Middlemarch by George Eliot
May. 9th, 2024 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoMiddlemarch is the kind of novel which I would usually resign myself to never reading. It's monstrously long and truly that's the biggest hurdle, above any other considerations—I never read any single story so long. But it came up as a reading group at my workplace and, given the opportunity to be peer-pressured into finishing, I took it.
I'm very glad I did! I did not, strictly, speaking, enjoy Middlemarch. It's comprised of eight installments, called books, and there are a few of those that I had to drag myself through in order to finish. Book... five? Six? The one in which we get mostly election gossip when the character of Mr. Brooke pursues a seat in parliament—I could not tell you what happens for many dozens of pages there. I know he's mocked during a speech, but the rest of it, eh! And I think that's okay.
I am so glad that I got to read this as part of a group. We met five times throughout and discussed along the way. The project was meant to simulate the serialized release schedule of the original publication run. Discussing with a group each month helped me pay so much more attention to the development of each storyline than I would have if I'd somehow pushed through alone! Everyone brought their own perspective to the meeting, and people focused on different moments or character beats. I feel like I got a much fuller understanding of a still very dense novel, and knowing that I would be discussing it helped me slow down and note Eliot's writing at a sentence level, which was rewarding! She's funny, biting, observant, and moralizing all at turn.
And although ~1870 is earlier than most of my Victorian reading, it was still striking to compare her tone to someone like F. W. Farrar. Especially in the early books of Middlemarch, you can see Eliot using a first-person narrator at the ends of chapters to drive home a lesson, much like Farrar, but with very different directions as to the moral weight of characters' actions!
Speaking of the characters—there are a ton of them. Middlemarch was pitched to me as a slow novel with a lot of very careful character portraits, which were great at capturing real types of people and real types of behavior. It is not a sensation novel, and not moved by a single plot or single lead. I think that's mostly true! We meet so many people, and I'd name a bunch of them as very important: Dorothea Brooke, Mr Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, Fred Vincy, Mary Garth (and her father Caleb), Tertius Lydgate, Rosamond Vincy... I'm leaving out Mr Feathersone, though he was also instrumental to the first half of the novel, and characters like Mr Brooke or Mr Bulstrode, whose arcs are not romantic in nature but do move the romantic players around the board. And all of these characters have families: spouses, children, siblings, cousins. There are townspeople whose names recur throughout many books, sometimes with gaps in between, such that keeping them all straight proved impossible for me! Another reason to be grateful for having a discussion group.
To oversimplify, I'd characterize the novel as about three women's marriage prospects: Dorothea, Mary, and Rosamond, all of whom are in their late teens or early twenties for the two years of the novel. They all do end the story married, though how many times, and how they got there, look very different. Contrasting them seems to be encouraged! It also encouraged me to pick favorites, lol.
Mary Solid throughout and solidly well-liked by me. She's stable, intelligent, and knows what her own boundaries are. My reading group puts that down to her being the only child of a happy, loving marriage—the best marriage in the book!—and watching her wait for Fred Vincy to become a respectable man was rewarding. Her most interesting moment comes early, when she is the caretaker for old Mr. Featherstone and she refuses to become entangled in the drama of his will. For the second half of Middlemarch I found her arc inevitable, and no longer particularly exciting, though I did feel for Mr. Farebrother when Mary rejects his implied offer of marriage. But also, Fred was too clearly on the rebound then, and too clearly fated for eventual marriage to Mary.
Dorothea Fantastic turnaround. I despised her in book one! Her sister, Celia, was so much more compelling to me. The way that Celia pushes for their deceased mother's jewelry, and the sister relationship there, was incredibly interesting. Celia drops off in interest after that, Dorothea marries an obviously terrible choice and is miserable and surprised about that, and then is surprised that another young man (her husband's cousin lol) considers her attractive. Mostly I found myself wanting to take her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. Yes, she was drawn to be a naïve and unworldly character, but knowing that did not make it less frustrating! So I thought I'd quietly resent her until the end—except that she does have a lovely moment of character growth in the final book, demonstrating her willingness to exert her sense of moral justice even when the men in her life are urging her against it. It was lovely! It's really unfortunate that I found her second husband Will, that younger cousin, so much less compelling by the time they got together. I wanted him to prove he wasn't actually a dilettante, and he never really did.
Rosamond Well. I wished cholera on Rosamond during one of our discussions, so. God, what a miserable character! She's vain and shallow and refuses to take responsibility for her own choices. My dislike of her was very strong; I admit I probably read her husband, Lydgate, more sympathetically in response to that. I felt terrible for him. What an awful marriage. I didn't think I could find a marriage worse than that of Dorothea and Casaubon, but then Rosamond and Lydgate came along to prove me wrong. There's a line to exemplify Rosamond's character which I think bears quoting:
Partway through (around the end of book five) I was so compelled by the contrast between two of the younger men, Ladislaw and Lydgate, that I sat down and wrote fic about it:
To Like What We Are Given, Ladislaw/Lydgate
I would not call this a slashy book, nor a femslashy one. It really is all about the m/f marriages and marriage prospects. But the effect of reading the book in parts was that when Ladislaw and Lydgate are both miserable about their desired women in roughly the middle of the story, they are briefly compelling together—Lydgate is miserable in his impulsive marriage, which has just begun to encounter the crises of their very different dispositions towards wealth and social standing; Ladislaw has idealized his attraction to the widowed and unattainable Dorothea, with whom he imagines perfect happiness and synchronicity. I loved the idea of Lydgate being infuriated by that idealism and attempting to dim Ladislaw's bright star, while also releasing some of his tension through extramarital sex.
Of course, by the end of the novel, this was no longer as interesting to me. Their characters move in different directions and that brief moment of contrast and tension becomes less striking. I'm glad I got the chance to write that before book eight + the epilogue sucked the wind out of my sails!
Overall, I can't rightly recommend Middlemarch as a reading experience, because I recognize that most people would be undertaking it alone. (I'm not volunteering for a reread!) It was fantastic to read and discuss as a group. It's an odyssey to do without that support, I'm sure. The colleague who ran the group said that they had stopped teaching Middlemarch—that even with a month dedicated to reading it during a course, students struggled with the length and breadth of the novel and didn't learn much from it, on average. I can see why it would be so difficult to teach! But I'm very glad to have the experience, and it's great context for the rest of my 19th century reading, and also I get to understand a classic Smiths lyric. ;) Totally worth the investment.
I'm very glad I did! I did not, strictly, speaking, enjoy Middlemarch. It's comprised of eight installments, called books, and there are a few of those that I had to drag myself through in order to finish. Book... five? Six? The one in which we get mostly election gossip when the character of Mr. Brooke pursues a seat in parliament—I could not tell you what happens for many dozens of pages there. I know he's mocked during a speech, but the rest of it, eh! And I think that's okay.
Many more words
I am so glad that I got to read this as part of a group. We met five times throughout and discussed along the way. The project was meant to simulate the serialized release schedule of the original publication run. Discussing with a group each month helped me pay so much more attention to the development of each storyline than I would have if I'd somehow pushed through alone! Everyone brought their own perspective to the meeting, and people focused on different moments or character beats. I feel like I got a much fuller understanding of a still very dense novel, and knowing that I would be discussing it helped me slow down and note Eliot's writing at a sentence level, which was rewarding! She's funny, biting, observant, and moralizing all at turn.
Sir James took out his handkerchief and began to bite the corner.
And although ~1870 is earlier than most of my Victorian reading, it was still striking to compare her tone to someone like F. W. Farrar. Especially in the early books of Middlemarch, you can see Eliot using a first-person narrator at the ends of chapters to drive home a lesson, much like Farrar, but with very different directions as to the moral weight of characters' actions!
For my part I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague: one’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.
Speaking of the characters—there are a ton of them. Middlemarch was pitched to me as a slow novel with a lot of very careful character portraits, which were great at capturing real types of people and real types of behavior. It is not a sensation novel, and not moved by a single plot or single lead. I think that's mostly true! We meet so many people, and I'd name a bunch of them as very important: Dorothea Brooke, Mr Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, Fred Vincy, Mary Garth (and her father Caleb), Tertius Lydgate, Rosamond Vincy... I'm leaving out Mr Feathersone, though he was also instrumental to the first half of the novel, and characters like Mr Brooke or Mr Bulstrode, whose arcs are not romantic in nature but do move the romantic players around the board. And all of these characters have families: spouses, children, siblings, cousins. There are townspeople whose names recur throughout many books, sometimes with gaps in between, such that keeping them all straight proved impossible for me! Another reason to be grateful for having a discussion group.
To oversimplify, I'd characterize the novel as about three women's marriage prospects: Dorothea, Mary, and Rosamond, all of whom are in their late teens or early twenties for the two years of the novel. They all do end the story married, though how many times, and how they got there, look very different. Contrasting them seems to be encouraged! It also encouraged me to pick favorites, lol.
Mary Solid throughout and solidly well-liked by me. She's stable, intelligent, and knows what her own boundaries are. My reading group puts that down to her being the only child of a happy, loving marriage—the best marriage in the book!—and watching her wait for Fred Vincy to become a respectable man was rewarding. Her most interesting moment comes early, when she is the caretaker for old Mr. Featherstone and she refuses to become entangled in the drama of his will. For the second half of Middlemarch I found her arc inevitable, and no longer particularly exciting, though I did feel for Mr. Farebrother when Mary rejects his implied offer of marriage. But also, Fred was too clearly on the rebound then, and too clearly fated for eventual marriage to Mary.
Dorothea Fantastic turnaround. I despised her in book one! Her sister, Celia, was so much more compelling to me. The way that Celia pushes for their deceased mother's jewelry, and the sister relationship there, was incredibly interesting. Celia drops off in interest after that, Dorothea marries an obviously terrible choice and is miserable and surprised about that, and then is surprised that another young man (her husband's cousin lol) considers her attractive. Mostly I found myself wanting to take her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. Yes, she was drawn to be a naïve and unworldly character, but knowing that did not make it less frustrating! So I thought I'd quietly resent her until the end—except that she does have a lovely moment of character growth in the final book, demonstrating her willingness to exert her sense of moral justice even when the men in her life are urging her against it. It was lovely! It's really unfortunate that I found her second husband Will, that younger cousin, so much less compelling by the time they got together. I wanted him to prove he wasn't actually a dilettante, and he never really did.
Rosamond Well. I wished cholera on Rosamond during one of our discussions, so. God, what a miserable character! She's vain and shallow and refuses to take responsibility for her own choices. My dislike of her was very strong; I admit I probably read her husband, Lydgate, more sympathetically in response to that. I felt terrible for him. What an awful marriage. I didn't think I could find a marriage worse than that of Dorothea and Casaubon, but then Rosamond and Lydgate came along to prove me wrong. There's a line to exemplify Rosamond's character which I think bears quoting:
In fact there was but one person in Rosamond’s world whom she did not regard as blameworthy, and that was the graceful creature with blond plaits and with little hands crossed before her, who had never expressed herself unbecomingly, and had always acted for the best—the best naturally being what she best liked.
Partway through (around the end of book five) I was so compelled by the contrast between two of the younger men, Ladislaw and Lydgate, that I sat down and wrote fic about it:
To Like What We Are Given, Ladislaw/Lydgate
I would not call this a slashy book, nor a femslashy one. It really is all about the m/f marriages and marriage prospects. But the effect of reading the book in parts was that when Ladislaw and Lydgate are both miserable about their desired women in roughly the middle of the story, they are briefly compelling together—Lydgate is miserable in his impulsive marriage, which has just begun to encounter the crises of their very different dispositions towards wealth and social standing; Ladislaw has idealized his attraction to the widowed and unattainable Dorothea, with whom he imagines perfect happiness and synchronicity. I loved the idea of Lydgate being infuriated by that idealism and attempting to dim Ladislaw's bright star, while also releasing some of his tension through extramarital sex.
Of course, by the end of the novel, this was no longer as interesting to me. Their characters move in different directions and that brief moment of contrast and tension becomes less striking. I'm glad I got the chance to write that before book eight + the epilogue sucked the wind out of my sails!
Overall, I can't rightly recommend Middlemarch as a reading experience, because I recognize that most people would be undertaking it alone. (I'm not volunteering for a reread!) It was fantastic to read and discuss as a group. It's an odyssey to do without that support, I'm sure. The colleague who ran the group said that they had stopped teaching Middlemarch—that even with a month dedicated to reading it during a course, students struggled with the length and breadth of the novel and didn't learn much from it, on average. I can see why it would be so difficult to teach! But I'm very glad to have the experience, and it's great context for the rest of my 19th century reading, and also I get to understand a classic Smiths lyric. ;) Totally worth the investment.
