Theresa as a motif within the novel suggests that many Victorian women are “frozen” like marble in a world controlled by patriarchal institutions. ![]() Eliot’s use of Gian Bologna Bernini’s marble statue The Ecstasy of St. But Dorothea refuses to be passively female. There is nothing dishonorable in being a woman of loving heartbeats who sobs for unattained goodness however, the inconvenient reality is that sobbing will not achieve any practical good, and passionate, able women such as Dorothea can easily be stuck in a social structure that prohibits women’s freedom to act. ![]() The novel opens, “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed” (Eliot 2). ![]() Dorothea Brooke is a passionate, capable woman in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, but she is tragically portrayed as an updated version of Saint Theresa of Avila from Catholic Mythology.
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