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Amanda Ghest's avatar

I never thought of myself as a "narratologist" before, but if the shoe fits .. : )

It's interesting to see where Dorothea disappears from the narrative, in Ch. 10 where GE throws a convenient dinner party and deftly shifts to another group of Middlemarchers. I do miss Dorothea and Celia when they disappear - and I mean the two of them together, for Dorothea needs to be "thrown into relief" to borrow a phrase from the beginning! On her own I don't think she can carry the narrative for long. They all need each other for that.

I was thinking along those lines reading the chapters about Lydgate. GE seems almost more interested in him, his past, what makes him tick, his personality, than she does Dorothea. Maybe it's Dorothea's way of thinking that sets the tone for the rest, so the others are all compared to her in some way, when it comes to their assumptions and blindnesses? Lydgate thinks he's not going to make an error after making one before -thinking he'd fallen in love with a woman who actually killed her own husband on purpose - a murderer !.. and still he lives in this kind of self-satisfaction that he knows what he's about .. re-reading that chapter yesterday I saw more of the dark humor in it and the way GE is both building Lydgate up and alerting us to his vulnerabilities to which he himself is comfortably insensible.

I think starting with Dorothea was a good idea because it makes you think you are going to read a love story but you get something different .. if she had started with the Vincy's she would have lost the determining factor of Dorothea's idealism .. it is a very tight little picture in the beginning that sort of naturally widens out to include others who in some way are all variations on Dorothea's pure example.

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Anthony Domestico's avatar

There's a really interesting section in Michael Gorra's Portrait of a Novel in which he talks about how serial publication affected the structure of the Victorian novel generally and Middlemarch specifically. Worth a read!

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