Ambition and Disappointment Theme Analysis

The experience that unites all the characters in Middlemarch is disappointment. In the novel, disappointment is something that happens on both a broad scale (when one’s lifelong dreams and ambitions do not come to pass) and on a more minor, everyday level. Indeed, at one point the narrator observes: “We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time.” This quotation indicates that disappointment is both a universal experience (it applies to all mortal beings, men and women) and that it is a notably frequent occurrence. Because disappointment is often inevitable, the novel suggests that it must be accepted as part of life. Doing so can even have positive side effects, such as forcing people to compromise and reconcile conflicting views.

The novel also presents ambition as an integral part of the human condition. In some ways, the book presents a positive view of ambition as something that helps society advance and that makes life meaningful.

In the case of the young doctor Tertius Lydgate, being orphaned young meant that he did not end up automatically following the vocation of his father, but instead picked a career based on “intellectual passion.” When he discovered such a passion for medicine, his guardians allowed him to pursue it, and the result was that he became an enthusiastic and talented doctor. Lydgate’s passionate ambitions make him a good doctor, which has a positive impact on the community: not only does he save Fred Vincy’s life, but he helps open the New Hospital, which brings medical advancements to Middlemarch.

Ambition is important both as a means of personal fulfilment and as a way of stimulating societal progress. Without ambition, life can seem empty and pointless, and professional roles are filled by people who are unenthusiastic and likely inept (as is the case of the doctors in Middlemarch before Lydgate’s arrival).

Yet despite these positive sides of ambition, ambition can also be dangerous—not least because it virtually guarantees disappointment in some form. Lydgate’s fervent ambitions mean that he sets expectations for himself (and others) that are too high. His pursuit of a medical career is arguably too single-minded, leading him to neglect other aspects of his life such as marriage. At first Lydgate refuses to even consider getting married until he has fulfilled his professional ambitions, which is shown to be an unrealistic and impractical way of approaching life. His obsessive focus on his career then leads him to make a mistake by marrying Rosamond, with whom he is fundamentally incompatible.

Lydgate’s trajectory suggests that single-minded ambition will lead to disappointment because it disrupts the balance in one’s life. Despite having a life that—like pretty much all lives—contains a mix of both successes and disappointments, when Lydgate dies he considers himself a failure. This suggests that if people are too ambitious in the first place, then they are setting themselves up for disappointment.

As Lydgate’s story shows, one of the main ways that ambition and disappointment are explored in the novel is through marriage. Where other nineteenth-century novels often end with marriage, Middlemarch depicts a series of marriages across the course of the narrative that are often filled with disappointment, boredom, conflict, and misery. In doing so, the novel challenges the idea that marriage is the ultimate ambition, a “happy ever after.” Instead, marriage is usually shown to be a highly disappointing experience.

In choosing to marry the much older Edward Casaubon, Dorothea attempts to reconcile her own ideals and ambitions with the role of a married woman that she is expected to play. Casaubon is a scholar who has been working on an ambitious work of theological writing, The Key to All Mythologies, for many years. Dorothea dreams both of submitting to Casaubon’s will (as a good wife should) and of putting her intellect to use by helping him with his scholarship. Yet this dream is doomed, both by the fact that Casaubon himself is something of a fraud whose scholarly work is not actually very good, and by the fact that he doesn’t respect Dorothea as his intellectual equal and thus does not want her assistance.

Dorothea’s miserable union with Casaubon becomes the primary example of disappointing and disastrous marriage. At one point the marriage is described as “an enclosed basin;” several other times it is referred to as a “prison,” and Casaubon’s cousin Will Ladislaw even tells Dorothea that she will be “buried alive” at Casaubon’s house, Lowick Manor. These descriptions highlight the extreme extent to which women lose their freedom and agency within marriage. Even worse, this imprisonment is basically permanent: the only hope of escape is if one’s husband dies, as happens to both Dorothea and, later, Rosamond.

The trope of disappointment in marriage both proves the novel’s point that disappointment must be accepted as part of life and shows that this acceptance can be impossibly difficult. Disappointment might be an inevitable (or at least highly likely) component of marriage, but a bad marriage can have the effect of permanently ruining a person’s life. While Dorothea and Rosamond are lucky enough to get second chances, this is only possible because their first husbands die before they do.

Over the course of the novel it becomes clear that one can avoid being broken by disappointment by setting more realistic goals and ambitions. At the same time, it is impossible to avoid disappointment altogether. No one can predict the trajectory of their career or marriage, and in this sense disappointment is inevitable. Furthermore, disappointment is the necessary flip side of having ambitions in the first place, and both ambitions and disappointment are thus shown to be essential aspects of human existence.