In both George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Toni Morrison’s Sula, marriage plays a large role in the plotline. Some characters marry, some don’t. Some find marriage almost accidentally, and some are extremely driven to find a spouse. For Sula’s Nel and Middlemarch’s Dorothea, the two find that married life doesn’t live up to their expectations. Both seem to settle into the role of wife, and by doing so end up in an unhappy marriages with men who don’t truly appreciate their significant other. Both Nel and Dorothea appear to settle into their role as wife. The two independent women never had marriage as their main goal in life before their husbands proposed; it seems that Dorothea is the type of woman who would rather build her cottages than worry about taking care of a man, and Nel values her relationship with Sula more than she does a relationship with any male. Either way, the two women end up
…show more content…
He wasn’t feeling masculine enough with his job at the hotel, and believed that by marrying Nel he would feel more like a man. Nigro writes, “it was his determination to take on a man’s role that pressed him into settling down with Nel” (Nigro 735). With Nel as a wife, there would be someone to care about his hurt, someone to care about him deep enough to hold him and rock him if he was okay. According to Claude Pruitt, who wrote “Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison’s ‘Sula,’” Freudian theory suggests that while all the men from the Bottom signify varying degrees of a castration complex, Jude’s is revealed when he “buries emasculation in self pity… all are without power, economically and socially castrated, just as their characters are symbolically castrated” (Pruitt 120). In other words, Jude’s lack of a “manly” job makes him feel less masculine than he wishes. This search for proof of masculinity also eventually leads Jude to have sex with Sula, an action that furthers the dissatisfaction in the marriage between him and
He wasn’t feeling masculine enough with his job at the hotel, and believed that by marrying Nel he would feel more like a man. Nigro writes, “it was his determination to take on a man’s role that pressed him into settling down with Nel” (Nigro 735). With Nel as a wife, there would be someone to care about his hurt, someone to care about him deep enough to hold him and rock him if he was okay. According to Claude Pruitt, who wrote “Circling Meaning in Toni Morrison’s ‘Sula,’” Freudian theory suggests that while all the men from the Bottom signify varying degrees of a castration complex, Jude’s is revealed when he “buries emasculation in self pity… all are without power, economically and socially castrated, just as their characters are symbolically castrated” (Pruitt 120). In other words, Jude’s lack of a “manly” job makes him feel less masculine than he wishes. This search for proof of masculinity also eventually leads Jude to have sex with Sula, an action that furthers the dissatisfaction in the marriage between him and