Excerpt: He had gained an excellent practice, alternating, according to the season, between London and a Continental bathing-place; having written a treatise on Gout, a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side. His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do.
Question: To what extent is a utopian ambition portrayed to be a corrosive force within the world of Middlemarch
But he was now a prey to that worst irritation which arises not simply from annoyances, but from the second consciousness underlying those annoyances, of wasted energy and a degrading preoccupation, which was the reverse of all his former purposes.
Standard literary histography thus reserves autonomy and agency for the centre, and necessary imitation with local colour for the peripheries. (Julien, 674)
How can the relationship of language between the core and peripheries in Julien's "The Extroverted African Novel" shed light on the power dynamics within Middlemarch society?