Editing Middlemarch (section)

===Marriage===
Marriage is one of the major themes in ''Middlemarch''. According to [[George Steiner]], "both principal plots [those of Dorothea and Lydgate] are case studies of unsuccessful marriage".{{sfnp |Steiner |1955 |p=264}} This suggests that these "disastrous marriages" leave the lives of Dorothea and Lydgate unfulfilled.{{sfnp |Ashton |1994 |p=8}} This is arguably more the case with Lydgate than with Dorothea, who gains a second chance through her later marriage to Will Ladislaw, but a favourable interpretation of this marriage depends on the character of Ladislaw himself, whom numerous critics have viewed as Dorothea's inferior.{{sfnp |Blake |1976 |pp=306–9}} In addition, there is the "meaningless and blissful" marriage of Dorothea's sister Celia Brooke to Sir James Chettam, and more significantly Fred Vincy's courting of Mary Garth. In the latter, Mary Garth will not accept Fred until he abandons the Church and settles on a more suitable career. Here Fred resembles [[Henry Fielding]]'s character [[The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling|Tom Jones]], both being moulded into a good husband by the love they give to and receive from a woman.{{sfnp |Steiner |1955 |pp=265–6}}

Dorothea is a St Teresa, born in the wrong century, in provincial Middlemarch, who mistakes in her idealistic ardor, "a poor dry mummified pedant... as a sort of angel of vocation".{{sfnp |Blake |1976 |p=293}} ''Middlemarch'' is in part a ''[[Bildungsroman]]'' focusing on the psychological or moral growth of the protagonist: Dorothea "blindly gropes forward, making mistakes in her sometimes foolish, often egotistical, but also admirably idealistic attempt to find a role" or vocation that fulfils her nature.{{sfnp |Ashton |1994 |p=4}} Lydgate is equally mistaken in his choice of a partner, as his idea of a perfect wife is someone "who can sing and play the piano and provide a soft cushion for her husband to rest after work". So he marries Rosamond Vincy, "the woman in the novel who most contrasts with Dorothea", and thereby "deteriorates from ardent researcher to fashionable doctor in London".{{sfnp |Ashton |1994 |p=4}}