Middlemarch opens with a very concise prelude commenting on the life of Saint Theresa. The prelude almost puts Saint Theresa on a pedestal, when the narrator compares other women to her by calling them “Many Theresas”.  In many ways, the narrator sees Saint Theresa as an ideal woman, sharing about her life and her motivations as if she was a legend. Interestingly, the prelude gives us a hint that there may be a character in this story as prominent and selfless as Saint Theresa.

The United States is the country of close reading, so I don’t expect this idea to be particularly popular. But the trouble with close reading [...] is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. This may have become an unconscious and invisible premiss by now, but it is an iron one nonetheless: you invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense.

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.

1. Dorothea’s power: “…and this strange unexpected manifestation of feeling in a woman whom she had approached with a shrinking aversion and dread, as one who must necessarily have a jealous hatred towards her, made her soul totter all the more with a sense that she had been walking in an unknown world which had just broken in upon her.” (ch.81)