George Eliot's Middlemarch: A Critique of Victorian Marriage

• Week 1:  Victorian crisis in belief 
  In her adolescence, George Eliot became a fervent evangelical but later lost her faith to become an agnostic intellectual. In this novel, Dorothea Brooke’s adolescent evangelicalism prompts her to marry Mr. Casaubon, an aged minister writing a reactionary book on myth and religion. 
• Week 2: Everyone meets in Rome
  Casaubon spends his wedding journey in libraries, while Dorothea enjoys having lively conversations with Will Ladislaw, his young cousin—a future source of tension. Dorothea’s problems with Casaubon raise the question, central to the novel, of how to understand a person very different from oneself. 
• Week 3: Lydgate—marriage and scientific research
  Lydgate plans to combine a passion for biological research with a career as a doctor. His view of Rosamond, whom he marries, is amazingly idealized but also assumes the complete superiority of the male. She will get the life she wants but is too narcissistic to value him as a person. 
• Week 4: Dorothea in prison
  Dorothea’s depression increases on returning home. She longs to see Will Ladislaw, but Casaubon refuses to let him visit, so she feels completely isolated. When she becomes upset about this, he has his “fit in the library,” for which she feels a terrible guilt. 
• Week 5: The sympathetic imagination
  Dorothea is too pure minded to suspect Casaubon of sexual jealousy. She adds to his hostility by asking him to include Will Ladislaw in his will. She tries to deal with Casaubon’s rejection of her offerings of sympathy by imagining him suffering from “a litany of pictured sorrows.”
• Week 6: A happy ending, for Dorothea
  After Casaubon’s death, Dorothea discovers his jealousy in the codicil. Now she can be angry. She is able to give genuine help to Lydgate, and through this involvement she discovers her love for Will. She has gone from total isolation with Casaubon to a genuine relationship with humanity.

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

• Identify how, in the pastoral environment of Middlemarch, Eliot dramatizes crises in religious belief and gender roles, subjects which were becoming more openly discussed in the later 19th century. 
• Recognize Eliot’s intention to show how, through imagination and experience of life, we can endeavour to understand that every person has an “equivalent centre of self” different from our own
• Appreciate Eliot’s anticipation of the technique known as “point of view” in modern fiction through her emphasis on the different ways in which her characters interpret the world
• Consider whether Eliot succeeds in establishing a coherent world-view in all the variety of Middlemarch

• Lectures
• Participation in discussions
  
• Supplementary resources accessed through Canvas
  
• Reflective essay (applicable only to certificate students)

You should obtain a copy of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, available through local or online bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. A free electronic copy can be found through Project Gutenberg. We will provide any other course materials online.