An Ethical Reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch

Abstract

This paper tries to illuminate George Eliot’s critique of the totalitarian desire of people, especially the intellectuals, and its impact to the person to person relationship, or the ethical relationship, of her age. Characters like Casaubon, Lydgate, Naumann, Dorothea, and more are represented as those with the strong totalitarian desire. Eliot criticizes their desires by revealing the absurdity of their projects and visions: Casaubon’s ambitious project to write a book, The Key to All Mythologies, Lydgate’s project to find “the primitive tissue,” Naumann’s aesthetic idea of capturing the universe in his painting, and Dorothea’s wish for “a binding theory.” Those projects and visions have the same tendency of building a unitary system to explain all the phenomena by subordinating and ignoring differences. The totalitarian desire becomes a more serious problem when it comes to influence the person to person relationships. The relationships between the characters with strong totalitarian desire mostly end up broken because of their desire to control the others. Those characters display their strong intention to ignore the singularities of the other characters and impose their wills. A ruined relationship due to the influence of the totalitarian desire is exemplified most obviously by Casaubon and Dorothea. Their marriage is plunged into destruction when Casaubon incessantly displays his desire for controlling his wife and ignores her singularity. However, Dorothea transforms to become a person who can “converse” with the other people. Through her heroine’s change Eliot exposes her vision of the society based on communication without totalitarian desire.