THE WOMAN QUESTION in MIDDLEMARCH

By the way,

The works of women are symbolical,

We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,

Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir

To put on when you’re weary…

Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean

And sleep, and dream of something we are not

But would be for your sake. Alas, Alas!

(Aurora Leigh: Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

In 1855 she wrote a sympathetic essay ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’ that

anticipates the concerns she takes up in ‘Middlemarch’: women’s natures, their need for work,

men’s presumption of superiority and its destructive consequences. Eliot says of Fuller, “some of the

best things she says are on the folly of absolute definitions of woman's nature and absolute

demarcations of woman's mission”. She quotes Fuller: “I think women need, especially at this

juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers” if they

are to avoid “the ennui that haunts grown women.”

George Eliot sets her novel nearly 40 years before the period in which it is written. This

period in which she grew to adulthood was one that saw an increasing number of studies of the
condition of women, some of which had outcome in action. The state of legislation, about property

rights and about divorce, held women in a state of dependency. This was completed by their lack of

education, which leads to their economic dependence on the home either of husband or father. In

‘Felix Holt’, and even more in ‘Daniel Deronda’, she continuously explores the condition of

women, apparently at ease, living privileged lives, and yet atrophied by their condition of slavery.

Mrs. Transome, Mrs. Glasher and Gwendolen all share this imagery. Thus she is able to explore a

series of connections and analogies between present and past. In one sense, the whole period of

growth of the women’s movement is excluded from the novel. In another, as narrative discourse and

as reader’s retrospect, it becomes the matter of the novel’s irony and of melancholy idealism.

‘Middlemarch’ begins and ends with Dorothea. Even in its revised state the ‘Finale’ still

completes the theme launched in the ‘Prelude’. That theme concerns what may be called the “Saint

Theresa syndrome”, the state of a soul that aspires to epic life but finds no channel for “far-resonant

action”, and so achieves only a blundering life, its aspirations “dispersed among hindrances”. This

fate is specifically feminine. The ‘Prelude’ concerns itself with “the natures of women”. The ardor

that appears extravagant because its object is so vague alternates with the “common yearning of

womanhood”. If she tries to take her stand anywhere but at the level that defines her by sex, which

Eliot hardly recommends, calling it a ‘lapse’, a woman's character becomes liable to the odd

condition of “indefiniteness”.
 Upper-middle and upper class Victorian women were expected to “marry money”, stay home

to raise the family, and be responsible for the management of domestic affairs. On the other hand,

Dorothea Brooke is an intelligent and independent young woman; she yearns to be more than her

society would allow her to be. While other Victorian ladies worried about fashion and marriage, she

concerns herself with issues of philosophy, spirituality, and service. Eliot points out Dorothea's

genuine beauty while describing her physical appearance by emphasizing the plainness of Dorothea's

clothing, alluding to paintings of the Virgin Mary to describe her, thereby accentuating her dignity

and purity. Because Dorothea does not concern herself with fashion, most people in Middlemarch

perceive her to be odd. Eliot mocks the social norm by praising the purity of the young and

"inexperienced" Miss Brooke.

Dorothea finds it hard to distinguish between love and learning: this problem that bears

particularly hard on women. The mentor-pupil relationship in its male-female form presents the man

as teacher and the women as pupil. The pattern traditionally extends across intellectually and sexual

experience. Men teach women sexually and intellectually. To Dorothea, passion and knowledge are

identified. She seeks to know more than her meager education has so far allowed her, and thereby to

do more than her society designates as appropriate to her. Casaubon does not represent a way out, as

the power of intellectual synthesis does not guarantee emotional power or sexual feeling. On the

other hand, the attraction to Will grows through the play of spirit and learning between them: they

teach each other. He frees her from desiring martyrdom; she gives him a great project.
 But in the ‘Finale’ there remain strong reminders of the social conditions that break the force

of women's strivings. In the water-obstruction imagery, which is important in the novel and with

which it ends, a full nature like Dorothea's “spent itself in channels which had no great name on the

earth”. We learn that Middlemarch attributes Fred Vincy's book “Cultivation of Green Crops and

the Economy of Cattle-Feeding” which won him high congratulations at agricultural meetings to his

wife, since they had never expected Fred Vincy “to write on turnips and mangel-wurzel”. But when

Mary wrote a little book for her boys, called “Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch”, every

one in the town was willing to give the credit of this work to Fred, observing that he had been to the

University, “where the ancients were studied”, and might have been a clergyman if he had chosen.

In a society where even the disarming Mr. Brooke assumes that female intelligence “runs

underground, like the rivers of Greece”, to come out in the sons, and the amiable Sir James assumes

that his masculine mind is of a higher kind than a woman's, no matter how soaring, as a birch to a

palm tree it is no surprise that Mary is not sorry to bring forth men children only.

The predicaments that George Eliot delves in ‘Middlemarch’: Lydgate’s “allowing his great

aims to fade out of view”; Rosamond “being from morning till night her own standard of a perfect

lady”; Dorothea’s sense of the “chaos of laborious trifling…at a loss to know how or to begin”,

misinterpreting Mr. Casaubon as a possible way out of her “walled-in maze of small paths that led

no whither”. Thus the mind of the young woman “bewildered and overcome…can neither

understand its own wants, nor frame a method to meet them”. Although conditions have changed

again, modern readers are likely to recognize a process of attrition and exclusion in the predicaments
of Rosamond and of Dorothea, even of Mary Garth, which is still a crucial concern for all those

concerned with the education of women and of men in the present day.

Thus it is simply not true that George Eliot “sought to be free of any close involvement with

the feminist movement of her time either in life or in literature”. But it would be wrong to convert

her into a radical feminist. She writes, “My function is that of the aesthetic not the doctrinal

teacher”. In her portrayal of the frustrations and yearnings of her heroine, Eliot seems sympathetic

to a feminist point of view. Yet her stress on the values of loyalty to one’s past; of adherence to duty,

despite personal desire; and of what William Wordsworth calls “little, nameless, unremembered acts

of kindness and of love” suggests that her attitude toward the Woman Question is complex.

Tathagata Dutta
(M.A., English Literature, University Of Delhi)
BIBLIOGRAPHY:

• MIDDLEMARCH by GEORGE ELIOT.

• MIDDLEMARCH (criticism) by MELODIE MONAHAN

• MIDDLEMARCH AND WOMEN’S QUESTION by KATHLEEN BLAKE

• PHILOSOPHY IN THE BEDROOM: MIDDLEMARCH AND THE SCANDAL OF

SYMPATHY by HINA NAZAR

• www.jstor.org .