5. I
can’t say what I should have done about that, Godfrey. I should
never have married anybody else. But I wasn’t worth doing wrong
for—nothing is in this world. Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand—not
even our marrying wasn’t, you see.
Nancy gently upbraids Godfrey with these
lines in Chapter 18, after he confesses that
he is Eppie’s father and has hidden that fact from Nancy for eighteen
years. Nancy’s reaction is not one of anger, but instead one of
deep regret that Godfrey had not claimed Eppie long ago, so they
could have raised her themselves. When Godfrey responds that Nancy
would never have married him had she known of his secret child,
she responds with these lines, a gentle condemnation of Godfrey’s
act and the thinking that justified it.
The quote brings Nancy’s “unalterable little code” of
behavior into confrontation with Godfrey’s slippery, self-justifying
equivocation. While Nancy and her code are portrayed as occasionally
arbitrary and even illogical, Eliot leaves no doubt that Nancy is
a deeply moral person. In taking Godfrey to task for simply molding
his actions to contingency, Nancy is passing Eliot’s judgment, as
well. Here, as elsewhere, Eliot’s narrative punishes those who,
by allowing ends to justify means, ignore basic questions of right
and wrong.
