BOOK
#49

Middlemarch
by George Eliot





Review by Edward Tanguay
November 3, 1996

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.  As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."  -- George Eliot, Middlemarch

Ordinary life is the topic of this 781-page monster book.  If you think back on the plot, nothing really happened: we never made it out of the little village of Middlemarch, there were no earth-shaking scenes, and most of the characters lived quite ordinary lives.  If this were a movie, it would last 20 minutes.  The fact that I was carried along from page to page amazed me, and I soon began to see George Eliot's style of writing as creating a fine web of psychological and introspective detail that makes you sit back and realize all that is there in ordinary life--you begin to "hear the grass grow" and "the squirrel's heart beat."

Reading through this book is like watching a wall-size landscape scene being painted brush stroke by brush stroke. Henry James called it a "treasure house of detail."  Virginia Woolf called it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."  You will find absolutely no action in this book unless you begin to see "action" as the meaningful glance onto a woman's hand or the hesitation of a character before she turns to speak to her husband.  These are the signals that you begin to consider as major action, the world gets smaller and quieter and more meaningful.  This book teaches you how to see detail again.  If you want a adventurous rollercoaster ride of a plot in a book this size, read Fielding's Tom Jones.  If you want to learn to see and appreciate the detail of subtle relationships and movements and personalities, read Middlemarch.  Eliot doesn't even drop back to philosophize as Fielding did, and even admits it midway through the book:

But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.

Eliot instead gets you into minute observations and keeps you there at several levels:  psychological, intellectual, physical, emotional.  Through the control of her description, you feel as though you are watching every scene in slow motion and picking up information on several other channels other than sight and sound. You hear what Dorothea and Casaubon are thinking, feeling, forseeing as well as what they do, how they move, and how they affect each other.  If reminds me of what Henry James tried to do in The Ambassadors, but James went overboard with psychological description.  Eliot keeps your senses tuned to her complex world with a balance of scenery painting, character analysis, and accurate descriptions of movements and gestures and how they are interpreted by others.

Eliot's control manifests itself in unforgettable scenes such as Featherstone's death scene in which this dying madman tries to convince the wholesome Mary to hand him his will. Her purity and resolve to remain true to her principles and how this simpleness overrides Featherstone's corrupt intentions on his death bed is powerful.  And Brook's visit to the Dagley's, finding Mr. Dagley drunk and thus empowered to "speak his mind" to Brook, who owns Dagley's land.  You get a sense of the political changes going on which put Brook in a compromising situation and gives Dagley confidence.  And the numerous discussions, quarrels, and firey spats between Rosamond and Lydgate as their relationship gathers tension and slowly sours:

Lydgate did not speak, but tossed his head on one side, and twitched the corners of his mouth in despair.  Rosamond, seeing that he was not looking at her, rose and set his cup of coffee before him; but he took no notice of it, and went on with an inward drama and argument, occasionally moving in his seat, resting one arm on the table, and rubbing his hand against his hair. There was a conflux of emotions and thoughts in him that would not let him either give thorough way to his anger of persevere with simple rigidity of resolve.  Rosamond took advantage of his silence.

And the scene of Bulstrode and his wife after she is shamed by the realization of his questionable past dealings.  Notice how Eliot packs the situation with emotion by telling the reader what the characters did NOT say:

He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half amazed for a moment: her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, "I know": and her hands and eyes rested gently on him.  He burst out crying and they cried together, she sitting at his side.  They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought it down on them.  His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent.  Open-minded as she was, she nevertheless shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire.  She could not say, "How much is only slander and false suspicion?" and he did not say, "I am innocent."

Dorothy was my favorite character. She was the kind of person you meet at a party and end up talking to till three in the morning because she says things like this:

I have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives would look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they could be put on the wall.

You feel like saying, "Wow, go on, that is so cool!"  She embodies both a negative view of humankind as well as a tremendous St.-Francis-like peace and goodwill towards others.  She is at once depressing and extremely motivating and never at peace with herself. 

All existence seemed to beat with a lower pulse than her own, and her religious faith was a solitary cry, the struggle out of a nightmare in which every object was withering and shrinking away from her.

She is the dreamer; you could tell from the beginning that she was headed for some kind of ruin.  It seemed the destiny of someone who always needs a more intense experience to give her life meaning.  Here she is dreaming about the world that her first husband is going to bring to her, a world that never came:

"He thinks with me," said Dorothea to herself, "or rather, he thinks a whole world of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror.  And his feelings too, his whole experience--what a lake compared with my little pool!"

Rosamond was another well portrayed character, being described more by her subtle actions than by any large speeches or words.

And Rosamond could say the right thing; for she was clever with that sort of cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous.  Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness.

I kept waiting for Rosamond or Lydgate to explode and leave each other or kill each other, but Eliot won't grant you that action.  She keeps their relationship on a finely tuned tension that builds more and more until it begins to show you how strong the social expectations are which kept people together in those days.  The tension grew to a point that every gesture and gesticulation and word of Lydgate or Rosamond could throw their moods, all capped by a 19th century politeness which covers it all like a blanket over TNT that never ignites.

There are really no good guys or bad guys and if so, Featherstone was the bad guy and the Garth family were the good guys, but everbody seems to be made up of so many subtle qualities that you find yourself considering each personality to understand what kind of a person they are (like in real life).  Fred was a mess who straightened himself out.  He might have been the most believable character, as every town knows a Fred who used to be a constant goof off but eventually grew up to somehow lead a half-way sober and decent life but only with constant attention and a partner who serves as constant support and a good example.

I think an introduction to this book ought to give you a good background of the politics of the time (1830s England) and what the "Reform Movement" of that time was all about, as you could probably get much more out of the many references to this movement in the story.

The male chauvinism entrenched in this book got tiresome to read and I often wondered if George Eliot, being a female genius in a male-dominated world, had salted this book with remarks such as "I cannot let young ladies meddle with my documents . . . young ladies are too flighty" or "one must protect females from intellectual pursuits" on purpose to show the ridiculousness of their content.

Middlemarch is a writer's book.  I challenge anyone, every great writer in this world, to write a 700-page book about ordinary life in a village and keep it interesting after 100 pages. Imagine what Eliiot's genius mind had seen and what she had thought and felt in order to structure such a volume of subtlety.  Eliot believed in ordinary life and she used her genius to give us a glimpse of what she saw:

. . . for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Edward Tanguay


Subject: RC: Notes on Middlemarch
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 1996 10:15:16 -0500 (EST)
From: Kathryn Obenshain <kobensha@runet.edu>


MIDDLEMARCH is a truly great book, in my opinion. I got reintroduced to George Eliot's works about a year ago when I watched the BBC dramatization of MIDDLEMARCH & also ADAM BEDE> I loaned the book to a colleague who read it & enjoyed it, but said it reminded him of a soap opera--I don't think that's quite a fair assessment: any story about a lot of people & their entangled lives and their everyday activities is going to sound something like a soap opera, I suppose. I agree with Edward that the book is hard to put down once begun and I admire the subtle control the author has throughout. (BTW, the movie version takes several videocassettes and is several hours long!) Of course from the reader's viewpoint, one sees the characters heading toward disaster & can see that they are definitely going to do whatever it is they shouldn't (like the disastrous marriages) no matter what common sense may tell them. I was interested, too, in the political climate and the state of medicine at the time, as well as attitudes toward arts, literature and philosophical thought. One of the best ones we've read, I think!

Best regards to everyone.
Cordially,
Kathryn o/o/ o/


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