Themes in middlemarch

1. Women and Gender theme

George Eliot’s Middlemarch is set in a fictional Midlands town in the early nineteenth century,
an environment in which typical gender roles are very are strictly enforced. While men are also
expected to live up to gendered ideals, Middlemarch mostly focuses on the way that such
expectations are particularly restrictive and suffocating for women. This is explored most
notably through the novel’s central character, Dorothea Brooke, who dreams of a grand, intense,
and meaningful life that is fundamentally incompatible with the role society has prescribed for
her. As a result, she becomes confused about what she really wants and makes some bad life
decisions that only serve to further isolate her from her true self and desires. Through Dorothea,
the novel implicitly critiques the oppressive expectations society places on women. At the same
time, however, it also shows that any resistance is inherently limited, as alternative ways of
living for women at the time simply did not exist.
As a heroine, Dorothea is deeply sympathetic. She is ambitious, idealistic, free-spirited, and
kind, yet these admirable aspects of her personality make it difficult for her to conform to the
gender norms of the society in which she lives.
For example, she is “enamored of intensity and greatness,” fond of horse-riding, and dreams of
building cottages for tenant farmers so that they might live in better conditions. These passions
do not conform with societal expectations of women, and thus although these dreams and
impulses exist very strongly within her, Dorothea feels ashamed of them and attempts to
suppress them. She wants to conform to a feminine ideal, which leads her to be highly self-
critical and continually make promises she doesn’t keep (such as her vow to give up horse-
riding).
Dorothea’s half-hearted attempt to suppress her own desires and personality leads her to exist in
a confused and self-contradictory state. This shows that gender roles have the effect of alienating
women from themselves.
Dorothea attempts to resolve the internal conflict she feels between her desires and societal
gender roles by marrying the much older Rev. Edward Casaubon. Because Casaubon is a scholar
working on a highly ambitious project on religious history (The Key to All Mythologies), she
believes that she can access the “intensity and greatness” she craves via him.
When Dorothea decides to marry Casaubon, the people around her are confused and (accurately)
predict that the marriage will not bring her happiness. They can see what Dorothea herself
cannot: she is both suppressing her own nature and trying to achieve the impossible by living
through her future husband. Dorothea claims that she wants a husband who can be like a father to
her and teach her about things; however, as Mr. Brooke points out, she is a strong-willed person
attached to her own opinions. Marrying Casaubon is thus a recipe for disaster.
It is painful to witness Dorothea make such a patently bad life decision, which ends up making
her miserable. At the same time, the novel’s exploration of gender norms shows that Dorothea’s
decision to marry Casaubon is not made out of mere foolishness. Rather, Dorothea is trapped by
the conflict between her own impulses and society’s expectations of her as a woman. The misery
of her marriage to Casaubon is only a symptom of this wider problem.
When Casaubon dies, Dorothea has a chance to reevaluate her life and, through her second
marriage to Will Ladislaw, ends up choosing a path that brings her far greater happiness and
fulfilment. This shows that it is better to stay true to oneself than to attempt to conform to
Themes in middlemarch
1. Women and Gender theme
society’s restrictive ideals of how women should behave. On the other hand, Dorothea’s ultimate
fate as a housewife and mother reminds readers that there is only so much women can do to
resist gender roles in a society that has so few rights, resources, and opportunities available to
women.
Dorothea loves Will, but her own dreams—such as the cottages and “colony” she planned to
build for tenant farmers—remain unrealized at the end of the novel. The narrator observes:
“Many who knew her [Dorothea] thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should
have been absorbed into the life of another, and be known only in certain circles as a wife and
mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have
done.”
This captures the difficulty of the situation Dorothea and other strong-willed women of the time
find themselves in. They desire a richer and more expansive life than that of a wife and mother,
but the reality is that there is basically no alternative for them. Thus, even if they rebel against
the gender norms of the era, there is only so much that this rebellion can achieve.
Quotes :-
1.“Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and
of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their
neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them”
2.“It is very hard: it is your favourite fad to draw plans.”
“Fad to draw plans! Do you think I only care about my fellow creatures’ houses in that
childish way? I may well make mistakes. How can one ever do anything nobly
Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?”
3. We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and
dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to
inquiries say, 'Oh, nothing!' Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only
urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others.
4. Of course, he had a profession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but
the piquant fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him from all
Middlemarch admirers, and presented marriage as a Prospect of rising in rank and
getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which she would have
nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last associate with relatives quite
equal to the county people who looked down on the Middlemarchers. It was part of
Rosamond's cleverness to discern very subtly the faintest aroma of rank.
5. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose name you are acquainted
solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called
courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as
something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not
appear altogether the same.
6. Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed and dried
him, was really no security against wounds, least of all against those which came from
Themes in middlemarch
1. Women and Gender theme
Dorothea. And he had begun now to frame possibilities for the future which were
somehow more embittering to him than anything his mind had dwelt on before.
7. And here Dorothea's pity turned from her own future to her husband's past - nay, to
his present hard struggle with a lot which had grown out of that past the lonely labour,
the ambition breathing hardly under the pressure of self-distrust; the goal receding, and
the heavier limbs; and now at last the sword visibly trembling above him! And had she
not wished to marry him that she might help him in his life's labour? - But she had
thought the work was to be something greater, which she could serve in devoutly for its
own sake. Was it right, even to soothe his grief - would it be possible, even if she
promised - to work as in a treadmill fruitlessly?
8. “I never felt it a misfortune to have nothing till now,” he said. “But poverty may be
as bad as leprosy, if it divides us from what we most care for.”
9. The business was felt to be so public and important that it required dinners to feed it,
and many invitations were just then issued and accepted on the strength of this
scandal concerning Bulstrode and Lydgate; wives, widows, and single ladies took their
work and went out to tea oftener than usual; and all public conviviality, from the
Green Dragon to Dollop's, gathered a zest which could not be won from the question
whether the Lords would throw out the Reform Bill.
10. “And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.”
Dorothea laughed and forgot her tears.
“Well, I mean about babies and those things,” explained Celia. “I should not give up to
James when I knew he was wrong, as you used to do to Mr Casaubon.”
11. Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature
should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain
circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power
she ought rather to have done - not even Sir James Chettam, who went no further than
the negative prescription that she ought not to have married Will Ladislaw.