Middlemarch is about many things, but at is core are a group of young people growing up and trying to find what role they might play in society. The protagonist is Dorothea Brooke, who at the beginning of the book is only eighteen years old -- essentially the same age as most first-year college students. But there are two other central characters who are also young people navigating the complexities of life in this town; two of the main other figures to watch are Ladislaw and Doctor Lydgate. The former is a nephew of one of the rich landowners in the story, and the latter a very young doctor who has just come back from studies abroad with grand plans for starting a new medical practice in this provincial town. Over the course of the novel we will watch all three characters grow up, deal with disappointments and frustrations, and try to sort out what they are “called” to do. In Eliot’s fiction, the goal is not simply to grow up and “get a job”; the goal is, instead for characters to find their vocation – their “calling.”
This is definitely a novel where “serious” characters are taken more seriously than shallow or silly characters. But not all the small-minded or simple people are bad (keep an eye on Dorothea’s “simple” sister, Celia – there’s more to her character than we see at first). Dorothea when we first meet her thinks the idea of wearing jewelry is silly, and is even contemplating giving up an activity she enjoys – horseback riding – because she worries she might enjoy it too much. She also laughs, in an early chapter, at a “toy dog,” because that kind of dog isn’t fit for doing useful work – i.e., helping in guarding a farm or hunting, etc. But perhaps there are situations where seriousness (or braininess) is not the highest value – where it doesn’t lead to the greatest possible good.
Needless to say this is also a novel about education, even though we don’t see the main characters actively in school. What do Dorothea, Lydgate, and Ladislaw need to know to accomplish their goals in life? How can they work around (or accept) the constraints of the society around them, a society where people might be jealous of their talents, or find surprising and unanticipated reasons to resist their advance? (Lydgate in particular has to struggle with this.) Part of growing up for these three characters entails coming to grips with the fact that just being young and intelligent doesn’t mean you will be recognized by older and more established people as being worthy of recognition or praise. Those older people sometimes have an interest in making sure things stay the way they are. Younger people sometimes have to fight against the old way of doing things. Other times, it is better and more effective to accept some aspects of the old way of doing things – and the authority of those older people – in order to deal with existing power structures and established institutions. (This might all sound very vague and abstract, but I don’t want to give too much of the plot away!)
Finally, there’s a problem that Dorothea in particular has to deal with, and that is the limitations that are placed on her as a woman in a male-dominated world. In the novel she is frequently figured as the most intelligent and capable of any of the characters in her social circle. But because women in her time period don’t manage farms or apply new farming technologies, don’t run hospitals, aren’t accepted as religious clergy, and don’t publish serious scholarly studies, there are fewer avenues available to her that are appropriate to her unusual intelligence. So what can she do? Is she doomed to simply get married to a nice man and raise children…? (We’ll see.)
Introducing George Eliot
George Eliot’s Middlemarch has been praised by many critics and fellow writers over the years. More than a few very accomplished novelists have actually called it “the greatest novel in the English language.” I don’t know how one would really measure that – and I can’t promise that you will feel the same way (though I do hope you’ll get something out of it). The early 20th century writer Virginia Woolf said that it was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Unlike, say, Charles Dickens, Middlemarch aims to tell a story thoughtfully and carefully, without a great deal of melodrama or dramatic shifts of the plot (no hidden stack of money; no ghost stories; no mad scientists). It does require careful attention and time – it’s not a novel that can be skimmed or “crammed.”
George Eliot published the novel in serial form starting in 1871 (continuing into 1872), and it was an immediate success. It was her seventh novel, and she was already quite well-known for earlier books like Adam Bede. Today, Middlemarch is really considered her masterpiece (to my eye, her earlier novels are somewhat “easier” – they are shorter and less densely structured). She did write one novel after Middlemarch, called Daniel Deronda, but critics have had mixed feelings about that book (I personally think it is a second masterpiece).
Besides the main plot involving a young woman (Dorothea Brooke) frustrated by the limitations of the society in which she lives, there are some important discussions in Middlemarch of changes in English society occurring in the 1830s, including some shifts in the religious landscape, scientific advances (an entire side-plot involves medical science), as well as economic and political shifts. This inclusion of social and political ideas and arguments has probably added to the novel’s reputation, especially amongst certain male critics disinclined to take the romantic plots of “lady novelists” as seriously as male novelists. (George Eliot herself went out of her way to distance herself from many of her female peers and predecessors; one of her first publications was an essay where she mocked “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” And it’s probably worth noting that in a bid to be taken seriously as a novelist, she published under a male pseudonym. After her first books her identity would come out – most people reading Middlemarch knew that its author was a woman.)
In her personal life I see two major events as significant in the evolution of Eliot’s view of human character. One occurred early in her life (when she was about the age of Dorothea Brooke at the beginning of Middlemarch). The other was her common law marriage to a scientist named George Lewes when she was already middle-aged and had built up a career as an editor at the influential journal, The Westminster Review. Lewes was married at the time Eliot met him – though he was in an open marriage with a woman who had herself had children by another man. Eliot and Lewes were happy together for many years, but the unusual nature of her personal life does seem to have an impact on her novels – specifically the view of societal conventions and expectations.
Let’s talk about her early struggle with religion in a bit more depth, as it will resonate in some important ways with Dorothea Brooke’s own struggle to define herself early in Middlemarch.
"George Eliot" is a pseudonym for a woman who identified herself publicly as Marian Lewes. But she grew up as Mary Ann Evans, in a tightly knit family in Warwickshire, in the 'midlands' region of central England. Her family was part of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England, and she was educated by a series of very religious women. People like her former teacher Maria Lewis had a disproportionate in Mary Ann's life after the death of her mother, in 1835.
On January 2, 1842, at the age of 22, Mary Ann Evans told her father she would not be accompanying him to church. This decision was the product of recent revelations and readings she had been doing over the course of the previous year, which had pulled her sharply away from her earlier religious devotion. Eliot’s biographer Kathryn Hughes cites particularly a book by Charles Hennell, An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of Christianity, as a turning point. Between Hennell and the personal influence of the freethinkers Charles and Cara Bray, [Freethinker was a term used at the time to describe any kind of radical thinker, from someone who may have had Christian beliefs but rejected the authority of the Church, to an outright Atheist.] Mary Ann came to believe that Jesus was essentially a very pious man who was murdered for his beliefs, but that none of the miracles or supernatural powers ascribed to him can be proved to have occurred. Thus, any orthodox Christianity which proclaimed the literal truth of the Bible was for her a falsehood.
Her father, Robert Evans, took her refusal extremely poorly, as he felt her lack of exposure to local society would doom her to spinsterhood. Belonging to the Church was not just a sign of respectability, but for a woman like Mary Ann, it represented the best possible access to the outside world. Her father withdrew all support, and even left it ambiguous where May Ann should live, and who would support her financially. She wrote a letter to him in an attempt to explain herself. Kathryn Hughes describes it as follows:
It is an extraordinary document for a girl of twenty-two to write – intellectually cogent, emotionally powerful. She starts by making clear the grounds for her rebellion. She assures him that she has not, contrary to his fears, become a Unitarian. Nor is she rejecting God, simply claiming the right to seek Him without the clutter of manmade dogma and doctrine. As far as the Bible is concerned, 'I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life . . . to be most dishonourable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness.' (Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot 50-51)
Eventually her brother Isaac and her sister-in-law Sarah interceded on her behalf, and her father reinstated her into the family life.
But that's just the beginning of the story. For several months after her initial refusal, her family was in complete upheaval. Relations amongst the Evans siblings were tense, and her father was extremely agitated. But then in May, having changed none of her beliefs -- Mary Ann's 'freethinking' habits would only strengthen throughout this period in her life -- she agreed to go with her father to Church.
Why did she do this? Was she under direct pressure from her family and friends to soften her stand? Undoubtedly, she was. But she was also a young woman of ferocious commitment to principle, with an awareness of her options in life. When she did have an offer to marry not too much later, she turned it down; only when she was well into her 30s did she find a life-partner, and then it was with a man who was already married and legally unable to divorce (and her decision to move in with George Henry Lewes would lead to an irrevocable break with her family). Contrary to the common-sense understanding of the 19th century as an era where women had to do what fathers and husbands told them to do, it would have been financially possible for Mary Ann to earn her own living as a governess (she had in fact been looking for such a position while in breach with her family). Not entirely desirable, but possible.
In fact, Mary Ann freely chose to end her initial public rejection of the Church in favor of a willingness to work within her social framework to accomplish her ends -- she felt she was still able to act ethically and freely even if she did agree to visit the Church on her father's request. She explained herself in a letter that Kathryn Hughes quotes in her biography:
'The first impulse of a young and ingenuous mind is to withhold the slightest sanction from all that contains even a mixture of supposed error. When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.' This soul, continues Mary Ann, believes that its new state of spiritual awareness more than compensates for the old world of error and confusion left behind. What's more, it is determined to spread the good news by proselytizing to all and sundry. A year or two on, however, and the situation appears quite different. 'Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union. We find that the intellectual errors which we once fancied were a mere incrustation have grown into the living body and that we cannot in the majority of causes, wrench them away without destroying vitality.' (Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot 54-55)
Mary Ann saw her early action as in fact a failure, but not because her loss of belief was false. Rather, she came to realize that her awareness did not by itself grant her any meaningful freedom because it destroyed the entire social fabric of her life. Expressing herself freely left her, in effect, less free. The only rock-solid truth was for her in the 'truth of feeling' she experienced for other human beings, including ones she disagreed with. This truth of feeling could only be possible if she accepted the beliefs of others as integral, not simply the product of error, backwardness, or stupidity.
The willingness to compromise would be an issue for Mary Ann (later Marian) throughout her life -- whether in her work as a journalist in London (at Westminster Review), or in her later career as one of England's most successful novelists.
As far as I know, Eliot never wrote about her early crisis with her father in a direct way in her novels. But the question of whether and when compromises might make a difference, and the question of how a person might follow his or her own light on matters of ethics, was an ongoing question in her books, and it’s one of the key themes of Middlemarch, though exactly how that happens will only become clear as we get further into the novel.
The Novel Itself
I’ve said a lot about George Eliot’s relationship to religion – I should probably point out that Middlemarch is not primarily a book about the rejection of religion. Though as we are first introduced to Dorothea Brooke in chapter 1, her strong religious feelings are among the first attributes mentioned:
Such reasons would have been enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious feeling; but in Miss Brooke's case, religion alone would have determined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knew many passages of Pascal's Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart; and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection. (chapter 1)
Note the shift at the end of the passage above – from a primary focus on religion itself to the way in which a young woman’s attitude to religion might impact her marriageability.
Perhaps more important, however, look at the middle of the passage. Dorothea is described as intense and interested in greatness. What we’ll come to understand is that her early interest in religion is more than anything else a product of this aspect of her personality – a smart, intense young woman living in this society would have no other outlet for her intellectual passions and desire to live “rigorously.” Dorothea is not first and foremost a religious zealot, but is rather using religion as a way to try and be more serious (or ambitious) than her peers and family members expect her to be.
Another passage from chapter one shows us this by way of comparison between Dorothea and her sister Celia:
The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers, was generally in favor of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking, while Miss Brooke's large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and striking. Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it.
Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against her by this alarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountably reconcilable with it. Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects of the country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure she looked very little like a devotee. Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.
Looking closely at this passage we see the narrator carefully refraining from giving too much away with regards to Dorothea’s character. We don’t see it clearly stated that Dorothea appears extremely religious and puritanical, but in fact was not fundamentally an ascetic personality. She is clearly not headed for the life of a monk or nun -- removed from the world. Still, the sincere pleasure and joy she takes in life (here the metaphor is horse-back riding) is something she isn’t sure she should allow herself to have.
There’s another passage that follows up on this idea in chapter 3. Here Eliot uses the word “ascetic,” and clearly suggests Dorothea is not that.
This was a trait of Miss Brooke's asceticism. But there was nothing of an ascetic's expression in her bright full eyes, as she looked before her, not consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other.
Ideas of Reform and References to Science and Economics early in Middlemarch
In the first couple of chapters alone, Middlemarch contains reference to Sir Robert Peel’s reversal on the question of Catholic emancipation (the great Parliamentarian and later Prime Minister of England reversed his position on Catholic Emancipation in 1829, when the novel begins); an invocation of Sir Humphry Davy’s ideas of scientific agriculture; and a reference to Adam Smith (author of The Wealth of Nations – considered to be the pioneering work of modern economics). In Chapter 2 we see Dorothea jumping right into a discussion between her uncle and Sir James Chettam regarding the merits of rethinking how major landowners managed their properties and tenants:
"A great mistake, Chettam," interposed Mr. Brooke, "going into electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlor of your cow-house. It won't do. I went into science a great deal myself at one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything; you can let nothing alone. No, no—see that your tenants don't sell their straw, and that kind of thing; and give them draining-tiles, you know. But your fancy farming will not do—the most expensive sort of whistle you can buy: you may as well keep a pack of hounds."
"Surely," said Dorothea, "it is better to spend money in finding out how men can make the most of the land which supports them all, than in keeping dogs and horses only to gallop over it. It is not a sin to make yourself poor in performing experiments for the good of all." (Chapter 2)
This theme will pick up steam in subsequent chapters, as Dorothea convinces Chetham to rebuild the cottages on his estate to give his tenants a better quality of life. You can see early on that she has a seemingly innate desire to involve herself in actions that will help others – and an instinctive sense that her being a woman does not disqualify her from participating in that conversation.
What Could She Do, What Ought She to Do?
Perhaps the key passage from this early section of the novel can be found in chapter 3. It begins with a key pair of rhetorical questions that in many ways will shape the course of what follows: “What could she do, what ought she to do?” This is the intense hunger of an ambitious young woman who doesn’t want to be bound by the limits society expects her to accept.
It’s this questioning tendency, I think, that makes this such a potentially important novel for young people reading the book, even today. Today we don’t have the same sense that women can’t become serious intellectuals, writers, or businesspeople. Rather, I think all of us, men and women, struggle as young people to chart the course we want our lives to take: what can we do, what ought we do?
What could she do, what ought she to do?—she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse. With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal of "Female Scripture Characters," unfolding the private experience of Sara under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under the New, and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir—with a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. From such contentment poor Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path. (chapter 3)
Note again that this passage suggests that Dorothea’s religious passion is more a secondary symptom of a deeper desire – to live a serious and meaningful life in a society in which that option will be foreclosed to her as a woman. The narrowness she exhibits is strictly a result of the way she’s been raised – the only education that would have been seen as appropriate to a girl in her position growing up would have been religious education.
The questions Middlemarch is considering are not just young women’s questions – as a young man reading this book (I first read it in an English class in college), I identified strongly with Dorothea’s struggles. A recent critic, Rebecca Mead, recently published an entire book about growing up with the novel. She frames its core questions as follows:
How is wisdom to be attained? What are the satisfactions of personal ambition, and how might they be weighed against ties and duties to others? What does a good marriage consist of, and what makes a bad one? What do the young owe to the old, and vice versa? What is the proper foundation of morality? (4)
Going back to the passage quoted above: What is Dorothea looking for in a husband? What does she hope her marriage will allow her to do, or be?