George Eliot's camera technique (Books - Middlemarch)

Sorry the pickings have been a little sparse here, I've been gobbled up by the great maw that is grad school. I finally had a little time late last night to dip back into the internecine, small town politics, and unexpressed hearts of Middlemarch. As our heroine, Dorothea, is thrown together more and more with Will Ladislaw, her husband's wayward cousin who has fallen in love with her, she displays how ignorant she is of her own heart yet in so many other ways she is the most grown-up female character in a 19th century novel I have ever met.

"Oh, my life is very simple," said Dorothea, her lips curling with an exquisite smile, which irradiated her melancholy. "I am always at Lowick."

"That is a dreadful imprisonment," said Will, impetuously.

"No, don't think that," said Dorothea. "I have no longings."

He did not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression. "I mean, for myself. Except that I should like not to have so much more than my share without doing anything for others. But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me."

"What is that? said Will, rather jealous of the belief.

"That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what ti is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil - widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."

"That is a beautiful mysticism - it is a - "

"Please not to call it by any name," said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. "You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it..."

I love that Eliot reveals the fact that Dorothea responds to a change in Will's expression and yet doesn't describe the change. It is as though her camera were on Dorothea rather than Will and, for that moment, that you see he has changed by seeing her change so that a) it doesn't interrupt the flow of our moment with Dorothea and our temporary assumption of her inner life with some feeling or other of our own and b) we must imagine that expression ourselves through Dorothea's behavior. It's a very filmic technique, very sophisticated. It is not as if we are deprived of his expression for want of Eliot's descriptive powers, lord knows I have 800 pages here to prove it. Take this one:

When Mrs. Causabon was announced he started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger ends. Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had. For effective magic is transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those touches which convery the quality of soul as well as body, and make a man's passion for one woman differ form his passion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels?

Interesting that her choice of descriptors is so purposefully technical rather than emotional: we have electric shocks, molecule, and the "adjustment of facial muscles," conveying the depth of his being moved but letting the reader begin the journey ourselves and then adding to it the "magic," the "transcendence" and the "passion." Eliot really knows how to involved her reader by making them do a little work and I like that!

Alive in the conflict (Books - Middlemarch by George Eliot)

I am nearly half way through George Eliot's massive social study of country life in Victorian England - Middlemarch - and I thought it a good time to step back and take a longer view, so caught up have I been in characterizations and authorial voice. Larger plot structure is now becoming visible and I see two young women - Dorothea and Rosamund, each desirable in her way. Dorothea is more serious, she cultivates plans for the design of housing on her Uncle's estate and she studies Latin and Greek. She decides to marry Casaubon, an elder clerical scholar, hoping to serve him. Rosamund is more spoiled and is drawn to Lydgate, the handsome young doctor newly come to Middlemarch. She is planning to marry him for love - love of him, love of love, love of the institution of marriage, but most of all out of love for herself.

Likewise we have Casaubon, a severe, impersonal man thought to be researching in order to write a book, although it is beginning to appear that he knows only how to research and hasn't the courage to create a book from his notes any more than he has the courage to consummate his marriage to Dorothea. Lydgate is a gentlemanly, young physician who has studied in Paris and has lived for his scientific work and now has, much to his own surprise, fallen in love with the beauty of Middlemarch. Eliot appears to have set up a tension between those who live from their passion and those who contain it with obligation - an apt contest for the Victorian era.

As Lydgate and Rosamund plan their wedding, order their plate and crystal and hire seamstresses for the trousseau, I am struck by the sheer impracticality of their plan making and can read the disaster that looms. Eliot has made me feel a sense of foreboding without explicitly writing a word about what might happen in their future. This couple behaves only out of I want. Whereas Casaubon and Dorothea act out of I must - preferring to think that they have no hearts at all. At the arrival of Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's young cousin who is very attracted to Dorothea, Casaubon has what we would today call a heart attack. He has never bothered to consider desire or marriage but now finds himself jealous. Dorothea's future is also coming into view. She, who tried to live solely from a sense of duty, finds herself wanting to see her young cousin-in-law. It is Eliot's strength as a writer that, although she makes it clear who her characters are, they are not caricatures but multi-faceted human beings capable of conflict within themselves.

My friend the omniscient narrator (Books - Middlemarch by George Eliot)

The assurance of George Eliot's authorial voice, which begins every chapter of Middlemarch like a film voice over, could be thought to create an enormous distance. Nearly each chapter begins, to continue with the filmic similes, with a long shot.

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun.

But their accretion begins, contrary to my initial certainty that the omniscient narrator is always a cold narrator, to accumulate intimacy. Now, well into Book Three, I am smiling as each chapter begins, saying to myself 'Oh, it's my friend again!" Book Three features a particularly gripping sub-plot concerning Fred Vincy, the too-indulged son of a well-to-do but not extravagantly rich Middlemarch family. To continue on the theme of chapter openings, one could read them alone to follow the plot:

Fred Vincy, we have seen, had a debt on his mind, and though no such immaterial burthen could dpress that buoyant-hearted young gentleman for many hours together, there were circumstances connected with this debt which made the thought of it unusually importunate...

I am sorry to say that only the third day after the propitious events at Houndsley Fred Vincy had fallen into worse spirits than he had known in his life before...

Fred Vincy wanted to arrive at Stone Court when Mary could not expect him, and when his uncle was not down stairs: in that case she might be sitting alone in the wainscoated parlour...

But Fred did not go to Stone Court the next day, for reasons that were quite peremptory...

But plot is not the point. Certainly the remainder of each chapter fills in the rough outline of action provided by the first sentence, but the treats I look forward to from Eliot are the description of her characters and their inner thoughts which my dearest friend, the omniscient narrator, knows so well.

Fred knew, to bully one about expenses: there was always a little storm over his extravagance if he had to disclose a debt, and Fred disliked bad weather within doors. He was too filial to be disrespectful to his father, and he bore the thunder with the certainty that it was transient; but in the meantime it was disagreeable to see his mother cry, and also to be obliged to look sulky instead of having fun; for Fred was so good tempered that if he looked glum under scolding, it was chiefly for propriety's sake...

Point of view is everything in the vast narrative that is Middlemarch, the telling of this story is not simply happening after happening but who it happened to and why it happened to them and, most of all, what we think of that. Although I had been struggling to get through more than a chapter or two a night with all of my reading for class, last night I sailed through about fifty pages. I am beginning to catch the rhythm of this epic of small town social psychology.

In which fantasy bumps up against reality and Dorothea says 'ouch.' (Books - Middlemarch by George Eliot)

The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same. And it would be astonishing to find how soon the change is felt if we had no kindred changes to compare with it. To share lodgings with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see your favourite politician in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.

Still, such comparisons might mislead, for no man was more incapable of flashy make-believe than Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a character as any ruminant animal, and he had not actively assisted in creating any illusions about himself. How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest smaple of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight - that, in face, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

Ah, the expansiveness of George Eliot's narrative. Middlemarch is a study in the constant bumping together of internal states and external realities. The expression "the honeymoon is over" seems to have been written with Dorothea in mind. Even with a multi-week stay in Rome, on the far shore of betrothal she becomes disillusioned. I love Eliot's two metaphors - the vista replaced by a closed room, and a voyage at sea replaced by one in a basin. They are hilarious even while Dorothea's circumstances are not. Anyone who has been an outsider in a community and takes Dorothea as a kindred spirit, and who admired that she married a much older man purely for his mind (or actually her fantasy of his mind) still, in reading the pages of their courtship, must have been saying 'don't do it' and in reading these pages is now saying 'I told you so,' and yet simultaneously (or maybe an instant later) experiencing her lonliness and sadness. But what have we to go on prior to engaging in a relationship but fantasy? Prior to co-habitation (since I am forbidden to marry anyone I could love) I could only imagine what it would be like to be together always. But marriage is a state of mind, all the more powerful because it is bestowed by the institution of the state or religion. Here's that notion of top-down phenomenon again (see this post for an explanation). In our modern habit of living together prior to marriage it is still not the same. It is not the same because of the name, even if it is no different circumstantially. Dorothea, however, lived in a much earlier era. She could only rely on her fantasy which is now rudely bumping up against the reality of a prim, distant, husband who she imagined a great scholar. Now she is realizing that those rows of notebooks, that she would patiently transcribe for him would, in fact, never become a book. His body is the same. He mind the same. The books the same. Rome the same. Only Dorothea's knowledge is different. It is because Eliot spend so much time in the mind's of her central characters, developing our intimate acquaintance with their point-of-view and the context in which it points, that we are treated to the simultaneous vistas that this book affords us. It's as though we have two lenses and might, at any time, peer through either. One gives us that distant wisdom, lets us anticipate Dorothea's misapprenhension and smile knowingly at her naivetee, the other makes us disillusioned ourselves. I thought I should get this post out of the way prior to Valentine's Day.

The Dark Knight and Middlemarch (Books - Middlemarch & Film - The Dark Knight)

One of my favorite creative exercises is bringing together the unlikely. The Dark Knight - the recent oh-so-bleak Batman flick - and Middlemarch - George Eliot's masterpiece of 18th century English village life - nothing to do with each other, you say? Try me. After a long day of school work, and cleaning up, and after about 10 days of having no bathroom due to renovations, the walls are finally done (though much else needs completing) but The Ragazzo and I decided to celebrate anyway with pizza and a movie. The Dark Knight had come in from the library. I have heard so much negative criticism of it - it's too long, it's too dark, Heath Ledger isn't Jack Nicholson... I decided to see for myself.

Not only would I say it is a well done movie, I think it really is the Batman for our time. Batman must fight a crazed terrorist who is willing to die, who seems to be motivated to do evil for the sake of it. A city despite its greatest forces seems brought to its knees by forces that seem to embody chaos. Sound familiar? My one qualified criticism, which I'll get out of the way up front, is that this Gotham was so obviously Chicago (I've lived in Chicago, so it was obvious to me). That distracted me a bit, but this film couldn't make the Tim Burton fantasy landscape kind of choice because it was going for a much more veridical sense of fantasy. It certainly did have some great sets for the interiors. In any event, now to address the criticisms I have heard from others. Too long - I didn't think so. A typical shoot-em-up Blockbuster would have developed the characters less, might have had fewer scenes between the wonderful Michael Caine and our Batman, Christian Bale, for example, and it would have probably ended with the "great tragedy." I'll call it that for anyone who hasn't seen the film yet. But that would not have been this Batman film, because this film isn't just about good versus evil, it is about consequences. The film would have had a hard time doing that in 2 hours and 10 minutes. Too dark? It couldn't have been much darker, I'll give you that, but what on earth do we make myths about if not our greatest forces of darkness. What was difficult about this film is that the darkness just didn't stop. It extended beyond the bad, bad guys casting its penumbra over what we thought we could count on as good. When it's not just the Joker wreaking havoc but the police, the D. A., Batman himself - what are we to do then? Then we have to consider whether we have any darkness within ourselves. Consequences. Then you have made a Batman film I am really interested in watching. The cast - Christian Bale always feels a little loopy to me. He seems to take himself very seriously, but that veneer seems to hide a kind of manic belief that I think really works, particularly in this Batman film. Michael Caine seems to have a lot of fun as the faithful Alfred. Maggie Gyllenhaal is thoughtful and a serious, like she's in an Ibsen play or something. I really liked that take on Rachel Dawes. She is a grown-up woman living in a dark world, having to make grown-up choices or she feels she will have waited too long. It was a Rachel, again, for our time. Everything does not have to be Sex in the City. But the stand-outs of the film are Gary Oldman, who must have the camera on him for 85% of the film, and he never stops being active inside. He is a man charged with keeping order in a crumbling world and plays quiet desperation in a way I really bought. Then there is Heath Ledger. No, he is not, Jack Nicholson. Thank god. Not that Jack isn't great, but the guy's still alive. They could have cast him if they wanted him. What is utterly menacing about this joker, is that he is so subdued. Even in his truly in-your-face-moments, he does go all the way, but he doesn't show off. It's dramatic but its not operatic. I thought this made him incredibly unpredictable and, therefore, scary. He had a different story about his scar for each person who would listen, but you could believe each one. This villain truly has no limits. Ledger wasn't trying to show you how far he himself was from this crazy man, the way Brad Pitt plays it in 12 Monkeys, he seemed to just quietly be trying to slip inside of him. It's not just a shame a young man like Ledger could not have lived a longer life, but his death seems our loss too. We can only wonder what this talented young artist might have created.

But the real thing that makes the film a Batman for our time isn't simply the terrorist parallels, but the notion of consequences. This is played out on multiple levels. There is Batman himself, who must agonize over concealing his identity, since it is the one thing the Joker wants (we will not give in to terrorists). Ironic since he conceals his own. There is a "good" character who turns "bad," when pushed to his limit, but I won't give away which character that is. There is one scene in which two groups of people - one mostly prisoners and their keepers and the other ordinary citizens of Gotham - must decide if they will blow the other group up to save themselves. That gets at the very meat of this film - what are we willing to do to save ourselves? for goodness sake, the prisoners on the boat are even dressed in the orange outfits we saw in every picture of Guantanamo. That's what makes this our Batman. This film asks - when terror strikes - who do we become? That is the true chaos faced in this film, our sense that we always know what is right goes out the window. If we are to search our souls there is probably a part of anyone of us that could be pushed to the limit and the joker wants to know where that limit is in each of us. That is why he is a force of such tremendous potential evil. Real chaos is when no one, not just the bad guys, but no one is regulated by a sense of right and wrong.

And that is where I find a parallel with George Eliot's Middlemarch. Eliot is interested in nothing so much as how choices are played out as consequences, except that her canvas is the 18th century village. I lay down in bed last night at close to midnight, after having watched a three-hour batman film, and written a homework assignment for several hours, and cleaned up the apartment, and not a book on my current list did it for me. I am enjoying Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air, but I have just started a 50-page chapter and I did not feel like non-fiction. I am not really enjoying either The Seance or The Locked Room that much, and then I saw Middlemarch. Which Matt and I were supposed to have been reading together and somehow we both slipped off the path last fall. Well, I'm back...Matt? In the chapter I read last night, I had to really come in for a landing in terms of pacing after The Dark Knight. Oh the pleasure of those swathes of words, that flow across the page like country paths.

That, entering into Lydgate's position as a newcomer who had his own professional objects to secure, Mr. Farebrother should have taken pains rather to warn off than to obtain his interest, showed an unusual delicacy and generosity which Lydgate's nature was keenly alive to.

And, so, here is the question facing Lydgate that is the subject of this chapter. Should Lydgate, the new physician in town who is interested in forwarding his scientific research (for the betterment of mankind, of course) elect to the chaplaincy the man whom Mr. Bulstrode, the banker, supports? This is the banker who has just become interest in supporting Lydgate's work. Or should he vote for a kinder man and a better preacher, to whom some Middlemarchers object for his playing billiards? If he should be seen to support a man some think immoral, will those people patronize his practice? But if he is seen to be Mr. Bulstrode's yes-man, will they respect him?

It went along with other points of conduct in Mr. Farebrother which were exceptionally fine, and made his character resemble those southern landscapes which seem divided between natural grandeur and social slovenliness. Very few men could have been as filial and chivalrous as he was to the mother, aunt, sister, whose dependence on him had in many ways shaped his life rather uneasily for himself; few men who feel the pressure of small needs are so nobly resolute not to dress up their inevitably self-interested desires in a pretext of better motives. In these matters he was conscious that his life would bear the closest scrutiny; and perhaps the consciousness encouraged a little defiance towards the critical strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies seemed not to improve their domestic manners, and whose lofty aims were not needed to account for their actions....

On the other hand, there was Tyke, a man entirely given to his clerical office, who was simply curate at a chapel of ease in St. Peter's parish, and had time for extra duty. Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke, except that they could not bear him, and suspected him of cant...

But whichever way Lydgate began to incline, there was something to make him wince; and being a proud man, he was a little exasperated at being obliged to wince.

Questions of consequence are the stuff of great fiction and great theater - Macbeth, A Winter's Tale, Crime and Punishment, Frankenstein, To Kill a Mockingbird, Anna Karenina even screwball comedies, think of Philadelphia Story or Bringing up Baby - what are these all about if not consequence? Not comfortable, to be sure - but involving and worth spending time in. These works of art are the exercise we give our conscience in a realm where we don't have live with the consequences so that, when we do, we have had some practice . That is one of the great values of art, in my opinion.

Machinations and justifications (Books - Middlemarch by George Eliot)

Ah, the machinations and justifications that go into the acquiring of power. I seem to be seeing it everywhere lately. New York's current mayor wishes to overturn the twice-approved term-limit law (whatever one might think of it) so that he may run for a third term. He has convinced himself that this is because he is the only person qualified to get our city through the current financial mess we are in. The Ragazzo and I continue to watch Rome - in which we are witnessing its descent into moral and literal bankruptcy as those both high and low murder its people and divide its territory so that they might rule what is left of it, and persuade themselves that they do so for the good of Rome. And in George Eliot's Middlemarch there is a certain banker...

Mr. Bulstrode's power was not due simply to his being a country banker, who knew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could touch the springs of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence that was at once ready and severe - ready to confer obligations, and severe in watching the result...His private minor loans were numerous, but he would inquire strictly into the circumstances both before and after. In this way a man gathers a domain in his neighbours' hope and fear as well as gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that subtle region, propagates itself, spreading out of all proportion to its external means. It was a principle with Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as possible, that he might use it for the glory of God. He went through a great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust his motives, and make clear to himself what God's glory required.

Yes, I'm sure he did. It is always scary when someone starts mixing god, or in the case of Rome - gods - into the equation and are so sure that they are the person who knows what it is this god or these gods want. The arrogance - but I suppose that lust for power is itself an expression of arrogance so this justification should not be so surprising, and Eliot meets this outrage with her tongue firmly in cheek:

But, as we have seen, his motives were not always rightly appreciated. There were many crass minds in Middlemarch whose reflective scales could only weigh things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion that since Mr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating and drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about everything, he must have a sort of vampire's feast in the sense of mastery.

Human nature hasn't changed, has it? 'If someone's nature is not like mine it cannot be good.' I think that is the saddest opinion one can hold. It's why political campaigns get away with bald manipulations of personality as a technique for acquiring office. Eliot's study of town and village domestic and political life is impressively comprehensive, it seems like one can study the entire world in microcosm, but I barely have the brain to read Middlemarch these days. It took me ages to read just this one chapter last night so preoccupied was I with studying for midterms.

Spacious writing (Middlemarch by George Eliot)

George Eliot spends the entire of the first book of Middlemarch introducing us to the Miss Brookes, Celia and Dorothea, and Dorothea's intended, the papery old Mr. Casaubon. As that first book ends, we are brought into another household - The Vincys - particularly their daughter Rosamond, a paragon of beauty, Rosamond's friend Mary Garth, and the handsome new doctor, Lydgate, who seems to be of great interest to everyone in Middlemarch. We have progressed 100 pages into the story of the Brookes before we ever encounter these new characters and the circumstances that are going to propel their story. Imagine giving that sort of writing to a contemporary editor or book agent. 'You cannot wait until page 106 to spring an entirely new cast of characters and circumstances on your reader. No one is going to want to wait that long.' I remember being told what a great writer Shakespeare for introducing characters and their situations in a scant few lines. It is meant to exemplify literary efficiency. And economy on the page can certainly be admired, but so can spaciousness. It's been awhile since I have had a reading experience where I feel like I have to look far out to cast my eye upon the literary horizon. Page turners are great, I love them. But there is something I am finding satisfying about the contrast in the pacing of this book with the rest of my New York life. After a long day of school orientation and classes, I read just 20 pages before going to sleep last night, where I will usually read 60-80 in something from the pile by the bed. Of course, at this rate, you may still be reading posts about Middlemarch in January.

With 100 pages to introduce three characters and their circumstances, one can afford two pages merely to contrasts the physical appearance of Mary Garth with her friend Rosamond. I just love how Eliot asks us to luxuriate in the specificity not only of the appearance of Mary but also of the meaning of that appearance to each of them, to Middlemarch, and to the world in general, but with a smile, of course. Eliot has a marvelous sense of humor.

Only a few children in Middlemarch looked blond by the side of Rosamond, and the slim figure displayed by her riding-habit had delicate undulations. In fact, most men in Middlemarch, except her brothers, held that Miss Garth, on the contrary, had the aspect of an ordinary sinner: she was brown; her curly dark hair was rough and stubborn; her stature was low; and it would not be true to declare, in satisfactory antithesis, that she had all the virtues. Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to feign amiability or, not feigning it, to show all the repulsiveness of discontent: at any rate, to be called an ugly thing in contrast with that lovely creature your companion, is apt to produce some effect beyond a sense of fine veracity and fitness in the phrase. At the age of two-and-twenty Mary had certainly not attained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be required. Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did something to make her so. Advancing womanhood had tempered her plainness, which was of a good human sort, such as the mothers of our race have very commonly worn in all latitudes under a more or less becoming headgear. Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent honesty. For honest, truth-telling fairness, was Mary's reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own behoof, and when she was in a good mood she had humour enough in her to laugh at herself. When she and Rosamond happened both to be reflected in the glass, she said laughingly -

"What a brown patch I am by the side of you, Rosy! You are the most unbecoming companion."

"Oh no! No one thinks of your appearance, you are so sensible and useful, Mary. Beauty is of very little consequence in reality," said Rosamond, turning her head towards Mary, but with eyes swerving towards the new view of her neck in the glass.

"You mean my beauty," said Mary, rather sardonically

Rosamond thought, "Poor Mary, she takes the kindest things ill." Aloud she said, "What have you been doing lately?"

"I? Oh minding the house - pouring out the syrup - pretending to be amiable and contented - learning to have a bad opinion of everybody."

I enjoy how Eliot blows apart the stereotype of the young middle class girl literary stereotypes of the day - young, fair and carefree being one, or above marriageable age, superficially unattractive, and practical, however contented with her lot. Mary belies them both. And that little passage toward the end where she writes Rosamond's silent thoughts and contrasts them with what she says aloud is quite a modern vantage point to give an audience towards a character.

19th Century Television (Books - Middlemarch by George Eliot)

I put Middlemarch on this year's re-read list after Sheila read it recently and I realized I barely remembered it, having read it 23 years ago while hiking in the Black Forest. Matt and I have a plan to read it simultaneously, but as classes are just starting I'm not certain how I'll keep up.

If the first section is any indication, George Eliot's mission seems to be to differentiate between a woman's role in rural English society and a woman's essence - there are strong women as well as helpless ones, those with opinions as well as compliant blank slates, she warns:

Theresas [women like Saint Theresa of Avila] were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardour alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the soical lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favourite love-stories in prose and verse...

The Miss Brooke's are being raised by the their uncle in rural England. They are parentless and of marriageable age, but of a reputable family. I love the way Eliot tells us this, not merely as a fact, but with a twinkle in her voice that lets us know we are not just reading a good story, but social criticism :

...the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably "good": if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers - anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell...

Middlemarch is really a book of ideas dressed in the clothes of the serialized novel of its day. Celia is the typical, down-to-earth sister who is happy not to have her pretty little head bothered by notions, Dorothea wants to study Greek, Latin and theology in order to help the aged religious scholar to whom she eventually become engaged - she spends her spare moments designing cottages for the poor farm workers. Sir James Chettam, the local country gentleman, has all but promised to build one of these cottages just to get Dorothea to marry him. But she is oblivious.

Celia says of her sister:

...you went on as you always do, never looking just where you are, and treading in the wrong place. You always see what nobody else sees; it is impossible to satisfy you; yet you never see what is quite plain.

And the neighbors say in comfort to the man who hoped to marry her:

Come, come, cheer up! you are well rid of Miss Brooke, a girl who would have been requiring you to see the stars by daylight.

Not a soul can understand why she wishes to marry Casaubon, a scholarly prig 25 years her senior:

"He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.

"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.

"Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying?" said Sir James, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound feeling of an English layman.

"Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brain. They say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of 'Hop o' my Thumb,' and he has been making abstracts ever since.

Gossip worthy of Sex in the City- and that really is the format here. Eight books, each about 100 pages in length (think seasons) which are composed of about 10-12 chapters (think episodes). Strong characters types have their psychology developed and exploited as they are placed in dramatic situations week-to-week in a popular magazine depicting a world that resembles our own, so that we might both think about who we are and be entertained by our foibles. The Ragazzo is just re-watching Six Feet Under, and the similarities scream to me. Middlemarch is nineteenth century television. One can look at the sheer width of the volume and think - doorstop, it's going to be weighty. But Eliot and Dickens were not originally read in big continuous gulps, but in little sips. Just because the book is a chunkster and written in the 1860s doesn't mean is dull or difficult. The serious aims are never far from a character you will nod at in recognition or a bright quip at which to smile:

Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.