“Middlemarch” (post 1) by George Eliot (post 11): Low Expectations for Protagonist; Author’s Male Pseudonym

The beginning of the story, which will introduce the protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, is preceded by a brief “Prelude,” the essence of which is as follows:

“Saint…Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life…She found her epos in the reform of a religious order…Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life…only a life of mistakes…Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness [of] the natures of women…Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart beats and sobs after an unattained goodness…dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed” (1, pp. 3-4).

Comment

Mary Anne Evans’s continued use of a male pseudonym—after everyone knew that “George Eliot” was a woman—may not be an example of the “indefiniteness of the natures of women,” but a manifestation of this great fiction writer’s multiple personality trait. (See prior posts, including the one yesterday about her acknowledged “double consciousness.”)

1. George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans). Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life [1872]. Edited with Notes by David Carroll. With an Introduction by David Russell. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Added same day: George Eliot's "Prelude" to Middlemarch may allude to Wordsworth's The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem, Book Second, School-time (1850 version), which includes the following about his double consciousness:

A tranquillising spirit presses now

On my corporeal frame, so wide appears

The vacancy between me and those days

Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,

That musing on them, often do I seem

Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself

And of some other Being.

Wordsworth J, Abrams MH, Gill S (Eds). William Wordsworth The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception; Recent Critical Essays. New York, WW Norton, 1979.