Further to this, his brutal act is ‘out of character’ motiveless and spontaneous, his behaviour could not have been foreseen, even by those that knew him.Įliot asks us what it is to know a person and feel able to judge their potential actions. The recurrence of the metaphor, from both mask and graphic sign, and with overlap between dramatic or fictional presentation and the possession of a private as well as evident nature, is very strikingĮliot’s impulsive navvy, then, is bound up in this metaphorical history as a hypothetical fictional being he signifies the complexities of both representation of the imagined character, and of the inner workings of actual personal character. ‘a minde that suites with this thy faire and outward character’īy the eighteenth century the word had taken on the meaning of ‘personality’, itself stemming from the Old French ‘persone’: the masks used by players, or acted ‘characters’ on stage while around the same time ‘character’ began to be used to describe those found in fiction (Williams 1988). He demonstrates through examples from Elizabethan drama: Williams (ibid) explains that the shift in meaning onto people came through metaphor, initially with particular reference to the face. The image is significant, for if we examine the etymology of ‘character’, we are taken back to the Greek for ‘sharpening’, ‘furrowing’, or ‘engraving’: the techniques used for imprinting lettering, signs and symbols (Williams 1988: 234).

The navvy waking from sleep and without malice heaving a stone to crush the life out of his still sleeping comrade, is understood to lack the trained motive which makes a character fairly calculable in his actions.(Eliot 1974: 364) (Daniel Deronda)Įliot presents us with the unpredictability of human nature each of us at the mercy of individual biology, that ‘strange spiritual chemistry’, is, although ‘fairly calculable’, simultaneously capable of working against the ordered patterns of character formation we have previously etched. We mortals have a strange spiritual chemistry going on within us, so that a lazy stagnation, or even a cottony milkiness may be preparing one knows not what biting or explosive material.

Daniel deronda book