Society And Society In George Eliot's Middlemarch

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George Eliot provides a valuable look into the lives of historically unremarkable and ordinary people in her novel Middlemarch. This insight allows the reader to discover the established society within 19th century Provincial England, and how that society shapes a relationship with the individual. Eliot uses Middlemarch and its disdain for the tropes of conventional romance to embody unimportant people –rather than magnificent journeys, struggles, and victories of princes and kings – whom are affected by the social web in which they inhabit and interact with each other. This human social web is the main focus of the novel, and, therefore, a world in which characters are free to imagine themselves free from social pressures, such as marriage idealism, that determine their lives is created.
The world of Middlemarch is socially complex with the way its characters interact with and treat each other. With its macabre and upsetting tone, Eliot uses unconventional characters, such as Dorothea and Edward, and Tertius and Rosamond, to reveal the cruel realities of marriage, and the true hardships people face in a society filled with idealistic visions. This major theme of marriage failure is inter-weaved throughout the novel, and is a result of people refusing to see their spouse’s imperfections or faults. The bonds between these characters fail because the mistakes made are only realised until after marriage, and the tragic reality destroys their once ideal visions of their partners and themselves. This relates back to the statement that an individual’s inner ideal version of themselves will never overpower who they really are as a person, and the harsh realities they have to face determine who that person is. When they see and learn the...

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...to support and stand by both Edward Casaubon and Tertius Lydgate – when the town alienates him – is socially criticised behaviour within Middlemarch. Standing by her strong beliefs and going against the social expectations of provincial Middlemarch allows her to pursue and emerge into a new role, away from Middlemarch, in which helps her achieve a happy ending with her second husband and highlights a change for the better of the relationship between women and society at the time.
Unfortunately, not many characters are as respectable as Dorothea, and there are contradictions in the character of the individual person throughout the entire novel. These contradictions are evident in the shifting sympathies of the reader. For example, Casaubon can be greatly sympathized with at one moment, and then Eliot causes the reader to harshly and critically judge him the next.

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