paper no-6

Paper no-6 (The Victorian age.)
Topic-A Critical Study (Analysis) Of Middle March.

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Assignment

Name: - Vala Asha T.

Class: -     M.A.  SEM 2

Topic: -    A Critical Study (Analysis) Of Middle March.

Paper: -   6.

ROLL NO: - 37

Year: -   2015 - 2016

ENROLLMENT NO: - PG15101041

E-MAIL:-valaasha10@gmail.com 

     

Submitted :-    Smt S.B.Gardy   Department of English      Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Bhavnagar

Middle March

George Eliot

        Author, Journalist (1819–1880)

   

Born

In South Farm, Asbury Hall, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the United Kingdom 

November 22, 1819

Introduction :-

                    In 1819, novelist George Eliot (nee Mary Ann Evans), was born at a farmstead in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, where her father was estate manager. Mary Ann, the youngest child and a favorite of her father's, received a good education for a young woman of her day. Influenced by a favorite governess, she became a religious evangelical as an adolescent. Her first published work was a religious poem. Through a family friend, she was exposed to Charles Pennell’s An Inquiry into the Origins of Christianity. Unable to believe, she conscientiously gave up religion and stopped attending church. Her father shunned her, sending the broken-hearted young dependent to live with a sister until she promised to reexamine her feelings. Her intellectual views did not, however, change.

Her major works :-

1) Adam Bede (1859), 

2) The Mill on the Floss (1860), 

3) Silas Marner (1861), 

4) Middlemarch (1871–72), and 

5) Daniel Deronda (1876).

“A Critical study (Analysis) Of Middle March ’’

                          Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by George Eliot; the novel is set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch, thought to be based on Coventry, during the period 1830–32. It has multiple plots with a large cast of characters, and in addition to its distinct though interlocking narratives it pursues a number of underlying themes, including the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism, self-interest, religion, hypocrisy, political reform, and education. The pace is leisurely, the tone is mildly didactic, and the canvas is very broad.

                       Although it has some comical elements and comically named characters. Middlemarch is a work of realism. Through the voices and opinions of different characters we become aware of various issues of the day: the Great Reform Bill, the beginnings of the railways, the death of King George IV, and the succession of his brother, the Duke of Clarence. We learn something of the state of contemporary medical science. We also encounter the deeply reactionary mindset within a settled community facing the prospect of what too many is unwelcome Chan.

                                              Middlemarch is a novel of epic proportions, but it transforms the notion of an epic. Epics usually narrate the tale of one important hero who experiences grand adventure, and they usually interpret events according to a grand design of fate. Every event has immediate, grand consequences. Kings and dynasties are made and unmade in epic tales.

                       Middlemarch's subtitle is "A Study of Provincial Life." This means that Middlemarch represents the lives of ordinary people, not the grand adventures of princes and kings. Middlemarch represents the spirit of nineteenth-century England through the unknown, historically unremarkable common people. The small community of Middlemarch is thrown into relief against the background of larger social transformations, rather than the other way around.  England is the process of rapid industrialization. Social mobility is growing rapidly. With the rise of the merchant middle class, one's birth no longer necessarily determines one's social class for life.

                      Middlemarch readers will be astonished by the novel's amazingly complex social world. Eliot continually uses the metaphor of a web to describe the town's social relations. She intricately weaves together the disparate life experiences of a large cast of characters. Many characters subscribe to a world-view; others want to find a world-view to organize their lives. The absence of a single, triumphant world-view to organize all life is the basic design of Middlemarch. No one occupies the center of the novel as the most important or influential person. Middlemarch social relations are indeed like a web, but the web has no center. Each individual occupies a point in the web, affecting and affected by the other points. Eliot's admirable effort to represent this web in great detail makes her novel epic in length and scope. Unlike in an epic, however, no single point in the web and no single world-view reign triumphant.

The moral standard and centre of the novel - the Garth family.

                            As a matter of fact, even “Middlemarch”, an imaginary provincial town, has a symbolical not a topical significance. It is provincial, because it is bereft of the glamour of heroic adventure and passionate dedication to high ideals; and this not because the characters are no longer capable of dedication, but because the time for uncommon fits is forever gone.

                             If the Dorothea and the Lydgate plots unfold as twin studies in defeated aspirations There was no more opportunity for either religious or speculative quests in the post-industrial and post-metaphysical age. There is one family that would seem to be the moral standard and centre of the novel - the Garth family. Mrs. Garth is introduced to us teaching Latin to the children while cooking dinner. 

                                  This is portrayed as being a very worthwhile activity, and is contrasted with the somewhat silly parenting attitude of both Celia and the Vinci’s. Mary Garth's insistence that Fred find a worthy profession before she will marry him is also held in high esteem - she is putting the good of others above her own desires. The only trouble that the Garth family goes through is a result of their virtue rather than their vice; Caleb, out of kindness and of love, backs Fred, and so when the redactors want their money, the future of one of the Garth children is put in jeopardy.

                                    She finds such accompaniment to her cooking in the kitchen as proper as having taught before marriage. So many critics, following the misleading Prelude, take Dorothea to be the moral centre of the novel. The Garth family is the only major characters in Middlemarch who are not educated by experience, they do not change. This is because they are already in possession of the moral education that matters by the time the novel opens. 

                                   This is a significant clue. The Dorothea-Casaubon story and its aftermath, and the Lydgate-Rosamond story, are of course more important in the pattern of the novel’s action than the Mary-Fred story or than anything which involves the Garth family, but the Garth family establishes the criteria to which most other actions are referred.H.J.Harvey:

“The Garths are the one solidly happy family in the book and as such provide a standard whereby the failings of the other marriages can be measured. Apart from the devious contrasts with the Casaubon’s and him Lydgates, the Garths relate especially – because of Fred – to the Vincy household. The different relationships of parents to children are especially well illustrated. The different reactions of Mrs. Garth and Mrs. Vincy to the news of Fred’s decision to work for Caleb illustrate George Eliot’s mature control over that difficult and complex area of human experience where likeness and unlikeness merge into each other.

Main character:-

v Dorothia Brooke.

v Mr.casaubon.

v Celia Brooke

v Sir James chettam

v Tertius Lydgate(Doctor)

v Lucy vincy

v Walter vincy

v Fred vincy

v Rosamond vincy

v Will ladislaw.

Middlemarch as a Subtle and Rich study of Females

                              George Eliot exhibited a rare insight in the presentation of female characters and her female figures have a feminine attitude towards life. They are all vividly and convincingly drawn However, they still had “soul hunger,” even if they had no outlet for their spiritual yearning as St. Theresa did (see Prelude).

                              Following the French positivist philosopher, Augusta Comte (the father of sociology), Eliot believed that it was women who held society together and guided its progress altruistically, from behind the scenes. She did not advocate working for political “rights” because a woman’s power and goodness were profoundly subtle. Sympathy was the antidote to competition, and women have this quality in abundance. They are the ones who encourage it in others and who use love and sympathy to ameliorate the harshness of the world.

MIDDLEMARCH EXPLORED THE WAYS IN WHICH SOCIAL AND SPIRITUAL ENERGY CAN BE FRUSTRATED

                         I do not believe that it is sufficient to say that Middlemarch explores the ways in which social and spiritual energy can be frustrated; it would be more appropriate to say that Middlemarch explores the ways in which social and spiritual energies (ideals if you will) are completely destroyed and perverted. One need only look to Lydgate to see an example of idealism being destroyed by the environment in which it is found. At the start of the novel, we are introduced to the "young, poor and ambitious" and most of all idealistic Doctor Lydgate, who has great plans for the fever hospital in Middlemarch. Throughout the novel, however, we see his plans frustrated by the designs of others, though primarily the hypocritical desires of Nicholas Bestrode. The second example of the idealism of the young being destroyed by the old is that of Dorothea. This can be seen by her continuing desire to "bear a larger part of the world's misery" or to learn Latin and Greek, both of which are continually thwarted by Casaubon, though this ends after his death, with her discovery of his selfish and suspicious nature, by way of the codicil.

                         The character who has their ambitions and ideals brought most obviously low is Lydgate. The earliest example is when he has to make the choice between Fairbrother and Tyke. Both of these characters are rather poor examples of the clergy (Fairbrother because of his gambling, and Tyke because of his rather lazy attitude). Our sympathies are clearly with Fairbrother for a number of reasons; he doesn't gamble because he wants to, but because the wage he receives from running his parish alone is too small to support him and the various members of his family that rely on him. Lydgate has to make the choice between someone he likes as a person (Fairbrother) and someone who he needs help from (Bestrode). It is clear that Lydgate is very similar to Fairbrother in a number of ways; both are scientists, and both have great hopes for the future. It would therefore seem to be the case that Lydgate would automatically support Fairbrother. 

                                    However, Bestrode uses his money and his influence to ensure Tyke's success. Bestrode is another example of a character that has had his idealism and destroyed, though not by Middlemarch. He was once a great and trusted minister, but the lure of money from the pawn shop, and the possibility of inheriting all of Ladislaw's mother's money proved too great for him. He is no longer the honorable and trusted man, but something all together darker and more sinister: There are many coarse hypocrites who consciously affect beliefs … for the sake of gulling the world, but Bestrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. He does not lie to others, but to himself; he continues to try and justify his desires, though puts them in such ways that they appear to be morally sound and justifiable.

Conclusion:-

According to the learned critic, the obvious moral of Dorothea’s story is

“that the describe thing is to your work well in the position to which providence has assigned you and not to bother about ideals at all. Such a moral seems satiric at the end of a story which is to give us a Modern Theresa.”

 Thus Dorothea is becomes an ironical portraits of young ladies with lofty ideals and noble aspirations.

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