Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion. Gender Difference and the Victorian Woman Writer

Why does Dorothea fall apart at the sight of Rome? Elsie B. Michie\u27s answer to this question is that the Rome scenes in Middlemarch stage a drama of female cultural exclusion. Dorothea\u27s distressed response to the ruined \u27city of visible history\u27 represents the female spectator\u27s confrontation with a concept of cultural \u27wholeness\u27 that implicitly excludes her. To explore this drama, and place it historically, Michie makes a series of imaginative and illuminating connections which are characteristic of her method in this book. She examines Freud\u27s account of a parallel dream, in which he desperately wanted to go to Rome, but feared that something would block or prevent his entry into the city. Freud\u27s fear focused upon Michelangelo\u27s statue of Moses, a figure which encapsulated the classical culture, patriarchal inheritance and Jewish heritage from which Freud felt excluded. But for Freud, confusion and doubt were followed by a return of the power to interpret: he was able to pull together the fragments of the scene into a single comprehensive reading. For Dorothea, Michie argues, such \u27masculine comprehensiveness\u27 is not available. She is excluded from the \u27high\u27 culture which Rome represents because, as a Victorian woman, she is biologically too \u27broken\u27 to participate in it. But, in a deft display of detective work, Michie shows how Eliot invokes images from Little Dorrit and Jane Eyre to resist the definition of woman as a fragmented being, incapacitated by menstruation and child-bearing. In Middlemarch it is not the female spectator but the city which she sees that is blood-red and broken: \u27Eliot represents culture itself not as a seamless whole but-as a heterogeneous construct made up of a myriad pieces\u27