Five types of cultural studies

Name                      : Gond Asmita K

Roll no                    : 1^st

 Paper                     : 8^th ( Cultural Studies)

Topic                       :     Five types of cultural studies

Class                       : M.A.—1, SEM--2

Year                        : 2014-15

Submitted to         : Dr. Dilip Barad

                                    Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji     

                                   Bhavnagar University.

Topic:  Five types of cultural studies

• What is culture:

          It is very difficult to define the word ‘culture’ because   it is an umbrella term. The word culture is come from the word ‘culture’ and ‘colere’. It means is ‘to cultivate’. It also means to honor and to protect. By the 19^th century in Europe it’s meaning was different it means the habits, customs and tastes of the upper classes.

• Five types of cultural studies:

                   Cultural studies were divided into five parts;

     

So let’ take introduction on five types of cultural studies.

1)   British cultural Materialism

                           Cultural studies are referred to as cultural materialism in Britain.

Matthew Arnold redefined the ‘givens’ of British culture.

“There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing other people as masses”

                                                  ------------Williams

Britain has two trajectories for culture

1—First leads to past culture preserver

2—Second leads to future

             

 Althussar insisted that ideology was ultimately in control of the people that the main function of ideology was to produce the society’s existing relations of production and that function is even carried out in literary texts.

Some cultural materialists are are:

                      1) Walter Benjamin

                      2) Leni Riefenstahl

                     3) Lukas

Cultural materialists also turned to 

---- Humanistic

-----Spiritual insight.

Cultural materialists also turned to the more humanized and even spiritual insights of the great students of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, Russian formalist Bakhtn, especially his amplification of the dialog form of communal, individual and social.

2)          New historicism:

“If  the 1970s could be called the age of deconstruction some hypothetical survey of late 20^th century criticism might well characterize the 1980s as marking the Return to History, or perhaps the recovery of the referent.”

New historicist seek “surprising coincidences “that may cross.”

 Stephen Greenbelt coined the word New Criticism. “New historicism explains the word “Laputa”from Gulliver’s travels.

“Laputa means the whore” it is describes as gigantic trope of the female body.

The “New Historicism” movement is led by Stephen Greenbelt. It refers to the historical nature of the text and textual nature of the history. It is different from the New Criticism in which theories like deconstruction and structuralism give importance to linguistic approach of the text. On the other hand, new historicism connects the text with its non-literary, historical text and breaks down the distinction between them. It draws inspiration from Michel Foucault’s discourse and power that holds that we find the active reflection of the power relation of that time in the text and it makes and remakes the meaning. New historicism is less a theory for interpreting text and more a set of shared assumption that history and text are intimately interconnected.

New Historicism focuses on the way literature expresses-and sometimes disguises-power relations at work in the social context in which the literature was produced, often this involves making connections between a literary work and other kinds of texts. Literature is often shown to “negotiate” conflicting power interests. New historicism has made its biggest mark on literary studies of the Renaissances and Romantic periods and has revised motions of literature as privileged, apolitical writing. Much new historicism focuses on the marginalization of subjects such as those identified as witches, the insane, heretics, vagabonds, and political prisoners.

3)  American Multiculturalism:

In 1965 the Watts race riots draw worldwide attention. They were given rights equal to Whites. Leon Botstein emphasized on reading classical and traditional books Bernard Diaz’s says….

     “Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view the observers of the conquest and of the history before the conquest. No American should graduate from college without a framework of knowledge that includes at least some construct of Asian history of Latin American history, of African history.”

American political history and we witness bloodshed and atrocities in the name of racism. Fifty years later, if we look at the matter now, we find the idea of race and ethnicity has evolved over the years. Social scientists believe that “race” is the whites’ construct rather than scientifically approved, to assign their privilege and dominance over the black. Interracial marriage is so widespread that the bicultural or multicultural American is the norm rather than exception. With the huge influx of Mexican American, it is predicted that in 2050, English will no more be the national language and Anglo-American a majority.

American Multiculturalism includes:

• African American Writers
•  American Indian Writers
• Latin Writers Asian American writers

• African American writers

African American writers subjects are multiple and the write about folk. Their writings target humankind. They are with “double consciousness.”

• Latin writers

            They are belongs originally to Mexico.

          Latina/o Writer Hispanic Mexican American, Puerto Rican Nuyarican Chicane may be Huizhou or Maya. Which names to use/ the choice after has political implications.

We will use the term'' Latina/o to indicate a broad sense of Ethnicity among Spanish speaking ,people n the united states Mexican American are the largest and most influential of Latina/o Ethnicity in the united states.

• American Indian Literature:

           They are original American Red Indians.

  In pre dominantly oral cultures, stalling passes and religious beliefs, moral values, political codes and practical lesson of everyday life .For American Indians stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro American.

• Asian American Writers 

           They are Asian immigrates Chinese women make up the targets and most influential group of Asian American writers.

                            Asian American literature is written by people of Asian descent in the United States addressing the experience of living in a society that views them as alien. Asian immigrants were denied citizenship as late as the1950s.Edward said has written of Orientals, or the tendency to objectify and exoticism Asian, and their work has sought to respond to such stereotypes Asian American writer include Chinese Japanese , Korean Filipino, Vietnamese, Asian , Polynesian and many other peoples of as a the Indian subcontinent , and pacific.

         The idea that American identity is vested in a commitment to core values expressed in the American Creed and the ideals of Exceptionalism raises a fundamental concern that has been the source of considerable debate. Can American identity be meaningfully established by a commitment to core values and ideals among a population that is becoming increasingly heterogeneous? Since the 1960s, scholars and political activists, recognizing that the “melting pot” concept fails to acknowledge that immigrant groups do not, and should not, entirely abandon their distinct identities, embraced multiculturalism and diversity. Racial and ethnic groups maintain many of their basic traits and cultural attributes, while at the same time their orientations change through marriage and interactions with other groups in society. The American Studies curriculum serves to illustrate this shift in attitude. The curriculum, which had for decades relied upon the “melting pot” metaphor as an organizing framework, began to employ the alternative notion of the “American mosaic.” Multiculturalism, in the context of the “American mosaic,” celebrates the unique cultural heritage of racial and ethnic groups, some of whom seek to preserve their native language and lifestyle.

(4)             Postmodernism and popular culture:

 Introduction:

                                          “Postmodernism” is a term usually applied to the period in literature  and  literary theory since the 1960s, though some regard postmodernism as the prevailing intellectual mood since World War-2 ended in 1945. Numerous Philosophers, critics, and belletristic writers can be seen as precursors or early representatives of the cultural and aesthetic approach that would come to be called postmodernism, among them Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Bretch, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roland Barthes. Postmodernism is characterized by a strikingly radical skepticism toward all aspects of western culture, the impetus for which many practitioners of postmodern theory they trace back to the writings of the nineteenth century, philosopher Frederic Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s spiritual descendants seek, in so many words, a new kind of meaning independent of the prevailing cultural “myth” of objective truth.

       

                  Post modernism borrows from modernism disillusionment with the givens of society; a penchant for irony. The self-conscious “play “within the work of art: fragmentation and ambiguity; and a restructured, debentured, dehumanized subject.

Recently the notions of met modernism, post-postmodernism and the ‘death of postmodernism’ have been increasingly widely debated in his introduction to a special issue of the journal 20^th century literature titled ‘After postmodernism’ that “declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become a critical commonplace”. The exhibition postmodernism- style and subversion 1970-1990 at the Victorian and Albert Museums was billed as the first however to document postmodernism as a historical movement.

                                                   Popular culture divided into…

               Popular culture is studied after 1960s popular culture reshaped……..

Popular culture…

1)   Ethnicity

2)   Race

3)   Gender

4)   Class

5)   Age

6)   Region

7)   Sexuality.

Popular culture is the entirely of ideas, perspective, attitudes, images and other Phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture, especially   western culture of the early to mid 20^th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20^th and early 21th   century. Heavily influenced by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society.

Popular culture is often viewed as being trivial and dumber down in order to find consensual acceptance throughout the mainstream. As a result it comes under heavy criticism from various non mainstream sources (most notably religious groups and counter cultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist, and corrupted.

5) Post colonial studies:

 Post colonialism is a historical phase undergone by third world countries after the decline of colonialism, post colonial theories.

Post colonial literary theorist study the English language within the political zed context.

Gayatri Chakravorly Spivak is post colonial feminist who examined the effects of political independence upon “subaltern” sub proletarian women in the Third World. The critical nature of postcolonial theory entails destabilizing Western ways of thinking, therefore creating space for the subaltern or marginalized groups, to speak and produce alternatives to dominant discourse. Often, the term post colonialism is taken literally, to mean the period of time after colonialism. This however, is problematic because the ‘once-colonized world’ is full of “contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridist, and liminalities” .In other words, it is important to accept the plural nature of the word post colonialism, as it does not simply refer to the period after the colonial era. By some definitions, post colonialism can also be seen as a continuation of colonialism, albeit through different or new relationships concerning power and the control/production of knowledge. Due to these similarities, it is debated whether to hyphenate post colonialism as to symbolize that we have fully moved beyond colonialism.
    

Conclusion:

 Thus, in cultural studies we can find five types of cultural studies. Which were helps to recognize the different cultures with the different communities and histories.

Is George Eliot a feminist or a champion of women's liberation from her bondage to men?

Name                       :           Gond Asmita K.

Roll No.                   :             1^st

Paper                       :           6^{th (Victorian Literature)}

Topic                       :       Is George Eliot a feminist or a champion of women's
                                                      liberation from her bondage to men?

Year                      :         2015-16

Class                     :   M.A. – 1          SEM -- 2

E-mail-Id             :  asmita.gond414@gmail.com

Submitted to        :     Heenaba Zala

                             Maharaja Krishna Kumar sinhji  

                             Bhavnagar University

Topic:-              Is George Eliot a feminist or champion of

                              Women’s liberation from her bondage to

                            Men in Middlemarch  

   

                     Middlemarch novel is written by George Eliot was a Victorian novelist this novel is long and bulky and it was known as the masterpiece of the novelist. This novel is written during Victorian age which was very difficult age for women’s liberation and novelist like George Eliot.

v  About Victorian age

          Victorian age is known as one of the most glorious epoch in the history of England. It was an age of material influence, scientific advancement, social unrest, education, expiation, imperialism, empire building, humanitarianism, idealism and all pensive intensity of life.

  About George Eliot

         Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) wrote under her pen name of George Eliot she was the youngest daughter of a farmer and land agent. She was a lonely and emotional child. Devoted to her elder brother and father. From the early age she showed the signs of wide intellectual interests. She had a deeply religious temperament evangelical.  It directed her action throughout life.

            She spent the first 30 years of her life at home, but after her father and mother’s death she went to London. She joined The Westminster Review. She came to know some of the leading literary figures of the day. George Lewes was one of them. The partnership proved greatly fruitful. It gave her confidence that enabled her to become a major novelist.

v      About the novel of Middlemarch novel

      Middlemarch is highly unusual novel. Although it is primarily a Victorian novel, it has many characteristics typical to modern novels. Critical reaction to Eliot’s masterpiece work was mixed. A common accusation leveled against it was it’s morbid, depressing tone. But many critics did not like Eliot’s habit of scattering obscure literary and scientific allusions through the book. In their opinion a women writer should not be so intellectual.

            There are two complicated stories intertwined in this novel. One is Dorothea Brook and her two marriages. The other is about Dr. Laudgate and the Vincy family.

Middlemarch is a great novel, because of the solidity, vividness truthfulness and comprehensiveness of the picture of provincial life which it depicts.  Middlemarch is also called a complex novel because it is composed of four stories:  

1.       Dorothea Casaubon story

2.       Lydgate—Rosamond story

3.       Mary Garth Fred Vincy story and

4.       Bulstrode and Featherstone story.

    George Eliot as  a Feminist in Middlemarch

In  George Eliot’s time women were thought to be physically as well as mentally inferior to men and intended by nature for child bearing and nurturing. Consequently they were denied opportunities for proper education and independent action outside the domestic sphere. But Georg Eliot regarded gender differences as complimentary and believed that male and female roles could be adjusted gradually overall to the mutual benefit of both sixes. She contended that the  naturalistic demarcation of women’s function in  society was fallacious because woman had a worse share in it’s zoological evolution but she had an art which could mend nature in it moral evolution. She liberated herself from the restrictive conventions of  her society not only by mastering the advanced thought of her age but also by writing novel after entering into a lifelong partnership with the versatile center of interest in her novels and dramatized their struggle for self-fulfillment in man’ s world with understanding an sympathy.

v  The position of women

                      During Victorian age women were not get the rite to getting education they thought that a woman can not write novel or book also and for the t reason Eliot has changed her name  for publishing her books. So that type of position we found to the women.

                          George Eliot has struggle throughout her position as journalist and writer and for her right to love the man of choice. In all this, she had to suffer opposition from her family and society at large, but she survived with her prestige. In fact she was associated withstand other prominent women in founding Girton College for women.

                   Although Middlemarch is not primarily a “feminist book” it reflects strongly her concern for the emancipation of women and the restrictions society places on them. This voice we found in the prelude itself when she states ironically.

“Some have felt that the blundering lives are  due to inconvenient indefiniteness with which the supreme power has fashioned the nature of women, if there were no feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three  and no more, the

Social lot of women might be treated scientific certitude   
   

                         George Eliot has portrayed female characters differently, Dorothea is shown                      rejecting the conventional impression of a young “lady” as one who plays graceful tunes on the piano, just as she is not “a women who lays herself out to please us.

                       Rosamond’s   portrayal is consistently unsympathetic, but she too is shown to depend for fulfillment of her ambitions on marriage. Mary Garth is plain, intelligent and humorous – is an aspiring woman she sympathizes with. Eliot has also depicts with sympathy the plight of middleclass women without beauty or fortune in those time. It is these women and others like Susan Garth and Harriet Bulstrode, who are shown to combine great strength of character with warmth and sympathy.

Women’s desire in the novel

              In this novel we can find that how women has many desires but because of some restrictions they cannot be able to fulfill their desires. If we can see Dorothea Brook’s desire to do great good to the world either by building   cottages for the tenant  farmers on her uncle’s estate or but participating in the intellectual life of her society is opposed by everyone around her . Her younger sister Celia fins her idealistic opinions out of tune with norms of a society which confined women to dependency and inferior roles. Here women were expected to have weak opinions, but great safeguard of society and of domestic life was their opinions were not acted on. In Dorothea’s society the only vocation available to the girl is marriage which describe as discipleship to a father figure like Hooker or Milton. But understanding for the dreams of a girl   whose notions about marriage took their colour entirely from an exalted enthusiasm which was lit chiefly by its own fire, and included either the niceties of the trousseau, the pattern of the plate, nor even the honors and sweet joys of the blooming matron.  In this way Dorothea consistently experiences repressioin, deniel, in her society. Dreaming of doing rather than having, she can find no suspense in a world that values only birth and wealth. Dorothea Brook also desires to discover a binding theory of life which can relate the particular to the general.

 Vocational marriage of Dorothea:-

    George Eliot has described failed marriage system and also the misunderstanding of a woman. We can see that how money is important thing than the marriage and how a one misunderstanding can broke the whole life of women. We can see that the female character like Rosamon who is the daughter of a mayor who marries Lydgate because she has money power and good position in society and she also she was an evil women also.

So we can see that how male dominated society plays negative role into the society of Dorothea.

           Dorothea’s marriage is described as full of mistake done by her. She decides to marry the Elderly Clergyman Casaubon in preference over the blooming Baronet Sir James Chattam, because she believes that the scholarly Casaubon will be more helpful than dull brained Chattam in realizing her intellectual ambition.

               The two major choices govern by the narrative of Middlemarch.

One is marriage and the other is vocation. Eliot takes both choices very seriously. Short, romantic courtship lead to trouble, because both parties entertain unrealistic ideas of others. They marry without getting to know one another. Marriages based on compatibility work better. Moreover, marriages in which woman have a greater say also work better, such a marriage between Fread and Mary. She tells him she will not marry if he becomes a Clergy man. Her condition saved Fread from a happy entrapment in an occupation he doesn’t like. Dorothea and Casaubon struggle continually attempts to make her submit to his control. The same applies in the marriage between Lydgate and Rosamond.  Dorithea ends with a happy marriage, but there is some sense that her ends as merely a wife and mother are a waste. Rosamond’ shrewd capabilities degenerated into vanity and her stifled ambitions only results n unhappiness for herself and her husband.

                   Thus, We can say that George Eliot has attack into the marriage system and the problems which were faced by the women in to the Victorian society.

v  Women and the society of Middlemarch

Celia is an interesting representative of the kind of women who entirely happy with the feminine, nursery world. Their uncle, as usual unconsciously expresses the conventional view with perfect exactness when he says to Casaubon, Dorothea’s husband : “Get Dorothea to read few light things, Smollett; Roderick, Random, Humphrey Clinker; they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she’s married , you know.” Woman’s reading her public acts deepens on the marital status. They are expected to obey and fall in line, as Mary Evans herself was expected to do as a girl. This society was transitional; the poor tenants raised their voice against their husbands. They demanded better condition of live.  Mr. Hawley regards Mr. Brook to be a  “Damned bad landlord”

Their feelings changed though the old order still continues.

Dorothea’s education

                                 As we know nothing about Dorothea’s childhood before she looses her parents at the age of 12. Attempting the “remedy the disadvantages of her orphaned condition”, her uncle has her educated along with her sister.

                                So it is Important to recognize that Dorothea’s story has an education or vindication pattern. Even as she glorifies Dorothea, George Eliot also presents her as an immature young woman who must undergo.

                             In George Eliot’s novels, there are three basic ways in which individuals related to the world. They may relate to the world subjectively or egoistically, seeing themselves as the center of the world and the world as an extension of self. They may overwhelmed by an encounter with harsh realities, leading them to see the world as alien and themselves as insignificant. Or they may relate to the world objectively, accepting it’s autonomous of relations that make up the human order.

      

                                        George Eliot has portrayed Dorithea’s life as being caught between the fear of crushing Casaubon and having to devoted her life to his meaningless work. These are not greatest fears, however As we have seen, she  is going to say yes to her own dooms because she has to  “too full of dread at the thought of inflicting the keen – edge below on her husband to do  anything but submit completely.

             After the marriageDorothea was forced to relinquish her dream of helping a great man with his work, but once she becomes aware of Casabaund’s frustration and sorrows.

                          The Prelude prepares us to approve of Dorothea’s search for glory. Saint Theresa had a passionate glory. Saint Theresa had a “passionate, ideal nature” that demands “an epic life.” Chivalric romances and “the social conquest of a brilliant girl” meant nothing to her: “her flame quickly burned up that light fuel;

                     So we can say that a woman should not free from the society for education also and for self- development also

 Dorothea’s sad sacrifice:

          As earlier we have studied that a woman should not get chance for developing their self because a woman have to always scarifies which we will find in this novel and the character like Dorothea.

         After death of Casaubon, Dorothea’s story focuses on her relationship with Will Ladislaw and her continuing effort to find something worthwhile to do with her life. These two strands come together at the end when, in what George Eliot describes as “a self subduing act of fellowship’ (ch-82), Dorothea overcomes her anger at finding Will with Rosamond and acts in a way that makes possible her marriage, finally giving her a life filled with “beneficent activity which she had not the doubtful pains of discovering and marking out for herself.” Dorothea becomes a mother, and Will becomes an “ardent man” to whom she gives “wifely help’’ in his struggle for political reform.

             

                  Despite the fact that Dorothea is presented as having found emotional fulfillment and meaningful life with Will, the novel concludes on a mournful note. Eliot continuous to bemoan the social conditions those are responsible for Dorothea’s lapses and her inability to do something of historical importance. Dorothea always feels there was   “something better which she might have done,” and George Eliot has described her fate as a sad sacrifice. Many who knew Dorothea “though it is a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only know in a certain circle as a wife and mother?”

                                          As self - effacing person, Dorothea, blames herself rather than others. George Eliot places the blame on society, however, arguing that  “there is no creature whose inward being is strong that it is not gratly determined by what lies out side”  The claims for Dorothea’s heroic stature to be excessive and at odds with the mimetic portrait of her character. Dorothea craves an epic life, but she has no special calling or ability, unlike Lydgate, or, for that matter, George Eliot. Her story is what Eliot’s might have been had she not been able to become a great novelist. It is certainly true that, as a woman, Dorothea had opportunity to develop her talents and discover a calling because a good education and a choice of vocation were denied to her. It does not necessarily follow, however, that under different conditions she would have been to do something great.

                                            Since Dorothea does not have a chance to develop her abilities, we can guess about her potential, but she seems to have the desire but not the capacity to do something of world—historical importance. What distinguishes Dorothea from ordinary people is her ardor and the loftiness of her aspirations, but it takes more than ardor and ambition to make memorable contribution to the world, even a female in patria in patriarchal society. George Eliot was criticizes the society because it will not honour Dorothea’s claims. A more appropriate criticism is that society has frustrated a number of Dorothea’s basic psychological needs, partly because of her gender, leading her to develop a search for glory that dooms her to feel discontented with herself and her life. So we can say that Dorothea is the better illustration of the ills of a patriarchal society.

  Comparison of George Eliot and Dorothea Brook

                              Gorge Eliot has great feeling to introduced her internal feeling and her thought over the society and the people and so she has do it threw her art means threw her mimetic character Dorothea Brook. George Eliot’s characters are not just illustrations of her ideas, but they are real human beings who are fascinating in their own right though not always in harmony with their formal and thematic functions. George Eliot’s mimetic achievement is great and has brilliant psychological intuitions. There is need to distinguish between her representation of a character, which is usually complex, accurate and enduring her interpretation which is often misleading, over- simple and confused.

                     One of most serious deficiencies of George Eliot’s philosophy is her emphasis on living for others as the means by which we give value to our lives. Since our life has the meaning that other people give it, we may be driven to satisfy their needs at all costs or to try living up to their values. There is no way in George Eliot’s thinking in which we can discriminate between the legitimate needs of others and their neurotic claims. Her characters can reply defend themselves when other people make irrational demands, and she tends to glorify their compulsively self—sacrificial behavior.

                       There are two striking examples of this in Middlemarch. Dorothea and Lydgate. George Eliot presented them as contrasting characters, with Dorothea’s problems being caused by deficiencies of her society and Lydgate’s by his flaws of character. But they are more alike than she realizes. Lydgate is destroyed by his compulsive submission to Rosamond and Dorothea would have been destroyed by her compulsive submission to Casaubon had she not been saved by his death.

                 So we can say that Eliot’s characters were the medium of convey her message to others about herself.

o   George Eliot’s use of irony into her characters

                                        Critics have charged George Eliot with too much personal involvement in her characters especially her female protagonists like Dorothea. While the involvement cannot denied, her omniscient irony tempers the portrait. This coupled with the many different persons through whose eye the reader is made to view a character gives a more complex viewpoint.

                              This irony is much harsher in the case of Rosamond, Who “never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, “Loveliness which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date. It is also biting when referring to Lydgate.

                           Eliot has described relationship with men and women ironically.  The stereotype of women doing what the men tell them to do seems to exist through out the novel. Even when there appears to be a female character who stands on her own and to whom the male characters listen and go for advice. Eliot writes the characters in such way that she turns around and does what she’s told because of her emotions. At the same time, Mr. Farebrother seems to possess a better understanding of women than most of the others men in the novel. His mother, aunt and sisters live with him, and the four appear to get along in harmony.

§  Eliot’s portrayal of society:

          The novel appears to revolve around the society. Even though Eliot shows the characters as inhabiting different social spheres, the people have the same difficulties and know about each other. The Lydgat proud when Dorothea Casaubon visits and yet, their marital problem s provides a foil the problems that she had with her husband before his death. Also, within these circle, the people have distrust for outsiders. Plus, even through they live in the same area, the characters refer to places by names of estate or house, name of parish, etc. rather than the overall country name.

    

v Conclusion :--

                                 Thus we can say that George Eliot is related with feminism and she  has more kindness towards women  which she has portrayed into her novel. She has also described the character Dorothea Brook differently who is searching for her real identity. As the title suggests, the novel gives us a realistic, vivid and comprehensive picture of provincial life of England. The picture is such that if  there is any hero in the novel  it is the society of Middlemarch. The novelist remembers her early girlhood and this gives the picture of truthfulness  and vividness of her portrait of provincial life.  We can also find that Rosamond is the daughter of a Mayor and was attracted towards Lydgate  because of  his Northumberland connections. The idea of professional status is not fully developed.  There are also honest workmen who devoted themselves to their own trade this classification of human employments was rather crude. She has also described that men and women  yoked together by needs, passions and prejudices, but she values interdependence above independence on account of it's threats and burdens. She wants men and women to live with on onther on a footing qualities and with full freedom to realize their potential. But she is of feminist who wants women to renounce their domestic responsibilities  for the sake of their emancipation.