In law, a husband and a wife are one person, and the husband is that person... Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayA woman...must put up with the life her husband makes for her...In Middlemarch, George Eliot offers a portrait of a close-knit semi-rural community, but actually transcends this simplistic framework to consider a number of social and political issues, thereby establishing herself as one of the great dialectical writers of the Victorian era. Eliot's interest fails to be ignited by the gossip and petty politics of rural life, and her amused contempt, which vacillates between the cynical and the scathing when describing the people of Middlemarch, underlines the fact that She needs intellectual protagonists to prevent her works from sliding into the depths of irony and condescension. Since Eliot does not appear to be writing about the society of Middlemarch itself, the novel centers around the theme of marriage; this is where the disparate plot points converge, and this is where Eliot's true strengths lie. Similarly, in He Knew He Was Right, Anthony Trollope does not focus on the political workings of a particular town (in this case, Barchester) or institution (such as the Church of England), but rather on choices made regarding marriage. In particular, Eliot and Trollope consider estrangement and the consequences of mistaken decisions, drawing on a series of explorations of male authority to situate their work within the broader Victorian debate about women's rights. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, society witnessed a shift away from the idea that marital love can only exist as an ideal, and toward an ethical imperative to marry for love. While by no means a radical move away from the status quo espoused by Blackstone, whispers of John Locke's contract ethic began to creep into the institution of government as well as in the family. Locke defined “contract” as a mutually voluntary agreement, asserting that any violation of the terms of the contract would render it dissolvable. However, as soon as this contractual ethic was applied to marriage, it opened a debate on the contractual foundations of marriage, which ensure that the husband should not subordinate or weaken his wife. Added to this was an argument about the economic consequences of marriage: women's rights were a necessary corollary of the progress made during the Victorian period. These factors all converged on the campaigns leading to reforms, including the Factory Acts of 1844, 1847 and 1850 (affecting women and children), the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 (giving a legally separated woman the right to keep his own earnings, and allowing, in the case of a man who divorces his wife for adultery, the latter to claim that her adultery was aggravated by cruelty or desertion), and finally, in 1870 , the first Women's Property Act. Set in the 1830s, against the backdrop of the Frantic Appeals and Counterattacks centered on the legal denial of female subjectivity, Middlemarch is a novel centered on the debate over women's property and the right to marry for love. Eliot incorporates examples of both characters who fail to conform to societal expectations (which she clearly considers admirable), as well as characters so absorbed in traditional ideas of male authority and female subjugation that Eliot believes that they should be taught a lesson. She tellsand therefore simultaneously criticizes successfully. That Dorothea is described as having a nature "at once ardent, theoretical and intellectually consistent... struggling within the bonds of a narrow teaching, encircled by a social life which seemed nothing more than a labyrinth of small course, a walled maze of little paths which lead to no decay" seems to suggest that Eliot intends to emphasize the harmful effects that the provincial society of Middlemarch can have, even on a strong-willed adolescent. To emphasize this further, Eliot writes in his prelude: " Women were supposed to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and domestic life lay in the fact that opinions were not put into practice” The power of custom is also expressed through many of the. major male figures in the novel, notably the rather unenlightened Arthur Brooke. Mr. Brooke's dialogue is largely composed of traditional attitudes regarding the nature of women, which he says are only suitable for "music, fine arts. , that sort of thing.” His rejection of Dorothea's knowledge and aspirations has a direct impact on the subject at hand – marriage – since cultural assumptions regarding female inferiority and male intelligence propel brilliant female characters like her niece into a difficult position in the sphere domestic. Dorothea is clearly not a "perfect" character - Eliot makes no attempt to hide his distaste for Dorothea's self-destructive characteristics - and in Chapter 4, Celia chastises her sister, saying, "You always see what no one else does not see... yet you I have never seen what is completely clear. However, while the character Dorothea speaks in intense and beautiful metaphors and is presented as a selfless innocent, Eliot's portrayal of Mr. Casaubon sometimes borders on caricature. Eliot seems to work through superlative juxtapositions in order to emphasize the importance of making "good" choices in marriage, and although she depicts Casaubon trying to show kindness to Dorothea, she takes every opportunity to portray him as “disgusting” and “death’s head”. - and, at one point, as Milton's "affable archangel." Trollope employs a similar tone of socio-historical observation of individual experiences which, born of the unenlightened attitudes of society, evidently shape the marriages of his characters Hugh Stanbury is a good example: he becomes a hero because he marries despite his lack of money "There appeared to him a vague ideal of self-abnegation, namely that... the poetry of. his life was, in fact, the capacity to care more for other human beings than for himself." Similarly, Nora Rowley rejects Lord Peterborough's marriage proposal and states: "There is a time when a girl must being expected to know what is best for herself, just as it is for a man” when she is reprimanded by her parents for choosing Hugues. Trollope's character thus engages in a fairly feminist discourse. radical Trollope again emphasizes the contractual ethic of marital love in his articulation of Trevelyan's obsession with his perceived right to "mastery" and the monomania that results from it. He cannot trust Emily and therefore thinks she needs the "rigors of surveillance". However, by hiring a personal detective, Trevelyan undermines the entire basis of the consensual contract that feminists hoped to see introduced into the institution of marriage. Ultimately, Trevelyan destroys his own home, symbolically destroying the domesticity he had always dreamed of. Trollope therefore seems to equate female subjectivity with domestic life, demonstrating that a marriage must be based on love and respectmutual to function. It is significant that Eliot's most notable passages center on the troubles of marriage. For example, after Dorothea's wedding, she reflects: But once the threshold of marriage is crossed, the anticipation focuses on the present. Once embarked on your marital journey, it is impossible not to realize that you are not making any path and that the sea is not in sight, that you are in fact exploring a closed basin. This metaphor for the “journey” of marriage aptly describes the growing loss and despair Dorothea feels as her marriage fails to live up to her expectations. Later in the novel, Lydgate describes his disappointment with his marriage by saying that he feels "as if he had opened the door to a stuffy place and found it walled up." Eliot uses language here of imprisonment to describe the emotions of a man victim of contemporary culture Indeed, the strength of the novel lies in the presentation of the tragedy of a failed marriage. In a truly consensual contract, both partners could continue to. realize their ambitions, each benefiting from the encouragement of the other However, the assassination of Dorothea and Lydgate's raison d'être - social reform and scientific progress respectively - once again highlights the importance of the L contract. he Ethics and the Harmful Effects of Legal Denial of Female Subjectivity A notable incident in He Knew He Was Right occurs when Miss Stanbury is informed of Dorothy's rejection of Mr. Gibson, at which point she states. that it was "like I was asking him to walk the streets." Ironically, prostituting herself is exactly what Miss Stanbury asks Dorothy to do by saying she should marry a man for purely mercenary reasons. The main question on the reader's mind throughout Middlemarch - besides whether Dorothea will actually end up marrying Will. Ladislaw is the question of why she married Casaubon in the first place. Despite her self-deprecating statements and desire for knowledge, it seems inconceivable that someone as fiery and romantic as Dorothea could fall in love with someone as cold and callous as Casaubon. And yet Dorothea cannot ask herself this question. While Celia is happy in a more superficial, traditional partnership, Dorothea is unable to reconcile her desire for independence with this conventional practice and therefore needs a more modern marriage of consensual love and respect. However, one could assume that Dorothea is incapable of love at the time of her introduction to Casaubon due to the damage she suffered after being orphaned and raised by her uncle. Furthermore, it is clear that Dorothea is a fanatic, and to some extent she does indeed marry a father figure. She attempts to treat the relationship as a fantasy, meditating on absence and loss, treating Casaubon as both a lover and a father. This approach, however, ultimately fails, prompting her to turn to Will for relief from the monotony. It is important to recognize that neither George Eliot nor Anthony Trollope can truly be called proto-feminists. The Lockean appeal to the principle of contract permeated the 19th century, and although Eliot was enlightened (she would clearly have had more of a vested interest in women's rights than Trollope, being a woman herself), Trollope seems fundamentally ambivalent towards feminism; both have clearly been conditioned by the society in which they exist. In He Knew He Was Right, Trollope seems to suggest that male authority is right, but that it should manifest itself through loving persuasion rather than harsh coercion. This is certainly not a controversy..