The film without the cuts. And the book itself.
Dorothea Brooke is young, brilliant, and serious - and she mistakes a dried-up scholar for a great man.
Dorothea Brooke / Mrs. Casaubon
A young woman in plain dress whose hunger for a great life keeps colliding with property, marriage, and opinion.
Tipton Grange
Here Dorothea's plain dress and grand plans first mark her out as too much for country comfort.
Great souls can fail tragically when the world offers them nowhere worthy to act.
Read →Grandeur And Meanness Of Opportunity
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
Eliot is making a case for a certain kind of woman before we have even met her: the one born with a saint's hunger to do something great, but into a time and place that offers her nothing worthy to pour it into. This is the close of the book's opening comparison to Saint Teresa of Avila, who had a whole religious order to reform. The later Theresas get no such cause, so their same drive looks to everyone around them like mere muddle and restlessness. Worst is the trap Eliot names at the end: reach too high and you are called ridiculous, settle for ordinary love and marriage and you are called a failure, with no honorable path between.
Dorothea and the Mistake
Dorothea Brooke is young, brilliant, and serious - and she mistakes a dried-up scholar for a great man.
Brooke jewels
A dead mother's jewels catch the light, and Dorothea's severe principles waver at the sight.
Edward Casaubon
A dry scholar whose unfinished life-work becomes a prison for himself and for Dorothea.
Middlemarch
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