¶ … Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole and Middlemarch by George Eliot may seem like strange texts to read in consort. The latter is one of the classic texts of 19th century literature, written by a Englishwoman brought up in a strict religious tradition who later exchanged her faith for that of secular humanism and Darwinism. Middlemarch is a sprawling, weighty novel, filled with overlapping plots that only (and then, really, only tangentially) come together at the end. The former is an autobiography written by Mary Seacole, a freeborn Jamaican Creole, who claimed that she used the energy and vitality received from her Scottish father and the healing skills taught to her by her Jamaican "doctress" mother to become a practicing war nurse. (Seacole 1-2) However, the two texts powerfully demonstrate that the lives of Victorian women were far more autonomous in practice than traditional Victorian fictional narratives might allow.
The main narrative of the fictive Middlemarch tells the tale of Dorothea Brooke. Dorothea begins the novel as an extremely pious but wealthy young woman, seeking a larger purpose in life. She thinks she has found this greater purpose when she marries an elderly, pedantic clergyman named Casaubon. However, it soon becomes clear that her young passions have been diverted to purposeless ends.
What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalment of knowledge. (Eliot 198)
Casaubon chooses to pass his honeymoon with Dorothea in Rome, hoping to further his attempts in unraveling the puzzle that he has devoted his entire life to. He seeks 'the key to all mythologies.' Dorothea, after her early, blind, 'short-sighted'...
Although the
sexuality of their relationship is not explicitly addressed, the surge in unhappiness between the two of them after their honeymoon in Rome, and the references to Dorothea's cruelly thwarted young impressions seems to suggest that there is no sexual attraction between the two of them. Because of her initial blindness, Dorothea has sacrificed her entire
youth and potential as a mother. A woman throws away her entire life when she marries badly, Eliot suggests.
But this is only the beginning to Dorothea's marital misery. Her despair increases when she learns that, rather than the important work she envisioned herself becoming dedicated to as a wife, diligently laboring to make her husband's labor easier, her husband's intellectual aim is in fact absurd. Her true intellectual companion in the novel, Will Laidslaw, makes this clear to her, in an outburst of
passion, when the two of them
debate the issue. Laidslaw becomes an aspiring local politician, and his eventual interests and energies provide a sharp relief to Dorothea's own formless stirrings to 'do good' and to Casaubon's rigid dogmatic study of
theology.
Another crushing blow is dealt to Dorothea's
dreams of marital bliss and usefulness when she realizes that she has not only found herself wedded to a sterile marriage bed, and a sterile intellectual pursuit, but to a man whose life is in jeopardy. The young and ambitious physician Lydgate informs Casaubon that he is "suffering form what is called fatty degeneration of the heart," in other words, that Dorothea has thrown in her life's lot with a man who is literally dying, physically, intellectually,…
