Female Lives Fit Into Procrustean Beds in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Paltry Female Instruction and Parochial Littleness

Two seemingly unrelated 19^th-century concerns – marriage and vocation – run very palpably through George Eliot’s (1871-72) novel, Middlemarch. Eliot’s female characters – Dorothea Brooke, Rosamond Vincy, and Mary Garth – stand as examples of the human frailties registered in an English provincial community on the verge of change, when the agitation for the first Reform Bill reaches its peak in England. Since history has always been much more than a dormant backdrop to literature and literary criticism, the present study intends to show that the only way of escaping parochial littleness in Eliot’s fictional town is through female reading and (self-) instruction. Women’s education – be it formal or non-formal – had acquired more significance towards the end of the 19^th century through the cultural revolution that female characters in Victorian fiction started for their readers.

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