Middlemarch Marriage Plot

Question 1

What is vocational marriage?

Answer 1

Vocational marriage means a marriage contracted in order to get meaningful work. The woman imagines her future in terms of parishioners, customers, students, clients, employees, patients, or colleagues. She sees herself as an aide or partner in the joint occupational project of her married life. What she dreams of is a larger usefulness to the world.

Question 2

Examples?

Answer 2

For examples of nineteenth-century vocational marriage plots, we might think of St. John’s proposal to Jane Eyre when he asks her to run an Indian school with him, Mr. Collins’s assurance that Lizzie will be acceptable as a clergyman’s wife, Casaubon’s wish for an assistant to “supply that need” of which he had become conscious, George Vavasor’s proposal of a political partnership with his cousin Alice, or Phillotson’s requesting a schoolmistress to work with him.

Question 3

The Marriage Plot

Answer 3

The marriage plot helped to create a kind of shadow version of this ideal, one that sadly lacks “real” power. A care dyad is not the same thing as a same-sex marriage. Influence is not the same thing as the vote. Marrying a clergyman in order to minister to others is not the same thing as becoming a member of the clergy oneself. The marriage plot helped people imagine what might be possible, but did not help them achieve it.

Question 4

Ruth Perry

Answer 4

Ruth Perry points out, “the ideology of romantic marriage served to de-legitimate earlier pragmatic motives for marriage such as providing care for orphaned infants, young children, or aging parents; prudent management of households; the addition of new wealth or property; avoiding sin; the production of new progeny.”2 Vocational marriage, like neighbor, cousin, and disability marriage, fulfilled older goals that were becoming suspect in the nineteenth century when marriage increasingly came to be associated with romantic love.

Question 5

Ivy Pinchbeck; business partnership

Answer 5

Ivy Pinchbeck, “marriage was, in fact, as much a business partnership as it was among the small clothiers and the farming classes.”

Question 6

Alan Mintz

Answer 6

Alan Mintz writes about vocation in George Eliot, “it means aiming for “the disciplined accumulation of ambitious good deeds rather than material goods or capital.”

Question 7

Vocational proposals for marriage - Middlemarch

Answer 7

The only vocational proposal that anyone welcomes is Casaubon’s, and this is presented as Dorothea’s delusion (the narrator provides the critique that Dorothea cannot, inquiring, “How could it occur to her to examine the letter, to look at it critically as a profession of love?”

Question 8

Gentility and feminism don’t go together!

Answer 8

Davidoff and Hall explain, “For a middle-class woman of the early nineteenth century, gentility was coming to be defined by a special form of femininity which ran directly counter to acting as a visibly independent economic agent.”

Question 9

Repent your careerist ambitions, woman!

Answer 9

Occasionally, a character who contemplated vocational marriage may be saved if she can repent her careerist drive in time. If she marries properly—that is, for love—she can get rewarded via a small job routed through her husband. Dorothea experiences such a belated spousal career through Ladislaw.

Question 10

When was work viable in vocational marriage?

Answer 10

Sometimes work was viable if it could be ascribed to a larger and more generally admirable force: artistic genius, saintly care for the poor, familial loyalty. Craik’s artist Olive, Eliot’s ardent Dorothea, and Dickens’s hard-working Caddy Jellyby Turveydrop all consider marriage compatible with work for these reasons.

Question 11

A women’s calling

Answer 11

Victorian novels often passionately insisted on women’s “calling” to exercise their talents, improve their society, and engage in meaningful occupation—not to mention getting paid—and to that extent, emulate their professional male brethren. However, Victorian novels did not often imagine a plot in which those women could succeed. If single women did male-identified work in novels, they were often strangely defeminized, unmarriageable beings, like the female lawyers Sally Brass, Cornelia Carlyle, and Judy Smallweed, or the female bankers Mrs. Clennam and Catherine Vernon. If married women tried to work, they were punished by miserable unions or by the death or suffering of family members that their attention might have prevented; such erring women include Dorothea Casaubon, Flora Rivers, and Mrs. Jellyby. These are generalizations, of course, but they name the dominant, if not necessarily exclusive, vocational plots available to women.

Question 12

The Langham Place group’s beginnings

Answer 12

The vocational marriage plot was set up to fail because of a major discursive shift in the mid-Victorian period. A particular kind of rhetoric about work began around 1855 and lasted through the late 1860s. It was the sustained campaign for work for women centered on the reformers associated with the Langham Place group. It was not that these writers invented the cause of work for women, which, after all, was eloquently expressed in earlier texts including Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh; it was, rather, that they codified, centralized, and turned this urge into a narrative form. The Langham Place advocates essentially marketed the notion of vocation for women and, like other forms of marketing, made it ubiquitous. They organized work into a genre, with a recognizable character experiencing predictable stages in a predetermined narrative.

Question 13

Key vocational marriage plots?

Answer 13

Key vocational marriage plots of the 1860s—Middlemarch, Can You Forgive Her?, Miss Marjoribanks, and The Clever Woman of the Family—engage explicitly with the Langham Place model, naturalizing and disseminating what amounts to a newly codified notion of womanhood.

Question 14

How important was the Langham Place group?

Answer 14

The extent and significance of the Langham Place group’s writings on work can scarcely be exaggerated. Rosemary Feurer writes, “One need only read the titles of the books of leading early feminists to realize the centrality of the issue of work to them.” She cites Barbara Leigh Smith, Women and Work (1857), as well as Bessie Raynor Parke, Essays on Woman’s Work (1866); Josephine Butler, The Education and Employment of Women (1868) and so on.

Question 15

1855 to 1857

Answer 15

Jordan notes, “It was during this brief period [from 1855 to 1857] … that the belief that women should earn their own livings ceased to be the odd cranky solution proposed on occasion by a number of people to diverse social problems, but coalesced into a discourse, a body of argument whose truth might be contested or defended, but whose existence as a discourse was known and acknowledged.”

Question 16

Foucault

Answer 16

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault noticed that in the nineteenth century, the oft-expressed belief that sex was being repressed offered an excuse for talking about it constantly: “sex became something to say, and to say exhaustively.”

Question 17

Work and sex

Answer 17

For 1860s Langhamite writers, work operated like sex did for 1890s Foucaultian subjects. Like sex, work was the subject of a discursive explosion, conferring new importance on what had previously been seen as an ordinary practice, and not a particularly dignified or interesting one. It offered a new template for a different understanding of identity: a person who worked became a person fundamentally different from one who did not. Middle-class women often regarded their desire for work (like sex) to be a source of shame—the work itself hidden from strangers, done in odd hours, denied by families—so that work for women was associated with a furtive, embarrassing, private drive.

Question 18

Gillian Beer on Middlemarch

Answer 18

Middlemarch is, according to Gillian Beer, “about work and the right to work, about the need to discover a vocation which will satisfy the whole self and to be educated to undertake it.” Eliot famously sets up parallel gendered stories of vocation. But at every moment, Dorothea’s story is bent by the Langham Place narrative in particular ways, ways that her male counterpart eludes.

Question 19

Lydgate’s work

Answer 19

Where Adam’s vocational story is one of inexorable improvement facilitated by an old-boy network, Lydgate’s vocational story is one of professional certainty and delight. Lydgate experiences a blinding flash of certainty, “the moment of vocation had come … the world was made new to him”. The moment he sees the anatomical entry, he recognizes his future.

Question 20

Dorothea’s work

Answer 20

By contrast, Dorothea never has a specific calling but seems equally happy to draw up architectural plans, contribute to a hospital, visit the poor, learn Greek, transcribe notes on myths, or assist a Member of Parliament in his reformist political activities.104 This changes Dorothea’s story subtly but importantly. If she were driven by a specific vocation, like Lydgate, it would be a case of genius that must find expression.

Question 21

Alan Mintz on Dorothea

Answer 21

As a woman, Dorothea is not allowed the direct access to the world possible for men. Despite this fact, what she wants most in life is to do some great good for the world, and, although there is no adequate vehicle for this desire, it remains in George Eliot’s eyes unequivocally vocational. The impossibility of its satisfaction does not change its nature. In fact, Dorothea’s womanhood, instead of being an anomaly, is simply the most extreme example of the variety of constraints and contingencies that frustrate the urge to alter the world

Question 22

Society’s conception of womanhood is what holds Dorothea back

Answer 22

Yet it is not “Dorothea’s womanhood” that prevents her, but a society that imagines womanhood to mean one thing rather than another—a world that assumes women possess only what Casaubon calls “the purely appreciative, unambitious abilities of her sex”

Question 23

Free indirect discourse

Answer 23

Eliot’s use of free indirect discourse also allows her to use the vocational ideas of the 1860s to define a character who is living through the 1830s

Question 24

Barbara Hardy

Answer 24

Barbara Hardy notes that Middlemarch “is written from an authorial viewpoint of the late 1860s, when the woman’s movement started.” When Dorothea mourns “the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman’s world, where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid” and “the gentlewoman’s oppressive liberty”, she “experiences what by midcentury was ‘the fashionable feminine complaint of occupational vacuity’—she has ‘nothing to do.’ ”

Question 25

Dorice Williams Elliot

Answer 25

Dorice Williams Elliott points out that Dorothea’s involvement in philanthropy and cottage housing are mid-Victorian causes.

Question 26

Blending otherwise dim conceptions of the higher initiation in ideas and marriage

Answer 26

Dorothea’s hunger for meaningful work leads her to marry Casaubon in the most famous example of a failed vocational marriage in nineteenth-century fiction. “It always seemed to me that the use I should like to make of my life would be to help some one who did great works, so that his burthen might be lighter,” Dorothea muses. This “use” is marital as well as occupational, the two intertwined: “She was looking forward to higher initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and blending her dim conceptions of both”.

Question 27

Notions of one’s own, only exhibited when free from marriage…

Answer 27

Eliot is so wedded to the suppressive hypothesis that she cannot show successful female work associated with marriage. She depicts Dorothea as a good woman with an ethically admirable ideal of marriage, who, unfortunately but innocently, picks an inferior specimen. Casaubon’s failings doom Dorothea’s hope for meaningful work in marriage. But after Casaubon dies, Dorothea’s vocational hopes are equally blighted, in spite of the apparently propitious conditions of being well provided with a great fortune and endless time to read and learn. As Celia remarks, with her characteristic sense, “I think it is very nice for Dodo to be a widow … she can have as many notions of her own as she likes”.

Question 28

Dodo widow

Answer 28

“I think it is very nice for Dodo to be a widow … she can have as many notions of her own as she likes”.

Question 29

18th century widow - Karen Bloom Gevirtz

Answer 29

Karen Bloom Gevirtz notes that in the eighteenth century “the widow was, of all women, the best situated for making full use of the new economic opportunities.”

Question 30

Dorothea’s plans

Answer 30

Dorothea’s married life must be a period of failure in order to fit the suppressive hypothesis. As she herself remarks sadly, “I have never carried out any plan yet”

Question 31

Dorothea’s education

Answer 31

When Casaubon tries to teach her Greek, she is “shocked and discouraged at her own stupidity” (65), and after Casaubon’s death, she has trouble learning the geography of Asia Minor. Eliot shows us Dorothea failing to concentrate on political economy, even though it was the “never-explained science” always used to extinguish her ideas (18) and therefore something she has long wished to learn. Instead, Dorothea pronounces the names on the map aloud in a kind of “chime.”

Question 32

Dorothea’s girlishness

Answer 32

“She looked amusingly girlish after all her deep experience—nodding her head and marking the names off on her fingers, with a little pursing of her lip, and now and then breaking off to put her hands on each side of her face and say, ‘Oh dear! oh dear!’ ”

Question 33

Middlemarch’s ending

Answer 33

Vocationalism characterizes Middlemarch’s ending, but in reformed, displaced, and minimized ways typical of the vocational marriage plot. Serious Dorothea ends up essentially idle, and it is the dilettantish Will Ladislaw who supposedly acquires a real vocation in the end.

Question 34

Ladislaw enacts Dorothea’s displaced vocational desires

Answer 34

Dorice Williams Elliott argues that Ladislaw enacts Dorothea’s displaced vocational desires. It is as if readers want the vocational urge, once raised, to be sated, even if it can only be resolved by transferring it to a male character. Dorothea ends up with a minor job routed through her husband to reward her for giving him her larger plans. She will help write his parliamentary speeches, the kind of indirect political participation most often vouchsafed to vocationalist female characters. The parliamentary wife redirection offers a vision of political work achieved through language rather than through direct representation.

Question 35

Dorothea’s failure

Answer 35

Dorothea’s failure is that of the general social organization, an “imperfect social state” that “we insignificant people with our daily words and acts” prepare for “many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know”

Question 36

Mary Garth

Answer 36

Like other nineteenth-century vocationalist novels, however, Middlemarch can depict female vocational success in minor, eccentric characters, the saintly protagonist’s sidekicks. Mary Garth and her mother are too robust, wry, and unattractive to carry the full romantic freight of the protagonist. Therefore they are allowed to write books and teach children while successfully making pies.

Question 37

Talia Schaffer

Answer 37

Middlemarch is the most powerful instantiation of Langham Place rhetoric, but it is important to note that in writing this compelling case study Eliot influenced and revised the Langham Place narrative.

Question 38

Gillian Beer sums it up

Answer 38

“What is remarkable is the extent to which the feminist issues of the work were recognized as crucial, and quite specific, by the book’s first readers … It is tonic to recognise how fully this work was in touch with the issues being debated in the women’s movement of the 1850s and 1860s, and how thoroughly it entered the debates.”