Theme Of Marriage In Sula And Middlemarch

Decent Essays
The Dissatisfaction of Marriage in Sula and Middlemarch 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, both find that married life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For both Nel and Dorothea, they seem to settle into the role of wife. The two independent women never had marriage at their main goal in life; Dorothea would rather build her cottages, and Nel seemed to value her relationship with Sula more than she did a relationship with any man. It’s not quite clear why Nel married Jude besides the fact that Nel wants to …show more content…
Both men tend to put their work before their wives; Casaubon, especially, has a main goal of finishing his book, a project that’s much more important to him than being a loving husband. He’d rather have a submissive wife that acts as his secretary than a woman his own age with common interests. He says that he wants a reader for the evenings, and that he has documents that need arranging, and tells Mr. Brooke that “you have an excellent secretary at hand,” hinting that he wants Dorothea to act as secretary for him (Eliot 20). Eventually, she does. Nel’s husband admires work much more than his wife or family as well. Morrison writes that he was never aiming to get married; the only reason he decided to propose to Nel was because he couldn’t get a job working on building the road. The rage that he felt after being denied the opportunity to work for so long led him to propose to …show more content…
Whatever his fortune, whatever the cut of his garment, there would always be the hem- the tuck and fold that hid his raveling edges; a someone sweet, industrious and loyal to shore him up. (Morrison 83)
All in all, both men only agreed to marry for personal benefit, and didn’t worry too much about what their wives would get out of the relationship. This of course led to the two marriages ending in

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