BOOK BLOG #22

I finally conquered my personal Everest, George Eliot's Middlemarch

Virginia Woolf called it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Min Jin Lee regards it the “best English-language novel, period.” Martin Amis called it a “novel without weaknesses.” Zadie Smith loves it. One can pull up countless examples of the best modern writers who hold Middlemarch in the highest esteem.

For many years I have wondered: why are people so obsessed with this book?

After more than a decade of thinking about, trying to, and saying I was reading Middlemarch, I have finally done so, and can report back. I listened to it in audiobook form as the sheer size of the physical book daunted me for a long time— it’s an absolute brick. The psychic weight of the audiobook was less somehow, despite clocking in at 40 hours.

For those who might be similarly curious of this lauded tome, I’ll summarize my findings in short, as I’m not psychotic enough to think I have anything revolutionary to say about this book.

I was struck again and again by the sheer power of Eliot’s writing and, separately, its amazing skepticism about marriage— a departure from the marriage plot novels of the era. While in Jane Austen, the book ends with marriage, this is where Middlemarch finds its start.

In an early chapter, the gentleman Mr. Brooke warns his niece that marriage is “a noose,” as he discusses with her the possibility of her marriage to an older pseudo-academic bore. (Reader, she married him.)

I’ve been deep in John Berger recently, and his brilliant essays in Ways of Seeing, and the final essay on advertising¹ struck me as relevant. What is it that the marriage plot is selling? It cannot be marriage, because it never touches on marriage. It is the idea of marriage, rather.

Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.

The marriage plot novels end in marriage; it is a glamor in that it is a simulacrum of marriage rather than an examination of its actualities.² None of them have much to say about what marriage itself entails, but Eliot does.

The main marriage examined is between Dorothea Brooke, an heiress and social progressive, also a bit annoying and pious, who rashly marries the older Casaubon, who she takes to be a serious intellectual but is actually a pedantic fool with no follow-through. Although she strives to be a moral person and a good wife, the clarity of her mistake dawns on her.

There are a half-dozen other marriages profiled in detail or as sketches in the book. Marriage is not the ending. It’s the beginning! Of something terrible and wonderful. The mismatch of expectation and reality necessitates them both. As Dorothea says, “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” Each little gesture contains multitudes, every move a reflection of some generosity or stinginess in our very soul. Eliot is interested in the thousands of little ways we withhold, whether it’s meted out as knowing punishment or insensitively in ignorance.

Mr. Casaubon kept his hands behind him and allowed her pliant arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.

There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her. That is a strong word, but not too strong: it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness—calling their denial knowledge.

Eliot eviscerates with compassion. Casaubon, who thankfully dies after only two years of marriage to Dorothea, faces a harrowing ending after not accomplishing anything he purported to be accomplishing his entire life, his grand opus of academic claptrap left unfulfilled. But his death scene is moving:

Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death—who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die—and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

There is a current of warning throughout. Firstly, to those who have engaged in wedlock: stay alert, marrieds! There are an infinite number of ways you can screw this up. Secondly, to the unwed: stay alert, singletons! Think carefully before you yoke yourself to somebody else.

Whether in the “noose” of marriage or not, Eliot sees that the potential for self-sabotage is great. But there’s hope, too.

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

1. https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ch7

2. The marriage plot has its hooks deep in contemporary culture as well, obviously: in advertising of goods like jewelry, in Romance novels, and through the wedding industry, to name just a few examples.