Aspects of \u27Indefiniteness\u27 in George Eliot\u27s Middlemarch

In this article I will be teasing out the significance of the various uses and senses of \u27indefiniteness\u27 in Middlemarch. Whether it is in relationships between other characters, or between Dorothea and other characters, or between Dorothea and herself, or indeed between Dorothea and the novel or the reader, it will be seen that indefiniteness often stands in for unfavourable conceptions of abstraction and externality, and that all contribute to disharmony in Eliot\u27s rendering. This disharmony is resolved by the end of the novel, and it seems to me that this particular resolution is one of the novel\u27s main themes. Let us start with the Prelude. In his review of Middlemarch Henry James laments the fact that there a \u27definite subject\u27 is established, the centrality of Dorothea and her story, but that then the novel fails structurally in diffusing the centrality of this main character.\u27 He is complaining of a resulting diffuseness in the novel, a lack of sufficient symmetry and neatness; he thinks it rambles. Barbara Hardy has argued against such a criticism in her formal analysis of contrast and correspondence in Middlemarch. She claims that these contrasts and correspondences are such a glaring feature of the novel that they are in effect \u27a reading direction\u27, that they are just as much a part of the reader\u27s enjoyment and experience of the novel, if, as I would suggest, at a second order level. And, this being so, these formal or structural attributes \u27concentrate\u27 the novel.2 So even if Dorothea fades out as the central concern of the novel, the structural properties of its resulting multiplicity prevent it from becoming diffuse or indefinite (to use the opposite term to James\u27s choice of word). If we look at the Prelude and the parallel drawn between St Theresa and Dorothea, and consider it in relation to the ensuing novel, we realize that Dorothea cannot become another St Theresa because of the limits to individuality in Middlemarch society; her indefinite spiritual ardour (the equivalent of St Theresa\u27s \u27illimitable satisfaction\u27) must be realistically checked by her concrete situation, her \u27domestic reality\u27. This is why the novel veers away from Dorothea after Book One