
The marriage between Rosamond and
Lydgate exemplifies the problems caused by ideals of romance and femininity. Lydgate
wants a wife with ‘that feminine radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be
classed with flowers and music.’ This description embodies the conventional
model of womanly beauty, and so we see how Lydgate has been manipulated by
ideals, leading him to choose a wife for the wrong reasons. It is no wonder,
though, that having adopted this interpretation of femininity, Lydgate falls
for Rosamond. Owing to her education at Mrs Lemon’s school, Rosamond represents
the supposedly perfect lady: she has ‘excellent taste in costume’ and a ‘nymph-like
figure’ accompanied by ‘pure blondness’. Lydgate has been deceived into believing
that Rosamond would be the best wife for him, simply because she fulfils a
societal stereotype, rather than because her personality suits his. But
Rosamond is also deceived by ideals and conventions – she is obsessed with
appearances, and she arguably chooses her husband because of his aristocratic
connections. In fact, she is so concerned with impressing Lydgate’s upper-class
relatives that she wants him to get a ‘first-rate position elsewhere than in
Middlemarch’ so that they are not shocked by her family. Again, this idea of
marrying into the aristocracy is typical of ‘silly novels’, which have clearly
influenced Rosamond. Hence, she estimates her interaction with Lydgate as ‘the
opening incidents of a preconceived romance’.
Despite the fact that,
according to the narrator, ‘Each lived in a world of which the other knew
nothing,’ and even though she has only known him ‘through the brief entrances
and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship’, Rosamond convinces
herself that meeting Lydgate is ‘the great epoch of her life’. Because of the brevity
of their acquaintance, and because they are misled by ideals of femininity and
of love, their marriage fails. They do not actually know each other (Rosamond
is ‘by nature an actress of parts’), so Lydgate is forced to admit that ‘the
tender devotedness and docile adoration of the ideal wife must be renounced,
and life must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation.’ Society, along with
the ‘Many-volumed romances of chivalry’, has created false ideals, and both
Rosamond and Lydgate suffer for it. Their marriage is rife with conflict, with
neither husband nor wife accepting the judgements of the other, leading to a
stale-mate. Rosamond is not the ‘docile’ or ‘devoted’ wife that Lydgate
desired, and she even begins to think that ‘if she had known how Lydgate would
behave, she would never have married him.’ It’s clear, then, that Lydgate and
Rosamond, conditioned as they have been by society, married for the wrong
reasons, and so they writhe under the failure of ideals and conventions.
Dorothea’s marriage to
Casaubon is similarly driven by dishonest ideals and flawed conventions. Of
course, neither Dorothea nor Casaubon resemble the heroine or hero of a
Victorian romance novel. And yet, both still cling to certain ideals of
femininity, concerned not so much with beauty or taste, but with the
patriarchal stereotype of submissive women (which Lydgate also seems to uphold).
Casaubon thinks that Dorothea ‘might really be such a helpmate to him as would
enable him to dispense with a hired secretary’, showing the lack of equality in
his marital expectations. Dorothea, though ambitious in what Rosemary Ashton
calls her ‘idealistic attempt to find a role’, feels similarly. She finds
her role in the vocation of wife and, in the words of Cara Weber, ‘internalises
the ideal of wifely duty’. Hence, she often compares her ideal relationship to
that between a father and daughter. She wishes for the ‘freedom of voluntary
submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path.’ This ideal
of wifely duty, combined with her Theresa-like ‘passionate, ideal nature’ which
‘demanded an epic life’, leads her to marrying Casaubon, with whom she is
utterly incompatible. We only have to compare the speech of the two to see how
very different they are. Derek Oldfield argues that, whilst Casaubon’s speech
is characterised by intricate constructions and subordinate clauses (as in his
proposal letter), Dorothea’s speech is constituted of simple sentences and
childish exclamations (“Oh, how happy!” she says to her uncle).
Perhaps Dorothea thinks
that, in helping Casaubon with his ‘Key to all Mythologies’, she will achieve
the ‘epic life’ she so desires, cultivating her intelligence towards some
higher end. But there is a tension here: Dorothea’s energetic personality is
surely incompatible with her religious commitment to subservience, arguably
influenced by the inequality of Victorian society. She has attempted to conform
to a stereotypical role she simply cannot play. This is why ‘the large vistas
and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind’ become
‘anterooms and winding passages’ leading ‘nowhither.’ The metaphorical
‘anterooms and winding passages’ seem an apt description of her married life,
trapped as she is in Casaubon’s ‘small windowed and melancholy-looking’ abode. In this sense, her
confession to Celia that she is “rather short-sighted” is symbolic of her
illusions about the virtues of marrying a secluded old man. It is when she is
in Rome, confronted by the ‘ruins and basilicas’ that she realises her mistake.
Rather than being charmed by the city’s antique beauty, she is shocked by a
‘vast wreck of ambitious ideals’ and ‘a glut of confused ideas’. Here she
comprehends the foolishness of her marriage with Casaubon and her desire to be
a submissive wife – her marriage is a ‘wreck of ambitious ideals’. Things
worsen when she returns to Middlemarch from her lonely honeymoon only to be
even more separated from her husband: they inhabit different spheres within the
house, Casaubon’s domain being his library, Dorothea’s being her blue-green
boudoir. This separation arguably reflects the 19th Century distinction
between masculine and feminine spheres, which Dorothea fights against in other
ways (planning housing and trying to set up the hospital).
The other problem in the
Dorothea-Casaubon marriage is that, as with Lydgate and Rosamond, their
courtship is extremely short. Dorothea meets Casaubon in chapter two, and after
‘three more conversations with him,’ she is ‘convinced that her first impressions
had been just.’ Dorothea receives Casaubon’s engagement letter in chapter five,
and they are married five chapters later. As Bernard Paris argues, ‘Dorothea is
a victim of the conditions of civilised courtship, which do not allow the
parties to gain much knowledge of each other.’ And so we see again how
dangerous these conventions can be. It is because they hardly know each other
that they fail to trust one another properly – hence Casaubon’s ‘disgust and
suspicion’ about Ladislaw. Moreover, their lack of closeness as a couple is
evident throughout (‘She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers’),
especially when compared to the Garth relationship, who are touchingly
communicative – Caleb’s habit is to ‘take no important step without consulting
Susan’. And so, Eliot is not just pointing out the failings of ideals and
feminine stereotypes – she also condemns the brevity of modern courtship, since
it deceives expectations. After embarking on the voyage of marriage, we
discover ‘that the sea is not within sight – that, in fact, you are exploring
an enclosed basin.’ This is why the marriage between Mary and Fred is a ‘solid,
mutual happiness’ – they have known each other from childhood, and as Fred
says, “I have never been without loving Mary.”
So what, in Eliot’s view,
constitutes a successful marriage? Romantic idealism and societal conventions
certainly do not – we see from the Cadwalladers that marriages across social
classes can still succeed, even if they are unorthodox. It’s clear from the
above examples that the happiest marriages follow on from lengthy courtships
and also some sort of mutuality. Mary and Fred become published authors later
in life, both giving credit to the other for their help – this alone
demonstrates the value of mutuality. The Garth’s are also mutually happy, both
working to provide for the family (Susan is a teacher). Susan Garth feels she
married the cleverest man she has ever known whilst Caleb thinks he has a woman
he is not worthy of. This illustrates the importance of mutual admiration and
love in a marriage, something that can only be certain after a long courtship.
This love is clear in Dorothea’s marriage to Will – as she tells her sister,
“you would have to feel with me, else you would never know,” showing how
ineffably strong her love is. The problem with her first marriage was its lack
of love, and as we discover later, ‘No life would have been possible to
Dorothea which was not filled with emotion’. Moreover, she has something
worthwhile to do in her second marriage: she lives ‘a life filled… with
beneficent activity’ helping Will in his political work. This explains the
historical placing of the novel, since we might argue that the passing of the
Great Reform Bill was directly influenced by Will Ladislaw and Dorothea’s help.
And yet, as aforementioned,
Eliot’s novels do not end in idealistic perfection. There is still much
unhappiness and ambiguity in the Finale. Harriet Bulstrode is martyred in her
extreme loyalty to her husband, and we see her at the end of the novel with
greying hair and black clothing. Rosamond and Lydgate’s marriage continues
turbulently until Lydgate dies at 50, having achieved none of his great
ambitions. Even the happiness of Dorothea and Will seems uncertain. The
narrator makes a particularly sarcastic comment about Dorothea’s loss of agency
in life: ‘she had now a life filled… with a beneficent activity which she had
not the doubtful pains of discovering and making out for herself.’ She may be
doing great things, but she is only doing them in terms of ‘wifely help’ rather
than making independent changes, as the novelist herself has done. She has
sadly been ‘absorbed into the life of another’ and is ‘only known in a certain
circle as a wife and mother’. But perhaps this is unfair: after all, Dorothea’s
influence is clear in that, in the Finale, her epithet is used to describe Will
as an ‘ardent public man’. Moreover, as Kathleen Blake argues, ‘the novel’s
focus on the disabilities of a woman’s lot’, and thus Eliot is showing that,
despite all of her ambitions, the best Dorothea could hope for was a productive
and happy marriage to the man she loved. To suggest her marriage is a
submission to patriarchy is to miss the point – she has done the best she could
within societal restraints, refusing to consider Will’s ‘low-birth’ and instead
marrying for love.
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