Middlemarch...redux

I've been wanting to reread George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, for awhile now, so decided to read it along with the GoodReads Victorians group.  They provided a nice easy reading schedule that spanned six weeks, and it was a very enjoyable way to revisit an absolute favorite.

Here's what I wrote for my summation on the group chat (SPOILERS BELOW).

This is my 4th or 5th time reading this wonderful book, and I absolutely love it. It's been probably ten years since I last read it, and it's so rich and dense and beautiful that it was still fresh and endlessly interesting. 

I liked how you [Frances, a GoodReads moderator] summed up the three threads as comedy, tragedy, and drama.  Fred and Mary were comic, Rosamond and Lydgate were tragic, and Dorothea and Will were romantic.

I adore Fred and Mary also--I know there is a big contingent out there that say that Mary should have married Farebrother because he "deserved" her, but Fred earned her respect and always had her love. I loved the glimpse the narrator gave us of their life together, growing older, comfortable and happy.

Lydgate and Rosamond are a tragic couple. His big, tender heart could never touch her tiny, cold one, but in the end, he did the right thing and sacrificed his ideals and ambitions to fulfill his end of the marriage contract.

Dorothea and Will are such a romantic couple, and Dorothea is one of my all-time favorite characters. In her sorrow and trouble, she never stopped trying to help others. Going to see Rosamond after witnessing the scene between Will and Rosamond was heroic and selfless and so admirable.

And that closing paragraph--it is magnificent and neatly encapsulates what Eliot was going for in Dorothea, her modern St Teresa:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Things are not so ill with you and me because people like Dorothea quietly and persistently try to make the world a better place.Finally, I think the narrator is one of the kindest, most sympathetic in all of literature. She is sort of like Mr. Garth himself--admiring those who work and are busy with business, but forgiving and tender-hearted and willing to help her poor, dear characters find their way in the world despite their weaknesses and follies. Everyone has a story, and those stories have light as well as shadows, and everyone's story is worth telling.



This brings my Back to the Classics reading challenge for 2016 up to seven completed.  Not great, but not bad either.

The Lifted Veil

Between writing Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot wrote a short story, The Lifted Veil, that is quite different from anything else of hers that I have read thus far.

In The Lifted Veil, Eliot dabbles in the supernatural. Known for her devotion to realism, I can't help but wonder what motivated Eliot to write this story in which a rather sickly and not very likeable young man, Latimer, is suddenly struck with the ability to access the thoughts and motivations of other people and to perceive future events, including the time and circumstances of his own death.

The story is very grim--it opens with Latimer anticipating the death he had seen in a vision off and on for years, and as death approaches he tells his life story, which is one of loneliness, heartbreak, and betrayal. He tells of his mother's early death, which robbed him of the only unconditional love he ever experienced, his father's disdain, his brother's contempt, and his wife's attempts to murder him after she stops loving him. The key to this last twist is that he knows when he woos and marries her that she will turn against him eventually, but he still wants her and takes her as his wife with his eyes wide open.

Absent from this story is Eliot's eloquence as well as her realism. Perhaps it is the first person narrative, which means that we are locked into Latimer's point of view and so do not have a sympathetic narrator who can soften or explain Latimer's situation, circumstances, actions, and motivations. Instead, he is left to fend for himself, and I was quite relieved when I finished the story and could wash my hands of him.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed reading Jenny Uglow's discussion of the story in her bio of Eliot--actually, I confess to enjoying the discussion more than the story itself. Here is my favorite passage:

In this Faustian story the hero chooses what he wants now, even though he knows the price will be later misery; for his visions are not of some absolutely determined future, but the future set in motion by the choices he makes. Eliot elaborates the moral by suggesting that what piques our desire most is the unknown; we prefer to live in suspense. Like readers of a novel, even if we know the end we try to forget it and concentrate on the intervening uncertainties of the plot...Foresight is irrelevant. It is not what we can foresee which is important, but how we live the intervening hours in the light of that knowledge.

I loved the notion that this is a Faustian story and looking at it in this way helped me see how it did fit in with other Eliot stories and themes. In some ways, Dr. Lydgate of Eliot's later novel Middlemarch is akin to Latimer in that he chooses to marry Rosamund despite knowing her severe limitations and even glimpsing, in those rare moments when he is truly honest with himself, the misery that marrying her will bring. All he can focus on is that he wants her.

I also loved the idea that "it is not what we can foresee which is important, but how we live the intervening hours in the light of that knowledge." Latimer dies unloved by the reader because he does nothing productive with his knowledge of what is on the other side of the veil. I can't help but think the gift of fore-knowledge was completely squandered on Latimer, and perhaps that was Eliot's point. It is better not to know. Knowing the hour and circumstances of one's death robs a person of the ability to focus on living, fully and in the moment.

I feel that The Lifted Veil was an experiment; as if Eliot wanted to see if she could deal with the themes that shaped her fiction on a supernatural canvas as well as the more comfortable realistic canvas. Given that I don't think she ventured this way again, I have to conclude the results were not satisfactory to her...but that will take another bio or letters to ferret out. All in good time, now I'm looking forward to a first-time reading of The Mill on the Floss.

Adam Bede

Last year I decided that George Eliot was going to be my new focus, having spent several years reading works by and about Elizabeth Gaskell. I started with Jenny Uglow’s bio of George Eliot, which was the penname of Maryann Evans. I confess I’m slightly disappointed with the bio—I was expecting the same depth and breadth that Uglow provided in her bio of Gaskell, but her bio of Eliot is much briefer and lighter. Nevertheless, I am sticking to my guns and reading Eliot’s works chronologically as I encounter them in the biography, although my pace is much slower than I had hoped having gotten bogged down in her early works.

Adam Bede is Eliot’s first novel. She transitioned from non-fiction to fiction with her set of three short stories that she published under the title Scenes of Clerical Life, which I found very slow going despite being fairly short. Adam Bede clearly grew out of her work with these earlier fictional scenes in that she explores issues of morality, community, familial relationships, and religious calling, particularly Methodism, but her characters in Adam Bede are much more fully developed and complex and her storytelling improved immensely between Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede. The former I had to force myself to continue reading and the latter I had to force myself to put down.

Although the three stories in Scenes of Clerical Life are written in Eliot’s clear prose and provide her characteristic compelling word images—she really is masterful at depicting realistic scenes without becoming pedantic with her level of details- I never really felt a warmth or interest in the characters in Scenes, whereas with Adam Bede, I was able to get to know and care deeply about the fate of Adam, his brother Seth, their mother, their neighbors, the Poysers, and the Poyser’s two nieces, Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel. The novel passed the acid test in being able to move me to tears at several points near its end, which is always a good sign.

Back when The Common Reader catalog was still a going concern, I remember reading the blurb on Eliot’s Middlemarch, my all-time favorite novel, and nodding in agreement with the description of the book as being “the wisest book I’ve ever read.” One of the aspects of Eliot’s style that I love is her willingness to articulate the points on her moral compass, and I was happy to see that aspect of Middlemarch in Adam Bede as well. She toyed with it a bit in Scenes, but with Adam Bede her narrative voice comes into its own.

She does a superb job of using her characters and their story to explore issues, but she does what so many authors, especially modern authors, don’t do, namely use her power as a narrator to reflect on the human condition, and she does this with such compassion and understanding for human frailty that I always come away from Middlemarch, and now Adam Bede, with a sense of fortified optimism despite the sorrow and tragedy that tempers the pastoral world Eliot portrays so well.

It seems to me I’ve read critics complain a bit about the unrealistic perfection of Adam himself, but I found him to be a flawed and therefore an interesting character. It’ s true that he is handsome, strong, and noble, but he is also willfully naïve when it comes to Hetty Sorrel to the point you want to shake him. Likewise, Arthur Donnithorne, his rival and counterpart, is truly a tragic figure because he has so many good qualities. I couldn’t help but compare the story of Hetty Sorrel to both Gaskell’s Ruth that preceded it and Hardy’s Tess that came after it. I think Eliot’s Arthur Donnithorne is a more complex and sympathetic villain than either Gaskell’s Bellingham or Hardy’s Alec d’Uberville.



Now for the BBC adaptation from 1991. I will give it a try, though I was shocked and appalled by the Woman in White travesty I tried to watch after completing that book so I’m not holding out a lot of hope that this will wow me…but you never know! Susannah Harker played the divine Methodist preaching woman, Dinah Morris, before she became Jane Bennet in BBC’s masterpiece Pride and Prejudice. Dinah is actually my favorite character in the book, and I found in her more than a little bit of Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke, one of my favorite heroines, particularly in how she ultimately lets herself live within the passionate love that she cannot disown.

I cannot imagine not rereading Adam Bede again in the not too distant future. It's a wonderful book by a brilliant novelist that has given me a lot to think about.

Ironic reversal....comedy, tragedy and Austen

I'm just about to start rereading Gaskell's last, unfinished novel, Wives and Daughters (Penguin Classics), and so last night started the Introduction in my Penguin Classics version by Pam Norris. In this Introduction, Norris presents a completely wonderful idea that delineates W&D from Middlemarch, another one of my favorite novels.

Both novels turn on what Norris terms "ironic reversals." For example, in W&D "Osborne Hamley's plan to reconcile his father to his secret marriage is, in the event, effected by his untimely death, not by literary immortaility as he had dreamed. This ironic reversal is deeply sad, but on the whole the persistent upsetting of human scheming imbues the novel with an optimistic spirit of comic regeneration...This makes a striking contrast to George Eliot's Middlemarch, in which the determining minutiae of social mischances imperceptibly bear down with tragic force upon human hopes and aspirations. In Wives and Daughters many seemingly arbitrary circumstances form the chain of cause and effect that lead Mr Gibson into his ill-judged proposal, but the resulting marriage is represented by Gaskell in a predominantly comic light of human fraility, compromise and self-deceptions. The result is survival not destruction."

Many lovers of Austen's novels have found another author to love in Gaskell, particularly W&D, which many say is closest to Austen. And in this aspect of ironic reversals leading to a comedic world view rather than a tragic one, I have to wonder whether this might be the nugget in Gaskell that grabs Janeites and holds them fast.

Bits and Bobs

Observations on both books that I'm currently reading.

I'm sailing through Daphne, and am nearing the end. It is still as fascinating at this point and getting more impressive. I love how Picardie is able to keep the three voices balanced, and I truly love how the stories of Branwell and the Brontes, Syminton, Daphne du Maurier and her pathetic husband, his Snow Queen, and, of course, her Rebecca, parallel and weave with the modern unnamed heroine and her Paul and his Rachel and Menabilly/Manderley. I have just got to read the recent bio of du Maurier.

In reading about Symington and his futile attempts to bring order and articulation to his life's work (and theft, er, borrowing) with regards to Branwell, I am reminded of Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Much as I love and identify with Dorothea, I truly feel sorry for Casaubon. He has what I have come to call the Amadeus complex--he recognizes genius, appreciates genius, and is tormented because as close as he gets to the sublime in art, as much as he is moved by it, he can never produce a work that approaches greatness. For him, it's not enough to appreciate and enjoy. He wants to create, and his efforts can never be more than pedantic, and he knows it in his heart. For me, that is Symington.

I am also still slowly working my way through Rebecca Dickson's A Jane Austen Treasury. One of the gems in this book is her micro essay regarding why anyone should watch the Laurence Olivier/Greer Garson Pride and Prejudice movie from 1940. I've always enjoyed the campiness of it, as well as the cinematic sexiness of Olivier. But, Dickson's sidebar talks about how this movie actually was part of Britain's propaganda to bring the U.S. into WWII on the side of the Allies, showing how Darcy wasn't really against the middle classes (aka the American Dream). According to Dickson, this movie demonstrates, by having Lady Catherine conspiring with Darcy to confirm that Elizabeth will love him as much if he's a poor man, that if the U.S. joins the war effort it "isn't going to war to help save an aristocracy--they're going to war to help the adorable Lizzie Bennet and her soon-to-be aunt-in-law, the chummy Cathy Bourgh." I give Dickson 10 gold stars for this analysis. I love it!

Sylvia's Lovers - Be Careful What You Wish For

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote some wonderfully creepy stories--The Old Nurse's Story, The Grey Woman, Lois the Witch, among others--and Sylvia's Lovers puts them in mind tonight when I read about Philip and Sylvia's marriage. In so many of her stories, Gaskell plays with the theme of children being punished for the sins of their fathers. While that element is present only marginally with Daniel Robson's influence over Sylvia, the much stronger theme relates back to the post I wrote about the narrator's comments on prayer.

Philip lusted after Sylvia to the point where he failed himself morally (i.e., in not telling her that Kinraid was taken by a press gang), but even before he achieved his goal of marrying her he was subconsciously realizing that having his bird in a cage was not really what he wanted after all. While I've been reading SL, I've been trying to pin down who Philip Hepburn reminds me of--it's Lydgate, of course, from Eliot's Middlemarch.

I wish the narrator hadn't pointed out that Sylvia was married in mourning and the first sounds she heard on entering her home as a bride was the sound of weeping and wailing. As a reader, I would rather have made the connection myself instead of having it pointed out to me.