Total control over your life is never going to happen. Try as we might, the guiding hand of fate will push us down stairs we are trying to climb up, will shove us off course, and generally mess up all of the best laid plans. Control is a central issue of Book 5. Characters fight for it, lose it, and die for it, and no one ever fully attains it.
The most blatant example of the need for control happens to Dorothea. Even before the death of Mr. Casaubon, Dorothea is unhappy with the idea of blindly agreeing to a promise to Mr. Casaubon because she felt “the need of freedom asserting itself within her”. Though Mr. Casaubon never receives that promise, he still is found to have added a codicil to his will stripping Dorothea of her inheritance should she marry Ladislaw. Mr. Casaubon seeks to control Dorothea from the grave. His jealousy and impending death, coupled with the prospect of leaving nothing worthwhile behind him, prompts him to grab at any avenue of control—and the only lane left is Dorothea. His desperation for control is evident and highlights the desperation jealously and impending death can instill.
Ladislaw fights for control as well. He is “a sort of gypsy, rather enjoying the sense of belonging to no class; he had a feeling of romance in his position” of transience. Ladislaw takes control of his life by being a nomad. He refuses to shackle himself to any place or person. He gives himself complete autonomy in order to feel in control as his own man. This changes as he decides that “no other woman could sit higher that [Dorothea’s] footstool”. It’s not that he loves her; rather, he wants to save her, “regardless of “whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss around her”. Ladislaw wants to play the hero and wrest Dorothea from the grasp of Mr. Casaubon, the grasp of married and settled life. He wants to play the white knight, without having an escape plan. Ladislaw takes control through chaos.
Bulstrode begins to lose control with the appearance of Mr. Raffles. Bulstrode goes so far as to say that “independence… could be supplied to [Raffles], if [he] would engage to keep at a distance”. While nothing bad immediately happens, and Bulstrode successfully bribes Raffles to leave, the threat still lingers on the horizon. Bulstrode’s success is threatened, and his potential control over his life is weakened. Simultaneously, Lydgate’s debts begin to come due. Lydgate has great potential—he has a new hospital, he has a large and growing client base, and is a better healer than the other doctors in Middlemarch. Lydgate receives a notice “insisting on the payment of a bill for furniture”, indicating that he hasn’t been paying back all his bills in a timely fashion or at all. He is at risk of losing respectability, as he bought most of his household goods on credit.
Mr. Brooks is up for election in his district. The only problem is that he is completely out of touch with his salt of the earth neighbors. He rambles about “Machinery, now, and machine-breaking…it won’t due, you know, breaking machines”. He fails to capture is audience because he doesn’t know them. Mr. Brooks becomes a fool during this speech—as much because of his own inability to make speeches as his inability to relate to his audience. The crowd, and by extension, his whole neighborhood is out of his control.
Book 5 sees all of these men begin to feel the pressures of outside elements. Whether it be debt, family, delusions of grandeur, generally being out of touch, or jealously, something inevitably pops up leaving the character in a tail spin, highlighting the cracks in every carefully cultivated persona.
– Valerie Harrison