| Like Eliot the novelist, the women of Middlemarch seek social and literary agency, feeling anger when their agency is constrained. But neither character nor author can openly express this anger in a patriarchal culture, real or fictional. Eliot maintains her literary propriety by constricting expressions of female anger through such devices as narrative bias, yet oppressive men in the novel suffer debilitating attacks, disease and death precisely when these women seem to have subdued their frustration. In Dorothea Brooke's arguments with Casaubon, Mary Garth's refusal to burn Featherstone's will and Rosamond Vincy's abortion of Lydgate's child, the author translates the lethal agency of suppressed female rage into male illness, thus deconstructing patriarchal structures of scholarship, law, religion and marriage. |
