In George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, each character struggles to reconcile his desires with the reality of his life. This struggle often leads to an imaginative construction of reality in the "communion of illusion". In this novel, the characters of Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate share a similar form of imagination, both constructing a vision of ideal marriage in their minds. As these illusions are forced to surrender to reality, the characters must attempt to understand the desires that fueled their imaginations in the first place and must try to make peace with their situation. The narrator attempts to show through these two characters this common tendency of humanity to create what we desire as a tool to cope with a disappointing and limited life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Dorothea and Lydgate imagine strangely coinciding forms of the ideal spouse. Dorothea seeks an intellectually dominant man to guide her toward her highest purpose, while Lydgate seeks a submissive woman who will share his struggles and help him achieve his lofty goals. In many ways, it seems they were looking for each other. The common element in this ideal was someone with whom they could share their highest goals, but they both ended up with someone very different. Dorothea is described as seeking "the union that would free her from her childish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of willing submission to a guide who would lead her along the grandest path" (23). Dorothea's ideal of herself in a state of submission seems a strange contrast to her extraordinary self-confidence. This, however, is a manifestation of his imagination. She imagines herself free from mortal constraints, and a marriage that is "trials" and "a state of higher duties" (35) is a manifestation of this freedom from the worldly. She acts against the passion of her character, imagining that she does not need to satisfy these basic desires and wanting a husband who is more like a father. We see later that this lofty illusion cannot be sustained for long. In the absence of this ideal person, Dorothea and Lydgate imagine the virtues they seek in the people at hand. With little experience, Dorothea concludes that Casaubon is "a man capable of understanding the highest inner life" (17) in what the narrator tells us is an assessment in which he "filled in all the blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting it as he interpreted the works of Providence, and justifies the apparent discordances by his deafness to the higher harmonies. And there are many empty spaces left in the weeks of courtship, which a loving faith fills with happy assurance" (66). Lydgate also at first believes that Rosamand is the ideal woman he had imagined, "an experienced creature who revered his high reflections and his important labors" (320). Each of them is filling the voids of their lives with another person, Dorothea imagines having found the father figure she has always missed, and Lydgate imagines having found the companion who will make his great efforts easier. Great desires are present in these moments. two characters to fuel such leaps of the imagination and support the illusions created. Each of them imagines an ideal mate in someone who is actually very different from that ideal and does not encourage illusion. Both Lydgate and Dorothea create such extraordinary illusions because they have such broad goals. Lydgate, like Dorothea, imagines himself above everyday worries, with romantic and financial worries thatthey have little relevance to his plans. In the novel he is torn between the good things he can do and everyday life, which interferes. To achieve great things, these characters must imagine freedom, and they do so by giving up the worries of the village. These illusions, however, end up trapping them. Lydgate believes that his flirtation means nothing to anyone, and finds himself more completely entangled than he would have been if he had recognized social norms. He forgets that every great scientist "had to walk the earth among neighbors who thought much more of his bearing and clothing than of anything that would give him a title of everlasting fame" (133), and these threads of social pressure operate the their immense power to attract him to marriage. Both Lydgate and Dorothea find themselves governed by desire, although they believe they are immune to it, and it is desire itself that creates this illusion of freedom. Once trapped in marriage, Lydgate creates illusions in an attempt to gain some happiness from a marriage that was not what he wanted. The illusions created by Dorothea and Lydgate in their attempts to find satisfaction end up harming them. Both are disappointed in their marriages, having let their imaginations trap them with people who don't understand them and who actually work against their goals. Dorothea, after her marriage to Mr. Casaubon, is reduced to an embodiment of surrendered passion and desire, saying "I have no desires" (356). Lydgate finds that his delusions and ideas of femininity have brought him into a situation he cannot handle, and he finds himself condemned to "an affectionless future" (592). The illusions created by these characters also contribute to making their marriages unmanageable, creating obstacles to understanding due to a refusal to see their spouses in their reality. The result for both of these characters is the retreat of their dreams from active fulfillment to secret desire. Lydgate is further damaged by the illusions he has created. His renunciation of worldly concerns not only lands him in financial difficulty, but stains his reputation and damages his practice. The financial problems he accumulates by imagining himself above such worries lead him to accept money from Bulstrode which is perceived in Middlemarch as a bribe. His haughty treatment of those people also led to animosity against him in Middlemarch, creating even more problems. The “mean medium of Middlemarch had been too strong for him” (170). The narrator is quick to tell us, however, that imagination is not all bad. Instead, it tells us that it is a shared human experience necessary for survival. That, "if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we would die from that roar" (177). Some illusion, he argues, is necessary to protect us from the overwhelming reality of the world. The narrator also comments that it is impossible to know everything about another person in a short time, especially through formalized courtship, so certain characteristics must be imagined for a relationship to progress. “Life could never have gone on at any time without this liberal concession of closure, which facilitated marriage in the difficulties of civilization” (17). Imagination is also useful in this novel as it provides the characters with an opportunity for moral victory in overcoming their illusions and understanding some of the real complications of the world. After Dorothea "began to see that she had been the victim of a wild delusion" (193), she continues to be devoted to Mr. Casaubon, a man of., 1985.