CONTRASTING PAIRS OF HEROINES IN GEORGE ELIOT'S FICTION

George Eliot's consistent employment of contrasting pairs of heroines in her fiction exemplifies her constant concern for moral lessons; through dramatic scenes involving two young women with different attitudes and characteristics, she preaches the negative effects of selfishness and the broadening, positive effects of sympathetic understanding. In each case the girls who are placed in deliberate contrast do and say things which indicate very clearly that one is distinctly more mature morally than the other. This moral distinction lies in their different capacities for sympathy. Hetty and Dinah in Adam Bede, Lucy and Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, Tessa and Romola in Romola, Celia and Dorothea and Rosamond and Mary Garth in Middlemarch, and Gwendolen and Mirah in Daniel Deronda, all illustrate the use of contrasting pairs in such scenes in the novels. A short selection among the first prose pieces that Mary Ann Evans published contains a pair of contrasting females which seem unmistakably to provide the pattern for those in the later fiction. This selection appeared in the Coventry Herald in February, 1847, and is entitled "A Little Fable with a Great Moral." Idione and Hieria in this early fiction become the prototype for the pairs in the novels. (CMF)