Narrative Voice in Middlemarch by George Eliot

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Many female novelists offered narrators that described some of the inner-workings of their female characters; the descriptions were not so wrought with the complexity of the feminine mind. While it might have sufficed for a Victorian love story’s narrator to relate that a woman had a “troubled heart” this observant narrator takes this one step further, describing, Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties; now she would be allowed to live continually in the light of a mind that she could reverence.  This hope was not unmixed with the glow of proud delight--the joyous maiden surprise that she was chosen by the man whom her admiration had chosen. 

All Dorothea's passion was transfused through a mind struggling towards an ideal life; the radiance of her transfigured girlhood fell on the first object that came within its level.  The impetus with which inclination became resolution was heightened by those little events of the day which had roused her discontent with the actual conditions of her life” (280). This richer and more developed narrative strategy of not confining a character to prescriptive codes of behavior or description allows Eliot’s narrator to relate the story outside of the confines of plot, thus moving the novel into the realm of the psychologically real. This realism of thought and character portrayal is effective in allowing women’s characters to be more developed since the number of decisive actions society would permit them to take is rather limited (thus limiting the possibility of a plot for female characters beyond love, family, or the home) but it also allows men’s roles in the novel to be explored more fully.

Although the case for women’s limited plot potential is more limited than their male counterparts in the novel, the narrator uses the same techniques to illustrate the position of men as well, thus allowing them to move outside of the plot and become more developed. This narrator does a particularly complete job of illustrating the internal turmoil of Lydgate in particular. She depicts him as a balance between the romantic and the real—again, relying on the contrast to make her point about character development in the novel. “But he had deliberately incurred the hindrance, having made up his mind that it was now time for him to adorn his life with the graces of female companionship, to irradiate the gloom which fatigue was apt to hang over the intervals of studious labor with the play of female fancy, and to secure in this, his culminating age, the solace of female tendance for his declining years (221). Here the contrast between the romantic and real is most pronounced since the narrator uses language to indicate the mood as it shifts from one to other. She uses terms of women such as “adorn” and “graces of female companionship” in the same paragraph as “irritate,” “gloom,” and “fatigue” thus indicating a more realistic portrait of human behavior.

It is important to see the narrator in this novel as necessary to building a sense of the female characters because she obviously wishes to shed the traditional romantic notions of the Victorian feminine novel by presenting women who exist outside of the plot. Again, the plot for women during the Victorian era was limited due to their confined and codified roles in society, thus in order to present a complete picture of female characters it became vital to extend plot to psychological description. By contrasting images that are most associated with traditional female novels of the time, Eliot’s narrator is able to portray the more attractive romantic ideals with the often stark realities of marriage, life, and love. In the end, although there is not the expected heartwarming message about the ultimate redemptive nature of love or marriage, there is the sense that the characters exist somehow in the ordinary lives of all of us in a way that the traditional romantic novel could not make a reader believe. Moreover, by giving women a “soul” through careful and detailed narration, the differences between men and women and their potential compatibility (or lack thereof) is more defined since both sexes are given equally complex narrative voice.

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