ABSTRACT
Eliot devotes a great deal of her energy as a novelist attempting to understand and convey a sense of the multiplicity of forces that exert pressure on, form and sometimes destroy aspects of subjectivity. But, as we have seen, equally important and problematic is the question of how the individual can, in turn, act in and influence the world. Given the centrality to Eliot’s ethical beliefs of the intellectual and emotional potential of the subject, it is a crucial question whether meaningful individual will can be said to exist, and of whether the individual has any significance beyond simply that of a conduit for the causal factors, hereditary, physiological or social, which impinge on that individual. This also raises the related question of whether, given the unpredictability of the inner life, the subject is able to exert any real control over that life, and thus direct and police that unpredictability. Much of the scientific writing with which Eliot engaged dismisses the notion of the will as free or spontaneous. With their physiological underpinning, the overwhelming emphasis of contemporary theories of mind is on the factors, internal and external, which cause thought and action. The first half of this chapter will examine how Eliot dramatizes the many factors which call into question the validity of the will as a concept, in doing so often suggesting parallels with contemporary science. I shall also be concerned with how she nonetheless maintains a sense of the will as a psychologically and ethically significant category and with how her awareness of the problems attached to the concept of the will provides the basis of a subtle and complex re-definition of that concept.
