Assignment paper no 6
Name :Gediya Disha Vijaybhai
Class :sem 2
Paper no:6
Subject: women subjugation in Middlemarch.
Roll no:9
Email
:dishagediya11@gmail.com
Submitted to: Department of
English Maharaja krishna kumar
sinhji Bhavnagar University.
Words:2,473
to evaluate my assignment click here
About George Eliot:
Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. She was the second child of Robert Evans and Christiana Evans the daughter of a local mill-owner. Mary Ann's name was sometimes shortened to Marian.Her full siblings were Christina chrisseyc Isaac And twin brothers who survived a few days in March 1821. She also had a half-brother, Robert (1802–64), and half-sister, Fanny from her farther previous marriage to Harriet Poynton . Her father Robert Evans, of Welsh ancestry, was the manager of the Arbury Hall Estate for the Newdigate family in Warwickshire, and Mary Ann was born on the estate at South Farm.
Brief summary of Middlemarch:
Middlemarch is a small fictional village undergoing large social change. There is rapid industrialization and increased social mobility, and no single religious faith ties the community together. In great detail is every class of Middlemarch society examined—from the landed gentry and clergy to the manufacturers and professional men, farmers, and labourers—though the focus of the novel is on the thwarted idealism of its two principal characters, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, both of whom marry disastrously. It is here where Eliot broke with convention. Instead of ending her work with the inevitable marriage and happy ending, as women writers of romance fiction were then expected to do, Eliot chose instead to detail the realities of marriage, even unhappy couplings. Male critics, as a result, castigated her bold and daring narrative as too gloomy for a “woman writer. In the story, Dorothea is an earnest, intelligent woman and a budding social reformer who makes a serious error in judgment when she chooses to marry Edward Casaubon, a scholarly man many years her senior. Lydgate is a young doctor in Middlemarch who becomes involved with and marries the unsuitable Rosamond Vincy. Dorothea discovers her husband to be a pompous fraud and an incompatible and repressive partner. Lydgate finds himself on the brink of financial ruin and personal disgrace because of his ill-considered choice of a wife. Power struggles in both marriages further doom the relationships. The plot of the novel is a long and involved working out of these two misguided decisions. In addition to creating a thoroughgoing and rich portrait of the life of a small early 19th-century town, Eliot produced an essentially modern novel, with penetrating psychological insights and moral ambiguity.
In the end, Dorothea, with her wealth of dreams and obvious intelligence, is pitied by some for having become “only” a mother and a wife, hinting that it was the social conditions of the day that forced women like Dorothea to defer to men and their careers, sublimate their larger ambitions, and prevent them from being all that they could be. This is but one of the many themes long teased out and debated from this complex but masterful web of fiction.
Women subjugation in Middlemarch:
In Middlemarch Eliot shows women situation and use that times situation in this novel.
What is women subjugation?
Women subjugation mean that she has live her life under Petrarch system. She has not any right for argument and also not to live life which kind she wants to live. They are very weak in argument.
During Victorian age woman face lot of struggle.
In India also have women subjugation. We had not any right to rise our voice against tyranny
George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch, is the role of women in the community. The female characters in the novel are, to some extent, oppressed by the social expectations that prevail in Middlemarch. Regardless of social standing, character or personality, women are expected to cater to and remain dependent on their husbands and to occupy themselves with trivial recreation rather than important household matters. Dorothea and Rosamond, though exceedingly dissimilar, are both subjected to the same social ideals of what women should be.
Dorothea and Rosamond are on different levels of the intricate social spectrum in Middlemarch. As a Brooke, Dorothea's connections "though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably ëgood'"(p.7). Rosamond is of a slightly lower status, especially given that her father has married an innkeeper's daughter, thus further lowering the family's social rank. Although Dorothea and Rosamond enjoy similar amenities such as servants, the detailed social continuum of Middlemarch separates them. The reader connects to strong, and seemingly defiant characters such as Mary Garth, Dorothea Brooke and Rosamond Vincy; yet despite their desire to fulfill a greater purpose, each of the female characters in the novel has to use the male characters as mediums to carry out their desires. Perhaps we can draw connections to Eliot herself, writing under a male pseudonym in order to retain recognition for her writing which might not have been achieved if she had written under her own name as a woman.
For example, Dorothea Brooke, who appears so strong-willed at the beginning of the novel, “she was enamoured of intensity and greatness”, yet she has to act through Sir James to initiate her plan for the cottages, and her marriage to Casaubon is ultimately a failure. Her attempts to become involved in her husband’s life work “The Key to all Mythologies” and to share his intellectual outlook on life drive him to misery and insecurity as he longs for a subservient and obeying wife. Even after Casaubon’s death, he has control over Dorothea’s future by using the codicil in his will to prevent her from marrying Will Ladislaw.
Throughout ‘Middlemarch’, we are confronted with the conflicting roles of gender in relationships, as conversely, Lydgate wishes that Rosamond would be more of an equal to him so that he could share his financial burden and occupational worries with her, instead of keeping them to himself and allowing her to live completely ignorant of their debts. Rosamond is also using Lydgate as a tool to further her own social ambitions, believing that, by marrying Lydgate, she will be able to leave Middlemarch and raise herself in society. Those who disobey the male characters in the novel appear, to a certain extent, to be punished: Rosamond miscarries after going against her husband’s orders not to go out riding, Will Ladislaw’s grandmother is disinherited after marrying a Pole against her family’s wishes, and Mary Garth feels the guilt of knowing that, to some extent, she prevented Fred from obtaining his inheritance from Featherstone.
Ultimately, Eliot does not give us a clear message of the role that gender plays in the novel, but we do see a recurring theme of miscommunication and misinterpretation between the sexes, of emotions, desires, and actions. In Middlemarch, women lack the kind of education given to men. Regardless of their
social rank, familial connections, or expectations from life, almost every girl is
destined to feel aggrieved by the educational inadequacy they experience in one way
or another. The consequences are not very different for any girl even if she belongs
to an aristocratic background. The Brooke sisters, Dorothea and Celia “had been both
educated on plans at once narrow and promiscuous, first in an English family and
afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne” The implication given at first sight is
that the education the sisters have received is inadequate; “narrow” and
“promiscuous”. It is not enough, because it was not systematic or programmed.
The nineteen-year-old and “remarkably clever” Dorothea Brooke is a girl “of some
good birth and fortune”. Although they are not exactly aristocratic, her uncle Mr
Arthur Brooke, who raised her and her sister Celia, has very good connections. From
the very first description given about Dorothea, it is asserted that she is not a girl of diocre expectations; at least for her time and place. Her thirst for knowledge or
being knowledgeable is hinted at frequently. She knows “many passages of Pascal’s
Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart” She thinks to herself that “such destinies
of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine
fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam” . thorough The ironic tone of the narrator
associated with comments about Dorothea actually starts here with the fact that
Pascal and Jeremy Taylor were then considered “improbable authors for a young
girl” to read and thoroughly absorb. Rosamond is the daughter of Mr. Walter Vincy, the mayor of Middlemarch, and a
middle-class manufacturer. She shows “exceptional” success in completing all these
stages of being lady-like, which makes her exemplary to all the girls of the town and
grants her a promising reputation among her elders. “Rosamond Vincy, the prize
pupil of Mrs. Lemon’s finishing school, is offered as an epitome of what nineteenth-
century society seeks in its women”, says Karen Chase noting that what
nineteenth-century people meant by the most proper education for women and
Rosamond, with all the connotations of her name, is a personification of the ideal girl. Prejudices against Women
In Middlemarch, it is not only the inadequacy of education or rejection of women’s
entrance to male-oriented vocational domains that confine women, but also people’s
notions, preconceptions and gossip that limit women’s lives. It should be asserted
that these prejudices and fixed notions arise not only from men but also from women.
The narrator puts instances of such prejudices with irony again, showing some
characters’ insecurities as well as their inflexibly-moulded views on women. Some
striking examples are briefly given here although the biased attitudes of men and
women towards women are integrated into the analysis of the characters in general.
The first group of these preconceptions is the assumed superiority of men over
women. The most universal of these presumptions is about women’s intellectual
capacity. The general tendency is to think that women are not as fit to delve much
into intellectual processes as men areIt can be stated that what is called “accomplished” in a female, and the education
Rosamond receives to be so, is rather shallow and trivial. Sandra M. Gilbert and
Susan Garth on both Dorothea and Rosamond’s lack of opportunities;
“both are victims of miseducation causing them not to ‘know Homer from slang’ and
neither, therefore, shows any unbecoming knowledge” . They do not have any
“unbecoming”, improper knowledge because they know too little. By the Homer
example, the critics make a reference to the dialogue between Fred and Rosamond
where the former teases the latter for her inability to comprehend the deeper
meanings of the words and expressions she labels as “correct English” Fred’s
sarcastic manner towards Rosamond reveals the implicit criticism of her superficial
knowledge of the world.
In Middlemarch, the inadequacy of education and lack of vocational opportunities
presented to women are interrelated and together they constitute an integral part of
women’s subordinated position in society. As Gillian Beer also suggests the novel is
“about work and the right to work, about the need to discover a vocation which will
satisfy the whole self and the need to be educated to undertake it” (150). Vocation, in
the context of the novel, can be interpreted as the female characters’ understanding
of a useful occupation. While some women look for active, useful occupations,
others experience being a woman as a vocation itself as an inevitable outcome of the
expectations of the society from women.
In Victorian age women’s condition:
During the Victorian period men and women’s roles became more sharply defined than at any time in history. In earlier centuries it had been usual for women to work alongside husbands and brothers in the family business. Living ‘over the shop’ made it easy for women to help out by serving customers or keeping accounts while also attending to their domestic duties. As the 19th century progressed men increasingly commuted to their place of work – the factory, shop or office. Wives, daughters and sisters were left at home all day to oversee the domestic duties that were increasingly carried out by servants. From the 1830s, women started to adopt the crinoline, a huge bell-shaped skirt that made it virtually impossible to clean a grate or sweep the stairs without tumbling over.
Women did, though, require a new kind of education to prepare them for this role of ‘Angel in the House’. Rather than attracting a husband through their domestic abilities, middle-class girls were coached in what were known as ‘accomplishments’. These would be learned either at boarding school or from a resident governess. In Pride & Prejudice the snobbish Caroline Bingley lists the skills required by any young lady who considers herself accomplished:
A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages….; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions.
At the same time, a young girl was not expected to focus too obviously on finding a husband. Being ‘forward’ in the company of men suggested a worrying sexual appetite. Women were assumed to desire marriage because it allowed them to become mothers rather than to pursue sexual or emotional satisfaction. One doctor, William Acton, famously declared that ‘The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’.
Girls usually married in their early to mid-20s. Typically, the groom would be five years older. Not only did this reinforce the ‘natural’ hierarchy between the sexes, but it also made sound financial sense. A young man needed to be able to show that he earned enough money to support a wife and any future children before the girl’s father would give his permission. Some unfortunate couples were obliged to endure an engagement lasting decades before they could afford to marry.
The prostitute was the shadow that haunted the well-run middle-class home. She serviced the needs of the men of the house, not just before marriage but sometimes during it too. Just like the men she slept with, but unlike their wives, the prostitute was a worker in the economic market place, exchanging services for cash. Doctors such as Acton were extremely worried by the ‘problem’ the prostitute presented, in particular the way she spread sexual disease amongst the male population. For this reason Contagious Diseases Act were instituted from 1860 which allowed, in certain towns, for the forced medical examination of any woman who was suspected of being a sex worker. If she was found to be infected she was placed in a ‘Lock Hospital’ until she was cured. A reform movement led by Josephine Butler vigorously campaigned for a repeal of the acts, arguing that it was male clients, as much as the prostitutes, who were responsible for the ‘problems’ associated with prostitution.
Conclusion:
So Eliot explain well what is subjugation in Middlemarch with the reference of Victorian age. We can says that there was a Petrarch system in Victorian era and it’s reflect well by George Eliot.
Although women who aspire to higher ends in the novel cannot realize their dreams
and their way is blocked by limited views and conclusions, still their ends show the
author’s stance; they at least arrive at a point of negotiation with their fates by being
presented with a second chance to try to shape their lives. “Every limit is a beginning
as well as an ending”, states the narrator Although it was not the targeted
device of the liberation for women in the novel, especially for Dorothea, “marriage is
still a great beginning” . Therefore, even though some of the character are not
provided with a blissful marriage, they are given a second chance despite their
failures and flaws.
Work cited:
https://www.shmoop.com/middlemarch/women-femininity-theme.html
Class :sem 2
Paper no:6
Subject: women subjugation in Middlemarch.
Roll no:9
:dishagediya11@gmail.com
Submitted to: Department of
English Maharaja krishna kumar
sinhji Bhavnagar University.
Words:2,473
to evaluate my assignment click here
About George Eliot:
Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. She was the second child of Robert Evans and Christiana Evans the daughter of a local mill-owner. Mary Ann's name was sometimes shortened to Marian.Her full siblings were Christina chrisseyc Isaac And twin brothers who survived a few days in March 1821. She also had a half-brother, Robert (1802–64), and half-sister, Fanny from her farther previous marriage to Harriet Poynton . Her father Robert Evans, of Welsh ancestry, was the manager of the Arbury Hall Estate for the Newdigate family in Warwickshire, and Mary Ann was born on the estate at South Farm.
Brief summary of Middlemarch:
Middlemarch is a small fictional village undergoing large social change. There is rapid industrialization and increased social mobility, and no single religious faith ties the community together. In great detail is every class of Middlemarch society examined—from the landed gentry and clergy to the manufacturers and professional men, farmers, and labourers—though the focus of the novel is on the thwarted idealism of its two principal characters, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, both of whom marry disastrously. It is here where Eliot broke with convention. Instead of ending her work with the inevitable marriage and happy ending, as women writers of romance fiction were then expected to do, Eliot chose instead to detail the realities of marriage, even unhappy couplings. Male critics, as a result, castigated her bold and daring narrative as too gloomy for a “woman writer. In the story, Dorothea is an earnest, intelligent woman and a budding social reformer who makes a serious error in judgment when she chooses to marry Edward Casaubon, a scholarly man many years her senior. Lydgate is a young doctor in Middlemarch who becomes involved with and marries the unsuitable Rosamond Vincy. Dorothea discovers her husband to be a pompous fraud and an incompatible and repressive partner. Lydgate finds himself on the brink of financial ruin and personal disgrace because of his ill-considered choice of a wife. Power struggles in both marriages further doom the relationships. The plot of the novel is a long and involved working out of these two misguided decisions. In addition to creating a thoroughgoing and rich portrait of the life of a small early 19th-century town, Eliot produced an essentially modern novel, with penetrating psychological insights and moral ambiguity.
In the end, Dorothea, with her wealth of dreams and obvious intelligence, is pitied by some for having become “only” a mother and a wife, hinting that it was the social conditions of the day that forced women like Dorothea to defer to men and their careers, sublimate their larger ambitions, and prevent them from being all that they could be. This is but one of the many themes long teased out and debated from this complex but masterful web of fiction.
Women subjugation in Middlemarch:
In Middlemarch Eliot shows women situation and use that times situation in this novel.
What is women subjugation?
Women subjugation mean that she has live her life under Petrarch system. She has not any right for argument and also not to live life which kind she wants to live. They are very weak in argument.
During Victorian age woman face lot of struggle.
In India also have women subjugation. We had not any right to rise our voice against tyranny
George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch, is the role of women in the community. The female characters in the novel are, to some extent, oppressed by the social expectations that prevail in Middlemarch. Regardless of social standing, character or personality, women are expected to cater to and remain dependent on their husbands and to occupy themselves with trivial recreation rather than important household matters. Dorothea and Rosamond, though exceedingly dissimilar, are both subjected to the same social ideals of what women should be.
Dorothea and Rosamond are on different levels of the intricate social spectrum in Middlemarch. As a Brooke, Dorothea's connections "though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably ëgood'"(p.7). Rosamond is of a slightly lower status, especially given that her father has married an innkeeper's daughter, thus further lowering the family's social rank. Although Dorothea and Rosamond enjoy similar amenities such as servants, the detailed social continuum of Middlemarch separates them. The reader connects to strong, and seemingly defiant characters such as Mary Garth, Dorothea Brooke and Rosamond Vincy; yet despite their desire to fulfill a greater purpose, each of the female characters in the novel has to use the male characters as mediums to carry out their desires. Perhaps we can draw connections to Eliot herself, writing under a male pseudonym in order to retain recognition for her writing which might not have been achieved if she had written under her own name as a woman.
For example, Dorothea Brooke, who appears so strong-willed at the beginning of the novel, “she was enamoured of intensity and greatness”, yet she has to act through Sir James to initiate her plan for the cottages, and her marriage to Casaubon is ultimately a failure. Her attempts to become involved in her husband’s life work “The Key to all Mythologies” and to share his intellectual outlook on life drive him to misery and insecurity as he longs for a subservient and obeying wife. Even after Casaubon’s death, he has control over Dorothea’s future by using the codicil in his will to prevent her from marrying Will Ladislaw.
Throughout ‘Middlemarch’, we are confronted with the conflicting roles of gender in relationships, as conversely, Lydgate wishes that Rosamond would be more of an equal to him so that he could share his financial burden and occupational worries with her, instead of keeping them to himself and allowing her to live completely ignorant of their debts. Rosamond is also using Lydgate as a tool to further her own social ambitions, believing that, by marrying Lydgate, she will be able to leave Middlemarch and raise herself in society. Those who disobey the male characters in the novel appear, to a certain extent, to be punished: Rosamond miscarries after going against her husband’s orders not to go out riding, Will Ladislaw’s grandmother is disinherited after marrying a Pole against her family’s wishes, and Mary Garth feels the guilt of knowing that, to some extent, she prevented Fred from obtaining his inheritance from Featherstone.
Ultimately, Eliot does not give us a clear message of the role that gender plays in the novel, but we do see a recurring theme of miscommunication and misinterpretation between the sexes, of emotions, desires, and actions. In Middlemarch, women lack the kind of education given to men. Regardless of their
social rank, familial connections, or expectations from life, almost every girl is
destined to feel aggrieved by the educational inadequacy they experience in one way
or another. The consequences are not very different for any girl even if she belongs
to an aristocratic background. The Brooke sisters, Dorothea and Celia “had been both
educated on plans at once narrow and promiscuous, first in an English family and
afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne” The implication given at first sight is
that the education the sisters have received is inadequate; “narrow” and
“promiscuous”. It is not enough, because it was not systematic or programmed.
The nineteen-year-old and “remarkably clever” Dorothea Brooke is a girl “of some
good birth and fortune”. Although they are not exactly aristocratic, her uncle Mr
Arthur Brooke, who raised her and her sister Celia, has very good connections. From
the very first description given about Dorothea, it is asserted that she is not a girl of diocre expectations; at least for her time and place. Her thirst for knowledge or
being knowledgeable is hinted at frequently. She knows “many passages of Pascal’s
Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart” She thinks to herself that “such destinies
of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine
fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam” . thorough The ironic tone of the narrator
associated with comments about Dorothea actually starts here with the fact that
Pascal and Jeremy Taylor were then considered “improbable authors for a young
girl” to read and thoroughly absorb. Rosamond is the daughter of Mr. Walter Vincy, the mayor of Middlemarch, and a
middle-class manufacturer. She shows “exceptional” success in completing all these
stages of being lady-like, which makes her exemplary to all the girls of the town and
grants her a promising reputation among her elders. “Rosamond Vincy, the prize
pupil of Mrs. Lemon’s finishing school, is offered as an epitome of what nineteenth-
century society seeks in its women”, says Karen Chase noting that what
nineteenth-century people meant by the most proper education for women and
Rosamond, with all the connotations of her name, is a personification of the ideal girl. Prejudices against Women
In Middlemarch, it is not only the inadequacy of education or rejection of women’s
entrance to male-oriented vocational domains that confine women, but also people’s
notions, preconceptions and gossip that limit women’s lives. It should be asserted
that these prejudices and fixed notions arise not only from men but also from women.
The narrator puts instances of such prejudices with irony again, showing some
characters’ insecurities as well as their inflexibly-moulded views on women. Some
striking examples are briefly given here although the biased attitudes of men and
women towards women are integrated into the analysis of the characters in general.
The first group of these preconceptions is the assumed superiority of men over
women. The most universal of these presumptions is about women’s intellectual
capacity. The general tendency is to think that women are not as fit to delve much
into intellectual processes as men areIt can be stated that what is called “accomplished” in a female, and the education
Rosamond receives to be so, is rather shallow and trivial. Sandra M. Gilbert and
Susan Garth on both Dorothea and Rosamond’s lack of opportunities;
“both are victims of miseducation causing them not to ‘know Homer from slang’ and
neither, therefore, shows any unbecoming knowledge” . They do not have any
“unbecoming”, improper knowledge because they know too little. By the Homer
example, the critics make a reference to the dialogue between Fred and Rosamond
where the former teases the latter for her inability to comprehend the deeper
meanings of the words and expressions she labels as “correct English” Fred’s
sarcastic manner towards Rosamond reveals the implicit criticism of her superficial
knowledge of the world.
In Middlemarch, the inadequacy of education and lack of vocational opportunities
presented to women are interrelated and together they constitute an integral part of
women’s subordinated position in society. As Gillian Beer also suggests the novel is
“about work and the right to work, about the need to discover a vocation which will
satisfy the whole self and the need to be educated to undertake it” (150). Vocation, in
the context of the novel, can be interpreted as the female characters’ understanding
of a useful occupation. While some women look for active, useful occupations,
others experience being a woman as a vocation itself as an inevitable outcome of the
expectations of the society from women.
In Victorian age women’s condition:
During the Victorian period men and women’s roles became more sharply defined than at any time in history. In earlier centuries it had been usual for women to work alongside husbands and brothers in the family business. Living ‘over the shop’ made it easy for women to help out by serving customers or keeping accounts while also attending to their domestic duties. As the 19th century progressed men increasingly commuted to their place of work – the factory, shop or office. Wives, daughters and sisters were left at home all day to oversee the domestic duties that were increasingly carried out by servants. From the 1830s, women started to adopt the crinoline, a huge bell-shaped skirt that made it virtually impossible to clean a grate or sweep the stairs without tumbling over.
Women did, though, require a new kind of education to prepare them for this role of ‘Angel in the House’. Rather than attracting a husband through their domestic abilities, middle-class girls were coached in what were known as ‘accomplishments’. These would be learned either at boarding school or from a resident governess. In Pride & Prejudice the snobbish Caroline Bingley lists the skills required by any young lady who considers herself accomplished:
A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages….; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions.
At the same time, a young girl was not expected to focus too obviously on finding a husband. Being ‘forward’ in the company of men suggested a worrying sexual appetite. Women were assumed to desire marriage because it allowed them to become mothers rather than to pursue sexual or emotional satisfaction. One doctor, William Acton, famously declared that ‘The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’.
Girls usually married in their early to mid-20s. Typically, the groom would be five years older. Not only did this reinforce the ‘natural’ hierarchy between the sexes, but it also made sound financial sense. A young man needed to be able to show that he earned enough money to support a wife and any future children before the girl’s father would give his permission. Some unfortunate couples were obliged to endure an engagement lasting decades before they could afford to marry.
The prostitute was the shadow that haunted the well-run middle-class home. She serviced the needs of the men of the house, not just before marriage but sometimes during it too. Just like the men she slept with, but unlike their wives, the prostitute was a worker in the economic market place, exchanging services for cash. Doctors such as Acton were extremely worried by the ‘problem’ the prostitute presented, in particular the way she spread sexual disease amongst the male population. For this reason Contagious Diseases Act were instituted from 1860 which allowed, in certain towns, for the forced medical examination of any woman who was suspected of being a sex worker. If she was found to be infected she was placed in a ‘Lock Hospital’ until she was cured. A reform movement led by Josephine Butler vigorously campaigned for a repeal of the acts, arguing that it was male clients, as much as the prostitutes, who were responsible for the ‘problems’ associated with prostitution.
Conclusion:
So Eliot explain well what is subjugation in Middlemarch with the reference of Victorian age. We can says that there was a Petrarch system in Victorian era and it’s reflect well by George Eliot.
Although women who aspire to higher ends in the novel cannot realize their dreams
and their way is blocked by limited views and conclusions, still their ends show the
author’s stance; they at least arrive at a point of negotiation with their fates by being
presented with a second chance to try to shape their lives. “Every limit is a beginning
as well as an ending”, states the narrator Although it was not the targeted
device of the liberation for women in the novel, especially for Dorothea, “marriage is
still a great beginning” . Therefore, even though some of the character are not
provided with a blissful marriage, they are given a second chance despite their
failures and flaws.
Work cited:
https://www.shmoop.com/middlemarch/women-femininity-theme.html
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