The Married Woman and Hysteria in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

This chapter discusses how George Eliot’s Middlemarch relates to the persistence of an outdated medical belief in the preventative and curative power of marriage, even as other scientific and medical advancements emerged in the nineteenth century. A hysterical fit may be brought on by disappointed courtship or a broken engagement; or it may be brought on by engaging in academic study and subsequently delayed marriage. When Eliot published Middlemarch, she did so in a medical climate where marriage could be both prevention and cure and safeguarding oneself from illness was only a matter of marrying and staying married. In this context, her use of the married woman figure and the double marriage plot in Middlemarch is especially pertinent. Dorothea’s first marriage to Mr. Casaubon does not safeguard her from illness but rather contributes to her dwindling health; her second, more compatible, marriage to Will Ladislaw depends upon (rather than initiates) her recovery. Eliot rewrites the content, if not sequence, of the marriage plot and challenges the assumptions of about women’s constitutions and health that underlie the medical understanding of gendered hysteria. In doing so, she joins a broader cultural dialogue that has begun to question the assumed sanctity of marriage.