All 12 Uses of

yoke
in
Middlemarch

The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?†
Chpt 1

Under the first galling pressure of foreseen difficulties, and the first perception that his marriage, if it were not to be a yoked loneliness, must be a state of effort to go on loving without too much care about being loved, he had once or twice tried a dose of opium.†
Chpt 7 *

The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?†
Chpt 1

But he felt his neck under Bulstrode's yoke; and though he usually enjoyed kicking, he was anxious to refrain from that relief.†
Chpt 2

Either you slip out of service altogether, and become good for nothing, or you wear the harness and draw a good deal where your yoke-fellows pull you.†
Chpt 2

In her present matronly age at least, Mrs. Garth never committed herself by over-hasty speech; having, as she said, borne the yoke in her youth, and learned self-control.†
Chpt 3

Dorothea was not taken by surprise: many incidents had been leading her to the conjecture of some intention on her husband's part which might make a new yoke for her.†
Chpt 5

Neither law nor the world's opinion compelled her to this—only her husband's nature and her own compassion, only the ideal and not the real yoke of marriage.†
Chpt 5

His was one of the natures in which conscience gets the more active when the yoke of life ceases to gall them.†
Chpt 5 *

Lydgate was bowing his neck under the yoke like a creature who had talons, but who had Reason too, which often reduces us to meekness.†
Chpt 6

It was because Lydgate writhed under the idea of getting his neck beneath this vile yoke that he had fallen into a bitter moody state which was continually widening Rosamond's alienation from him.†
Chpt 7

the "if Rosamond will not mind," which had fallen from him involuntarily as part of his thought, was a significant mark of the yoke he bore.†
Chpt 7

Definitions:

(1) (yoke as in: the yoke of bondage)
an oppressive burden or something that limits freedom
(2) (yoke as in: oxen yoke)
a wooden frame used to join beasts of burden so they pull together, or a connected pair, or the connecting of a pair
(3) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
meaning too rare to warrant focus:

See a comprehensive dictionary for less common senses of the word including:
- a clothing item from which fabric is hung
- a control apparatus for an airplane or ship