As I read through Book Three this past week, I found myself struck by the marriage proposal scene between Mr. Lydgate and Rosamund Vincy. We have seen a number of potential matches come to fruition throughout the novel, regardless of whether they will end happily or not. The citizens of Middlemarch seem as uneasy about the matches as we as readers have been trained by Eliot to be. With the partnering of Lydgate and Rosamund, we are left wondering at the motives behind their hasty engagement. Eliot sets up the relationship between Lydgate and Rosamund almost as an opposite to that of Dorthea and Casaubon. Whereas the Casaubons appear to have little in common and a lack of affection between them, Lydgate and Rosamund are ill suited not because they lack affection for one another, but because they have not been realistic with how their comfortable lives will change in the face of their newly created relationship. Both of the couples are blind to the challenges which their marriage will face but continue with the partnership for different reasons.

As readers, we have learned of Lydgate’s failed attachment while living abroad in Paris and he has spoken animatedly about his desire to remain single for the time being. Two weeks prior to the engagement scene in Book Three, Mrs. Bulstrode warns Rosamund that by aligning herself with Lydgate, she will not be able to uphold her standard of living as she is “not fit to marry a poor man” (B3, Ch. 31). And yet here we are, observing the two lovers becoming engaged against their own better judgement and the warnings of everyone in town. Eliot creates an interesting conundrum here: instead of siding with the main characters of Lydgate and Rosamund, whose stories we have followed through the last two books, we are instead inclined to trust the wary opinions of the townspeople. Eliot has created an environment within Middlemarch where the reader does not root for love and views every coupling with reservations.

Eliot creates an interesting parallel between the two engagements we have witnessed so far. Mr. Casaubon proposed to Dorthea in a letter, a symbol of his lack of affection and the challenge he will face as a married man. He opens by making reference to their apparent attachment, saying “I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you” (B1, Ch. 5). Even his prose is stiff and unnecessarily wody as he awkwardly tries to convince Dorthea and himself of his affections. Contrast this with the scene between Rosamund and Lydgate. When the latter sees Rosamund become emotional as a result of the distance he has created between them, he is enraptured by her vulnerability, recognizing “[t]hat moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feather-touch: it shook flirtation into love” (B3, Ch. 31). Lydgate and Rosamund are so affected by their emotions that they are driven towards love. They are able to see and physically touch one another during the scene of their engagement, playing off one another to fall deeper and deeper towards true affection whereas Casaubon and Dorthea cement their relationship through sterile letters.

However, Eliot does not simply create two relationships which serve as a foil for one another. The Casaubons and the future Lydgates come about their engagements very differently, and yet the author has left hints within the two scenes which link them and link the troubled futures which each couple will experience. Both men see their future brides as childlike and innocent, features which are attractive because the women are seen as easily pliable. After receiving her letter from Casaubon, Dorthea imagines herself in a “childlike sense of reclining” and Eliot describes her as a “neophyte” (B1, Ch. 5). Lydgate is most attracted by Rosamund’s naivete, describing the moment when he fell in love with her as the “moment she was as natural as she had ever been when she was five years old” (B3, Ch. 21). Eliot links the two scenes just as she does the two marriages: doomed for unhappiness.

As a reader, I find myself holding out hope for the third engagement in the novel so far. Eliot does not provide us with the scene in which Sir James Chettum and Celia Brooke become entangled. In fact, we see very little of their relationship first hand. Instead, we are given accounts of the townspeople’s approval of the match, an approval which is sorely lacking in the case of the other two relationships. We do not know much about the pair, but we do know that Celia is more realistic in her views of marriage as she states “I don’t want to be married so very soon, because I think it is nice to be engaged. And we shall be married all our lives after” (B3, Ch. 28). Celia’s level-headedness grounds her views about marriage and gives us as readers a sense to believe in her choice of husband. Though the relationship started inauspiciously, with Sir James jumping to the younger sister when the older proved disinterested, I am curious how Eliot will map their future. She has given us so many reasons to disapprove of the matches between Casaubon and Dorthea and Rosamund and Lydgate, but sets up Celia and Sir James as the practical pair. In a novel so critical of small town marriage and youthful affection, can the relationship between Sir James and Celia provide a model for the others? Or is Eliot simply luring us into a lull before she strikes down this couple as well?

Elizabeth Hatcher ’13