Marriage as Slavery in Middlemarch Essay -- Eliot Middlemarch Essays

Marriage as Slavery in Middlemarch One of George Eliots challenges in Middlemarch is to depict a sexually desirous woman, Dorothea, at heart the confines of dainty literary propriety. The critic, Abigail Rischin, identifies the moment that Dorotheas future husband, Ladislaw, and his painter-friend see her on base an ancient, partially nude statue of the mythic heroine, Ariadne, in a museum in capital of Italy as the key to Eliots sexualization of this character. Ariadne is, in the sculpture, between her two lovers. Theseus, whom she helped to escape from her fathers labyrinth in Crete has already left her, while the jubilant God, Bacchus, her next lover, has even so to arrive. By invoking the silent visual rhetoric of ancient sculpture, writes Rischin, George Eliot is able to demonstrate the erotic female body far more explicitly than Victorian conventions of... language would permit... By juxtaposing the statue with Dorothea, Eliot displays Dorotheas erotic potenti al. Here, Eliot uses an allusion to another type of narrative to in full illustrate her own heroine, and empower her with emotions that Victorian women were not supposed to possess. Later, Eliot, the novels omnicient narrator, uses a parabol to explain her theory of perspectivism. She compares the self-centered characters of her creation to candels, who all see coaxial patterns of events (scratches, in the parabol) develop around themselves because their vision (light) only extends so far in every direction not because, as they think, events spread out around them (ch 27). J. Hillis Miller, in Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch, explains the etymolgy of the word parable, a word which Eliot herself uses in the midst of telling i... ...e institutionalized. --May West Bibliography Bogdanor, Vernon, The People and the fellowship System, London Cambridge University Press, 1981. Eagleton, Terry, George Eliot Ideology and Literary Form, in Middlemarch sore Casebooks, Ed. John Peck. Eliot, George, Middlemarch, peachy Britain Penguin, 1994. Graner, Suzanne, Organic Fictions, in in Middlemarch New Casebooks, Ed. John Peck. Miller, J. Hillis, Narrative and History, in ELH (English Literary History), vol. 41 (1974). pp. 455-473. Miller, J. Hillis, Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch, in Middlemarch New Casebooks, Ed. John Peck. Morgan, Kenneth O. (Ed.), The Oxford Popular History of Britain, United Kingdom Oxford University Press, 1993. Rischin, Abigail S., Ekphrasis, Narrative and longing in Middlemarch, in PMLA, vol. 111. pp. 1121-1132.