George Eliot's Masculinities In Middlemarch

This dissertation considers heroes of George Eliot's "Middlemarch" in a cultural context of Victorian attitudes toward masculinity. In Victorian Age, periodicals and writers suggested that work would give men control over themselves and others, in spite of cultural change. The traditional forms of masculine authority are involvement in work, detachment from friends and decisiveness in civic affairs. Eliot reflects and transforms these attitudes in her novels. In "Middlemarch", using negative examples of Mr. Casaubon and Dr. Lydgate, Eliot explores the destructive potential of traditional forms of masculine authority. Then in the patterns of Sir James and Will Ladislaw, she depicts her truly heroic men who, to a certain extent, relinquish tight hold of conventional expressions of manhood, and respond more freely to their own instincts in nature, whether these instincts are so-called "masculine", or, "feminine". Thus, she establishes a new form of masculinities in the novel, which boldly breaks through the traditional concept of masculine/feminine binary structure.