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

Middlemarch 135Ladislaw, he says: “If you were an artist, you would think of MistressSecond-Cousin as antique form animated by Christian sentiment—asort of Christian Antigone—sensuous force controlled by spiritualpassion” (141). What is the force of this allusion? It refers to Antigone,the daughter of Oedipus, a self-sacrificing young woman with arather lightweight sister named Ismene, who may be the counterpartto Dorothea’s Celia. But Antigone was the hero of a Greek tragedywho faced down civil authority in defense of the higher-law obediencethat she would not compromise, was condemned to death, anddied by her own hand.Gerhard Joseph writes that:the character of Antigone is profoundly relevant to a “modern”life, providing one of the mythic types against which Dorothea’ssoul making asks to be measured. But what of the action ofthe play, which was after all the focus of [Matthew] Arnold’sjudgment? . . . Eliot all but seconds Arnold’s charge that theaction is obsolescent, although her grounds differ. The distancebetween the heroic, larger-than-life context of Thebes and theprosaic reality of Middlemarch is too great. (27)Is the function of heroic allusions—to Saint Theresa, the Virgin Mary,Antigone, John Milton, King Arthur—only to point out, with repetitiveinsistence, that Dorothea Brooke is not one of these heroes andcannot be? That every time we measure her soul against one of themythic types, we get the same result: She comes up short?That is one way of reading the book, and it accords with Eliot’sdevotion to realism, her artistic fidelity to the ordinary dimensions ofhuman life. Northrop Frye classified literary modes by the nature ofthe hero and stipulated that if the character is:superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the herois one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity,and demand from the poet the same canons of probabilitythat we find in our own experience. This gives us the heroof the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realisticfiction. . . . On this level the difficulty in retaining the word“hero” . . . occasionally strikes an author. (34)