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What role does social class play in George Eliot's Middlemarch?
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In Middlemarch, social class plays a crucial role in shaping characters' lives and opportunities. The novel portrays a society obsessed with class, where the bourgeoisie rise to prominence through wealth, yet often lack stability. Protagonist Dorothea's actions are constrained by her upper-middle-class status, preventing her from engaging in professions or scholarly work, leading to her restlessness and dissatisfaction until her second marriage.
Contemporary society, as depicted by George Eliot in Middlemarch, is totally obsessed by class. This is a rapidly changing society in which members of the bourgeoisie use their growing wealth to rise to positions of social prominence and respectability. Though provincial society as portrayed in the story may be rather conservative on the whole, it is far from being immune to the dynamics of pre-Victorian industrial capitalism.
The increased wealth of English society and the professional opportunities it generates have undoubtedly transformed the prospects of many. Tertius Lydgate, for example, is working as a doctor at a time when the medical profession is just starting to become respectable. He may well be distrusted by most of the local inhabitants, but there's no doubting the superior social status that his profession confers upon him.
At the same time, it's notable that Dr. Lydgate encounters money troubles on account of his...
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being unable to manage his finances properly. This indicates perhaps that, despite their new-found prosperity and social prominence, the bourgeoisie still lack the kind of stability that more established families in Middlemarch enjoy.
In Middlemarch by George Eliot, class and gender determine the
circumstances within which the protagonist Dorothea must act. The narrator
describes Dorothea in the following terms:
For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her
mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly
effective. What could she do, what ought she to do? – she, hardly more than a
budding woman, but yet with an active conscience and a great mental need, not
to be satisfied by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and
judgments of a discursive mouse. (1.3.13)
A well-bred girl such as Dorothea could not, for example, become a member of
the clergy or a doctor or in fact become involved in any active profession
aimed at alleviating the needs of the poor or unfortunate. Because she lacks
the education available to men, she cannot become a scholar like Causabon, or
even help him in his work. If she had been a poor woman, she would have been
occupied in useful and necessary work, but as an upper middle class woman, she
had no need to do anything practical and so is restless and unhappy until
in her second marriage she finally is able to become a partner with a husband
who is active in social justice issues.