Silenced angels: an obscure Saint Theresa in George Eliot s Middlemarch

Abstract

The present dissertation s purpose is the comparison proposed by George Eliot in the Prelude of the novel Middlemarch between its protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, and the historical character Teresa of Avila. Such study endeavors to understand in which way the specific situation of the Victorian woman is articulated within the novel as to mirror the ontological and epistemological crisis of the human being itself during the transformations consolidated by the Enlightenment and the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century which culminated in the death of God . Dorothea is as ardent a Christian as the fifteenth century Teresa, but she lacks the certainties and the resolution to concretize the social reforms she defends, because she incarnates the nineteenth century myth of womanhood known as the Angel in the House an ideal of feminine subjection to the phalocentric order whose functions are the protection and diffusion of the bourgeois morality and the replacement of Christian elements within the imaginary universe of the sacred to a society progressively more materialistic and insecure of absolute values. The afflictions of Dorothea represent the afflictions of the Victorian woman, but the critical moment of this woman reflects, in Middlemarch, a much greater crisis in the Western thought, which began with the Age of Reason