Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

Middlemarch 133imaginative concerns” (135). It is important to emphasize the “paralleland converging” narrative lines. Eliot’s success lies largely in the wayshe launches a number of different and originally separate stories,develops each in its own way and with its own independent sourcesof interest, and yet makes them all part of a larger system—or, to useher metaphor, a web—that gives the long and multifarious book anintricate unity.If Dorothea’s is the main plot, then the second plot is that ofTertius Lydgate, a high-born physician newly arrived in Middlemarch.Bearing what Eliot calls “spots of commonness”—featuresthat ultimately mar his chances for heroism despite his noble intentions—Lydgatemarries badly to a pretty but silly woman and spoilshis life’s promise; he is hampered by convention, by debt, by marriage,and by the prejudices of small-minded people. Once a man withheroic ambitions—to become a “discoverer,” one of the “great originators,”and to “do good small work for Middlemarch, and great workfor the world”—he dwindles to a fashionable resort physician, whosecontribution to medical knowledge has to do not with discovering theprimitive tissue of all life, as he hoped, but with an improvement inthe treatment of gout (108, 110). Lydgate fails at heroism through acombination of social pressures and his own character.But Dorothea is different. William Deresiewicz, who attributesthe difference to gender, writes:Middlemarch is generally regarded as an antiheroic novel.Dorothea’s failure to perform “some long-recognizable deed,”and even more, that of Lydgate, are seen as implicit argumentsagainst the possibility of heroism in any grand sense and for aheroism of small measures, even of resignation. . . . Of coursethe novel clearly does assert the impossibility of heroism for awoman like Dorothea, but it just as clearly does not extend thatclaim to men. (723)Nevertheless, Eliot understands the possibility of female heroism,at least in times past (the bourgeois nineteenth century may bedifferent). Her prelude begins with a consideration of Saint Theresa,whose “passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what weremany-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a