The traffic in men: female kinship in three novels by George Eliot

Style, Spring, 1998 by Patricia Vigderman

Adam's "new power of loving" - deeper, wider, based in suffering - expresses the feeling that passed between the two women as they embraced in Hetty's dark cell. Of all the scenes in which Dinah "saves" souls, this one seems truly authentic. Neither preaching nor beseeching, here Dinah's powerful desire to save is matched by Hetty"s suffering during her search for Arthur. The powerful need of one human being for another is expressed in the physical attachment of the women to each other in the time remaining before Hetty"s execution:

She was clinging close to Dinah; her cheek was against Dinah's. It seemed as if her last faint strength and hope lay in that contact, and the pitying love that shone out from Dinah's face looked like a visible pledge of the Invisible Mercy. (436)

Salvation itself is incarnated here, but as an "intertwining" love that is reincarnated in Adam's new power of loving. His name is the title of the book, but the resolution of his story expresses the emotional bond between two quite disparate women, even as it brings Dinah into the bourgeois nuclear family and unifies the plot.

In Middlemarch a similar pattern emerges, in the self-forgetting Dorothea Brooke Casaubon and the vain, small-souled Rosamond Vincy Lydgate. Like Dinah's, Dorothea's looks are more than skin deep:

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters. (1)

But Dorothea, born at the top of the provincial society of Middlemarch, has neither Dinah's spiritual calling nor her freedom. Although she is permitted to refuse a match that would link her family's property to the neighboring one, she is also frustrated by her lack of direct access to great ideas, and decides to marry a dried-up old scholar. That is, she chooses a phallus labeled "Learning" over one meaning "Land." She makes this "choice" without any sense of her own needs for affection, and brings herself much loneliness and suffering. When her husband dies, she has been so deeply chastened by the experience of this marriage that she cannot imagine ever marrying again. The pleasure she feels in the company of her husband's young cousin Will Ladislaw remains undefined; the spontaneous delight of sharing her true feelings with someone who understands them is almost unconscious.

Rosamond Vincy, on the other hand, has a beauty that is both more worldly than Dorothea's and more complicated than Hetty's. Her charms have a studied innocence; she's a baby duck from a finishing school who has a predictable effect on the local swains. Unfortunately for them, because she shares Hetty's confusion of personal charm with social mobility, she hopes that her small hands and feet, her forget-me-not blue eyes, and wondrous blond hair will get her out of Middlemarch. Her mark is Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor who comes to Middlemarch from studies in London and Paris and who is related to a baronet. He is utterly enchanted by her: