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

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.

To what extent is Dorothea's attraction towards Mr. Casaubon, and romantic disinterest in Sir James, a reaction to her uncle's continual frustrations of her attempts to be taken seriously in her own intellectual pursuits? Is Dorothea trying to come into the possession of the intellectual gravitas, that which Mr. Casaubon has, by marriage that a patriarchal society, what the uncle who insists "Young ladies don't understand political economy, you know," stands for, has denied her by dint of her gender?