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Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolyn Harleth and Hetty Sorrel
on the Brink of the Impossible: George Eliot and the
Female Bildungsroman

Mariana Teixeira Marques

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Mariana Teixeira Marques. Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolyn Harleth and Hetty Sorrel on the Brink of the Impossible: George Eliot and the Female Bildungsroman. Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 2025, 101 Printemps, 10.4000/13qta. hal-05161523

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**Biographical notice**

Mariana Teixeira Marques-Pujol is a lecturer in English at the University of Toulouse Capitole. A specialist in 18th- and 19th-century Anglophone novels, her current research focuses on the study of 19th-century North American and Victorian women's literature. She is the author of a study on the novels *Fanny Hill* by John Cleland and *Margot la Ravaudeuse* attributed to Fougeret de Monbron (*Fanny and Margot, Libertines: Learning the Body and the World in Two 18th-Century Erotic Novels*, São Paulo, Fap-Unifesp, 2015). She contributed to the collective work *Femmes et philosophie des Lumières. De l'imaginaire à la vie des idées* (Paris: Garnier, 2020) and to other collective works in preparation. She has notably published in a special issue of the journal *Europe* dedicated to Laurence Sterne (published in November 2024).

**Notice biographique**

Mariana Teixeira Marques-Pujol est maître de conférences en anglais à l'Université Toulouse Capitole. Spécialiste du roman anglophone des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, ses recherches actuelles portent sur l'étude de la littérature féminine nord-américaine et victorienne du XIXe siècle. Elle est l'auteure d'une étude sur les romans *Fanny Hill* de John Cleland et *Margot la Ravaudeuse* attribués à Fougeret de Monbron (*Fanny et Margot, libertines : l'apprentissage du corps et du monde dans deux romans érotiques du XVIIIe siècle*, São Paulo, Fap-Unifesp, 2015). Elle a contribué à l'ouvrage collectif *Femmes et philosophie des Lumières. De l'imaginaire à la vie des idées* (Paris : Garnier, 2020) et à d'autres collectifs en préparation. Elle a notamment publié dans un numéro spécial de la revue *Europe* consacré à Laurence Sterne (publié en novembre 2024).

**Title**

Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolyn Harleth and Hetty Sorrel on the Brink of the Impossible: George Eliot and the Female *Bildungsroman*

**Titre**

Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolyn Harleth et Hetty Sorrel au bord de l'impossible : George Eliot et le *Bildungsroman* féminin

**Abstract**

This paper examines the tension between ambition and failure in the trajectories of the female protagonists in three George Eliot novels—Hetty Sorrel in *Adam Bede* (1859), Dorothea Brooke in *Middlemarch* (1871-72), and Gwendolyn Harleth in *Daniel Deronda* (1876). Building on Franco Moretti’s notion of a “distinct female Bildungsroman,” I argue that these characters’ development follows a similar three-step structure as they navigate the constraints of gender, class, and socioeconomic status. The dialectical interplay between ambition and coercion sustains the narratives on the brink of possibility and impossibility, while Eliot’s narrative choices challenge traditional forms of the Bildungsroman, offering a critique of the genre as it applies to women.

**Résumé**

Cet article examine la tension entre ambition et échec dans les trajectoires des protagonistes féminines de trois romans de George Eliot : Hetty Sorrel dans *Adam Bede* (1859), Dorothea Brooke dans *Middlemarch* (1871-72) et Gwendolyn Harleth dans *Daniel Deronda* (1876). En m’appuyant sur la notion de Franco Moretti d’un « Bildungsroman féminin distinct, » je soutiens que le développement de ces personnages suit une structure similaire en trois étapes, alors qu’elles naviguent à travers les contraintes de genre, de classe et de statut socio-économique. L’interaction dialectique entre ambition et coercion maintient les récits à la
critics have followed this thread and confronted the assumptions that underlie traditional critical approaches of the *Bildungsroman* in order to show that authors did manage to imagine versions of the formation of young heroines, and to understand how these fictions developed as an extension and a challenge to the genre (Maier 333).

Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland argue in the Introduction to *Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development* (1983), that mainstream perspectives of the *Bildungsroman* did not consider the variable of gender as a key element to assess fiction depicting female “formation” as “critics have assumed that society constrains men and women equally” (Abel, Hirsch, Langland 6). The essays in the volume display a multifaceted perspective on what they name “female stories of development” from which the authors consider the specificities of the psychological and social restraints imposed on women and their consequences on literary forms and genres. One of the features that stands out in these discussions of female narratives of “education” is the argument that such fictions of development are necessarily dominated by failure. If the hero of the *Bildungsroman* overcomes the hassles of evolving in a hostile milieu, the path of his female counterpart abounds in obstacles and impossibilities: from Maggie Tulliver to Edna Pontellier, from Jane Eyre to Mrs. Dalloway, the outcome of the journey of female protagonists towards some form of “emergence” is too often ultimately tragic.

In *Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction* (1981), Annis Pratt also highlights the dismay of female protagonists: “the [female] novel of development,” she argues, “portrays a world in which the young woman hero is destined for disappointment” as “every element of her desired world [...] inevitably clashes with patriarchal norms.” (Pratt 29) Similarly, Susan Fraiman states, in *Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development* (1993), that to reinvent the genre around the woman means “to recognize a set of stories in which compromise and even coercion are more strongly thematized than choice.” Fraiman emphasizes the fact that such heroines “have a clear sense that formation is what is foisted upon them, that they are what other people, what the world, will make of them.” (Fraiman 6)

With regard to George Eliot's works, the concept of *Bildung* is thus often associated to Maggie Tulliver's trajectory in *The Mill on the Floss* (1860) since, as a “loving chronicle of childhood” (Hardy 45), the novel not only depicts “the construction of the child subject in fiction” (Maier 317) and its consequences on the young woman the protagonist later becomes, but it can also be seen as a “double Bildungsroman” which narrates Tom's growth and Maggie's
failed attempts to “make Tom’s *Bildung* her own” (Fraiman 1993, 141). While I endorse the argument according to which the ideas of disappointment, failure, coercion and compromise are central aspects of the female *Bildungsroman*, I posit that the narratives of “development” with female protagonists can equally be seen as structures that find their balance on the edge between aspiration and failure, on the frontier between possibilities and limitations.

In this sense, I would like to put forward that the idea of “development” be used not only to refer to a character’s literal development from childhood to adulthood, but also as the means through which young women cross thresholds of consciousness that define their destinies. From this point of view, the concept of *Bildung* can be expanded to other heroines in George Eliot’s novels who, as Philip Davis contends, were left to themselves to find “what life was like, what life was for” (Davis 386). By enlarging the perspective on the idea of “formation,” lines of convergence between the experiences of different characters unfold. I wish to suggest that the characterizations of three of George Eliot’s young female protagonists—Hetty Sorrel in *Adam Bede* (1859), Dorothea Brooke in *Middlemarch* (1871-72) and Gwendolyn Harleth in *Daniel Deronda* (1876)— share the “complex tension between resignation and defiance” (Fraiman 138) and lead them through the crossing of such thresholds. I argue that, if constraints and concessions play a central role in the process of “formation” of these young heroines, the former function in dialectical interplay with ambition.

But what precisely do these protagonists have in common? In *La faute au roman* (2023), Paolo Tortonese recalls how the narrator of *Middlemarch* uses the adjective “poor” to describe Dorothea Brooke’s lack of consciousness about her own condition, which leads her to make the wrong choices. In a discussion with her uncle about marriage, this is what the young woman responds : ““I know that I must expect trials, uncle. Marriage is a state of higher duties. I never thought of it as mere personal ease,” said **poor** Dorothea.” (Eliot 2019, 38 ; my emphasis) According to Tortonese, the adjective encapsulates the fact that Dorothea’s “blindness”: “elle est aveugle parce qu’elle est incapable de confronter les grands principes aux situations de fait, aux circonstances. Elle se trompe [...].” (Tortonese 228) This is the feature that Dorothea Brooke shares with Hetty Sorrel and Gwendolyn Harleth: blinded by their incapability to fully understand their circumstances, and pushed forward by an ambitious (and even defiant) drive, these young women make crucial mistakes of judgment— concerning their potential and freedom, or the power of social determinism over the sense of initiative— that define their destinies. I claim that, in these three novels, Eliot narrativizes these processes of *Bildung*
through similar plot and character structures. The characters are thus “formed” via a similar three-step narrative pattern: the ambitious impulse, the confrontation with reality, and a moment of crisis in which they acknowledge the full extent of their condition. I wish to demonstrate at the end of this essay that each one of these steps engages different levels of consciousness, as well as the reassessment of gender, individual, and social boundaries.

From the late 18th century on, the energy of ambition has been inseparable from the idea of the striving individual—Eric Hobsbawm reminds us of the fact that “Napoleon gave ambition a personal name at the moment when the double revolution had opened the world to men of ambition” (Hobsbawm 75). Such promise (or illusion) of social mobility, associated to youth and to an ardent desire for rank, power, fame, or fortune set the grounds for a variety of heroes of novels throughout the 19th-century. The plots of these novels are commonly built to allow male protagonists to display their version of ambition in the efforts to fulfill their personal potential, in the expansion of their sense of initiative, or in the intense desire to experience individual freedom. The starting point for female characters cannot be the same. As Elisabeth Badinter points out : “rares sont les moments de l’histoire où l’alliance des mots ‘ambition’ et ‘féminine’ n’a pas choqué. Le rejet presque constant de l’idée d’ambition féminine tient à la fois à l’importance accordée à la différentiation des sexes et à la connotation virile de l’ambition.” (Badinter 25).

Until quite recently, an ambitious woman necessarily went against her own nature, against her gender and social status, against her community—and publicly crossing these boundaries simply meant too high a price to pay. In a letter, Eliot defends her relationship with George Lewes by stating that “women who are satisfied with [light and easily broken] ties do not act as I have done—they obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.” (Welsh 57 in Levine 2001). Throughout the 19th century, the territory of female ambition was thus confined to a space in which the desire to transcend their condition was not consciously avowed by women, and sometimes overtly denied. Yet, the ambitious drive is a defining feature in the characterization of Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolyn Harleth and Hetty Sorrel; it is a central element of their personalities, and it originates outside the framework of the expectations of their social environment. Indeed, what the narrator of *Middlemarch* states about Dorothea Brooke can be extended to the other two characters: their “enthusiasm [...] was lit chiefly by its own fire.” (Eliot 2019, 26) The first step in the development of these three female protagonists is therefore the acknowledgement of their ambition.
It is Dorothea Brooke's intellectual aspirations – as she had “an active conscience and a great mental need”— that lead the young woman towards the soporific Mr. Casaubon, whom she sees as a new Pascal, as a “guide” who would help her move away from “her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path.” (Eliot 2019, 26). Even if her conception of freedom is determined by a form of self-denial, it is still based on the disenfranchisement from the mediocre instruction she had received as a girl— the marriage to Casaubon being ultimately the means to reach this goal. The young woman is not at all interested in “the niceties of the trousseau, the pattern of plate, nor even the honours and sweet joys of the blooming matron” (Eliot 2019, 26). As a bride-to-be, what makes her eyes sparkle is the possibility of knowing everything and learning to see the truth just like “great men” would.

Gwendolyn Harleth's ambitious impulse at the beginning of *Daniel Deronda* is two-pronged. On the one hand, it is led by a desire to challenge, at an individual level, the rules that “marriageable” girls and young wives were expected to follow. “When [...] married, I should not do as other women do,” she explains, because “girls’ lives are so stupid: they never do what they like.” (Eliot 2014, 57). She suggests to a surprised interlocutor how she could “go to the North Pole, or ride steeple-chases, or go to be a queen in the East like Lady Hester Stanhope” to avoid the boredom of a wife's routine (Eliot 2014, 57). On the other hand, her desire to secure a place among the elite and avoid becoming a governess is reiterated by an apparently unwavering self-esteem. She sees Mr. Grandcourt as her pathway to wealth and describes how the aristocrat will declare himself her slave, fall at her feet with a wedding ring, offer her “hunters and racers, and a London house and two country-houses” (Eliot 2014, 79).

In *Adam Bede*, Hetty Sorrel is described as using her “coquettish tyranny” (Eliot 2008, 108) to seduce Adam, but the idea of marrying him never seriously crossed her mind. Although she is aware of her inferior social condition and recognizes the carpenter’s status within the community, she somehow believes that she has the potential for more. What pushes her forward are her dreams of “luxuries: to sit in a carpeted parlour, and always wear white stockings; to have some large beautiful ear-rings, such as were all the fashion; to have Nottingham lace round the top of her gown, and something to make her handkerchief smell nice [...]” (Eliot 2008, 109). This is the force that drives her to fall under “a new influence” that has “a pleasant narcotic effect” (Eliot 2008, 110): the attention of squire Arthur Donnithorne, who embodies her desire for social rise. As with Dorothea, the narrator does not fail to pinpoint the gap between the girl’s
aspirations and the reality of the situation which, in Hetty's case, turns her into a poignant victim: with a "little silly imagination" (Eliot 2008, 110), she was "quite uneducated—a simple farmer's girl to whom a gentleman with a white hand was dazzling as an Olympian god." (Eliot 2008, 110). If the scenario of the relationship of power between the dominant master and a young female servant was certainly in the background,<fnref n="2" /> Eliot's fiction turns it into a more complex situation in which Hetty Sorrel's ambition is a central ingredient. In other words, Hetty believes she has some power over Arthur, and she is willing to use it.

Intellectual or social aspirations seem to be an essential, not a circumstantial part of who these three characters are. Eliot thus displaces the seduction plot (in the case of Harriet Sorrel) and the marriage plot (for Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolyn Harleth), typical fictional scenarios of women's resignation to their state, and complexifies them: what the characters desire as individuals play an important role in the choices they believe they are making. However, these narratives put the idea of freedom of choice itself to test. Hence, the second step in the process of "growing up" which the three characters go through is the confrontation with the clear boundaries set by reality, or the acknowledgment of the mistakes of judgment they have made. One could almost envisage it as a "no trespassing" sign since it entails physical reactions that materialize the reestablishment of the personal, social or gender limits they had envisaged crossing. Such confrontation compels the three characters to reappraise the new identities they had imagined for themselves.

During the honeymoon in Rome, Dorothea Brooke's physical agitation, sadness and even depression convey her struggles with the "new real future" she could not yet fully recognize. Most of all, she understands that she had been blinded by her aspirations. How was it possible, she wonders, "that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?" (Eliot 2019, 183). Weariness, anger, repulsion and humiliation dominate Dorothea Brooke's realization of Causabon's mediocrity, and of the limits it sets to her ambition. Her "ideas and resolves" seemed like "melting ice" (Eliot 2019, 186), and she feels powerless and confined to the realm of feeling, which is the opposite of the rational persona she had imagined for herself. And even when she later finds fulfilment in her relationship with Will

<footnote n="2">² In "Nobody's Angels: Domestic Ideology and Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Novel" (1992), Elizabeth Langland shows that the 18th-century trope of the possible marriage between the master and the servant set by Samuel Richardson's *Pamela* (1740) was no longer plausible in Victorian novels because wives had become part of a wider ideological and class-oriented project of power in which they played a central role, and whose codes of lower class women did not possess.</footnote>
Ladislaw, she is far from having lived to the full extent of her potential. The narrator describes how "many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another [...]." (Eliot 2019, 611).

If Dorothea Brooke's realization of the limits she had to cope with comes through the disappointment with her husband's lack of intellectual depth, in the cases of Hetty Sorrel and Gwendolyn Harleth, the return to reality is triggered by letters they receive and is materialized in reflections of their old and new selves in the mirror. Arthur Donnithorne's "break up" letter leaves Hetty Sorrel in a state of mental emptiness. Her face, reflected in the "old dim glass" in her bedroom displays the physical effects of such powerful call to order. "When she looked up from [Arthur's letter]," the narrator explains, "there was the reflection of a blanched face in the old dim glass—a white marble face with rounded childish forms, but with something sadder than a child's pain in it." (Eliot 2008, 363). The scene describes Hetty's physical and emotional transformation as reality hits, and the reader experiences, through the character's point of view, the reestablishment of the borders which had become definitely uncrossable to her: "her short poisonous delights had spoiled for ever all the little joys that had once made the sweetness of her life [...]; everything would be a weariness, and she would carry about for ever a hopeless thirst and longing." (Eliot 2008, 365)

Similarly, the scene during which Gwendolyn Harleth understands her powerlessness is triggered by a note she receives on her first evening as Mrs. Grandcourt. Although she feels that "a numbness had come over her personality" (Eliot 2014, 298) when she arrives with her husband at her new home, there is still "a brilliant light in the hall—warmth, matting, carpets, full-length portraits, Olympian statues, assiduous servants." (Eliot 2014, 298) The ominous threats in the note that comes inside a mysterious case of diamonds reminds the protagonist of the terrible grip of reality:

> These diamonds, which were once given with ardent love to Lydia Glasher, she passes on to you. You have broken your word to her, that you might possess what was hers. [...] The man you have married has a withered heart. His best young love was mine: you could not take that from me when you took the rest. It is dead: but I am the grave in which your chance of happiness is buried as well as mine. You had your warning. You have chosen to injure me and my children. He had meant to marry me. He would have married me at last, if you had not broken your word. You will have your punishment. I desire it with all my soul [...].
> 
> (Eliot 2014, 300)

The tone and content of the message bury Gwendolyn Harleth's expectations of a life of wealthy nonchalance. As Grandcourt enters the room and sees his wife in what seems to be
a “fit of madness,” he understands that “the furies had crossed his threshold” (Eliot 2014, 301).

Such distress erases the reflections of the beautiful, dominant, energetic woman that Gwendolyn Harleth had perceived a couple of minutes earlier in the glass panels of the luxurious room; they had now become blurred, almost invisible, “they were like so many women petrified white” (Eliot 2014, 300).

These episodes reveal what Susan Rosowski names an “awakening to limitation and conflict” (Rosowski 64 in Abel, Hirsch, Langland 1983) in female novels of formation as they disclose the huge gap between the self-image the protagonists build and what is truly available for them. If disappointment and failure define their “awakening” though, this is because the characters’ ambition had set goals which were way beyond the limits that the world had established for them. The dialectics between the former and the latter is what provides depth to their experiences. Although Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolyn Harleth and Hetty Sorrel deeply resent the fact of being emotionally and physically stuck where they are—Dorothea and Gwendolyn as “submissive” and frustrated wives struggling to adjust to the narrowness of their milieu, and Hetty as Adam Bede’s fiancée, trying to reunite with the social environment she had wanted to leave behind—the third moment of the process of “formation” depicts the crises which lead them to grasp the full extent of their condition and its distressing essence.

Because their desire is elsewhere, they make choices that place them on the brink of the impossible. There is no turning back and yet, how can one conceive one's existence in the world once certain thresholds are crossed? Unconsciousness and death characterize this third step. After the demises of Causabon, Grandcourt and Hetty Sorrel's baby, the three characters go through delirious, feverish episodes of unconsciousness which they later describe in confessions made to the only interlocutors on whom they could depend. The narrative ellipses pave the way for the young women's full awareness of the strength of these ordeals. In this last step, the protagonists finally become aware that women's individual potential is unescapably harnessed by compromise, coercion and failure.

The breaking point for Dorothea Brooke happens when Causabon makes his famous request: “in the case of my death,” he tells his wife, “you will carry out my wishes: [...] avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire.” (Eliot 2019, 448). To her surprise, the young woman is not ready to submit, and her first response is simply to avoid answering before she knows exactly what it entails— “[...] I think it is not right—to make a promise when I am ignorant what it will bind me to.” (Eliot 2019, 448) As she
ambiguously postpones her response, the reader is never convinced of her willingness to comply: would her “need of freedom” (in the words of the narrator) help her to say “no”? Or would the “ideal and not the real yoke of marriage” (Eliot 2019, 452) compel her to accept? It is through the eyes of the young doctor Lydgate, whom we find at her bedside, that the reader learns about Dorothea’s troubles as her husband dies without an answer. The narrator describes her delirious repetition of a promise that could no longer be made, and the doubts over her compliance to compromise remain entire.

Gwendolyn Harleth’s and Hetty Sorrel’s tribulations are more intense and violent. After Grandcourt’s drowning in Italy, Gwendolyn admits to Daniel Deronda her feeling of guilt. “I will tell you everything now,” she says. And she adds, “Do you think a woman who cried, and prayed, and struggled to be saved from herself could be a murderess?” (Eliot 2014, 583). The narrator describes how her “fitful, wandering confession” comes in jerks, and the “crime” she claims is tinted with her gloomy condition: “I meant to get pleasure for myself, and it all turned to misery. I wanted to make my gain out of another’s loss—you remember?—it was like roulette—and the money burned into me.” (Eliot 2014, 583). The distress in Gwendolyn Harleth’s voice and body as she shares her inner battles indicates an unbearable situation. Grandcourt’s tragic end freed her from the chains that tied her to unhappiness, but his “dead face” is a reminder of all the impossibilities and barriers ahead.

Hetty Sorrel’s confession to the preacher Dinah Morris follows a similar structure. After a long period of silence, the girl delivers an emotional disclosure of the events that led to her imprisonment and conviction for infanticide. Her discourse is at the same time plain and terrifying, since she acknowledges her agency with disconcerting uncertainty:

> I met nobody, for it was very early, and I got into the wood.... I knew the way to the place... the place against the nut-tree; and I could hear it crying at every step.... I thought it was alive.... I don't know whether I was frightened or glad... I don't know what I felt. I only know I was in the wood and heard the cry. I don't know what I felt till I saw the baby was gone. And when I'd put it there, I thought I should like somebody to find it and save it from dying; but when I saw it was gone, I was struck like a stone, with fear. I never thought o' stirring, I felt so weak. I knew I couldn't run away, and everybody as saw me 'ud know about the baby. My heart went like a stone. (Eliot 2008, 494)

As with Gwendolyn Harleth, Hetty Sorrel’s voice and body convey the struggles she had been through and the extent of her inability to deal with them. The baby’s disappearance seemed like a desperate solution to a hopeless situation— “it was like a heavy weight hanging around my neck” (Eliot 2008, 492)—, but the protagonist realizes too late that her existence
was hopelessly intertwined with its delivery and demise. Similarly, her mind is inhabited by visions of the scene which epitomizes her loss: "I saw nothing but that place in the wood where I'd buried the baby... I see it now. [...] shall I always see it?" (Eliot 2008, 494)

## Conclusion

Throughout her life, George Eliot encountered, in both personal and professional realms, the harshness of challenging the frontiers society set to women. Her fiction often depicts what happens when girls' desires do not match what is expected of them through versions of the "formation" of her young heroines as they discover their own autonomous aspirations<fnref n="3" />, as if "the unresolved predicament of her [Eliot's] emotional young women retained within all its suffering and confusion the untransformed preconceptual life stuff of vital need" (Davis 386). Although Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolyn Harleth and Hetty Sorrel have different individual trajectories, their characterization shares a similar three-part structure which addresses issues such as *female* potential, *female* freedom, *female* necessity and *female* initiative. If the destinies of the three heroines is marked by compromise, coercion and inevitable failure, their stories find their balance on the boundaries between the ambitious drive that energizes these characters, and the impossibilities that curb it.

At the heart of these stories we find the question of relationships and marriage, which was not a minor topic for women in the 19th century, and sexual desire is certainly the flipside of this problem. In a study on gender and the Victorian novel, Nancy Armstrong argues that the genre served to redefine "traditional femininity in agonistic struggle with female nature" in a movement that the critic names "femaleness" (Armstrong 108). According to Armstrong, various Victorian novels narrativize the trials of women whose desire was so strong that it seemed to wipe out all the signs of Victorian femininity, and who could be seen as unsuitable for becoming "agreeable" domestic partners for ambitious men.

Ambition for wealth or social ascension is hence identified as the domain of men as it qualified them for the role of head of the family circle. To qualify for the position of wives, women had to abandon whatever personal cravings they had, and display, in their behavior and

<footnote n="3">³ Other female characters in Eliot's novels have called the attention of critics in this sense. See, for example, Kinsey-Bull, Elisabeth. 2019. "Mary Garth's Beautiful Soul: 'Inner Abilities' as Bildung in *Middlemarch*." *George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies*, Vol. 71, No. 2: 164-188</footnote>
in their own bodies, the full command of “femaleness.” As Langland has reminded us, such state or condition did not mean that women were passive victims of patriarchy since wives played a central and active role in the performance of middle-class domestic management and in the perpetuation of its ideological hegemony (Langland 291). Yet, as Armstrong puts it, “*true femininity depends on the subject’s active suppression of desire*” in the Victorian novel (Armstrong 111). But “[...] *what of desire that cannot or will not be so suppressed?*” (Armstrong 111). Such struggle and its consequences—which psychoanalysis would define at the end of the century as hysteria—pushed female characters in Eliot towards narratives that necessarily meant making crucial mistakes that would redefine their individual, gender, and social boundaries. Despite their differences, Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolyn Harleth and Hetty Sorrel share this process of disenchantment which leads to a radical consciousness of what life is, or can be.

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