Women and Gender Theme Analysis

George Eliot’s Middlemarch is set in a fictional Midlands town in the early nineteenth century, an environment in which typical gender roles are very are strictly enforced. While men are also expected to live up to gendered ideals, Middlemarch mostly focuses on the way that such expectations are particularly restrictive and suffocating for women. This is explored most notably through the novel’s central character, Dorothea Brooke, who dreams of a grand, intense, and meaningful life that is fundamentally incompatible with the role society has prescribed for her. As a result, she becomes confused about what she really wants and makes some bad life decisions that only serve to further isolate her from her true self and desires. Through Dorothea, the novel implicitly critiques the oppressive expectations society places on women. At the same time, however, it also shows that any resistance is inherently limited, as alternative ways of living for women at the time simply did not exist.

As a heroine, Dorothea is deeply sympathetic. She is ambitious, idealistic, free-spirited, and kind, yet these admirable aspects of her personality make it difficult for her to conform to the gender norms of the society in which she lives.

For example, she is “enamored of intensity and greatness,” fond of horse-riding, and dreams of building cottages for tenant farmers so that they might live in better conditions. These passions do not conform with societal expectations of women, and thus although these dreams and impulses exist very strongly within her, Dorothea feels ashamed of them and attempts to suppress them. She wants to conform to a feminine ideal, which leads her to be highly self-critical and continually make promises she doesn’t keep (such as her vow to give up horse-riding).

Dorothea’s half-hearted attempt to suppress her own desires and personality leads her to exist in a confused and self-contradictory state. This shows that gender roles have the effect of alienating women from themselves.

Dorothea attempts to resolve the internal conflict she feels between her desires and societal gender roles by marrying the much older Rev. Edward Casaubon. Because Casaubon is a scholar working on a highly ambitious project on religious history (The Key to All Mythologies), she believes that she can access the “intensity and greatness” she craves via him.

When Dorothea decides to marry Casaubon, the people around her are confused and (accurately) predict that the marriage will not bring her happiness. They can see what Dorothea herself cannot: she is both suppressing her own nature and trying to achieve the impossible by living through her future husband. Dorothea claims that she wants a husband who can be like a father to her and teach her about things; however, as Mr. Brooke points out, she is a strong-willed person attached to her own opinions. Marrying Casaubon is thus a recipe for disaster.

It is painful to witness Dorothea make such a patently bad life decision, which ends up making her miserable. At the same time, the novel’s exploration of gender norms shows that Dorothea’s decision to marry Casaubon is not made out of mere foolishness. Rather, Dorothea is trapped by the conflict between her own impulses and society’s expectations of her as a woman. The misery of her marriage to Casaubon is only a symptom of this wider problem.

When Casaubon dies, Dorothea has a chance to reevaluate her life and, through her second marriage to Will Ladislaw, ends up choosing a path that brings her far greater happiness and fulfilment. This shows that it is better to stay true to oneself than to attempt to conform to society’s restrictive ideals of how women should behave. On the other hand, Dorothea’s ultimate fate as a housewife and mother reminds readers that there is only so much women can do to resist gender roles in a society that has so few rights, resources, and opportunities available to women.

Dorothea loves Will, but her own dreams—such as the cottages and “colony” she planned to build for tenant farmers—remain unrealized at the end of the novel. The narrator observes: “Many who knew her [Dorothea] thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be known only in certain circles as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done.”

This captures the difficulty of the situation Dorothea and other strong-willed women of the time find themselves in. They desire a richer and more expansive life than that of a wife and mother, but the reality is that there is basically no alternative for them. Thus, even if they rebel against the gender norms of the era, there is only so much that this rebellion can achieve.