Middlemarch: Dramatizing Psychological Dynamics of Bodies and Surroundings

Abstract

Middlemarch (1872), novel by George Eliot projects weather, atmosphere, landscape, architecture, and other environmental elements. These environmental elements in the novel construct shape and participate in plot and significantly are functioning as dynamic participants in it affecting the lives of inhabitants of Middlemarch in the background. Eliot’s novel Middlemarch under this study, exhibits a defining role between characters and their environments at the center instead of the periphery. As a literary text, Middlemarch represents literal exchanges and interactions between bodies and their material surroundings. In Eliot’s Middlemarch, descriptions of weather, landscape, and atmospherics significantly dramatize psychological projection on the characters and their actions in the plot in contact with their surroundings. The denotative, literal function of ambient description works as a characterizing force in the text. This study examines the role of ambient description as author’s tool because it dramatizes psychological dynamics, as well as literal, material interactions between physical bodies and their surroundings. This study illuminates the notion how Victorian novelists especially George Eliot used the description of physical surroundings as a means of medium to establish debates of mutual effects on one another in context of organism-environment interaction.