Excerpt: Rosamond took his way of talking to herself, which was a mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolical gallantry, as the disguise of a deeper feeling; and in his presence she felt that agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama which Lydgate’s presence had no longer the magic to create. She even fancied—what will not men and women fancy in these matters? —that Will exaggerated his admiration for Mrs. Casaubon in order to pique herself. In this way poor Rosamond’s brain had been busy before Will’s departure. He would have made, she thought, a much more suitable husband for her than she had found in Lydgate.

Question: To what extent do Rosamond’s constructed romances serve the purpose of providing her with a sense of continuity comparable with the one produced by Dorothea’s religiosity?

Benedict Anderson noted that a purpose that religion fulfilled prior to the weakening of its position during the course of the 17^th century was of providing a sense of continuity during the process of societal regeneration and that it did so by linking event neither temporally nor causally related to one another. It accomplished this feat by providing a framework of providence where the will of an extraneous being simultaneously charts the course of history and provides the tools for its interpretation. Within the world of Middlemarch, we this ‘religious community’ being inhabited by Dorothea who via her religious devotion is thus connected with the figures of Milton and St. Theresa. This ‘imagined religious community’ serves to sanctify and elevate the choices that Dorothea makes in her own eyes. To entreat Mr. Casaubon to consider her as a student and an assistant for his research is thus to her in direct continuity with the devotion that Milton’s daughters showed in helping him compose after his blindness.

The character of Rosamond however, seems to represent a successor form of imagined community through her constructed romances. Through these constructed romances, Rosamond too is able to create the sense of continuity the imagined religious community of Dorothea provides, albeit to a smaller scale. Via her constructed romances, Rosamond is able to escape the disadvantageous social positions she finds herself in. The fall in Lydgate’s social and economic status and the subsequent desertion by the Middlemarch community that she experiences represents a break in continuity for Rosamond who has thus far enjoyed a life of privilege and thus she retreats into a constructed romance that provides her with a sense of continuity. Hence just as Dorothea uses the imagined religious community to raise in her eyes the validity of her choices, by believing that she is desired by Will, Rosamond too is able to raise her own estimation of herself. The fact that the Will of her constructed romance puts her above Dorothea, a woman of substantially greater financial means than herself, Rosamond is also able to separate her own worth from that of worldly assets as she comes to realize how easily reversals of fortune can strip her of them. Rosamond is thus able to create for herself a more resilient self-estimation, one that is more suited for her current circumstances. 

In this respect however, Rosamond’s constructed romances are unlike Dorothea’s imagined religious communities in that they present her with a convenient coping mechanism instead of providing her with the tools to better herself. Unlike Rosamond, to create the all-important sense of continuity Dorothea has to do the arduous task of living up to the examples set by her ‘predecessors’ such as Milton’s daughters and develop a command over Greek and Latin. Dorothea thus develops marketable skills of the sort whose absence made Rosamond suffer. To maintain a sense of continuity through an imagined religious community as Dorothea did is a demanding, yet fruitful, task for it necessitates a degree of self-improvement, retreating into yourself and constructing romances around you to overcome the incongruity a privileged past and a bleaker present however only brings stagnation. Thus Lydgate, at his most repentant even, was unable to get through to his wife for she was too preoccupied with boosting her ego with thoughts of another man and the problems within their relationship were left to fester.