Three Good Victorian Characters

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the Victorian concept of female "goodness" as seen in three characters: Tess, Dorothea and Amy Dorritt. The paper illustrates that there is one unifying element in these three Victorian texts: The force of human goodness in one singular, good female protagonist. The paper author believes that these character present profoundly different views of the impact of goodness upon human life.

From the Paper:

"In contrast to Hardy, George Eliot wishes to stress the willed nature of goodness. "Middlemarch's" main character, Dorothea Brooke, is willfully blind to the faults of her first husband, Causabon. Like the character, she is literally "short sighted" about small dogs lying in her footpath and refuses to see "what is quite plain,' about human marriage as her sister quite astutely says. Dorothea has admirable desires, to create improved cottages to shelter individuals from the elements, but creates an unrealistic ideal of the scholar Causabon in her head, until it is revealed too plainly that he will make a cold husband and that his intellectual ideals are narrow and sterile. Dorothea also might be "too late", as it was for Tess, were it not for the convenient death of her older husband and her marriage (and subsequent disinheritance of fortune) to Will Ladislaw. Eliot, in contrast to Hardy, sees more of an element of moral choice in Dorothea's poor marital and sexual choice."

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