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Show 276 MADELYN CANNON STEWART SILVER ple, places, and events. Her intellect was one of the strongest of all English writers, and reminded Madelyn of Emily Dickinson." The heroine of Middlemarch is Dorothea Brooke a Protestant whom Eliot calls a St. Theresa, after Theresa of Avila, a Spanish Carmelite nun and Doctor of the Church considered one of the greatest of the Catholic mystics, a remarkable woman who combined intense practicality with rarified spirituality. She organized convents, and wrote with humor, intelligence, and Equally ardent, Dorothea was puritanical, with high ideals. Here is a paragraph from Eliot's "Prelude" to common sense. Middlemarch: Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile, the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than anyone would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favourite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the duck and never finds the living stream in in the brown pond, lings fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed. Madelyn also liked the concluding statement: Certainly those determining acts of her [Dorothea's] life the mixed result of were not ideally beautiful. They were amidst the conditions of young and noble impulse struggling which in great feelings will often an imperfect social state, take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new |
