The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England

Chapter 7: George Eliot’s Middlemarch

Name /V2007/V2007_CH07 12/19/01 06:02AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 189 # 1 7 George Eliot’s Middlemarch The Failure of the Philanthropic Heroine In a frequently quoted 1873 review of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), Florence Nightingale took the author to task for creating a noble, idealistic heroine but giving her nothing to do: ‘‘Indeed it is past telling the mischief that is done in thus putting down youthful ideals. There are not too many to begin with. There are few indeed to end with— even without such a gratuitous impulse as this to end them.’’1 Nightingale ’s comments call attention to Middlemarch’s participation in the midnineteenth -century debate over what middle- and upper-class women properly could and should do with their time and energies. While writers such as Jameson, Maurice and his fellow lecturers, Gaskell, and the philanthropic heroine novelists of the 1860s argued explicitly or implicitly for an expanded role for middle- and upper-class women in a social sphere that included but also extended outside the home, Eliot’s acclaimed novel rejects such a role for its heroine, and, as Nightingale observed , it discourages such ambitious desires on the part of young women such as Dorothea Brooke. Nightingale’s criticism, however, oversimpli- fies Eliot’s exploration of women’s desires and potential occupations. By setting her novel not in the present (late 1860s and early 1870s) but in the past (early 1830s), Eliot was able to represent both the need for expanded opportunities for women and the obstacles to and limitations Name /V2007/V2007_CH07 12/19/01 06:02AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 190 # 2 of her contemporaries’ attempts to extend women’s role into the social sphere through philanthropic social work. It is ironic that while Middlemarch may be Eliot’s most successful novel, it chronicles the failure of the ideal represented by the philanthropic heroine Nightingale represents and Dorothea Brooke aspires to become. In her Middlemarch review, Nightingale offers a philanthropic model worthy of the youthful female heroism available to Eliot in the person of her friend Octavia Hill: Yet close at hand, in actual life, was a woman . . . and, if we mistake not, a connection of the author’s, who has managed to make her ideal very real indeed. By taking charge of blocks of buildings in poorest London, while making herself the rentcollector , she found work for those who could not find work themselves; she organised a system of visitors—real visitors; of referees—real referees; and thus obtaining actual insight into the moral or immoral, industrial or non-industrial conduct of those who seemed almost past helping . . . , she brought sympathy and education to bear from individual to individual. . . . Could not the heroine, the ‘‘sweet sad enthusiast,’’ have been set to some such work as this?2 While Dorothea Brooke’s plans for building cottages for agricultural laborers are suggestive of Octavia Hill’s housing schemes, the fictional Dorothea is not allowed the heroic ‘‘real’’ work Nightingale extols— although there was ample precedent for it in novels from the previous decade. In Middlemarch Eliot ultimately rejects the newly available and popular philanthropic heroine Nightingale would have her choose in favor of the traditional literary romantic heroine who ends up marrying the man she loves. But by representing her romantic heroine’s ambitious desires, as well as her erotic ones, in the context of male professionals’ struggle for vocation, Eliot records both the possibility and the problems of using philanthropy as a solution to women’s predicament. The Philanthropic Heroine In the late 1860s, when George Eliot began to write Middlemarch, the philanthropic heroine was an available convention, as we have seen, in novels and in representations of the lives of real women. Although such 190 George Eliot’s Middlemarch Name /V2007/V2007_CH07 12/19/01 06:02AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 191 # 3 a model of womanhood would not have been so widely at hand and acceptable forty years earlier—during the period in which Middlemarch is set—the ideal of the philanthropic heroine is available to Dorothea Brooke. Dorothea, whom the narrator proclaims a victim of the ‘‘stifling oppression of [the] gentlewoman’s world,’’ experiences what by midcentury was the ‘‘fashionable feminine complaint of occupationalvacuity’’— she has ‘‘nothing to do.’’3 Attributing such desires to a character whose present is late 1829, and who therefore lacks the possibilities for fulfilling her ambitions that...