Using the two Novels Middlemarch by George Eliot and Bleak House by Charles Dickins. I want you to focus on Middlearch and specifically Dorothea marriges and character growth throughout the second half of the novel. Attached below is the reading journal you can use for refrence. Only talk about Dorothea from the same part of the reading journal to the end of the novel, not the first half of it.
Prompt:
In its broadest
sense, I’d like you to make an argument for what you think one of these
novels is trying to say and do, using the other as a comparative point of
reference as needed. Your argument can be focused on social commentary (the
“condition-of-England” question) in which case,
your task here is to return to one of the hypotheses you set out in that
writing (or in your reading journal) in order to test, adjust, clarify, and
extend it now that you’ve come to the end of the novel. If that’s in the
category of “saying,” that of “doing” might approach the question more in terms
of form and structure: what is it trying to accomplish as a novel that
we couldn’t say about the other one, or other novels you know?
1)
Most
importantly, deal with the novel as a whole, rather than isolating a
subtopic, episode, thematic emphasis, or particular technique.
2)
Almost
as importantly, don’t make a hard separation between form and content –
even if the options as I’ve set them out above might imply just that. By all
means subordinate one to the other, but please don’t work on the assumption
that we can talk about a commentary without attending to how it’s conveyed, or
a formal structure without what that structure is designed to be able to say.
Doing so would be to leave nearly half the job undone and make it very hard to
get a good grade for this assignment.
5)
By
using the other text as a comparative point of reference, I definitely don’t
mean to suggest anything like one of those easy “compare-and-contrast”
exercises. If, say, you’re focused on Middlemarch, any discussion of Bleak
House has to be in the service of clarifying the point you’re making about
Eliot’s novel (and vice versa, of course).
