Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Keywords
English literature, George Eliot, Middlemarch, Saint Theresa, analysis
Department
English
Major
Economics
Abstract
Dorothea Brooke is a passionate, capable woman in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, but she is tragically portrayed as an updated version of Saint Theresa of Avila from Catholic Mythology. The novel opens, “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed” (Eliot 2). There is nothing dishonorable in being a woman of loving heartbeats who sobs for unattained goodness; however, the inconvenient reality is that sobbing will not achieve any practical good, and passionate, able women such as Dorothea can easily be stuck in a social structure that prohibits women’s freedom to act. But Dorothea refuses to be passively female. Eliot’s use of Gian Bologna Bernini’s marble statue The Ecstasy of St. Theresa as a motif within the novel suggests that many Victorian women are “frozen” like marble in a world controlled by patriarchal institutions. But by acting outside of the bounds of Victorian England’s expectations of women, Dorothea breaks out of these statuesque molds of domesticity and femininity and becomes a new, self- reliant heroine.
Faculty Mentor
Constance Fulmer
Funding Source or Research Program
Summer Undergraduate Research Program
Presentation Session
Session D
Location
Rockwell Academic Center 175
Start Date
21-3-2014 5:15 PM
Included in
A New Heroine: Renovation of the Saint Theresa Archetype in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
Rockwell Academic Center 175
Dorothea Brooke is a passionate, capable woman in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, but she is tragically portrayed as an updated version of Saint Theresa of Avila from Catholic Mythology. The novel opens, “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed” (Eliot 2). There is nothing dishonorable in being a woman of loving heartbeats who sobs for unattained goodness; however, the inconvenient reality is that sobbing will not achieve any practical good, and passionate, able women such as Dorothea can easily be stuck in a social structure that prohibits women’s freedom to act. But Dorothea refuses to be passively female. Eliot’s use of Gian Bologna Bernini’s marble statue The Ecstasy of St. Theresa as a motif within the novel suggests that many Victorian women are “frozen” like marble in a world controlled by patriarchal institutions. But by acting outside of the bounds of Victorian England’s expectations of women, Dorothea breaks out of these statuesque molds of domesticity and femininity and becomes a new, self- reliant heroine.