Práctica 1B

The excerpt proposed for the commentary belongs to the novel Middlemarch by George

Eliot. In spite of the masculine name, Eliot was a woman but she used a pseudonym so that

her works could be taken seriously. The name of the author is a reflection of the women

question of this age that will be addressed later in the commentary of the book. Despite Eliot

grew sceptical, she was interested in religion, especially any religion that offered solace for

human sorrows. For this reason, she joined a group of intellectuals in their historical study of

the Bible. Later she began writing for magazines, worked as an editor and writing fiction.

When she finally decided to write her own novel, she described a rural community in the past

in opposition to the urban present. Now heroes belong to a moral and ordinary country life

with tolerance, compassion and understanding. Moreover, she tried to achieve the

appreciation of good with her philosophical interpretations of life, learning from experience

and developing characters. In addition, she demonstrates a moral concern with justice,

progress and right. Furthermore, she studies the impact of the environment, including the

social environment, on the individual in order to make her settings more realistic and

believable through details and dialect.

Middlemarch is a novel published between 1867 and 1872 in Blackwood's Magazine in eight

monthly installments. This novel has a great realism because of the intensive investigation

accomplished by the author in provincial hospitals, medical practices, and physicians, rather

than accept conventional thinking and stereotypes. Another important element in the writing

of Eliot are the characters who are not individual or autonomous, but their destinies are

interwoven with others. They have depth psychological descriptions, they are not flat

characters. The most important plots of the novel are the following ones: the nature of

marriage, idealism, personal interest, religion, political reforms, education.

This excerpt belongs to chapter 3 of the novel Middlemarch in which Dorothea realizes that

she is interested in Mr Casaubon and wants to marry him. She thinks that Mr Casaubon will

include her in his project and, for this reason, she accepted to marry him. Dorothea is a strong

woman with clear ideas and she is not interested in trivial issues proper to woman of this age.

Dorothea is more interested in religion than in material things in the same manner of Eliot,

who studied the Bible and the spirituality of individuals, in this fragment, it could be seen in

‘...With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might have thought that a Christian

young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the

humbler clergy, the perusal of "Female Scripture Characters," unfolding the private

experience of Sara under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under the New, and the care of

her soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir -- with a background of prospective

marriage to a man who, if less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously

inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. From such contentment poor

Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religious disposition,...’.

Another important element of the novel is the setting where is placed the story. In

Middlemarch, the action is settled in a provincial scenery in contrast with urban scenery.

The narrator of the story is a third-person narrator who knows the feelings and thoughts of the

characters and provides a perfect background of each of them.

The principal topics of the books, previously mentioned, presented in this excerpt are religion

for example, in the excerpt previously mentioned, the idea of marriage because Dorothea is

going to married to a man that she idealized. The women question is important too because

Eliot criticized how Victorian society considers women, as weak people who have not to own

opinions.

To bring this essay to a close, it is important to compare Middlemarch with other Victorian

books like Oliver Twist. In spite of these two novels are similar in time and in the way of
publishing because are published in installments, it exists a difference in the scenery:

Middlemarch is placed in a rural ambient and Oliver Twist is placed in the urban scenery that

criticised Eliot.