More on George Eliot

Eliot was sympathetic to liberal causes including women’s rights and suffrage and supported the North in the American Civil War.

However she tended to be rather harsh towards “pretty feminine “ kinds of women.  Hetty Sorrel, the naïve and silly Dairy maid in Adam Bede, who becomes pregnant by the squire Arthur Donnithorne , is the sort of girl she tended to dislike.  Hetty  lets herself be seduced, gives birth alone.  She is in a dazed fugue state and abandons her new-born baby and is then accused of infanticide.  Eliot  portrays Hetty as extremely silly and stupid and morally unaware.  And although she rescues the girl from hanging, Hetty is transported to Australia where she dies.    Adam Bede, the young and decent man who was engaged to her.. ends up married to the serious minded Dinah Morris.  

In Middlemarch, Rosamond Vincy is another rather similar “type” of silly butterfly female whom Eliot tends to portray as the unlikable woman.  Rosamond is a middle class girl, who is ambitious to marry someone upper class. She marries Tertius Lydgate, who comes from a gentry family but has gone into medicine.  Rosy tries to ignore the “vulgarity” of his doctor’s practice  and concentrates on trying to get noticed by his grand relatives.  She and Lydgate over spend.. and get into financial trouble.   Lydgate tries to ask her to be more careful with money, but she calmly ignores him… She flirts with Will Ladislaw who is in love with Dorothea.

However Rosamond does not come to a bad end, like Hetty.  In fact, she persuades and pushes Lydgate into taking a fashionable practice and giving up his wish to do medical experiments and to do good with his skills.  He makes a good living but is miserably unhappy…. having given up his ideals.  He dies young and Rosamond marries again.  Eliot seems to blame her for Lydgate’s downfall from being an idealistic and energetic doctor to a fashionable practitioner..   But she does not inflict any “punishment” on the character.

However Mary Garth who is plain and shrewd, makes a happy marriage to Fred, Rosy’s brother and rescues him from a life of idle uselessness and makes him a worthy gentleman farmer.   She is a "real" success as a woman.

  ELiots’ preference is clearly for the useful over the ornamental…but sometimes it feels as if she is hostile to pretty women…

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