Looking beyond the ‘two inches of ivory’ through the eyes of Dorothea and Rosamond: the Gift of the Gods and the Rose of the World in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
In 1855, George Eliot wrote a sympathetic essay on Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft that anticipates the concerns she takes up in Middlemarch: women’s nature, their need for work, men’s presumption of superiority and its destructive consequences. Eliot says of Fuller, “some of the best things she says are on the folly of absolute definitions of woman’s nature and absolute demarcations of woman’s mission.” She quotes Fuller” “I think women need, especially at this juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers” if they are to avoid “the ennui that haunts grown women.” Both Wollstonecraft and Fuller write forcibly, says Eliot, on “the fact, that, while men have a horror of such faculty or culture in the other sex as tends to place it on a level with their own, they are really in a state of subjection to ignorant and feeble minded women.”[1] Eliot had pondered enough about the position and the portrayal of women in Victorian society, and the various responses different types of women elicit. Probably this had enabled Eliot to sketch and embed in her novel, charming characters such as Dorothea and Rosamond, two very different women who reflected in them the different tunes of the times. To highlight the cause of women, Eliot made a rather calculated move and brought in marriage as a very important theme in Middlemarch. Altick comments on the importance of marriage, “Competing with men and male-indoctrinated commerce without the added benefit of a formal education caused many Victorian women to seek the only alternative available, marriage as a vocation.”[2] But George Eliot’s portrayal of marriage was such that, lots of critics began considering it as a treatise in favor of divorce. If it had been Elliot’s intention to write about such a controversial...