The theme of marriage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
The theme of marriage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
Many Victorian novels are driven by the prospect of marriage, and George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, embodies through its various couples a nuptial kaleidoscope not matched since Chaucer's Wife of Bath. Conditions surrounding marriages in Victorian times for women were considerably different from what modern readers would surmise. Partly due to the deprivation of an equal opportunity to education, Victorian women were confronted with limited survival tactics. Richard Altick reminds readers in his Victorian People and Ideas that women could enter the female colleges of Cambridge and Oxford in 1869 and 1879 respectively but could not take degrees until 1920-21 (55).
Middlemarch takes place in the years leading up to 1832, the year of the Reform Bill, and this bill was for the benefit of middle class men. Without an education women were subjected to vocations, actually jobs, not callings, that could hardly be called careers. The male defense of this narrowing of options was simply "the female brain was not equal to the demands of commerce or the professions, and women, simply by virtue of their sex, had no business mingling with men in a man's world" (Altick 54). 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.
Making a ‘good marriage’ was of great importance in Eliot’s society. A ‘good marriage’ meant a marriage to a rich man, or woman, preferably from a ‘good’ family – usually a family which was rich and owned land. In Middlemarch, the marriage between Celia Brooke and Sir James Chettam is a perfect example of a ‘good marriage’. It is also a good example of a successful marriage, a marriage where both partners are satisfied that both their expectations and
Many Victorian novels are driven by the prospect of marriage, and George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, embodies through its various couples a nuptial kaleidoscope not matched since Chaucer's Wife of Bath. Conditions surrounding marriages in Victorian times for women were considerably different from what modern readers would surmise. Partly due to the deprivation of an equal opportunity to education, Victorian women were confronted with limited survival tactics. Richard Altick reminds readers in his Victorian People and Ideas that women could enter the female colleges of Cambridge and Oxford in 1869 and 1879 respectively but could not take degrees until 1920-21 (55).
Middlemarch takes place in the years leading up to 1832, the year of the Reform Bill, and this bill was for the benefit of middle class men. Without an education women were subjected to vocations, actually jobs, not callings, that could hardly be called careers. The male defense of this narrowing of options was simply "the female brain was not equal to the demands of commerce or the professions, and women, simply by virtue of their sex, had no business mingling with men in a man's world" (Altick 54). 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.
Making a ‘good marriage’ was of great importance in Eliot’s society. A ‘good marriage’ meant a marriage to a rich man, or woman, preferably from a ‘good’ family – usually a family which was rich and owned land. In Middlemarch, the marriage between Celia Brooke and Sir James Chettam is a perfect example of a ‘good marriage’. It is also a good example of a successful marriage, a marriage where both partners are satisfied that both their expectations and