Beyond the goose and gander

No issue in the interpretation of Middlemarch has been more consistently vexing than the representation of gender. For early (especially male) readers, the book failed to offer a strong masculine protagonist; for recent (especially female) readers the novel fails to acknowledge the strength in its women. It has been common for readers to feel (and to say) that in the person of Dorothea the novel creates an image of the feminist protagonist, but then, out of fear, doubt, weariness, or pessimism, George Eliot is unable to carry through the strength of her insight. She marries Dorothea to Will Ladislaw, of whom it has been said, since the first publication of the novel, that he is no fit match; and then in a final indignity the revolutionary possibilities contained in the portrait of Dorothea are renounced in favor of the conventional roles of wife and mother.

The challenges contained in this view must be met, but this will only be possible once the context of the issue has been set out fully. In order to do this, it will help to hold the question of Will and Dorothea in suspense and to bring forward the no less vexing question of Rosamond Vincy. The puzzle is not about Rosamond herself. The portrait is if anything too clearly drawn. The puzzle concerns the pronounced animus, the sustained hostility, that governs the narrator's relation to the character.