentance”; Nancy in Silas Marner, who forgives her husband for refusing to share his former life with her; Harriet Bulstrode in Middlemarch, who forgives her husband, even though he not only has kept from her the sins of his past but whose language – like his life – makes a mockery of biblical principles as well as those of solidarity and continuity; and Mirah in Daniel Deronda, who forgives her manipulative and deceptive father, who actually tries to sell her to another man. In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie forgives her brother Tom and attempts to rescue him from the flood, and Fedalma, the Spanish gypsy whose blood is as “unchristian as a leopard’s” (259), forgives Don Silva, who kills her father. Adam Bede forgives his father and repents of his own hardness of heart, and this helps him to forgive Hetty. And as George Eliot faces her own death, she commends these expressions of forgiveness. And in one of her last poems, she uses language which has a biblical solemnity and takes an incident from the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 34).
