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Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of burning ideals, a would-be Saint Theresa. Having been born into Victorian England, she has to make instruments of the men around her, and usually she is overoptimistic as to their capacities and commitment. She wants to build cottages on the estate of her uncle so that his tenants may be happy and prosperous, and she is constantly drawing up plans for the purpose, although nothing ever gets built. She seeks to endow a charity hospital that will rely on the best modern methods, but the young doctor whose idealism matches her own is led into scandal by the compromises made to realize his scientific ambitions. Dorothea also wants to see great intellectual work done in the world and, to that end, marries Mr. Casaubon, an elderly scholar who has spent his career accumulating index cards full of data that, duly categorized and arranged, will allow him to settle a great question with a magnum opus, The Key to All Mythologies. Alas, he has no ink in his pen: Dorothea keeps asking when he will begin to write the book, and his young artist cousin, Will Ladislaw, points out that all the good scholarship is now being done in German, which Mr. Casaubon does not read. The scholar dies of irritation, and, after a decent interval, a humbled Dorothea marries the cousin, who has in the meantime gone into local politics.
Like Elliott Oring, I have sometimes found illumination among the Victorians as I seek to understand my own vocation. In my testier moments, I have felt that the bad marriage depicted in George Eliot's 1872 novel Middlemarch might serve as an allegory for the field of folklore, all the more so in that I can never decide whether I am more like the activist Dorothea or the dusty procrastinator Mr. Casaubon. Today, as I reconsider this analogy, I am more struck by the relevance of the third party: Will Ladislaw, the Romantic artist turned political journalist.
Still less than I can Oring be aligned with any of these positions, though George Eliot would have appreciated his confidence in science and his prodigious scholarly energies. At the same time, with her keen eye for the ways in which character...