The novel gives us heroes and heroines who struggle to overcome all kinds of challenges, from medieval monsters to modern bankruptcy. And we are really accustomed not only to respect but to understand with these heroic images. (Direct hand signal: who is the reader Pride and criticism and thought, “I know how and mr. Collins”?) While I don’t want to downplay the value of having heroes and heroines to emulate, I think the problem lies in how we see and compare these stereotypes.
We are all, the centers of our realities, inside our own heads, seeing the world through our own bodies in relation to our pasts. This leads to a proclivity to think of ourselves as the center of the universe. This is impossible. But throwing ourselves into the defined literary role of the “heroine” refocuses our attention – and some literary genres teach us this.
Take, for example, Jane Austen Emma. Austen called Emma Woodhouse “a heroine I do not like very much,” and with good reason. Emma treats the people of her town like pawns because she feels her own role as a matchmaker is better. We don’t like what she does to the people in her life, and Emma learns the hard way (read: public humiliation) about the importance of living life before she finds out about herself. she is the heroine of his little drama.
Or, consider Dorothea Brooks, George Eliot’s ostensible heroine Middlemarch. It was published nearly fifty years after Austen’s works, Middlemarch explore questions about how fiction relates to life and examine our ideas of heroism.
From the beginning of the book, Dorothea is shown to be her tragic heroine – a role she has designed for herself and is eager to fill. A star-eyed charmer of the first degree, he spent his days dreaming and trying to gather support for his good but impossible ideas to renovate houses for the poor. She despises the true feelings of a strange local lord, she chooses to marry Mr.
Casaubon was a fool, and the rest of the town knew it. He is so self-centered that he does not compromise his self-righteousness and self-esteem, and his pride separates him from his family and community. Dorothea falls for him because she loses sight of this truth in her delusions of grandeur and inferiority. It seems that he was honored to give his life in the service of his vision, and he was willing to throw himself on the altar of self-immolation – he just knew In the first weeks of his marriage, his good intentions are nothing but for the protection of his own feelings, his fear of living and being good, and his fear of being more than his fast young wife.
Dorothea is looking for an opportunity to lose herself in some great story, and so she builds this small and small person into a fake god. When she gets what she wants, it results in her being buried with her old husband who had previously closed herself off and closed her off from the world. Dorothea tries to mend her ways by re-accustoming herself to that world and learning to accept human imperfection.
Dorothea’s role as a “heroine” is slowly undermined by Eliot but still urges us to focus on other things with greater meaning. Two of these examples are women who immediately start the tension between idealism and realism. Rosie, the town mayor’s daughter, is a beautiful young woman who sets her sights on the best new doctor in town. Imagining a life of luxury and luxury beyond what his new job could support, he drove them into debt and social embarrassment—because she is determined to live up to her role as a loving wife and wife, a role that her real life has failed to fulfill.
Unlike Rosie, Mary Garth, a poor girl who takes care of Rosie’s uncle and Rosie’s brother Fred’s love interest, is always loyal to the truth. She had to work to help her parents support her many siblings, and although Fred, whom she later fell in love with, repeatedly proposed to her, she repeatedly refused. it is because he has debts and is always lazy. Mary’s insistence on standing up to the truth, working to pay off her debts, and doing something for herself motivates him to become a man close to her. Eliot’s narrator kindly tells us that Mary Garth knew that “things might not be arranged to her own satisfaction” and that “she wasted no time in wondering and resenting that fact.” ,” by choosing “to take life as music.” According to the author, he is better for it.
It’s a very human tendency to make ourselves central to the drama of our lives – and the therapist, I think, doesn’t commit to books or whole stories, but according to Mary Garth, “take life as a comedy. While tragedy creates a strong hero or heroine, comedy, like life, offers a variety of characters. equally important, different motives, and competing interests. It’s sometimes silly and sometimes profound. And for this reason, Comedy provides a bracing (and, well, funny) correction to our own understanding of the world. Similar books Middlemarchand humor in general, can help us better connect and understand the people around us.
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