Back to the Classics #1

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life - George Eliot

Eliot and her novels have intimidated me to the extent that over the 40 years of my adulthood I’ve never read one until now. Her reputation for long, solemn, intellectual, erudite novels daunted my inner slacker, ever resistant to being improved. But reading this remarkable novel convinced me that with focus and effort, I could come to grips with Eliot’s comprehensive view of life.

I expected this to be a novel of ideas like Aldous Huxley wrote. That is, as if essays were presented as clever dialogues, pages would be taken up with characters discussing heavy thoughts in earnest conversations. In fact, she gradually introduces us to a set of characters who live in the provincial town of the title in the late 1820s. The issues they grapple with exemplify the ordinary problems generations must deal with – work, career, love, reputation, station, and success. The main characters – Dorothea, Lydgate, Bulstrode – are true philosophers in that they don’t leave ideas about how to live ethically and morally between the covers of books. Instead, they are determined to go beyond “doing no harm” to doing practical good in the real world.

But another stern reality in life – marriage – derails the hopes of Dorothea and Lydgate. Dorothea marries a withered up scholar of myths decades her senior, out of her own immaturity and stupidity – Eliot is blunt enough to point out – but also with the backdrop of a society that was just fine with dry frail geezers with a foot in the grave marrying inexperienced healthy young women.

Lydgate’s goal as a doctor and researcher is reforming the treatment of cholera, then a devastating disease. He has a bright future but his advantages are undermined by his marriage to the village beauty Rosamund, whose narcissism feels strangely postmodern and familiar. Again, though, Eliot does not let Lydgate off the hook for being an educated fool. He’s bright in his profession but, incautious and unwary, he figures money will somehow take care of itself and it would be nice for the practice if he gave expensive dinner parties with a very presentable wife. Pity to see such stupidity in a smart guy.

Spoiled twit Rosamund, for whom money to buy more stuff is supposed to just appear, is no help. Neither one of them deals with debt and belt tightening superlatively. She blithely ignores his pleas on how to proceed against this problem. The chapter where he realizes he has zero influence over her is intense, a dazzling piece of literature. His fate is so interesting we read to the end to find out what happens to him.

Eliot casts many characters and shows their relationships with each other. I sometimes lose track of who is who but never in this novel since Eliot’s pace and repetition prevent this from happening. The recapitulation is subtle but effective. She makes clear how their social backgrounds and personal characters have influenced the characters in daily life, work, and love. Like all great novelist do, Eliot creates Middlemarch, a world of its own, as various and diverse as our world. The people are complicated, subject to emotions that cloud their reasoning faculties just as surely as the assumptions of their culture influence them too. People are naturally self-centered, unconscious of the fact they see themselves as the pivot upon the world spins. Having little or loose education, they are prejudiced  – her detailing of small town exclusivity, suspicion and distrust of strangers and new-fangled things fascinates us readers, leading us to marvel that humans make any progress at all. But she’s not satirical or cold or condescending about doing so.

I can’t possibly in a short review go over all the reasons why this novel, which will take a month even for hardcore readers like us, is worth reading. The themes, to name only a few, include the desperate risks of marriage, the pitfalls of doing good and having expectations, the dead hand of mean last wills, acceptance of the world as it is, and the comparison of the visual arts with literature. Eliot’s grammar and vocabulary and long sentences take some getting used to. Google is needed for quick studies of the Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Act of 1830.