A 'later-born Theresa': Dorothea Brooke as point of resistance in George Eliot's 'Middlemarch'. An interpretation of the theories of Michel Foucault

In her novel Middlemarch George Eliot creates Dorothea Brooke, a central female figure whose individual resistant acts counter the author's own professed faith in society's "progressive evolution." Eliot's convictions and confusions regarding the order and movement of this society as well as women's roles within it contribute to Dorothea's dissenting character. The elements of resistance inherent in Dorothea are oppositions delineated in the theories of Michel Foucault as madness, disease, and crime. These sources of "subjugated knowledges" act as subjecting and segregating conceptions but also locations for resistance and friction in a complicated image of power, community, and the individual. Together with Eliot's original social uncertainty, Dorothea becomes an application point for these forces.