5/24/2023 0 Comments Eliot middlemarch![]() ![]() Cadwallader) exacerbate this by being prone to gossip and judgment about marriages in the community. There is little privacy in Middlemarch, and certain characters (such as Mrs. The obsession leads Middlemarch residents to be overly involved with and critical of other people’s choices, especially women’s choices of whom to marry. In Middlemarch, class anxiety emerges primarily through an obsession with family reputation. While this close-knit aspect of the community has a positive dimension, overall the novel condemns the way that small communities like Middlemarch can foster small-mindedness, pettiness, and intense social hierarchies. This “provincial life” is further defined by the fact that the characters are all connected to one another in a complex familial, marital, political, and professional web. ![]() The novel’s subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life,” indicates that the book intends to give readers a sense of what “provincial life” is like during this period, during which the class system remained both highly rigid and extremely prominent as a way of structuring pretty much every part of society. Significantly, the book is also set thirty years before it was written, and is full of detail about this important, tumultuous period in English history. ![]() Rather than focusing on the lives of a small group of characters, Middlemarch is about an entire community: the fictional town of the novel’s title. ![]()
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