ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the patterns of expression in Middlemarch by discovering how it presents the moral mind. In Middlemarch ardor has an important connection to another, more familiar, image - the current or stream. Schorer has called Middlemarch 'a novel of religious yearning without religious object'. But one can extend that point and call it a novel of historical yearning without historical object, scientific yearning without scientific object, moral yearning without moral object - in brief, that is, a novel of yearning without object. Middlemarch struggles to imagine the moral mind. Human personality remains poised within the expressive design so carefully drawn for it, and the figures of mind have now become figures of the wide domain that surrounds the mind. Through Dorothea, Middlemarch offers the possibility of a self-subduing moral faith that presses tirelessly outwards toward suffusive wholes.
