CW 5 Reading Journal

CW 5 Reading Journal

Dorothea: Dutiful, overwhelmed, religious, rebel, confused

“Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither” (183).

Dorothea feels trapped in her marriage; she feels as if her expectations for her life with her husband are shattered.

Mr. Casaubon: Ruminant, unchangeable, inaccessible, encyclopedic, embalmment

“He had not found marriage a rapturous state, but he had no idea of being anything else than an irreproachable husband, who would make a charming young woman as happy as she deserved to be” (187).

Mr. Casaubon does not have enough devotion in him for both his studies and his wife; rather, in life outside his studies, he is inoffensive to the point of inducing nausea in those around him.

Will Ladislaw: Hesitant, sunny, uncertain, agreeable, broad.

“Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and gave no opportunity for Mr. Casaubon to show disapprobation” (198).

Will had a talent for engaging people in agreeable conversation.

In “On Realism,” Eliot says that some of the author’s most important responsibilities are to be realistic (to write things as they are and allow the reader to draw his own conclusions) and to portray the way that characters would truly act. Nobody is perfect. She thinks that novels can be set in a mundane locale or situation, because the real story is in the interactions and emotions of the characters. Also, human feeling and emotion should play large roles in the story, because Eliot says beauty lies in emotion. I think she does practice what she preaches in Middlemarch, because the characters all have flaws and incongruities, and none of them represent a paragon of humanity by any stretch of the imagination. They all interact with each other and the story is created without the introduction of an outside dilemma or conflict, such as the popular motif of setting a story in a war so that characters may react to it and move the story forward externally. I find that, often, in the absence of a clearly delineated plot with external elements that characters must react to, I tire of a novel quickly. This seems to be a danger redolent in this “realist” style of writing.