Talk Examines Marriage, ‘Middlemarch’

Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, professor of English at Westmont, examines the expectation of marriage through George Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch” in a lecture, “Marriage Law Reform, Singleness, and Middlemarch” on Tuesday, March 29, at 7 p.m. in Hieronymus Lounge at Westmont’s Kerrwood Hall. The Gender Studies Lecture is free and open to the public.

“I hope the talk will give the audience some grounds for considering cultural imperatives around marriage and where some of the roots of those imperatives begin and how we might imagine other plots for our lives,” Larsen Hoeckley says.

Larsen Hoeckley, who has taught at Westmont since 1997, is a specialist in Victorian studies and gender studies. Her current projects concern the intersection of faith, gender and sexuality. She graduated from UC Riverside, earned a Master of Arts at the University of Texas at Austin and a doctorate at UC Berkeley. She edited “Shakespeare’s Heroines” (Broadview, 2005) and authored “The Dynamics of Forgiveness and Poetics in Adelaide Procter’s ‘Homeless’” (Literature Compass 2014).

“The early 20th-Century novelist Virginia Woolf called ‘Middlemarch’ ‘the first novel written in English for grown-ups,’ Larsen Hoeckley says. “That praise from Woolf pinpoints Eliot’s ability to shape characters in ways no other novelist has, and to help us see ourselves in those complex characters.  So, I think anyone who has ever loved a novel or thought about being married will find something interesting in this talk. It will help to have read Middlemarch, but it won’t be necessary.”