Practicality In New Grub Street

Improved Essays
The “sceptical” and “cynical” Marian Yule, “not readily the victim of illusion,” demonstrates practicality in New Grub Street by perceiving the “distance that lay between a girl’s dream of life as it might be and life as it is.” Meanwhile, the “rapturous tumult of [her] heart” and her belief in “her future happiness” reveal her sentimentality [idealism]. These contrary states of being ignite within Marian a struggle over Jasper Milvain and allow George Gissing to develop the theme that sentimental, non-materialistic people are self-doomed in a practical, materialistic society.
According to Gissing, the sentimentalist initiates her own destruction by ignoring her own practicality. For example, in the passage that begins moments after Marian

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