Characterization, character, and moral judgment of the women in 'Middlemarch'

This is a detailed study of the methods of characterization used to create the female personages of Middlemarch and an attempt to place those characters historically. The first two chapters include a discussion of the position of women in the growing nineteenth-century middle class, their educational opportunities, marital relationships, financial expectations, and cultural demands. The second chapter takes into account contemporary feminist perspectives on George Eliot and Middlemarch.;Chapters three through six are an in-depth study of the methods of characterization George Eliot uses to create her fictional women. Chapters three and four discuss the novel's two major characters, Dorothea Brooke and Rosamond Vincy; chapter five deals with the intermediate characters, Mary Garth and Harriet Bulstrode; and chapter six explains the importance of the minor characters who act as foils and parallels to the major characters. Chapter seven summarizes this extended analysis and draws conclusions based on the study.;George Eliot looks at characters as the product of will and circumstance, showing both as they operate to produce the fictional lives of her women characters. The study includes an exhaustive analysis of the devices of characterization, including physical description, dramatic presentation, gossip, interior consciousness, epithets, authorial intrusion, and narrative distancing, pointing out the relation of technique to various character types.;This study also uses the conduct books and educational treatises of the day to make social and historical connections with the novel. George Eliot's emphasis is always on moral consciousness, and this study demonstrates the way in which the women of Middlemarch reveal the author's moral principles to the extent that they have, or lack, the moral consciousness which is the expected feminine contribution in a patriarchal society.