Literary presentation of complex human nature in Middlemarch

Assignment: Literary presentation of complex human nature in Middlemarch

Assignment paper: 4

Topic: Literary presentation of complex human nature in Middlemarch

Student name: Bhatt Dhara

Roll no.: 02

Paper no.: 2981-IX-EC-204

Sem.:2

Batch:2011

Submitted to: Ruchira Dudharejia

Department of English

 Literary presentation of complex human nature in Middlemarch

       Complex human nature in Middlemarch

       Views of critics

George Eliot’s views human nature is pessimistic, and that the provincial life she had depicted is mean and petty. In the view of such critics, the novel is a terrible indictment of provincial life.

 Introduction

        In her novel “Middlemarch”, George Eliot described a culture and era which was for her original readers, recent and familiar. Although is  a work of Victorian era artistic conscience, Middlemarch ‘s focus is in fact on the epoch .immediately preceding Victorian’s ,and details in panorama the subtle shifts British social life. The novel is defined by a constant dialogue of dichotomous actions and reaction and how they might manifest and conflict in forms individual and communal.

      “There must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry.”    

     Pronounces Dr  Tetris Lad gate, one of Eliot’s protagonists, and his medical metaphor identifies .Eliot’s own method of contemplating the human world, whether observable in the clash between private ambition and social role, emotional passion and restraining roles, settled custom and new possibilities ,and a multitude of other oppositions. These forces work upon each other within the psychology of Eliot’s heroes, and the field of Middlemarch socity,always resolving with complex ,often costly ,but also necessary compromises .

    

   Realism solidity and complexity of Eliot’s picture

    In order words the central theme of the novel is a melancholy one and it has been illustrated through the twin stories of Dorothy and Lydgate .she has given a wonderfully fresh and varied picture of country life lived in and around Middlemarch as the novelists’ object was to show.

“The paralysis and the misleading diversion from its natural course, which a blunt and unsympathetic world prepares for the noblest identity of feeling that is not in sympathy with it”

    It was essential for her to give such a solidity and complexity to her hero’s and heroin’s  and heroine’s idealism was to be more or less tested and  party subjugated ,as would justify the impression that she understood fully the character or the struggle.

  “we doubt if any other novelist who ever wrote could have succeeded equally well is this melancholy design, could have framed as complete a picture of English country and country town society, with all its thorough good nature, stereotyped habits of thought ,and very limited accessibility to higher class ideas ,and have threaded all these pictures together by a story ,if not of the deepest intrest,still admirable fitted for peculiar of showing hoe unpleastic in such an age as ours to the glowing emotion of an ideal purpose.”

 The good and the happy         

        There is love affair, which eventually prospers well, running through the tale; and the only characters of any movements which are left in a certain cheerless solitude at the close, are the those of young surgeon who has married the women of the mistakes for himself, and of the middle aged fare brother ,who shoes too much more advantage in giving up his love than he could have shown in urging it, and who is made the occasion of giving us perhaps, the only really satisfying emotion which story excites.

Mean of opportunity: its frustrating Impact

     Both Dorothea Casaubon and Lydgate Rosamond stories are pessimistic in their intention and design. Trough the story of Dorothy the novelist has shown the maladaptation of a disinterensted,and spiritual minded girl, to the world into which she is born .she has shown that instead of giving her a full natural channel for enthusiasm, and opening to her a career as large as her heart and mind it, for a time at least, absorbed her great quality in fertile and fruitless efforts which left hardly anyone but herself the betters for  them; that it made the one man living in her neighborhood and in circles where they frequently crossed each other paths. Whom she could have to something great and noble, and left her even at close, in no position better adapted to her rare qualities than that of wife of a clever, me curial ,petulant, young political, not without good in him, but without any need of such a women as this, a women who as his wife came to be know in a certain circle as a wife and a mother.

Dorothy’s desire to devote herself wiser and dipper than herself idea her into marrying the Rev adwardcasauban ,a middle  aged, reseed, vain and dry clergy man, given to allegories researches into a somewhat which  he does not possess the adequate oriental learning , nor even access to the German authorities who made that learning their own. He acts upon Dorothy as a mere moral sponge to absorb all the finer juices of her nature without being of happiness of or the better for them rather perhaps the more irritable and the worse.

“This very frustrating impact of meanness of opportunity; of a narrow and a confined provincial world incapable of appreciating any spiritual or intellectual of loftiness is future illustrated and universalized by the life and career of legate .”

His earnest though parley intellectual thirst for scientific thrust is far more completely defeated and subjugated by the meanness of opportunity than dorothea’s thirst for goodness, no doubt because it is purely intellectual, and because his moral nature, though manly and generous has no particular exalted aims.

     There are no scenes in English literature so full of the sort of power from the excess of which almost shrink as these in which Rosamond’s thin, unyielding, inexpressible 

Selfness and wordless of nature encounters and defeats the story,masculine,magnanimous ,generous struggle of Lydgate to overcome the difficulties caused by an improvident marriage, and to hold fast to his resolve of developing his life to the higher scientific aims of physiological study and not merely to winning his bread as a medical specialists.

   Not an unrelieved pessimism-way of amelioration

 “In short, the whole picture of provincial life is wonderfully vivid in its illustration of the pettiness and meanness of not an unrelieved one. There are also noble nature’s echo rise above this meanness and pettiness.”

   For example, there is Mr. Fare brother, kindly and generous; who renounces his own love rises above pettiness and meanness to bring about the union of freed band Mary. He is noble and grand in his willing self sacrifice. Then there are the garths, not motivated by any loft idealism, but guided in life by piratical virtue and by a noble philosophy of work. George Eliot claimed that she was a ameliorated or improved by patient discharge of one’s duty, in whatever sphere of life one is called upon to work.          

Flashes of humors

“Futher,there are occasional flashes of human provides mostly by Mr. Brooke and Mrs. cad wader which illuminate the gloom of the novel and provide refreshing dramatic relief.”

   The novel may be pessimistic, in conception and design, but it is certainly not an unrelieved pessimism .George Eliot‘s ethical depth and purity of mind were too profound for a complete loss of faith in the essential goodness of human nature. Noble characters like fare brother and garths are living testimonies to her faith in human nature, in the spiritual virtues of purity and self scarce.

Historical nature

    The historical nature of Eliot’s enquiry is repeatedly noted, through phrases like “in those days” and in “those ante reform times “The landed class depicted through figures like Tory Stalwart Sir James Chet team, dithering  Mr. Brooke ,a would be reform candidate for parliament who neglected his tenants, and eccentric old peter Featherstone  ,who neglects his tenants ,and eccentric old peter Featherstone, who uses money to taunt and goad relative and yet finally leaves it all to an illegitimate son, is still enshrined as the essential power base, a hegemony the bill promises to at least partly shake, in favor of manufacturing and mercantile forces, which have already begun to take up  mantle in local governance as ,embodies by Mr. Vince.

This social landscape

         Within this social landscape individual human dramas are defined by the constant push and pull of aspiration and actuality and the way one can alter the other.

       “It is the way community that preserves an inherited wisdom about the human condition. It is the medium in which the individual  lives, and shapes its density” R.T.Jones put it in his 1970 survey of Eliot’s work, and “Middlemarch” is define contrapuntal reflection between the acts of hero and the reaction of social choruses.

              Thus, will young man with a free ranging artistic ,political ,philosophy ,is rigidly dismissive to the leery offered him steaming from disrepute business dealings ,and courtly in the extreme towards his forbidden object of the desire ,Diarrhea ,with her fulsome ambition to  work for social good and intellectual fulfillment .In initial expresses her longing and channels them into religious ,dogmatism, maintains a determination to live up to her choice.

      Middlemarch is also a vicinity of ironies and hypocrisies .Mr. broke, genial pro-reform independent politely candidates is a tightwad about maintaining his property and tenants. Balustrade, apostle and artier, made his dubious deals and can contemplate man manslaughter to protest his reputation.

    Conclusion

   As “Middlemarch” narratives draws to a close ,of her major protagonist ,some find fulfillment ,other propriety but  the two are not necessarily mutual .The immediate story concludes with the rejection of the reform Bill, whilst Legate and Rosamond ,Mr. and Mrs. Bulstrode ,and will and Dorothea all must leave Middlemarch ,the medium nature of which is suggest by its very name :it is the centre, the core ,the given ,the banal and the essential .himself a failure will is elected to parliament and become a man of note ,at the expense of Dorothea ‘s  shrinkage to mere social appendage.

     In Dorothy, most clearly awareness of humanity as a shared state seining,

     “The largeness of the world and the manifold of men to labor and endurance that involuntary, palpitating life”

   Rather than as a net of limitations, a new reality awakens, and all these were skirmishes in an ongoing struggle for society and the self.