."..beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress." Would a woman enjoy being told such words? In the passage from George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch, the narrator describes the simple, yet inexplicably beautiful and complex woman, Dorothea Brooke. The speaker's classification and comparison of her beauty and retelling of an event from her life, gives the reader the impression that his blasé attitude serves as a façade to his subconscious attraction to her, for his comments appear contradictory.

In the excerpt, the narrator defines Dorothea's type of beauty as flagrant, yet tempered. She apparently had been so beautiful, every part of her "finely formed," that each feature had been modulated only by "poor dress." Even with such modest style, she acquired more distinction from her "plain garments." He also identifies her beauty as one would identify the beauty of a "quotation from the Bible;" in...