After their parents die, Celia and Dorothea Brooke go to live with their uncle Mr. Brooke at Tipton Grange in Middlemarch, a small town in the English countryside. Dorothea, the beautiful, clever sister, immediately attracts the attention of Sir James Chettam, but with her always present desire to be useful, Dorothea has eyes only for the older, scholarly Mr. Casaubon. Against the desires of many in the Middlemarch community, Dorothea and Casaubon are married.
In the meantime, the lives of another pair of would-be lovers becomes quite complicated. Fred Vincy, by nature a somewhat wild and undisciplined young man, finds himself in debt. He has accepted credit from unreliable sources and must find a way to repay the debt, if he does not, the father of Mary Garth, Fred's only true love, must pay the debt for him. Fred's only hope is that his old, dying uncle Peter Featherstone will leave him money in his will. When Featherstone dies, he leaves two wills. The first promises a large sum of money to Fred, but the second and more recent will leaves the entire estate to Mr. Joshua Rigg, Peter Featherstone's son, thus effectively crushing Fred's expectations. As a result of the disappointment, Fred becomes violently ill. The Vincys call in young Dr. Lydgate, a doctor who hopes to reform medical practices in England. In the process of attending to Fred, Lydgate finds himself captivated by Rosamond Vincy, Fred's sister.
On their honeymoon in Rome, the newly married Casaubons find things not to be as happy as they had expected. Mr. Casaubon spends his time doing research for his book The Key to All Mythologies, Dorothea, who desperately wants to help him in his scholarly pursuits, finds herself shut out from his work. One afternoon as she...
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...e support of a wealthy widow is another step towards restoring Lydgate's name. Dorothea also visits Rosamond, convincing her that Lydgate loves her and that the two of them should be happy together. In the process, though, Dorothea realizes her own love for Will Ladislaw. Much to the dismay of Sir James Chettam and others, Dorothea renounces her fortune and marries Will. The novel ends with a vision of the futures of the different characters. Rosamond and Lydgate build a marriage and a medical practice, their lives are generally happy though not without occasional problems. Fred Vincy and Mary Garth are married and live happily as hard working tenants at Stone Court, the land that Fred had once hoped to inherit from his uncle Featherstone. Dorothea and Will Ladislaw move to London where they build a happy family and Dorothea continues to look for ways to be useful.
In the novel “The Middle Passage” by Charles Johnson, mental slavery is a huge factor that is used throughout the book. Metal slavery is the inability to view events, or one’s self, differently from commonly held beliefs. This explains that if you have heard something that is most likely not true and will not research history on it, but spread it around as if you did thus being ignorant as the person that told you. I think that mental slavery is a terrible thing in the world today because everyone is or was a slave captivated by lies or false accusations. In the novel it was possessed by almost every single character in “The Middle Passage”. Within my essay I will discuss the topic of mental slavery and how it affects four characters that I chose from this inspiring novel .
what the reader once thought of Dorothea, a woman of dignity, into a naive child.
In the novel Jane Eyre, it narrates the story of a young, orphaned girl. The story begins shortly after Jane walk around Gateshead Hall and evolves within the different situations she face growing up. During Jane’s life the people she encounter has impact her growth and the character she has become.
The short story, “Roman Fever” illustrates the shocking relationship between two women, Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade, by a chance meeting in Rome. As the story opens the two women are sitting on the terrace of a Roman restaurant that has an astonishing view of the Colosseum and other Roman ruins. While the women sit in silence and enjoy the tranquil view from the terrace they notice their daughters down below running off to spend a romantic evening with two young men. This triggers Mrs. Slades memories of her and Mrs. Ansley’s quixotic adventures in Rome as young adults and their first encounter with “Roman fever”. Wharton uses the term Roman fever to illustrative the women’s past relationship that is embedded with destruction, jealously and deceit. Both women live their life privately consumed with Roman fever for twenty-five years, once these secretes are reveled an ironic twist will still hold a plague on the lives of these women.
At the beginning of the story, in plot “A”, John and Mary are introduced as a stereotypical happy couple with stereotypically happy lives of middle class folks. Words like “stimulating” and “challenging” are used repetitiously to describe events in thei...
...n their stories at first, but by the end they both praise them for their ability to act with the virtues that every Roman woman should strive to act with.
Claudio's interest in Hero is on account of her wealth, but her outward beauty also attracts him. Claudio is hence revealed to be a slave to social assumptions. He regards love and marriage as a sensible way in which to obta...
In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet’s journey to love and marriage is the focal point of the narrative. But, the lesser known source of richness in Austen’s writing comes from her complex themes the well-developed minor characters. A closer examination of Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth’s dear friend in Pride and Prejudice, shows that while she did not take up a large amount of space in the narrative, her impact was great. Charlotte’s unfortunate circumstances in the marriage market make her a foil to Elizabeth, who has the power of choice and refusal when it comes to deciding who will be her husband. By focusing on Charlotte’s age and lack of beauty, Austen emphasizes how ridiculous and cruel marriage can be in this time.
The story is about two sisters Katherine and Bianca. Bianca has a suitor who would like to marry her, Lucentio, but the only way that he will be able to marry her is if her older sister is married first. When Petruccio arrives to Padua he agrees to court and marry Katherine because she will provide a lovely dowry. Rumor has it that Katherine is a cynical, unruly, and extremely unpleasant female. Bianca on the other hand is the typical image of a lovely woman, beautiful, soft-spoken, and very feminine.
In her passage she imagines what it may have been like had William Shakespeare had a sister. She notices how difficult it would be even given...
Aubery Tanqueray, a self-made man, is a Widower at the age of Forty two with a beautiful teenage daughter, Ellean whom he seems very protective over. His deceased wife, the first Mrs. Tanqueray was "an iceberg," stiff, and assertive, alive as well as dead (13). She had ironically died of a fever "the only warmth, I believe, that ever came to that woman's body" (14). Now alone because his daughter is away at a nunnery he's found someone that can add a little life to his elite, high class existence; a little someone, we learn, that has a past that doesn't quite fit in with the rest of his friends.
George Eliot’s Middlemarch focuses on relationships within the town of Middlemarch. As restated by David Kurnick, Virgina Woolf proclaimed that Middlemarch is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” (583). The complexity of this novel provides an insight into the treatment of female identity during the mid to late 1800s, the time period in which Eliot wrote the novel. The issues presented within this novel include: “social and scientific reform, the law-governed aspects of human behavior, and especially, the ‘Woman Question,’ that catch-all phrase for the interconnected debates about women’s rights, duties, and capacities” (Allison 716). George Eliot’s most prominent female character, Dorothea Brooke, seeks to find fulfillment, professionally and socially, yet never fully achieves this goal. George Eliot is shining a light on the roles women played in relationships by showing a variety of relationships, both failing and thriving. George Eliot, just as Virginia Woolf also explained, had to battle for publishing rights by writing under a pen name and struggling to receive compensation to continue to write.
Clarissa Dalloway is content with her life with Richard, is content to give her party on a beautiful June evening, but she does regret at times that she can’t “have her life over again” (10). Clarissa’s memories of Bourton, of her youth, are brought back to her vividly by just the “squeak of the hinges. . . [and] she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air” (3). The very intensity of these memories are what make them so much a part of what she is– everything in life reminds her of Bourton, of Sally Seton, of Peter Walsh. Peter and Sally were her best friends as a girl, and “with the two of them. . . she s...
Nelly Dean’s position as a longtime servant for both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange allow her easy access to the personal lives of these two dysfunctional families. Nelly was brought to Wuthering Heights by her mother, who was a nursemaid for Hindley Earnshaw. She grew up around the E...
The plot of the novel follows traditional plot guidelines; although there are many small conflicts, there is one central conflict that sets the scene for the novel. The novel is about an embarrassing mismatched couple and their five daughters. The novel begins with Mrs. Bennet, telling her daughters of the importance of marrying well. During this time a wealthy man, Charles Bingley, moves close to Netherfield, where the Bennets’ reside. The Bennet girls struggle to capture his attention, and Jane, who judges no one, is the daughter who manages to win his heart, until Mr. Bingley abruptly leaves town.