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From Ethnocentrism to Cultural Hybridity: George Eliot’s Middlemarch

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Englishness and English culture seem to be disparaged by the miscegenation of Dorothea Brook, an English lady, and Will Ladislaw, “a dangerously mixed blood” of Englishman and Pole, and rumored to be of Jew and Gypsy. But Dorothea revolts against English ethnocentrism represented by her first husband Edward Casaubon, a sick, incommunicable, and narrow-minded English scholar and embraces cultural hybridity represented by her second husband Will, a vital, open, and sympathetic cosmopolitan bohemian. Eliot’s Will is different from other Victorian writers’ racial others such as Brontë’s Bertha, a Creole, Dickens’s Fagin, a Jew, and Thackeray’s Rhoda, a mulatto, who are eliminated or excluded in the texts to reestablish superior Englishness and English culture. Nonetheless, Eliot doesn’t negate Englishness. Rather, by embracing cultural hybridity, she proposes her grand vision to widen Englishness in the age of English reform around the early 1830s.