Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

By George Eliot

Analysis:Dorothea Brookeand Celia Brooke are sisters.Contradictions in their natureMiddlemarch is a novel of relations.A story of an idealistic young girl Her ambition in life is to help people.Her marriage with a dried-up old scholar named Casaubon, thinking that helping him in his research will be the project she will do after marriage. After marriage she discovers that her husband cares more for his research than her.Her matrimonial life ruined. Tertius Lydgatean idealistic doctor. Marries with Rosamond Vincy

Lydgate ruined after marriage.Short, romantic courtships lead to trouble, because both parties entertain unrealistic ideals of each other. They marry without getting to know one another. Marriages based on compatibility work better.Fred and Marys marriage. She tells him she will not marry if he becomes a clergyman. Her condition saves Fred from an unhappy entrapment in an occupation he doesn't like.

A study of Provincial life:The subtitle of EliotsMiddlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, succinctly demonstrates her breadth of ambition.Eliot is not merely concerned with the individual narratives but also with the society at large.By telling the story of three young women of slightly different classes, their suitors and the social milieu in which their relationships develop, Eliot is able to show the nuances of class in the 1830s.she focuses primarily on higher classes capable of instigating change. She thereby demonstrates the reciprocal influence of individual narrative and broader social trends.

Three Love Problems-but one can understand the novels structure in light of three marriages.Its primary focus is Dorothea Brooke. Dorothea, the novels Spinozan core, believes in the supremacy of knowledge and thinks she can find wisdom by marrying and assisting an elderly would-be scholar. In her eponymous section, Dorothea is visited by Dr. Lydgate, who quickly marries town beauty Rosamond Vincy. Both Dorothea and Rosamond are unhappy in their marriages. Only Mary Garth, a poor woman who waits for her beloved to find financial stability before marriage, does not regret her decision.Middlemarchappears as a warning against rash marriages.The stories of Dorotheas uncles political career, Lydgates medical practice, and Mr. Garths business are as important as the romances. The personal and the political are inextricably linked in Middlemarch.

Middlemarch- the place is difficult to enter. It does not present ideas clearly. AmbiguousMiddlemarch warns one not to be rash and to be prudent about ones expectations, but also raises important points about the relationship between the personal and the political and the implications on responsibility therein.Ones actions have social repercussions for which one is responsible.The novel indirectly lead to more important concerns, such as the relationship between decision and determinism.

Narrative Voice in Middlemarch

The novel is internal machinations of individualsmost notably women.Intelligent narrative voice in the novelFocus is on external events- the voice is a connecting link between these eventsWithout this narrative voice it would be difficult for the reader to discern the level of depth to a character such as Dorothea since as a woman of the Victorian age.. . .these later born [St.] Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood . . . (Prologue)

This describes the main character, Dorothea Brooke, as a modern St. Theresa with no outlet for her spiritual yearning in the England of the 1830s.We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves. (Chapter 21, p. 156)A comment on Dorotheas mistake in marrying Casaubon, thinking he is what she imagines him to be.. . . by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we dont quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against all evilwidening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower. (Chapter 39, p. 287)Dorothea speaks her belief to Will Ladislaw.

there is only one passage, that gives us a closer insight into Casaubons inner life and soul at length. In chapter 42 Casaubon reflects on his wifes sympathy towards young Will Ladislaw:The human soul moves in many channels, and Mr. Casaubon, we know, had a sense of rectitude and an honorable pride in satisfying the requirements of honor, which compelled him to find other reasons for his conduct than those of jealousy and vindictiveness. The way in which Mr. Casaubon put the case was this: In marrying Dorothea Brooke I had to care for her well-being in case of my death.Dorothea after Casaubons death reviews her previous life:

Was it her fault that she had believed in him had believed in his worthiness? And what, exactly, was he? She was able enough to estimate him she who waited on his glances with trembling, andshut her best soul in prison, paying it only hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please him. In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate. Dorotheas great disappointment in Casaubon derives from the fact that she has shut her best soul in prison for the benefit of his so-called great soul, which turns out to be a lie and thereby negates all her former efforts of endurance. Furthermore it proves her own inability to succeed at the difficult task of knowing another soul

Marriage, which has been the borne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epicthe gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common. (Finale, 608)The narrator speaks of marriage in general and then tells the wrap-up of three main marriages in the novel: Mary and Fred; Lydgate and Rosamond; Dorothea and Will.

For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it . . . Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as thy might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. (Finale, 612-13)Dorotheas influence is disproportional to her outward circumstance; she is an invisible St. Theresa, unrecognized but important to the world.

MIDDLEMARCH: A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE

George Eliot's Middlemarch is a novel embroidered by social relations, marriages, gender roles and a plain perspective on the Victorian society.Gender roles within the time which portrays the state of the society with her complex characters and marriages full of frustration and disappointment.Some of the major themes stated in the novel can be considered as disillusion, gender roles and frustrated love relations and marriages especially with the marriages of some major characters such as Dorothea, Casaubon, Lydgate and Rosamond.Dorothea: the character of a young lady who is idealist and who stands against the patriarchal law of the Victorian society.

Nineteenth century England experienced a great deal of change and upheaval. Societal norms were questioned as Europe experienced numerous revolutions that cried for equality. Womens issues also became a major rallying point for those interested in propelling England toward more equal ground. it depends upon the social understanding of marriage.Women were expected to marry men of equal social standing and fulfill three main roles: obeying and satisfying ones husband, keeping ones children physically and morally sound, and maintaining the household.Sense over sensibility, and marriage still functioned as a way of maintaining social structure and order.

Eliot has set Middlemarch in the period immediately before the passage of the first Reform Bill and is able to situate her characters in a time when the changes they experience would have been new and different, perhaps even exciting.Dorothea Brooke is married to Mr. Casaubon in chapter ten. She gives up her freedom voluntarily. She assumes: I should learn everything then, she said to herself, still walking quickly along the bridle road through the wood. It would be my duty to study that I might help him the better in his great works. There would be nothing trivial about our lives. Everyday-things with us would mean the greatest things. It would be like marrying Pascal. I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by. And then I should know what to do, when I got older: I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here now in England (29)

Casaubon believed: he had found even more than he demanded. [Dorothea] might really be such a helpmate to him as would enable him to dispense with a hired secretary because she is a modest young lady, with the purely appreciative, unambitious abilities of her sex, [who] is sure to think her husbands mind powerful (279).Dorotheas admiration for Casaubons intellect dwindles after she learns that Casaubons ambitious and perpetual work-in-progress entitled Key to all Mythologies has already been completed by the Germans.Casaubon also begins to think that marriage is not particularly blissful.Dorothea descends into a reaction of a rebellious anger stronger than any she had felt since her marriage as she saw her own and her husbands solitude (426).

Casaubon regards Dorothea as an unresponsive hardness and he regrets having married her. The narrator regards Dorothea in a sympathetic manner, stating that in such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate (426).Because love and companionship were not top priorities in choosing a spouse at this time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Dorothea envisions her happy marriage life with Casaubon and is convinced by his impression. Chapter five opens with Casaubons engagement letter to Dorothea in which he proposes, To be accepted by you as your husband and the earthly guardian of your welfare, I should regard as the highest of providential gifts (44).The marriage follows the timeline dictated by society, they fail to understand each others true nature; thus their marriage is doomed to fail.

Hence Dorothea is a victim of the conditions of civilized courtship, which do not allow the parties to gain much knowledge of each other.The novel concludes with the marriagethe most notable of which is that of Dorothea and Will Ladislaw It representative of the type of modern marriage that was beginning to replace the more traditional unions of the early Victorian Age.

Gender Issues and class distinction in the novel:The novel can be read as female subjugation in the patriarchal system.The novel revolves round the gender issues in the society.The novel begins and ends with Dorothea. The novel is about Dorotheas role as a women.Dorothea the combination of intelligent mind and noble and arduous soul. She fails to break free completely from the societal pressures.Some feminist critics expect Dorothea to live an epic life to set an example. They view her marriage(s) (to Will Ladislaw) as a subjugation of feminine spirit and a reinforcement of the patriarchal order.Eliot is also concerned with the plight of humanity.

The theme of artificial class distinction and the theme of artificial gender distinction and Casaubon is the personification of both these inequalities.Like Dorothea, Lydgate is also the central of the novel. He led down to the path to failure because he has internalized both of these artificial constructs.The contrast between Vincy family and the Garth family: the Vincy family represents falseness of aristocratic pretentions whereas the Garth family represents the sort of simple morality that is free from class distinctions.Virtue and plainness in Marys character. Honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Marys reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own behalf, and when she was in a good mood she had humor enough in her to laugh at herself.

Her commitment to Fred contains an element of sacrifice. She clearheadedly undertakes the task of making him into a man.Rosamond wants to meet Lydgate, "the new aspiring doctor," because she is utterly disappointed with the eligible bachelors in her immediate community. Eliot utilizes Rosamond's character to reveal her attitude towards provincial middle-class society by describing Rosamond's social circle as "inevitable Middlemarch companions.Rosamond knows what she wants out of life: to become a member of the aristocracy, but her marriage to Lydgate is not what she expects. Her upbringing and education do not prepare her for the hardships all married couples experience. Eliot uses her as a foil to Dorothea as an example of the misfortunes of shallow women. Or, she may be highlighting the importance of seeing reality instead of appearance.

Rosamond is used to having company in a "cheerful house" which is "very different from a husband out at odd hours, and never knowing when he will come home" (642).Perhaps Lydgate's willingness to sacrifice his own interests to ensure her happiness could have been appreciated by another wife. Instead, he sacrifices himself without any real hope of reciprocated affection.The novel centers around two failures which are the central of the novel. The failure of Dorothea and Lydgate and they live up to their full potential. They are involved in the struggle to make the world beautiful.They fail to achieve their high ideals.Here we can say that the theme of the novel is the search for good and meaningful work and the societal pressure that hampers this.

The Construction and Deconstruction of Science in Middlemarch:The subtitle of the novel, , A Study of Provincial Life, strongly to "scientific study. (J. Hillis Miller )http://www.theliteraryindex.com/middlemarch-analysis.html

Middlemarch does not abandon observation for experiment, but rather involves experiment in order to discover the underlying principles which animate phenomena. In order for connections to be made, the imagination must be involved. From Middlemarch and other of Eliot's writing, as compared to those of scientific theorists, we can see this distinction illustrated. After beginning to read Darwin's The Origin of the Species, George Eliot writes to her friend and feminist activist, Barbara Bodichon:

We have just been reading Darwin's book on the Origin of Species' just now: it makes an epoch, as the expression of his thorough adhesion, after long years of study, to the Doctrine of Development--and not the adhesion of an anonym like the author of the Vestiges', but of a long-celebrated naturalist. The book is ill-written and sadly wanting in illustrative facts--of which he has collected a vast number, but reserves them for a future book...So the world gets on step by step towards clearness and honesty! But to me the Development theory and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes (Letters, qtd. in Newton, 278).

This passage at once confirms the relative value of observation for Eliot, of "illustrative facts," while simultaneously criticizing the "adhesion" to "explanations of processes" of a "long-celebrated naturalist" who misses "the mystery" "underlying the processes. Eliot elaborates this view in Middlemarch passages, the most impressive of which is the description of Lydgate's developing theory:Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:--...But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate regarded as vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. (ch. 16, 147).

Here the scientist probes the mystery underlying the processes, and the methodology involves an imagination which connects phenomena which are inaccessible to observation alone, and at best, merely inferred by the senses. Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. (ch. 6, 50).

This passage suggests an endless possibility of revision, which is, of course, analogous to science's own history. Furthermore, not only are interpretations tentative, but they involve an active projection on the part of the viewing subject, as seeming to "see an active voracity," "so many animated tax-pennies," and "victims," are finally metaphorical descriptions dependent upon the subject's "interpretations.The novel is "an experiment in time" in terms of its own historical moment. It is also an experiment for its protagonists, who must, like the narrator, seek unifying principles--a scientific' search, made necessary, in part, by science itself, or by the conditions which permitted science its expansion into matters human. This paradoxical realization in Middlemarch accounts, in part, for its ambiguous treatment of science. Science is both problem and tool, as an early exchange, during which Chettam hopes to impress Dorothea but is interrupted, suggests:

"I am reading the Agricultural Chemistry," said this excellent baronet [Chettam], "because I am going to take one of the farms into my own hands, and see if something cannot be done in setting a good pattern of farming among my tenants. Do you approve of that, Miss Brooke?" "A great mistake, Chettam," interposed Mr. Brooke, "going into electrifying your land and that sort of thing, and making a parlor of your cow-house. It won't do. I went into science a great deal myself at one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything; you can let nothing alone" (ch. 2, 12).

Metaphor:Pier-Glass: Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! The scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round the little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absentof Miss Vincy, for example.she points out, that we interpret all things with a bias as long as we only use the light of our selfishness to see by. The example introduced is Rosamond Vincy, who like a child, cannot imagine anything apart from her own interests or viewpoint.

Character Cut in Stone: Character is not cut in marbleit is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do, says Farebrother. This is an excellent metaphor because it is true for those characters who are still alive! Many, like Mr. Casaubon, suffer precisely because they insist on being cut of stone, unable to change. Both Dorothea and her husband begin as egoists in their own worlds, but Dorothea is not cut in stone and quickly learns from her experience, while Casaubons rigidity literally kills him.