A Feminist Approach to Middlemarch

Abstract

As Alan Mintz suggests, George Eiolt's use of vocation as a subject in Middlemarch (1871) is very original. This work becomes not romance of love, but romance of vocation. But Dorothea, frustrated by the inhibiting conditions of Middlemarch society and by her own "spots of commonness," gives up her pursuit of vocation and seems happy to sink into her second marriage to Will Ladislaw. Many feminist critics object to this second marriage. Lee R. Edwards is disappointed with the novel's failure to fulfil its opening chapters' "promise of a new spiritual incarnation, possibly even an entirely new creation." She says that "what I had seen as revolution was in fact reaction... it [Middlemarch] no longer be one of the books of my life. In so seeing, I am alternately angered, puzzled, and finally depressed." Edwards' statements reflect many feminist critics' frustrations with the novel. What I try to do in this paper is to examine briefly the problems of Dorothea's second marriage in relation to the romance of vocation.