An Exercise In Frustration
Dec. 19th, 2010 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselApr 2010
Middlemarch - George Eliot - Oxford World's Classics, 1997
* * *
I can't help wondering about George Eliot's motivations for writing Middlemarch given that humorous observations of small town life sit so uneasily with her intellectual and philosophical preoccupations. In part it must have been purely commercial - Mrs Gaskell's Cranford stories had been extremely popular, albeit some 15 years earlier, so a novel of provincial life was bound to sell well. It may have also have been a reaction to the Silly Novels by Lady Novelists that she lambasted in the Westminster Review - she wanted to show how a "woman's novel" could be done right. But I think the major motivation was to give outlet to Eliot's frustration at the limited options and slow pace of reform in Victorian life, particularly for women. And this impatience goes a long way to explaining both the novel's triumphs and its flaws.
The plot is driven by three young women - Dorothea Brook, Rosamund Vincy and Mary Garth - although they are not the main characters in terms of the time we spend with them (Eliot, knowing that her potential buyers were likely to be men, was much too canny for that). All are typical Victorian middle-class daughters who react to their restricted lives in different ways. Dorothea, the wannabe bluestocking who, one strongly suspects, is a satirical portrait by the older George Eliot of her younger self, marries Edward Casaubon, a dry-as-dust cleric whom she is convinced is writing a Great Work on comparative mythology, and soon comes to regret it, particularly after she meets dashing artist Will Ladislaw. The beautiful but vapid Rosamund sets her sights on the handsome Tertius Lydgate, a doctor who plans to reform the provision of medical services in Middlemarch against the wishes of the old guard. Mary, the plain and poor daughter of a tradesman, sets about the reform of Fred Vincy, Rosamund's dim but good-hearted brother, into suitable marriage material.
Change and its frustration are everywhere in the book. Most obviously it is in the famous scenes where Dorothea's father tries to become an MP in a pre-Reform Act election. But it is also present in the character of Lydgate whose attempts to set up a new hospital while maintaining Rosamund in the style to which she has become accustomed land him in financial trouble. Fred's sense of entitlement prevents him from accepting the need to work and thereby to win Mary's hand. And Dorothea is trapped by her stultifying husband even when it becomes clear that her future lies with Ladislaw.
The problem with this is that it makes for a very static book. There is a sub-plot concerning Ladislaw's antecedents but it seems to come from a different novel. The rest of the time we are waiting for the static patterns of the relationships in the novel to resolve themselves. Which would be fine if Eliot were good at distracting us with the little details and observations that would bring Middlemarch to life, but she is not. At the end of an 800-page novel, you still have no physical sense of the town, no notion of its shape or where its community centres are. There is equally little sense of its social structure - for a book which is trying to describe the whole of society in microcosm, there is remarkably little said about the working classes, with the focus firmly kept on the lower- and upper-middle class families of the main characters rather than their servants.
Instead, Eliot engages in seemingly endless psychological analysis of her characters, telling us what they are thinking rather than showing. Whilst the trains of thought that she describes are perceptive and help us to understand and sympathise with the constraints within which the characters believe they are working, they also serve to remind us, constantly, that these are constructed people. The effect, for me at least, is to drain them of life in much the same way as characters in clever-clever post-modern novels.
This arises, I think, because Eliot felt the need to show that she was just as capable of intellectual analysis as a male author. It was her way of rebelling against Victorian notions of a woman's place in society. It is interesting that the characters for whom she clearly has least sympathy are Rosamund Vincy and Edward Casaubon, who both impose their conventional notions of womanhood on their spouses. Ironically, Eliot's rebellion is done by showing in novelistic form, rather than telling in an essay. She makes her point, but at the cost of the reader's patience.
Middlemarch - George Eliot - Oxford World's Classics, 1997
* * *
I can't help wondering about George Eliot's motivations for writing Middlemarch given that humorous observations of small town life sit so uneasily with her intellectual and philosophical preoccupations. In part it must have been purely commercial - Mrs Gaskell's Cranford stories had been extremely popular, albeit some 15 years earlier, so a novel of provincial life was bound to sell well. It may have also have been a reaction to the Silly Novels by Lady Novelists that she lambasted in the Westminster Review - she wanted to show how a "woman's novel" could be done right. But I think the major motivation was to give outlet to Eliot's frustration at the limited options and slow pace of reform in Victorian life, particularly for women. And this impatience goes a long way to explaining both the novel's triumphs and its flaws.
The plot is driven by three young women - Dorothea Brook, Rosamund Vincy and Mary Garth - although they are not the main characters in terms of the time we spend with them (Eliot, knowing that her potential buyers were likely to be men, was much too canny for that). All are typical Victorian middle-class daughters who react to their restricted lives in different ways. Dorothea, the wannabe bluestocking who, one strongly suspects, is a satirical portrait by the older George Eliot of her younger self, marries Edward Casaubon, a dry-as-dust cleric whom she is convinced is writing a Great Work on comparative mythology, and soon comes to regret it, particularly after she meets dashing artist Will Ladislaw. The beautiful but vapid Rosamund sets her sights on the handsome Tertius Lydgate, a doctor who plans to reform the provision of medical services in Middlemarch against the wishes of the old guard. Mary, the plain and poor daughter of a tradesman, sets about the reform of Fred Vincy, Rosamund's dim but good-hearted brother, into suitable marriage material.
Change and its frustration are everywhere in the book. Most obviously it is in the famous scenes where Dorothea's father tries to become an MP in a pre-Reform Act election. But it is also present in the character of Lydgate whose attempts to set up a new hospital while maintaining Rosamund in the style to which she has become accustomed land him in financial trouble. Fred's sense of entitlement prevents him from accepting the need to work and thereby to win Mary's hand. And Dorothea is trapped by her stultifying husband even when it becomes clear that her future lies with Ladislaw.
The problem with this is that it makes for a very static book. There is a sub-plot concerning Ladislaw's antecedents but it seems to come from a different novel. The rest of the time we are waiting for the static patterns of the relationships in the novel to resolve themselves. Which would be fine if Eliot were good at distracting us with the little details and observations that would bring Middlemarch to life, but she is not. At the end of an 800-page novel, you still have no physical sense of the town, no notion of its shape or where its community centres are. There is equally little sense of its social structure - for a book which is trying to describe the whole of society in microcosm, there is remarkably little said about the working classes, with the focus firmly kept on the lower- and upper-middle class families of the main characters rather than their servants.
Instead, Eliot engages in seemingly endless psychological analysis of her characters, telling us what they are thinking rather than showing. Whilst the trains of thought that she describes are perceptive and help us to understand and sympathise with the constraints within which the characters believe they are working, they also serve to remind us, constantly, that these are constructed people. The effect, for me at least, is to drain them of life in much the same way as characters in clever-clever post-modern novels.
This arises, I think, because Eliot felt the need to show that she was just as capable of intellectual analysis as a male author. It was her way of rebelling against Victorian notions of a woman's place in society. It is interesting that the characters for whom she clearly has least sympathy are Rosamund Vincy and Edward Casaubon, who both impose their conventional notions of womanhood on their spouses. Ironically, Eliot's rebellion is done by showing in novelistic form, rather than telling in an essay. She makes her point, but at the cost of the reader's patience.