This essay is a comparative analysis of two prominent Victorian novels, namely Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1880-1) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). I argue that the female protagonists in each novel suffer a kind of deprivation of identity as a direct result of personal pride and their submission to the dominant men they marry. By marrying for the sake of personal betterment, rather than true love, both are deprived of the independence, aspiration and joy that characterized them before marriage. Once married, both protagonists experience dispassionate and constrictive relationships with their husbands, adopting submissive and dependent roles, aspects of a normative femininity that are characteristic of the Victorian era.