Summary:
The piece of criticism I chose to read is written by Lee R. Edwards and is called "Women, Energy, and
Middlemarch." Edwards discusses how the issue of energy is shown throughout Eliot's novel, especially in regard to the female characters. She specifically focuses on the characters of Dorothea and Rosamond, saying that, even though the two are definitely opposites, they both have this energy that readers can feel in the book. Edwards feels that both women have this strong energy, but that both are unable to become what they really want to (and probably could become) due to the fact that they are female. For Edwards, Dorothea is the biggest disappointment of the novel because she shows so much promise in the beginning of really becoming someone who could affect the world. By the end, she is merely a wife and mother, only able to do what she's passionate about through her husband. Edwards is not happy with the fact that Eliot has Dorothea marry Will Ladislaw, but she states, "The objection is not that Dorothea should have married Will but that she should have married anybody at all" (628).
Analysis:
I chose to write about Edward's piece because I truly agreed with everything she said regarding the female characters. As readers, we have to acknowledge that the Victorian age was a different time period and that women just couldn't really have independent lives, but I still found myself hoping that Eliot would end the novel with Dorothea doing great things as a reformer. Even Rosamond has goals--even though they are just to move up in society--but she too cannot do anything without the help of a husband. Edwards is exactly right in pointing out how Dorothea is such a great character. She says, "I saw in Dorothea an endorsement I had found in no other book I had read of energy and social commitment on the part of a woman in combination, as I believed, with the promise that these qualities did not render the possessor either a social misfit or a danger to herself or others" (624). In other words, Edwards (and I too) believed that Dorothea was going to be a new kind of female character not defined by the males in her life. When she marries Will, she gives up her own dreams and settles on being a wife. It's true that she has realized that she loves him, but it's hard to swallow as a reader because he gets to have the career that Dorothea always wanted herself. It makes me wonder if there were any other options for Eliot in regards to the female characters. I find myself wishing that the novel could have been written just 50 years later so maybe there could have been different opportunities for both Rosamond and Dorothea. It seems like Eliot had pretty modern opinions, but ultimately let her novel continue to reflect the status quo of the position of women during the Victorian period.
Whoops, almost forgot to respond to these. Anyway, as you may have seen, I wrote about the same piece and it seems that we agree on a lot of things. Both you and I (and Edwards) reference Eliot's writing as opposed to our contemporary model/vision of women, I think, and how Eliot does or doesn't meet this standard. In other words, we kinda view the current role of women in society as the ideal, and base our criticisms of Eliot upon that. Not sure what that means in the long-run, but I realized it was I was reading your blog and thought it might be worth mentioning.
ReplyDeleteI'm proud of myself for writing a comment that says absolutely nothing conclusive.
I love your final lines of your blog. I too wished that there could've been different, more sustained and prominent, results of Dorothea and Rosamonds characters. Eliot writes in a fashion that strongly reflects the era in which she lived, yet her modern tones and hopes are clearly evident. I also, have wondered how this novel would've turned out had Eliot been able to rewrite the same characters throughout different time periods between then and now. I find the women of this book really interesting, especially because we really didn't get to see or hear the opinions of feels of women during that time; when women had expectations from the dominant male gender. So with that in mind, Eliot did allow her readers into the hearts and minds into the gender that really had no voice of that time.
ReplyDeleteOh the endless amounts of thoughts, questions, ideas and intrepretations of this book! It makes my mind hurt at times because I get almost obsessed with thinking about so many things Middlemarch! Haha :)
Do we really know that Dorothea wants the career that her husband has? She wants to do and accomplish things, but I don't get a strong sense that she wanted an actual career of her own. Your post does make me wonder what readers would have said had Dorothea stayed unmarried and pursued her goals. Given the way that Middlemarch society polices and governs respectable behavior, I feel like Eliot is telling us that dreams which involve overthrowing the status quo don't come to fruition yet in this world. It's curious that Eliot set the novel in the past, too; had she stuck with her present, it might have been easier to make Dorothea independent.
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