St. Theresa, St. Dorothea, and Miss Brooke in Middlemarch

Abstract

considerable portion of the large body of critical literature on Middlemarch has been taken up with discussions of the character of Dorothea, her relation to the author, and the significance of the analogy with St. Theresa in establishing the tone of the novel. Many readers find it a serious inconsistency that Dorothea, the would-be St. Theresa of the beginning of the novel, should have fallen passionately in love with the handsome young Ladislaw by the end. Ever since E R. Leavis detected an element of unresolved emotionalism in George Eliot's idealization of her heroine and located the source of the problem in her invocation of St. Theresa as Dorothea's heroic prototype,' the ubiquitous question of what Laurence Lerner has famously called Dorothea's Theresa-complex2 has entered into almost every discussion of the novel. But most critics have persisted in interpreting George Eliot's identification of Dorothea with St. Theresa simply in the light of the Spanish saint's epic life as a founder and reformer of religious communities. Certainly the author herself directs the reader's attention to this particular aspect of the St. Theresa myth in order to underline the fact that such