At the point in the novel when this passage was presented, George Eliot has established numerous ideals of English provincial life in the 1830’s. In books I and II, George Eliot has introduced two main struggles or principles dealt with during this time period. As alluded to in the above passage, Eliot examines male and female relationships and the role that both sex

Eliot enables herself to critique the idea of Enlightenment individualism with the union of Dorothea and Casaubon. In Middlemarch, the couple either improves or weakens society. Dorothea recognizes this concept. Her idea of growth and change revolves around Mr. Casaubon and the way that they can, together, improve the circumstances of their environment. “Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties…All Dorothea’s passion was transfused through a mind struggling towards an ideal life” (29).

At this point in the novel it is becoming apparent to readers that Dorothea and Mr. Casaubon’s relationship, like society itself, is doomed for inevitable change, “whose nature you are acquainted solely the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same” (125). Just as this quote suggests, conditions are destined to change.

Likewise, Casaubon anticipates the assistance Dorothea will bring into the relationship. However, readers learn that Casaubon cannot and will not change. Eliot uses this character to symbolize the resistance from society that will certainly exist when the winds of change blow through. He is motivated completely by selfish desires. “Mr. Casaubon, too, was the center of his own world; if he was liable to think that others were providentially made for him”

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