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Is Middlemarch Ahistorical?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Henry Staten
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Abstract

Middlemarch has been criticized as a work that subordinates politics and history to an ethics of universal sympathy. Such criticisms grant too much authority to narratorial commentary over what is represented in the novel: the grip on the bourgeoisie of an ideology derived from the aristocracy as model class of Victorian society, resulting in a baffling of the movement of democracy. The disastrous consequences of the mystification of the sources of wealth by the allure of “aristocratization” are depicted in the figure of Lydgate; the possibilities of liberation from class ideology in the interests of democracy are evident in that of Ladislaw, who emerges as, in Raymond Williams's words, the novel's “thread to the future.” The contrast between these two figures shows the novel as a whole to be a critical analysis, not a symptom, of the historical impasse of Victorian society.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 115 , Issue 5 , October 2000 , pp. 991 - 1005
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2000

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