The Process of a Search for Meaning in Middlemarch

The present paper focuses attention on the process of a search for meaning conducted by Dorothea the major protagonist in George Eliot's Middlemarch during her days of the honeymoon in Rome. The process of her growing awareness of Casaubon her husband's pathetic reality is seen to represent her emergence from narcissistic idealism into a higher vision of seeing things as they are and sympathizing with fallible fellow beings. First it is made clear that Dorothea's self-idealized sense of devotion in regard to her subsequent husband Will Ladislaw the romantic voice of George Eliot's own. Then we place the process of Dorothea's self-discovery in the light of the author's own spiritual autobiography. Lastly we bring into focus a stylistic analysis of the discource depicting Dorothea's awakening. Thus we see how scientific imagination and the romantic vision of seeing into a whole organic unity behind the seeming miscellaneousness strike a subtle balance in the conception of Dorothea's drama.