After a string of reading experiences that I have found less than stellar, I decided to indulge in one of my favorite luxuries: re-reading. Considering how much there is out there that I want to read, I always feel a little guilty or lazy when I re-read something, but I greatly enjoy it. Freed from the task of keeping up with a complex plot and remembering who all the characters are, I can focus on subtler aspects of the work that I may have missed the first time around.
My choice this time was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in my opinion one of the truly great English novels. I finished the book about a week ago and have found myself reluctant to write about it. Writing about perfection is terribly boring, and I find Middlemarch just about perfect. Dorothea Causabon is one of my favorite characters in all of literature, with her youthful idealism and flare for martyrdom giving way to a more self-possessed peace in which she can finally act upon her own desires. She is also an interesting case of the female scholar (or would-be scholar) in the nineteenth century, a theme which we also see in the bibliophilic Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. She is clearly a woman of great mental capacity and yet is unable to realize her potential. I am not sure whether to blame “society” for this or the peculiar short sightedness and insecurity of Mr. Causabon.
Clearly I am in love with Dorothea, and when I think of Middlemarch it is her story that comes to mind. But the other stories are almost as riveting: the fall of the prosperous banker Bulstrode, the horribly failed marriage of Lydgate to Rosamund Vincy, and Fred Vincy’s pursuit of Mary Garth. I was particularly struck by the parallelism between Causabon and old Featherstone. Both of them are men facing death who seek ways to control the living after they are gone, Causabon in the single case of his wife’s possible re-marriage, and Featherstone in a more general sense of trying to disappoint as many people as possible with his will. Causabon fancies himself a man of high principles while Featherstone is unapologetically vulgar, but both are unable to accept death enough to let go of their earthly influence.
A more obvious parallelism is between the two failed marriages in the book. The Causabon marriage fails despite Dorothea’s desperate and selfless desire to make it work, while the Lydgate pairing fails due to the opposite tendency on the part of the selfish and indifferent Rosamund. Looking at the men in these marriages, we notice that both of them are possessed of some degree of intellectual ambition. The happiest marriage we see in the book is that of Dorothea’s sister Celia, who marries a gentleman farmer who has no use for scholarship. It is also worth noting that Celia’s marriage produces a child, while Dorothea remains childless and Rosamund has a stillbirth. Are we to draw the conclusion that the life of the mind and that of the hearth are incompatible?
Middlemarch is truly a spectacular novel and my favorite by Eliot to date (though I have not read all of her books). I’m sure that this will not be the last time I read it.