Why Feminist Critics Are Angry with George Eliot

Abstract

FEMINIST CRITICS ARE ANGRY with George Eliot because she did not permit Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch to do what George Eliot did in real life: translate, publish articles, edit a periodical, refuse to marry until she was middle-aged, live an independent existence as a spinster, and finally live openly with a man whom she could not marry. While Dorothea lacks George Eliot's erudition and talent, and this is of course an enormous lack, Dorothea, like her creator, aspires passionately towards a life beyond the provincial domestic confines of a Mliddlemarch, and wishes to be of use in the world. To this end she marries an elderly scholar and offers her undirected energies to his guidance. She is nearly smothered. Freed by his death, she passes a short widowhood in introspection and a little active benevolence and again thinks of fulfillment only in terms of marriage, this time to a young and passionate man with a political career. In her essay Women, Energy and Middlemarch, Lee R. Edwards has expressed the feminist critic's resentment at George Eliot most completely. She had first read the book as an adolescent and perceived in its ending only a happy offer of the possibility of combining marriage with intellectual aspiration. Later she began to perceive Dorothea's second marriage as a copout of some magnitude. Alluding to critics who object to Will Ladislaw as a fitting choice for Dorothea, she says, objection is not that Dorothea should have married Will, but that she should have married anybody at all, that she should ultimately be denied the opportunity given Will to find her own paths and forge her energies into some new mold.... We could have had this vision if the author held the mirror to reflect.. .that world she forced into existence when she stopped being Mary Ann Evans and became George Eliot instead. In other words, George Eliot should have turned the mirror to reflect herself rather than the world out there. The