ABSTRACT
This chapter began by pointing to the prominence of motive in George Eliot's characterization. It continued by noticing that the body stands as a rival determinant of character. Middlemarch approaches both mind and body through the methods of a philosophic atomism which seeks to understand a phenomenon by analyzing it into smaller units. Middlemarch follows the fate of motives and the fate of bodies, and at crucial moments it pits one against the other. The attention that Middlemarch gives to the body is a way of setting those limits, a way of marking the boundaries of mind and its morality. Pritchett is right: Middlemarch gives us no madness, but it gives us something quite as troubling and quite as final: the unreason of the body. The mind indeed occupies the dramatic center of Middlemarch, with its images and ideas, its beliefs and grounds, its reasons and motives.
