Dickens, Eliot and Hardy: Marriage and the Sensible Youth of the Victorian Era
Dickens, Eliot and Hardy: Marriage and the Sensible Youth of the Victorian Era

Summary/Abstract: This article advances a psychoanalytical reading of the main protagonists in the Victorian novels The Bleak House by Charles Dickens, Middlemarch by George Eliot and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Esther Summerson, Dorothea Brooke and Jude Fawley begin their adult lives strongly influenced by their religiously-inflected upbringing only to end up exercising their free will in terms of their choice of marriage partners. All three evolve from being unwittingly tributary to a vita contemplativa to consciously choosing and cultivating more their vita activa. In the process, they balance out the rapport between their id, ego and supergo. Each succeeds in assigning worth to risking long-learned thought patterns in favor of adopting less secure but more fulfilling personal futures. By quieting their superego, each protagonist applies a corrective measure to their ego-driven personality, gaining thus a newfound sense of agency and selfhood.

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