What I’m Reading: Middlemarch

As some dedicated readers of this blog might know, my friend Margaret Luongo and I posted a pair of videos discussing George Eliot’s classic novel Middlemarch to our “Read A Classic Novel…Together!” channel on YouTube. Ever since then, I’ve been meaning to take the time to write a post about it, mainly because it had such a big impact on me. I mean, lots of books have achieved the classic moniker and yet don’t hold up to modern scrutiny. But Middlemarch does. In fact, it’s one of those titanic works of literature that you almost can’t get your head around. It has so many sides and so many aspects, such that it attains a kind of sublime quality. Like Shakespeare’s works, Middlemarch is a different experience for everyone who reads it.

When I say titanic, I mean it literally. Middlemarch is a big book–eight hundred pages in most editions–following the lives of six major and at least a dozen minor characters in the fictional, provincial town called Middlemarch. The story is set in the 1830s, but Eliot wrote the book in the 1870s, when the world had already been vastly changed by the industrial revolution in England. And so, the book has a little bit of a “lost world” feel to it. One can sense that Eliot (whose real name was Mary Ann Evans) is writing about the social and economic environment that is already a thing of the past. However, absolutely nothing about the book feels the least bit sentimental or nostalgic. Quite the contrary. Eliot was a great writer whose blazing intelligence seems to illuminate every page of this very long book. And everything she describes feels as true and relevant today as when she wrote it.

Primarily, Middlemarch is a book about striving. All the main characters are striving for something–success, honor, praise, respect, status–while at the same time striving for someone. That is, these six characters actually represent three couples, locked in complicated, overlapping romantic orbits with each other. For all six individuals, their desired, would-be lover represents love and salvation. 

And yet, in the tradition of great drama (as well as every soap opera), they keep missing each other. Why? Because each of them, in their own way, makes some terrible life-choice that thwarts any chance of their relationships getting started or taking hold.

The most central character is the niece of a local aristocrat, Dorothea Brook, who is nineteen at the start of the novel. Dorothea is highly intelligent, kind, and pious. Paradoxically (and every character in this book is a paradox; that’s one thing that makes it so great) she is also ambitious, with a craving to make some profound, positive mark on the world. As a result, she’s very pretentious, and even foolish. This leads her to make a disastrous marriage to a much older, wealthy man named Causabon whose religious probity and scholarly pursuits strike her as worthy objects of her devotion. In fact, Causabon is a failed writer whose timidity and complete lack of imagination make him a total drag, and worse. Fortunately, Dorothe soon meets Causabon’s much younger nephew, Will Ladislaw, an artist and writer whose creativity, kindness, and adventurousness are the polar opposites of Causabon. Dorethea and Will promptly fall in love with each other, but any chance of happiness between them is nixed by the pesky fact of Dorothea’s being already married to an old stick. Even when Causabon has the decency to kick-off from a heart attack, he ensures that the young couple will be thwarted for the foreseeable future. (In one of the few instances of genuine cruelty in the novel, Causabon places a codicil in his will that Dorethea will lose her inheritance if she ever marries Will Ladislaw.)

In addition to Dorothea and Will, the other main characters are Tertius Lydgate, a brilliant, innovative young physician whose cutting-edge ideas are quashed by the provincial aldermen; Rosamond Vincy, a beautiful rich girl whose charm is matched only her callowness; Fred Vincy, a loveable fuck-up who prefers gambling and horse-racing to his college studies; and Mary Garth, a kind-hearted, decent girl from a struggling middle-class family who is wise beyond her years. 

With the exception of Mary, all these characters have some kind of fatal flaw that drives them away from happiness with their prospective lover. For Dorothea, Lydgate, Will, and Celia, that flaw is pride. Dorothea wants to be the most pious, generous person in Middlemarch (a paradoxical kind of flaw if ever there was one—the ambition to be more holy than everyone else). Will wants to retain every ounce of his artistic and creative freedom (which means never seeking the approval or the love of a rich woman like Dorothea). Lydgate wants to be the best doctor in rural England, which makes him uncompromising and a bit of a dick; it also drives him to work long hours, to the neglect of his new wife, Celia. And Celia wants to be the belle of the ball at every event she attends, even if it bankrupts her struggling-doctor husband Lydgate.

Only poor Fred has a different kind of flaw, that of hedonism. He likes to party too much. He also lies to himself and everyone else (especially Mary, the secret love of his life), pretending that he will someday get his act together, finish school, and become a respectable clergyman as his parents wish. Only Mary has the wisdom to see that Fred could never be a clergyman, and she swears that she will never marry him if he gets his degree. 

If all of these troubled relationships sound like the making of a soap-opera, be aware that every vexation, wrinkle, and plot-point comes off as surprising and smart. And utterly believable. Moreover, every page and every scene in Middlemarch is illuminated by Eliot’s fierce and penetrating intelligence. And wisdom. 

Take this passage, in which the recently married Dorothea begins to realize that she has made a terrible mistake in marrying Causabon. 

The duties of her married life, contemplated as so great beforehand, seemed to be shrinking with the furniture and the white vapor-walled landscape. The clear heights where she expected to walk in full communion had become difficult to see even in her imagination; the delicious repose of the soul on a complete superior had been shaken into uneasy effort and alarmed with dim presentiment. When would the days begin of that active wifely devotion which was to strengthen her husband’s life and exalt her own? Never perhaps, as she had preconceived them; but somehow—still somehow. In this solemnly pledged union of her life, duty would present itself in some new form of inspiration and give a new meaning to wifely love.

Contrast that passage with this one, in which we, the reader, inhabit the thoughts of the much humbler (and wiser) character, Mary Garth.

…for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part. Mary might have become cynical if she had not had parents whom she honored, and a well of affectionate gratitude within her, which was all the fuller because she had learned to make no unreasonable claims.

As I did a bit of research into the book in preparation for my and Margaret Luongo’s YouTube videos about it, I was struck by how many other writers have cited it as an influence. In fact, while a classic novel is, almost by definition, a book that other writers write books about, Middlemarch is one of those very rare uber-classics that other writers write memoirs about. A case in point is Rebecca Mead’s fine work My Life in Middlemarch: A Memoir, in she writes very movingly and with deep perceptiveness about the experience she had a young woman  discovering and reading this fine novel:

This book, which had been published serially in eight volumes almost a hundred years before I was born, wasn’t distant or dusty, but arresting in the acuteness of its psychological penetration and the snap of its sentences. Through it, George Eliot spoke with an authority and a generosity that was wise and essential and profound. I couldn’t believe how good it was.

Indeed. Check it out…