A Study of Provincial Life
The fictional town of Middlemarch, North Loamshire, is probably based on Coventry, where Eliot had lived before moving to London. Like Coventry, Middlemarch is described as a silk-ribbon manufacturing town.[2][23]
The subtitle—"A Study of Provincial Life"—has been seen as significant. One critic views the unity of Middlemarch as achieved through "the fusion of the two senses of 'provincial'":[23] on the one hand it means geographically "all parts of the country except the capital"; and on the other, a person who is "unsophisticated" or "narrow-minded".[24] Carolyn Steedman links Eliot's emphasis on provincialism in Middlemarch to Matthew Arnold's discussion of social class in England in Culture and Anarchy essays, published in 1869, about the time Eliot began working on the stories that became Middlemarch. There Arnold classes British society in terms of Barbarians (aristocrats and landed gentry), Philistines (urban middle class) and Populace (working class). Steedman suggests Middlemarch "is a portrait of Philistine Provincialism".[2]
It is worth noting that Eliot went to London, as her heroine Dorothea does at the end of the book. There Eliot achieved fame way beyond most women of her time, whereas Dorothea takes on the role of nurturing Will and her family. Eliot was rejected by her family once she had settled in her common-law relationship with Lewes, and "their profound disapproval prevented her ever going home again". She omitted Coventry from her last visit to the Midlands in 1855.[2]
The "Woman Question"
Central to Middlemarch is the idea that Dorothea Brooke cannot hope to achieve the heroic stature of a figure like Saint Teresa, for Eliot's heroine lives at the wrong time, "amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion".[25] Antigone, a figure from Greek mythology best known from Sophocles' play, is given in the "Finale" as a further example of a heroic woman. The literary critic Kathleen Blake notes Eliot's emphasis on St Teresa's "very concrete accomplishment, the reform of a religious order", rather than her Christian mysticism.[26] A frequent criticism by feminist critics is that not only is Dorothea less heroic than Saint Teresa and Antigone, but George Eliot herself.[27] In response, Ruth Yeazell and Kathleen Blake chide these critics for "expecting literary pictures of a strong woman succeeding in a period [around 1830] that did not make them likely in life".[21] Eliot has also been criticised more widely for ending the novel with Dorothea marrying Will Ladislaw, someone so clearly her inferior.[28] The novelist Henry James describes Ladislaw as a dilettante who "has not the concentrated fervour essential in the man chosen by so nobly strenuous a heroine".[22]
Marriage
Marriage is one of the major themes in Middlemarch. According to George Steiner, "both principal plots [those of Dorothea and Lydgate] are case studies of unsuccessful marriage".[18] This suggests that these "disastrous marriages" leave the lives of Dorothea and Lydgate unfulfilled.[29] This is arguably more the case with Lydgate than with Dorothea, who gains a second chance through her later marriage to Will Ladislaw, but a favourable interpretation of this marriage depends on the character of Ladislaw himself, whom numerous critics have viewed as Dorothea's inferior.[30] In addition, there is the "meaningless and blissful" marriage of Dorothea's sister Celia Brooke to Sir James Chettam, and more significantly Fred Vincy's courting of Mary Garth. In the latter, Mary Garth will not accept Fred until he abandons the Church and settles on a more suitable career. Here Fred resembles Henry Fielding's character Tom Jones, both being moulded into a good husband by the love they give to and receive from a woman.[31]
Dorothea is a St Teresa, born in the wrong century, in provincial Middlemarch, who mistakes in her idealistic ardor, "a poor dry mummified pedant... as a sort of angel of vocation".[32] Middlemarch is in part a Bildungsroman focusing on the psychological or moral growth of the protagonist: Dorothea "blindly gropes forward, making mistakes in her sometimes foolish, often egotistical, but also admirably idealistic attempt to find a role" or vocation that fulfils her nature.[33] Lydgate is equally mistaken in his choice of a partner, as his idea of a perfect wife is someone "who can sing and play the piano and provide a soft cushion for her husband to rest after work". So he marries Rosamond Vincy, "the woman in the novel who most contrasts with Dorothea", and thereby "deteriorates from ardent researcher to fashionable doctor in London".[33]
