All posts by valerieharrison

My-Life-in-Middlemarch

When I walk back to Middlemarch….

During my reading of Middlemarch, I found myself hating many of the characters. It took multiple readings and days of meditation before I was willing to forgive some of the characters and try to understand their motivation. I was really jealous of several of the other Middlemarch bloggers because they seemed to understand the characters in ways I could not. Reading My Life in Middlemarch invoked a similar feeling within me. Rebecca Mead understood the characters on a level that transcended my own understanding. Mead’s explanations of each character highlighted their progress as people, not just as characters, and allowed me empathize more easily with characters that I hated.

Dorothea really bothered me throughout most of Middlemarch. I found her cerebral and charitable nature very annoying. I could not understand the impact of living in a town like Middlemarch, to be in the country with very little society or experience, having an intimate knowledge of your immediate surroundings but only a vague concept of life outside of your confines. Mead combats this beautifully when she speaks about her own journey to get out of her small English town and head off to university. Dorothea had a mix of arrogance and charity, a final spark of youthful innocence and optimism that I don’t really see in people her age (and im 20), and when I do, I run the other way. Mixing Dorothea’s story with her own allowed Mead to mire Dorothea in reality a bit more and helped me appreciate where Dorothea was coming from.

This illumination didn’t stop with Dorothea. Mead uses her personal journey and her years of experience and personality change to comment on how the reader’s relationship with the characters is a constant evolution. The young teenager Mead delighted in Dorothea where the older reader found solace for failed ambition with Lydgate and later with Celia. Mead also talked about Elliot’s personal evolution and how her growth showed up in her characters. There was something immensely special about understanding the change from idealistic Elliot to rebel (living with a married man) to mother. George Elliot became a person, much like her characters, though this reading. It is so easy to abandon the story of the author as the author gets lost among her creation. By breathing life into Elliot, several characters where explained.

Mead illuminated Middlemarch for me, making me tempted to go back and re-read it for myself and catch more of the subtle character changes. I think I will wait five years until I walk back into Middlemarch. Maybe I’ll finally have patience for Dorothea. Maybe I’ll not want to slap Rosamond. Maybe I’ll find my way back to these blog posts and be embarrassed by my lack of empathy. I can be certain that this book with still resonate with me, characters will find paramours in my real life, and my perception will most assuredly have evolved. Middlemarch is a personal journey, with each character representing different stages of life and understanding. And like any good home town, I know they will be waiting to welcome me home.

 

– Valerie Harrison

Book-Eight

Black and White and Grey All Over

Middlemarch is a journey. I went from deeply hating almost every character (but Mary, who is, let’s face it, basically the best person ever) to cheering for Dorothea and Ladislaw and pitting Bulstrode. This is not your average happily ever after fairy tale, meant only to leave you with a feeling of wellbeing. It is a story that looks deeply at individuals and calls out each person’s character flaws while highlighting their redeeming qualities. For this reason, the characters are not bound in text—they take on a realistic life of their own. Children cannot understand Middlemarch. You have to live to see the world shift from black and white into shades of grey.

Take Bulstrode. He could easily be the villain of Middlemarch. He stole Ladislaw’s potential inheritance and blackened Ladislaw’s reputation. His inaction killed a man. The problem with this simplistic notion comes from his characterization. Bulstrode was just a man terrified to losing his reputation. He was an old man faced with oncoming physical death and the death of his legacy. Understanding his fear comes easily. Does that mean he is totally absolved of all sin? NO. But it does allow for leniency. It is this multifaceted characterization that George Elliot exploits in Middlemarch. Middlemarch reaches into the depth of the human experience to equalize all members of society.

Rank and social standing shifts in Middlemarch as easily as the weather. Social evolution and devolution happen at every social rank. The business men—Mr. Garth and Mr. Vincy—cling to prosperity with every shift in the economy. They both chose similar paths, though their personal morals determined the success of their family. The clergy—Mr. Casaubon and Mr. Farebrother—changes lives with just a few words. The former with his codicil and the latter with his “timely” speech to Fred. The ladies—Dorothea and Cecilia and Rosemond—all fall and rise on their own, whether or not they follow social standards.

This is echoed in the Finale. The son of Dorothea and Ladislaw “might have represented Middlemarch”, an opportunity that would never have been given to Ladislaw, for all of his mixed blood. Lydgate recovered his name and had a good living and provided for his family, leaving behind four daughters with a good shot at life. Rank can be dropped or gained, personally or generationally.

Middlemarch doesn’t discount social standing. It has very real effects on the physical and mental health of many characters. Peer pressure inhibits actions and feelings, but is also a counter measure to bad behavior. There is a natural balance that exists because people so not want to face the ire of the larger community. However, by exploring different lifestyles and characters, Middlemarch gives a voice to everyone. In this way, the separation between different people becomes arbitrary. In consequence, you should always be nice to your neighbor because you never know when your neighbor will die and leave his property to a hitherto unknown illegitimate son who will then sell it to you, but not until after exposing your identity to the one man who knows the secret to your utter destruction. But that could never happen in real life. I mean, what are the odds?

– Valerie Harrison

Book-Seven

Divorce isn’t an Option

Marriage is a problem in Middlemarch because no one seems to enter into a partnership; rather, couples enter on severely uneven footing and find the marriage very unstable as a consequence. Mr. Casaubon wanted a secretary and nurse where Dorothea wanted a teacher. Celia wanted a nice gentleman and Sir James wanted Dorothea. Lydgate loved Rosamond and Rosamond loved his social standing.

For Lydgate, Book 7 was a tale of one hardship after another. One of my favorite literary quotes comes from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. In a scene where a man is straining under the newly-dawned yoke of marriage, Wharton comments that “he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. “After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,” he reflected; but the worst of it was that May’s pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep”. Lydgate has lost all of his prized angles. For him, marriage is literally the root of all evil. His debt stems from overspending in an attempt to provide for his new wife. Under this debt, which is widely known about through Middlemarch, Lydgate stops his scientific experiments. He considers begging for a loan from his family. He belittles himself to Bulstrode. And has every door slammed in his face. He becomes sickly. His practice begins to flounder. It is through these hardships that it is plainly visible that Lydgate loves Rosamond.  He deals with the “pain of foreseeing that Rosamond would come to regard him chiefly as the cause of disappointment and unhappiness”, even crying after she rebukes him. His character transformation has gone from a man with a purpose and grand plans to a shell of a man with little recourse left to him.  This fall works to reinforce the notion that one-sided love cannot make a marriage endure.  I wanted to step into the book and slap Rosamond when she declared that she “wished she had died with the baby” just because she was facing a reduction in her standard of living. I truly feel for Lydgate. After all, how do you go on fighting when the one you love looks at you as a failure?

This whole fiasco is compounded by Rosamond constantly going behind Lydgate’s back. She writes to his uncle and speaks to her father when he expressly did not want her to. She blocks the downsizing of their house, though it might have been their last refuge. She does not care about his opinion in these matters. It is a stereotypical role reversal. In stereotypical family units, the man takes care of financial matters and the women looks after the house, taking care to live within the means she is provided with. In the Lydgate house, Rosamond has no concept of budgeting and bullies and manipulates Lydgate into solutions that will not solve any of their financial problems. Rosamond holds all the cards and is the real power in her house.

This book delves into what marriage means. Is it a pathway to social climb? Should it be sued to secure education? Is there a benefit to losing part of yourself in another person? In reality, Middlemarch gives plenty of examples of marriages that are fundamentally skewed and cracked. In a time where divorce does not happen, Middlemarch provides several test cases that demand choosing a partner carefully.

– Valerie Harrison

Book-Five

Out of Control

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

Book-Four

Men Troubles

Three Love Problems was spent largely exposing the faults of the men in Middlemarch. The women have faults of course—Dorothea is oblivious and Rosamond is needy and blind to the dangers in front of her. But the men, while they undeniably had issues in the previous books, where roasted in this book.

Mr. Casaubon is stuck in a rut of territorial jealously. He is isolating Dorothea from Ladislaw because he sees Ladislaw as a potential enemy. In reality, Ladislaw is a foil for Mr. Casaubon. Ladislaw is young, intelligent, and understands new ideas and concepts. Mr. Casaubon is bogged down with age, and while he is intelligent, he is facing the knowledge that his research may be obsolete before he even sets pen to paper for an academic work. Ladislaw listens to Dorothea and treats her like her words have value—something Dorothea does not find in her husband. Ladislaw is everything Mr. Casaubon wishes he was or could be again. This is a problem that will only grow and it betrays Mr. Casaubon as a frightened old man, scared of losing Dorothea—his nurse, secretary, and maid. The cracks in this character are deepened considerably in this book, though the faults are, on the whole, pitiable.

Ladislaw does not escape unharmed. He specifically stays in Middlemarch for Dorothea. He wants to save her from her folly in marrying Mr. Casaubon, and therefor interjects himself into her society with much gusto. However, his actions put a tremendous pressure on the Casaubon’s marriage. It is undeniably selfish for Ladislaw to ignore his uncle (and benefactor) so completely for such selfish reasons. In the end, it will be Dorothea who will suffer the wrath of Mr. Casaubon, and she will not even understand why he will be angry with her. It is Ladislaw’s youthful belief in his ability to right wrongs and be a savior that show him to be misguided and selfish.

And then there is Fred. I really hate Fred. His behavior is constantly pardoned by everyone—his parents, the Garths, and Middlemarch society in general.   Even Mrs. Garth finds herself “ready to think well of him again when he gives [her] good reason to do so” though it was merely a quirk of fate that kept the Garths from feeling the unfriendly effects of the loss of the money for Fred’s debts. Fred send the vicar as “an envoy” to tell the Garths that “he is going away, and that he his miserable about the debt…, and his inability to pay, that he can’t bear to come himself even to bid [them] good by”.  Fred cannot bring himself to apologize or inform the garths himself that he is leaving. Sending an envoy highlights his cowardly nature and is inexcusable. Fred leaves knowing that he will be leaving behind a family is tight financial straits and a damaged future. I feel like he will see the good fortune of Mr. Garth’s new position as fate intervening on his own behalf and settling his debts, rather than remaining in the debt of the Garths. Fred has no right to be relieved because he seriously messed up. He is fundamentally a coward who relies on fate to bolster him. He feels entitled to a good life. I hope he grows up, but I am not holding out much hope.

Interpersonal relations remain a struggle for the people in Middlemarch. They are becoming real people rather than characters—they have disappointments, good characteristics, bad habits, health problems, and struggle with money. I hope they also have the capacity to grow.

-Valerie Harrison

Book-Six

My Good Name

The age old saying that pride comes before the fall is true; too much pride leads to arrogance and complacency. However, everyone must have a little pride—pride in their work, in themselves, in their capacity for faith. Pride demands that we walk a line. For several Middlemarch residents, personal pride, healthy and otherwise, is being challenged, putting many characters in situations they are not comfortable with.

Lydgate is deeply in debt and his pride is the main reason why. His motives were sweet; he just wanted to provide his new wife with a nice life. Unfortunately, his pride keeps him spiraling deeper into debt because he is controlled by what he thinks society demands a man with a good living ‘should’ have. He can’t immediately sell off possessions because he “thought he was obliged” to maintain a certain standard of living. It is so painful to see him struggle with this pride. Telling Rosamond that they needed to scale back was excruciating. Lydgate has nowhere to turn—he refuses to ask his father in law for help and cannot repossess the healing he dispensed when people don’t pay him for his service. It is touching that Lydgate does not sell the jewelry. He wants to badly to provide for his wife and not take back wedding gifts. He reveals himself to truly love Rosamond, while Rosemond acts like a child and pouts and goes to daddy for help. This stress may humble Lydgate, but he still struggles to provide for Rosamond over himself or his honor.

And then there is Ladislaw. I never truly believed that he loved Dorothea until this book. He always described her in terms of classical, unparalleled beauty, to the extent where his adoration bordered on worship rather than love. However, he hastens to leave Middlemarch when he finds out about the codicil and realizes the effect it could have on her—and his—honor in the eyes of their neighbors. His pride cannot stand being besmirched by gossip. Ladislaw would rather leave Middlemarch for good than have his honor questioned.

Ladislaw turns down the offer of financial assistance from Bulstrode for pride as well. Ladislaw knows that the money from his mother’s family was gotten by dishonorable means. At a time where Ladislaw is questioning his own honor and knows the town is doing likewise, it would be forsaking his own honor to accept the money from Bulstrode. Further, Bulstrode is motivated by pride and honor. He realizes that he is dishonorable—though unwilling to let go of his position of respect attempts to atone by bribing Ladislaw. This Hail Mary is repugnant. Bulstrode makes sure Ladislaw realizes that he has no legal claim on the money, thus protecting his interests while attempting to atone for his sin. Bulstrode is characterized as a clearly impotent, dishonorable old man, trying to eke out some semblance of forgiveness before he dies. By refusing the money, Ladislaw cements his good character and condemns all dishonorable action by Bulstrode —the best punishment that could have happened.

 

– Valerie Harrison

Book-Three

Maybe Consider Moving…

One of the problems with reading good literature comes when your romanticized version of the past is blown to smithereens. I had a lot of issues with Book 3. The actual reading was easy and the story line was super compelling, but the flaws within every character were reveled and deepened, causing my idyllic notion of what it meant to live in this time period to all but vanish.

We see Fred pawn off his debt on his good friend,  feeling guilty not because he is essentially robbing the Garth family of a sum that is going to cripple the future prospects of their young son, but because he is going to lose the regard of Mary. The family that comes in to watch as Mr. Featherstone dies, not because of any familial loyalty, but because they want to pick clean the carcass of his estate as soon as he stops breathing. No one is as I would expect, no one is the prototypical ‘good guy’ who is willing to do a good thing for the sake of doing a good deed.

No one, that is except the people who are not well off. The Garths are good people, though they have never been and will never be wealthy. Mr. Garth is charitable to a fault, thinking nothing of signing a debt away for a friend. He literally gambles his family’s security and future because of his belief that Fred is a good person who will not default. The harsh truth is that Mr. Garth is easily taken advantage of because of this nature. Fred asks Mr. Garth for his signature because Mr. Garth “was the poorest and kindest” because his pride couldn’t allow himself to be “looked down upon as wanting funds for small debts”.  Fred is in the wrong and so is Mr. Garth.

The one person who acts morally and in a fashion befitting the antiquated ideals of femininity is Mary Garth. And, truth be told, I found her as annoying as the others. She truly is the ideal daughter—loyal, giving, and hardworking. She makes her own living looking after Mr. Featherstone, though he is remarkably rude to her in front of others. She even saves her money, a sign of responsibility. However, she gives it all up to her father when he comes looking for help to cover Fred’s debt. Even when Mr. Featherstone smears her father by (correctly) guessing that he had come for Mary’s earnings, Mary doesn’t correct him, doesn’t tell him that the debt is Fred’s.

When Mr. Featherstone is dying and offers her money to destroy his second will, Mary refuses. Her honor does not allow her to take money freely offered, money that no one would know was missing, money that would help her family recover from the havoc that Fred created. She leaves the money, refuses to abandon her morals for anyone. Aside from ignoring this request, she does everything she can to comfort the man, even seeing to it that he does not die alone. She is the only characters that does not have a dark side.

Her characterization stands in direct contrast to all the well-off people in Middlemarch. Rosemond and Dorothea rush hastily into marriage without a fully formed notion of what it means to be married; Mary refuses Fred because he has “no manly independence”.  Mary provides herself a living while Fred lives on the “chance that others will provide for him”. Mary takes care of Mr. Featherstone in the end, though he was a scrooge in life. It was Mary’s moral superiority in every lauded personality trait that causes everyone else to look worse. Frankly, Mary seems too good for the lot of them, and should, perhaps, consider moving.

– Valerie Harrison

Book-Two

A Dose of Reality

Throughout all of Book II of Middlemarch, I kept remembering a quote from the movie Serenity—“what you plan and what takes place ain’t ever exactly been similar”. There is a natural discordance between plans and actual events, but Mr. Lydgate, Dorothea, and Mr. Casaubon, due to not realizing that they have less control over their future than they imagine, come through Book II bruised and battered.

Take Mr. Lydgate. He is by all appearances a master of his own destiny. He is a well-educated doctor, just setting out on his journey of professional life. He purposely chooses to move to Middlemarch instead of a metropolis because his “plan of the future” was “to do small good work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world”, necessitating he remove himself for the bustle and self-importance of the city and live in the country where he could practice in relative quite. He did not mean to immediately get caught up in small town politics, let alone being to develop friend and potential enemies from the outset. Lydgate sets himself up as one of the most important people in a small town—as a pillar of the ‘good’ set of society—and has no concept of the role society demands he fill. He looks forward to a future full of personal academic inquiry, but it seems that goal is going to be totally derailed.

Meanwhile in Rome, a city that is full of sensuous pleasure for all the senses, Dorothea and Mr. Casaubon are finally realizing that they may have entered into marriage without considering the motives of the other person. The Dorothea we meet in Book I is in love with learning. Though she bows to the ‘intellectual superiority’ of men, she fully believes herself to be intelligent and learned. This is seen most clearly in her quest to redesign and help the poor within her provincial location. She is feisty and dearly wants to fulfill her duty to help others. She sees her potential marriage to Mr. Casaubon as a potential avenue for greater learning, though “from the very first she had thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so much above her own, that he must often be claimed by studies which she could not entirely share” (106). Dorothea wants to act as a secretary and pupil to Mr. Casaubon —not act as a demure wife and nurse. In Rome, she wants to learn about her surroundings and gain from Casaubon’s knowledge, but he is forever in the Vatican library. This location is interesting because he and Dorothea are now literally in a male dominated place, religiously and intellectually, and Dorothea is left out with statues and paintings of idealized women.

Mr. Casaubon would have been more comfortable if he had married a statue of a women then Dorothea. He really only wanted a nurse and wife, not an intellectual equal. His attitude in Rome is one that completely dismisses Dorothea’s insights. He talks down to her constantly, coddling her intellectually like a child. When asking her if she would like to see some frescos, he remarks that “the romantic inversion of a literary period, and cannot,… be reckoned as genuine”, but if she likes these “wall-paintings” they can go see them ( 109). He speaks of them in this manner to highlight his own intelligence while referring to them as ‘wall-paintings’ to make sure that Dorothea knows what he is deriding. He wants an idealized wife and nurse, not an intellectual sparring partner. Both are beginning to come around to the idea that their desires when they entered into marriage are not going to be met.

Book II is entitled Old and Young—a very apt name considering fate makes equal fools of Dorothea, Mr. Casaubon, and Mr. Lydgate. They all must struggle to leave behind their simplistic notions of how their future will turn out in favor of reality. Elliot masterfully allows us to watch as all three characters experience the growing pains of reality.

 

Valerie Harrison

Book-One

Don’t Give Up Riding Horses

Mass market romance always follows the same pattern—two people meet, fall in love, overcome an obstacle, and eventually skip off into the sunset together, destined for a future of happiness or they die tragically and are forever more a testament to true love. This formula has been a massive success in all media because everyone loves the idea of being in love. It is because I am so used to this formula that I immediately hated Dorothea. She sacrifices the worldly things that make her happy and a relationship with a man who appreciates her personality in favor of cerebral pursuits and a marriage with a cracked foundation. Throughout Book 1, Dorothea sets herself up for unhappiness, but due to her youth, fails to see that her pride and ambition are blinding her to real happiness.

Dorothea follows her heart straight into a marriage with a man who does not love her, does not want her to be anything other than his stereotypical notion of a ‘good’ housewife.  In fact, Mr. Casaubon should be a warning to Dorothea; he is foremost a student, putting the academic life above everything. He ends up in a small town, and while well-off, his only family dislikes him. His nephew, an artist, ignores the academic life and is a disappointment to Mr. Casaubon. He is essentially alone until Dorothea falls in love with him. The “colors” of his house were “subdued by time”, indicating a stagnancy that is depressing. His life is lacking in color and vibrancy literally and figuratively.  Even the proposal letter Mr. Casaubon writes to Dorothea lacks all passion. He says that “a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you (20). In this, Mr. Casaubon shows a personal need that Dorothea can fulfill. She will be a means to an end, or a housekeeper with benefits. This self-serving nature for the good of scholarly work shows a vanity that is off-putting and should serve as a warning.

The problem is that Dorothea is so infatuated with what she could learn from Mr. Casaubon that she is blind to any of his faults. You have to admire Dorothea; she has the gumption and dedication to stick to her self-sacrificing quest for intellectual improvement. However, she does this at the expense of her future happiness. I believe that she truly loves the idea of marriage to Mr. Casaubon; she could not have survived her uncle’s warnings about the pitfalls of married life otherwise. But loving the idea of a marriage is not substantive. Dorothea wants to learn and be taught, seeing her relationship with Mr. Casaubon as a means to further her education. She does not notice Mr. Casaubon’s coolness of feeling because of her youthful zeal for knowledge. It is hard to notice that your lover has his feet firmly on the ground when you are being swept away.

I can forgive her overlooking Mr. Casaubon’s lack of romantic feeling because of her passion, though I feel the marriage will end unhappily. What I cannot forgive is her innate hypocrisy of morality. Dorothea uses her ascetic pursuits as a shield to protect against the world. She gives up horse riding because “she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way” (2). She is constantly governing and judging the actions of the people around her, from the puppy Sir James would give her to her sister admiring jewelry. She judges others on their wealth and pride, but never looks inward in inspect her own self-regard. I feel like throughout the remainder of Middlemarch, Dorothea’s life with spiral as she grows up and gets a realistic look at her husband and life.

-Valerie Harrison