If you’ve somehow missed being hounded by me to read (first) Middlemarch and (in the New Year) My Life in Middlemarch, you can catch up here.
So, I very nicely requested that everyone (who has any interest in doing so) read to the end of Book One (Ch. 1-12), a very reasonably-sized chunk of George Eliot’s masterpiece. If you haven’t yet done so, that’s perfectly fine. I anticipate this comment thread/discussion will remain open and active over the next few weeks, and you can drop in any time to chat.
One of the reasons I picked a smaller-than-customary portion to begin our discussion with is to recreate the experience of Eliot’s original readers, who were given the novel in eight volumes, the first six with two month gaps, and the last two with only one month gaps. We will not be stretching our discussion out nearly so long as that, but this first volume–”Miss Brooke”–does benefit from being exactly itself, and no more.
I asked Rebecca if she had anything she’d like to say about this first little expedition into Middlemarch, and although she’s mainly excited to have the pleasure of watching Toasties encounter the text themselves, she felt it would be helpful to point out that Eliot’s original critics and readers had no idea what to make of Vol. 1, and that the novel as a whole was a slow burn, culminating eventually in tremendous anticipation for each subsequent release. If you, like they, find the prelude heavy-handed and Dorothea completely incomprehensible, you’re in good company. She drew my attention to the original review of Vol. 1 from The Spectator, which professes that any attraction to Casaubon on Dorothea’s part “leaves the impression of something slightly unnatural and repellent,” a sentiment I must confess a certain sympathy for.
I, too, am chiefly interested in hearing about the questions and complaints and enjoyments and favourite sentences and mystifying sentences that have occurred to you during your read, so I will not belabor this introduction unnecessarily, but there are one or two things I’d love to draw your attention to as you move forward.
George Eliot, first, was an exceptionally radical woman, even when taken out of the context of the immediate age in which she wrote (I’m going to call her George Eliot, instead of Mary Ann Evans, because we are mostly concerned here with her writing, and I’m only going to touch very briefly on her life; when we find ourselves in Mead’s own book, that will change.) She was an atheist, a very personal realization that impacted her intensely, and which you can watch infuse the great driving after purpose and work and creative fulfillment that marked her life and that of her characters. She met and fell in love with George Lewes when she was 32, and within three years had made the decision to live with him as his wife, although they never married, and chose to conduct her private life in exactly the manner that dovetailed with her own, deep ethical sensibilities, which only rarely overlapped with what the society of her contemporaries deemed acceptable. Then, too, she was ugly, as was Lewes, a fact that almost everyone who encountered her spoke of as though it had been a dream, so quickly was it forgotten. “Behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking,” Henry James said of her. It’s not completely unimportant to her work, I think, and I enjoy reading Middlemarch knowing that Eliot never mistook conventional beauty for meaning more than it does, or forgot that it is not a mandatory component of having, as Eliot did, the very richest and deepest of human intimacy with a lover.
That brings me to the only other thing I want to talk about before we get to our discussion: the un-romanticism of this novel which stands in contrast to the extraordinary depiction of the variations of human love it contains. Not necessarily the love of two very young people (or one very young person and a young-looking vampire) who eventually overcome whatever artifice separates them and are married, which is a story with which we are all familiar, but the manner in which Eliot is able to quietly encourage and praise the other kinds of love one may encounter over the entirety of a life: parental love, the love between friends, the enduring and evolving love of two people who have been together for many decades, and the late-flowering love that one might find unexpectedly in life, and the great comfort it can provide. I won’t go any further into this thought now, because it’s the subject of what I believe to be one of the best parts of My Life in Middlemarch, and I want you to discover it for yourself.
So, then, let’s talk about Middlemarch. My favourite sentence? “Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.” Let’s talk about Celia, let’s talk about Casaubon (who plays Casaubon in the movie in your head?), let’s talk about this early version of Dorothea, and let’s talk about how easy it is to assume people feel differently than they do, based on your own desires.
Please speak excessively, and, again, come back anytime. We have to prove wrong those who say Middlemarch murders book clubs.
(For our next conversation, we’ll meet on Dec. 16th and read through the end of Vol. 3.)
Tags: george eliot, middlemarch, middlemarch book club, my life in middlemarch, rebecca mead
I’ll start: oh, Dorothea, don’t do it!
Dorothea nothing, it’s Lydgate I want to hurl myself in front of.
LYDGATE.
I feel like Lydgate can fend for himself. #misandrist
Yeah, you’d think. But he has that kind of naivete that comes with youthful arrogance… he has no idea what he can(‘t) handle…
I am waaaaay less sympathetic to dudes who make bad marriages in 19th century novels than I am to women who do the same. See also: Newland Archer. PIPE DOWN BUDDY. YOU MADE YOUR BED SO LIE IN IT.
But don’t you think it’s better to be Dorothea and be wrong than to be Celia and be right about him? At least she’s aspiring to something beyond the ordinary.
But Dorothea is not aspiring to something beyond ordinary. She is just signing up for a different ‘traditional’ role than Celia–the ‘handmaiden to genius’ role with a side helping of religious fervor and some Lady Bountiful daydreams.
That’s not quite how I see it: that’s the only route she can figure out to the spiritually meaningful existence she wants. I agree it’s not a good option, but the prelude makes the point that this is precisely the problem for ‘latter-day’ St. Theresas … what exactly is she supposed to do? Even that handmaiden role is something different from what conventional Celia wants, though. Her limited experience also works against her as she tries to imagine what exactly she can do that will satisfy her yearning for something … more … but vague. She’s so young, isn’t she?
For real. I react to Dorothea’s decision to marry Casaubon in much the same way I react when someone in a horror movie decides that it’s a great idea to go investigate the scary noises coming from the basement. NOOOOOO DON’T DO IT! RUN AWAAAAYYYY!
Dorothea was beautiful, George Eliot was famously…not. Here’s what I can’t decide: was her character’s beauty George Eliot’s version of wish fulfillment Mary Sue-dom, or did George Eliot just think that her contemporary audience was Not Ready for a non-conventionally attractive heroine?
“Miss Brooke had the kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, — or from one of our elder poets, — in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.”
Along similar lines – I was struck by the way GE, herself a self-educated woman, portrayed Dorothea as such a driven woman bent on self-educating herself, but for VERY DIFFERENT reasons than GE herself.
Oh, I see the Mary Sue in the book as Mary Garth, no question — right down to the name that parallels Elliot’s own given name. The wit and self-awareness are all her. I’ve read a bit past book 1, and am anxious to see how her life unfurls.
WHOA I never saw that. So the author avatar is Mary not Dorothea?
I definitely think so- Eliot gently mocks Dorothea and her ideals throughout the novel, whereas if Mary weren’t so bloody good, she would for sure be joining Celia to laugh at how Casaubon always blinks before he speaks.
I get the impression that she’s a little bit all of them, and not completely any of them. Mary is a “hoyden” (I love that word!) and seems less of a snob than anyone else but also seems too “good” to fully represent the author, she’s so strictly moral. I see Dorothea and Will as two sides of one issue that would be close to an engaged artist’s heart – social interest/goodness vs. aesthetic pleasure/freedom. Still a relevant issue now, though we’re less likely to put up with a heroine who falls at the feet of an older “learned” man the way Dorothea does with Casaubon, in the service of the debate. Makes me want to hurl :).
Definitely!
There’s probably a degree of pandering to audience expectation/interest by making her a conventionally palatable heroine, but I think that Dorothea’s beauty (and her status) is also meant to give her goodness more credibility. She doesn’t have to be educated, or kind, or generous to carve out a niche in society; because her desires occur in defiance of her natural position we’re being told that they’re powerful and genuine.
I’m definitely with MandaX on delightful Mary as author stand-in.
I’m rereading and it is so much easier to get through this first part when you know what’s coming. I was totally baffled by Dorothea the first time I read this. If I thought back to being her age I could relate to the desire to subordinate one’s self romantically to someone older with (putative) wisdom and knowledge for two, but the religious parts were hard for me to get anything out of.
Favorite sentences in this part:
Explaining that Casaubon was less contented by his engagement than he expected because his ability to experience joy had atrophied: “Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them. ”
Describing Rosamond on meeting Lydgate: “Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.”
One wonders, too, how things would have been different (if at all!) had Casaubon actually been the great academic genius of her dreams, instead of a failure on that front (who had never read “The Germans”!)
If he’d been the same sort of unpleasant personality for whom she felt no real kinship, but DID have true brilliance. I think it would still have been a disaster, but a different sort of one.
Yeah, in the long run it would have been worse for her, I think. She was so ready to be subsumed into a worthwhile endeavor, she would have put up with anything on the interpersonal side if she felt she was contributing to a Great Work.
Nah, I don’t think it would have been a disaster. The ONE thing that Dodo wanted out of her marriage was to be around a genius and contribute to a great and lasting work. Not companionship, children, romantic affection, or money. If she’d gotten the thing she wanted, by her standards the marriage would have been great (or in line with her expectations), regardless if other people silently pitied her.
Really? I am bad at coming up with Big Themes in books, but Middlemarch seems interested in the maturation of desire: the way the things people want are not the things that will make them happy (which, ideally, they realize before getting married).
Or the way the things they want (to support a brilliant man in his Great Work) are actually just feelings that they want (to feel that their lives are meaningful).
I’m still thrown off a bit by her religious (evangelical?) interest, but I think I’m so unfamiliar with England’s religious landscape at this point (e.g. the implied attitudes towards evangelism) that it’s both fascinating and confusing to me.
Same here. It reminds me of reading Mansfield Park, which so heavily features Fanny Price’s evangelical focus. I think it puts Dorothea at a remove not only from the rest of her community but also from the reader, but it’s also intriguing that Eliot would introduce a main character in such a way. Having not read Middlemarch before, I will be interested to see how Dorothea’s religious attitudes and activities change over time.
Knowing a bit more about GE’s life helped me with this to some extent. She was very religious as a young girl and went through different phases of religious exploration, which eventually resulted in her atheism. On some level it seems like it was a way for her to channel her enormous intellectual energy until she found friends who were engaged intellectually in non-religious questions. I think evangelism functions as a more personal, idiosyncratic connection to religious thought here.
That Casaubon sentence is wonderful! I underlined it also. I also love a few chapters earlier, “Hence he [Casaubon] had determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was … Mr. Casaubon found that sprinkling was the utmost approach to a plunge which his stream could afford him; and he concluded that the poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine passion.”
I read Middlemarch first when I was 18 and was entirely baffled and put off by both Dorothea and Casaubon, but now I find I have huge affection for poor Mr. Casaubon. Because I am getting old and peculiar and a bit mean? Or I just have realized how much I adore old, peculiar, mean characters in Victorian novels?
Oh, that sentence! That sentence was the point where I wanted to have an “Oh, honey, no” conversation with BOTH Dorothea and Casaubon (though for wildly different reasons). So much emotional immaturity floating around. And actual immaturity. It turns out Dorothea seems so much younger than I remember her being on my first attempt reading this as a teenager.
This actually makes me feel better, because I’m reading for the first time and I’m still baffled by Dorothea. I mean, I GET it, I just… she makes me very tired and want to put my head down on the desk. Oh honey no.
I am so excited for this book club, y’all. Favorite quote so far: “Somebody put a drop [of Casaubon’s blood] under a magnifying glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.”
(Also: DOROTHEA NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO)
yes, this line – SO GOOD
Oh that is the best damn line.
YEP! this is my favorite line…of…anything ever??
not even just like periods and commas. SEMICOLONS AND PARENTHESES.
Casaubon looks like that guy who plays Argus Filch in the Harry Potter movies.
DOROTHEA WHAT ARE YOU DOING. WHAT.
I like Mary Garth. She seems like she might have the capacity to be delightfully snarky.
She gets awesome.
I think she is by far my favorite character.
MARY GARTH <3 <3 <3
Mary is the actual best.
I also think he is the guy who plays Alexei Karenin in the BBC miniseries of Anna Karenina.
Those white moles [shudder]
Patrick Malahide played him in the most recent BBC adaptation (which was filmed just down the road from me!), but omg David Bradley would have been a great Casubon also. Clearly the common denominator here is Must Have Played An Asshat Game Of Thrones Patriarch.
I’ve watched adaptations but this is the first time I’ve read the book, so knowing what’s to come is taking the edge off the worst DOROTHEA NO moments
At any rate Patrick Malahide and Filch both have the gross hair necessary for Casaubon, eh? I’m listening to the audio book and the reader (I forget who it is – Juliet Stevenson maybe?) has his voice down. SO grating. That sort of pedantic nasal quality starting every sentence. Brgghhrhggh, it is to shudder.
I don’t know if anyone else has read The Portrait of a Lady – I feel much the same about Dorothea/Casaubon as I did about Isabelle and whatsisname that she marries so terribly… only this one comes at the beginning and she goes into it with such high hopes! Ach! At least she has the hope of redemption, with the whole rest of the novel ahead.
I’m only halfway through the Miss Brooke section, but I read it twice because I wasn’t really retaining any of it the first time. I’m a little more in the swing of it now though and it’s going faster. I’m real curious to figure out if Dorothea is actually insane or not?
I also really liked the bit complaining about how brothers-in-law can be too agreeable (I forgot my copy today so I can’t quote it directly, but it was very accurate in my experience!)
I had to re-read the first few chapters, as well, to get into the ‘style’ of the novel. I found the Prelude to be much more difficultly written than the actual chapters, and I think that affected my getting into the novel. My recommendation to people starting this book is to start with Chapter 1, then, after you’re a few chapters in, go back and read the Prelude…
As to whether Dorothea is insane :O) , I would say she’s just a very young, highly sensitive woman with dreams she’s not quite sure how to fulfill and it gets the better of her sometimes. (I’m only on Chapter 5, though, so we’ll see!)
Okay, “insane” definitely is an exaggeration. I don’t think she really is. In fact I think I see a little bit of myself in her, which is why I want to yell NO GIRL, RUN! at the book. I sometimes charge ahead into really bad decisions with blinders on and at full speed ahead.
And good tip about the prelude — I didn’t get it at all. Maybe now that I’m a little farther in I’ll go back and see if I can make sense of it.
I know what you mean. I think it’s like on a soap opera, you just want to yell at the characters for being so oblivious, but that’s part of the fun!
I thought when I saw the mini-series, and even more strongly now I’m reading the book, that basically this is a novel all about Terrible Relationships. It’s enough to put one off marriage altogether! Unlike Jane Austen, this book makes you want to run a mile from anyone wedding-minded. Though anyone who’s been in a situation like one of the awful ones in Middlemarch can enjoy seeing their dysfunctional relationship has a good historical literary pedigree ;).
Confession: I am only up to chapter 5, but I LOVE IT! I have known so many Dorothea’s, and I love how George Elliott gets her so perfectly: How she gets so overly excited about her ‘plans’ for the villages that she completely ignores/hope goes away/ overlooks Chettam’s obsession with her, yet how she simultaneously acknowledges his obsession on some level and berates herself for it! How hurt she is when Celia refers to her plans as a ‘fad’. How Celia is a ‘cherub’ in her estimation until the ‘fad’ reference and so quickly becomes a thorn in her side after it, and yet again how quickly they ‘make -up’. Perfect description of sisterhood at that age. I love this novel so much!!!!
Favorite line, on Chettam: Certainly these men who had so few spontaneous ideas might be very useful members of society under good feminine direction, IF THEY WERE FORTUNATE IN CHOOSING THEIR SISTERS-IN-LAW!” Oh, Dorothea!
Yes. I love how acutely Eliot renders the relationship between the sisters. The last lines of Chapter 1? So sharp, and so funny:
As Celia bent over the paper, Dorothea put her cheek against her sister’s arm caressingly. Celia understood the action. Dorothea saw that she had been in the wrong, and Celia pardoned her. Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia’s mind towards her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?
I like the sisterly relationship too, and how it transcends discussions about suitors.
I almost quoted this very line!
Hmm, now that I think of it, Dorothea is kind of like a more pious and intellectual version of Austen’s Emma, with Celia as her Harriet Smith. Right down to the obliviousness about the man she thinks is interested in Celia actually being interested in her.
MR. BROOKE. WHAT A TURD. I am still trying to think through why he irritates me more than any other character.. well, beyond the overt misogyny and his general obliviousness to other people.
[I am on like, Book 6 or something.]
“Blah blah blah – blah blah, you know” total mansplainer with shit for brains. ugh.
Also, this is not focused on relationships or any of the larger themes of the book, but I totally feel Dorothea on her interest in tenant housing, wanting to make the world a better place, and that desire to be a philanthropist. I have very similar career goals but you know, I’m not doing it out of such a large sense of noblesse oblige.
ALSO (and maybe this is not the appropriate time to do this), would love to play a game where we all name potential careers for the ladies (and Ladies) of Middlemarch had they been in the 21st century. For instance, I’m not super crazy about Rosamond but I think if she had the opportunity. she would’ve been the head of her own communications/marketing firm, all Lean-In stylee. I’m not sure about her romantic prospects but she would’ve gotten that access to the wider (aristocratic) world she longs for.
Yes to the tenant housing – it is a much more interesting (to me) outlet for evangelism than missionary work!
He reminds me of the dad in Persuasion by Jane Austen – so bad he’s good. So clueless and so oblivious to his own cluelessness ;). He’s brilliant in the mini-series too, played really well – i.e. really annoyingly!
I actually highlighted that quote (“Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.”) because I loved it so much.
My favorite “Oh, honey, no” quote about Dorothea and Causabon: “However, Mr. Casaubon consented to listen and teach for an hour together, like a schoolmaster of little boys, or rather like a lover, to whom a mistress’s elementary ignorance and difficulties have a touching fitness.”
We should score it to “We Do Not Belong Together” from “Sunday in the Park With George.”
Ah, but at least George DID something, besides being a bad lover! Unlike Caschmaubon with his pedantic nonsense and notebooks. He lacks the cachet of being the eccentric artist, but has all the megalomania.
This is the first time I’ve read Middlemarch, and I’m kind of glad of that, because I read a ton of classics when I was in high school and I don’t think I would have realized how young Dorothea is. It’s good that 21 year olds generally don’t make irreversible decisions anymore.
I’m also getting into it as a project read more than a fun read. These days I read books like I watch tv (I just want the book to fall into my face with no effort on my part) and it was nice to dive into something harder. I even kept a list of words I didn’t know!
I had such a similar experience! She seemed so grown-up to me when I was younger, if misguided, and on re-read I am horrified that anyone was letting her make such (effectively) eternal decisions so badly.
Dorothea acts very grown-up (making and implementing her plans for cottages, being self-righteous and having a lot of opinions and convictions) and her supposed guardian Mr. Brooke is so immature (I roll my eyes SO HARD whenever he speaks), it seems like she has no one who can tell her not to make the decision to marry Casaubon. She’s an unsupervised child. I feel kind of bad for her 🙁
And yet it was definitely an era when it was expected that people would marry at an age that seems painfully young to us. What’s interesting to me is how Elliot seemed to have recognized this and rendered it in a way that is plainly obvious to the modern reader. The book overall (so far, and in spite of its flowery, far-flung metaphors) is shockingly modern in its themes and sensibilities.
I think Mr Brooke has a go at dissuading her when he first tells her about the proposal, in his own way, but since his own way is a)useless and b) MANSPLAINY it just sort of evaporates in the face of her obsession (if that’s the right word).
George Eliot did not choose to “live in sin” with Lewes as an alternative to getting married; she could not marry Lewes because he was already married and could not get a divorce. She was certainly not opposed to marriage on principle, since she wed John Cross two years after Lewes’s death.
Oh, you’re definitely right there was no alternative mode of being WITH Lewes, but that makes her decision to live with him no less radical. Let’s also speculate about what caused John Cross to leap/fall from the hotel balcony on their honeymoon!
Wait, what?
He lived, he was fine, but I’m sure it put a damper on things.
Right?? Like, he knew what he was getting into, presumably. There is, as far as I know, no evidence for an old-Testment-style wife swap surprise. Please tell me that you have a more entertaining theory than [ahem] a miscommunication as to the [ahem] nature of their [ahem] companionship.
Yes, the fact that she wasn’t a renegade Free Love proponent made her choice that much more difficult–especially since her beloved/awful brother Isaac refused to speak to her or acknowledge her until she married Cross.
And Cross’s Venetian Canal Adventure certainly rivals the Ruskin honeymoon for intrigue! If only they had TMZ.
The relationship with Isaac is so fraught, isn’t it? And the sorrows of the deaths of Lewes’ sons from his “first” marriage, who were essentially her own sons. Her life was so difficult, I think she was an incredible person to continue stubbornly along her path.
The ending of The Mill on the Floss is SO unsatisfying narratively yet so tragic when considered in light of GE’s relationship with Isaac.
After feeling baffled by Dorthea myself in college (like many others) this time around I felt more empathy towards her and here’s why: how many of us are also bad at predicting what will make us happy/fulfilled? I mean, she’s pretty extreme, but she has an extreme personality and I’m sure many of us have to a lesser degree overlooked warning signs because we’re just so attached to an idea that we have about a certain situation or someone, especially when we’re young. As I’m still in my 20s and contemplating life changes, it seems like a warning … but it also makes for SUCH GOOD FICTION. I’m on book four and I haven’t forced myself to pick it up yet. So glad I revisited this book.
It is better for you than you know to have realized this as early in life as possible, let me tell you.
Yeah. I also see in her a sort of…liberated willfulness, in that she goes ahead with her own independent ideas about Casaubon which, yeah, too bad they were WRONG but she did go in for what she thought were the right reasons. She comes across as really self-deprecating, which seems at first really annoyingly unliberated, but in contrast with her husband’s COMPLETE LACK of humility, her own extreme humbleness seems quite enlightened to me actually – though it took me a while to come around to this point of view!
Am I the only one who totally gets/LOVES Dorothea? I feel like Flaubert with Bovary: “Dorothea…c’est moi.” I read this book at 21 and now again at 28, and I find I have much the same feelings towards most of the people. Perhaps I am still waiting for my grown-up feelings? But the PRELUDE. My gosh-I love it so much. Love love love it. I have been accused of loving heavy-handed things in the past, but man oh man, the prelude sucker punches me right in all the feelings. Am I alone in that?
It is because I like Dorothea that I want to grasp her firmly by the shoulders and give her a good shake.
I like Dorothea, too! Partly because she seems to know, on some level, that she’s a bit much to deal with. She says, early on in the novel, after a spat with Celia, “Souls have complexions too: what will suit one, will not suit another.” I feel that shows she knows she has one personality type/set of feelings and doesn’t begrudge anyone else their own…
Dorothea’s personality is not at all similar to my own, but I often find myself in friendship with Dorothea’s. I admire their cleverness and how high they aim in life, even if they fail/fall sometimes!
I first read the book a year or so ago, and had just enough distance from my religious past to really understand her desire to be The Best At Good Works. Oh yes. That, and the desire to join oneself to a man who was Godly. Those aspirations made total sense with my upbringing.
She also greatly pained me because I have a close friend who, up until fairly recently, had a long history of only dating much older men and positioning herself as a student to Older Man Wisdom. In fact, Dorothea helped me understand that friend more, if despair for her no less.
I have that friend too! All the Dorothea/Celia scenes in vol 1 reminded me of said friend and I at university when she met her first husband (if Celia had a buzzcut and a Blur t-shirt). Thankfully second husband is her own age.
I do not like Dorothea, and when I first read this book, when I was younger than either of the sisters, I gave up reading it, because I didn’t care what happened to Dorothea. (I skimmed through to see what happened to Celia, though it’s long enough ago that I don’t remember, so it will still be a surprise this time around.)
I agree with the Spectator’s original review, that Dorothea and Casaubon as a couple “leaves the impression of something slightly unnatural and repellent,” and I would add, unsavory. When I was young and the skeevy old men wanted to share their wisdom and guidance with such a young and intelligent woman who was woefully ignorant (according to their lights), it grossed me out, as I would have put it then, and I did not then (and do not now) understand young women who want such a relationship. I guess on some level I grasped that they did not really think I was intelligent, more like a highly trainable dog that they could mold to their satisfaction and show off to their friends.
I knew (and know) many women who got entangled in such situations, and, since I grew up in a fundamentalist community, it often had the religious overtones as well, which makes Dorothea even more off-putting to me. Maybe it is partly because I can’t see her desire for Godliness as sincere. Most of the girls and women who professed Dorothea-like ideas in my community were also the most sanctimonious and hypocritical.
So I don’t know if it’s grown-up feelings, or if I was just born a curmudgeon myself, ha!
I definitely get her. When I was her age, I would have wanted nothing more than to marry an older genius, and I was just as clueless about things like emotional intelligence and any possibility of sexual connection. She frustrates me in her youth because I see her making so many mistakes that I made, but I also love her, and love her more as she matures and learns some hard and complicated truths.
Yeah, I would agree with the thoughts about the off-putting older-man thing, though at least in this case he’s skeevy mostly in the sense of objectifying her “desirable qualities” but without being a real lech as some men might have been.
Has anyone seen the film “Elegy,” with Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz? I recently saw it and…well, I can’t express my true feelings politely. It’s an older male professor seducing a young beautiful student, who actually falls in love with him, and he treats her like crap anyway even though he regrets it… and I just kind of wanted to punch everyone (especially Philip Roth – though admittedly I haven’t read the novel the film was based on so I’m being presumptuous) because basically the only critique of this brilliant-older-man-teaching-younger-woman thing was that her physical beauty and youth had tremendous power over him.
I’ve never been in my own situation of being attracted to a man and dating him chiefly because I was in awe of his superior intellect… and I can’t really imagine I ever would be, seeing how violently I reacted to Dorothea’s attraction to Casaubon… and yet i have definitely been in situations where I wanted to think well of someone, and sort of made up my own version of them in my head and then got involved ill-advisedly with them… so in that sense I can really relate to D’s sad situation.
Yes! I have seen Elegy. Actually with a professor double my age who would become my lover over the next couple of months. Oh the irony! 🙂 I can certainly understand the appeal of an older man. I think I needed it to get past my daddy issues and this was exactly what I “used” him for. But obviously him being so sophisticated and experienced was part of the attraction. It got old pretty fast though.
Wow, ironic indeed. Sounds like an interestingly effective way to confront such issues! Did you like the movie though?
I see the appeal of older men too – partly why I watched that movie! Ah, Ben Kingsley. The gross part to me is the power issue of “There’s so much I want to teach you…” etc. Or the reverse, with the older “wiser” man learning surprisingly valuable life lessons from the young innocent woman. I guess they’re easy enough positions to find oneself in… I think I’m just fed up with the ego stuff. Looking for true equality in relationships, I get so impatient with characters who deliberately eschew it and idolize their mates!
Celia is one of my favorite parts of this early section, mostly because her head seems to be much more reasonably screwed on than her sister’s. She’s affectionate, reasonably insightful (at least as regards other people). Which is why I’m always a little dissatisfied by the direction in which she matures over the course of the book, especially as Dorothea’s character arc is one of my favorites.
Also, a side query: Was the term “Dodo” in use yet as a synonym for dummies? Because there are moments when Celia uses the nickname where it feels like she ‘s maybe conveying just a soupcon of “idiot” along with sisterly affection.
I love Celia too. Everything said in her voice, from her perspective, is like one big Alicia Silverstone Eye Roll in my mind.
Oh man, yes. “As if,” as she tries on mum’s jewelry.
I just looked this up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and apparently the bird was named for the simpleton (and not the other way around). Dodo comes from the Portuguese “doudo” for fool, and the bird’s Latin name is “Didus ineptus”!
Amazing! The joys of language.
I think I may have been prejudiced in this respect by the mini-series. She comes across as a pretty much shallow and superficial in it… though I guess anyone would when up against Dorothea’s strenuous earnestness! They make a good pair, offsetting each other. They don’t seem to have much in common, though.
Oh, she’s so young! I forgot how very young she was. And such a steamroller of a personality, so convinced she has a clue about what she wants, so who is Mr Brooks to talk her out of it? I mean, he does try, kinda. But he’s so clueless and lost. And Celia just gets the pat on the head. They have no chance against Dorothea’s conviction. Even though they’re right and she’s wrong.
But it’s soul-killing, having her sit there being tutored and talked down to and thinking she’s just got a lot to learn from a learned man. She would totally have gone off to college and married the know-it-all in the classics department who irritated all of the other professors. She would have left college at 19 and thrown trying-to-be-grown-up cocktail parties and ignored the creeping fear that Her Professor wasn’t nearly as innovative and worthy as he’d made himself out to be.
Mr Brooks ineffectually mansplaining is one of the funniest things in the book. It’s sad for Dorothea’s sake, that he is who he is, but Eliot has him pegged perfectly, and I love it.
“They have no chance against Dorothea’s conviction.” YES! Great explanation!
I suggest imagining everything Mr Brooks says in the Celebrity Jeopardy Sean Connery accent for additional entertainment
hilarious, love it.
To me, Casaubon is Alan Rickman, for sure. And Dorothea: Rebecca Hall. Brooke: Jim Broadbent. Shall I stop? I can’t stop.
No keep going Alan Rickman is so good!
Emma Thompson as Mrs. Cadwallader, right? But Fred Vincy stumps me.
like a young Crispin Bonham-Carter kind of guy?
Fred/George Weasley.
Oh my god, I would do terrible things if it meant I could witness Emma Thompson as Mrs. Cadwallader.
WHO IS YOUR LADISLAW?!?!
Alan Rickman is too precious and lovely to play Casaubon. TOO PRECIOUS AND LOVELY BY FAR
Phew. There’s someone else here on Team Rickman. There is no cap on how hot I will think he is forever. I DO NOT CARE HOW OLD OR JOWLY HE GETS.
But Alan Rickman is so he’s just I mean …. Alan Rickman is sexy! Wait. No. Am I in a safe space here?
It’s true. Rickman is too lovable/sexy to be Causabon. It’s got be someone who’s yes, repellent, but also has a vulnerability that comes through. I can’t think of a good actor for Causabon!
Yes! Alan Rickman really is too sexy, there’s no way he would do for Causabon. Even though he did play Colonol Brandon in 1995 and I suppose the age difference in Sense and Sensibility isn’t TOO different to Middlemarch?
He is definitely sexy.
Young Alan Rickman: a VERY sexy and VERY bad boy in Les Liasons Dangerous.
I picture Casaubon as the second husband of the mom is six feet under, aka James Cromwell.
I love Mr Brooke! I mean, yes, he’s dopey and bumbling, but his heart is good. He tries (ineptly) to steer Dorothea away from Causubon; and yet, he lets make her own decisions — which, as Chettam points out) he did not have to do. Dorothea is underage; he could have forbidden the marriage.
Plus there is advantage (for him) in Dorothea marrying Chettam: their lands lie together, as he notes. Still he allows Dorothea the decency of believing she is capable of deciding, for herself, what is best for her own life.
Of course, the real tragedy of this book is that Lydgate (at this point in the novel) is such a misogynist as to think that women’s place is to be purely decorative. Poor blind dope.
I love this reading of everything! Though, I don’t totally agree with you about Brooke, because he is such a bad landlord, just not a good caretaker as a human really in general.
Ugh, fucking Lydgate.
Yeah. Brooke tried.
Oh crap, I have more to say – to me, the best part of Middlemarch is that it manages to be both incredibly cynical and funny and the most compassionate novel ever written. Just when you think you have the measure of someone – that they are greedy, or vain, or boring, you are also allowed to love them for some other part of their consciousness. Even Casaubon.
Yes! Everyone is flawed, and everyone is lovable. And recognizable!
Tolstoy was a genius at this. But he wasn’t funny!
YES this. Even Casaubon. Even goddamn Rosamund. I end up wanting to smack somebody six ways to Sunday, and also feeling deep sympathy for them.
Maybe I’m the only one who loves the prelude? I’ve never read Middlemarch before and kept forcing my husband to listen to lines as I first got started. I love the looking forward to renouncing riding line. LOVE IT. But my favorite is from the prelude:
Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognisable deed.
OH! And the “…until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve.” Also from the prelude. Basically, I think the whole prelude is brilliant and I will fight you if you disagree.
I’m having trouble taking Celia’s version of Dorothea when she calls her Dodo seriously…I keep picturing the bird, which certainly doesn’t jibe well with her personality.
I see it as reflecting on Celia rather than on Dorothea when she calls her that… it’s like in those moment she has no idea at all of who her sister actually is!
I feel quite sympathetic toward Dorothea. She’s well-aware of the way her interests mark her out as different and less-than-ideal in some fashion. Likewise, it rings true that she would set her sights on Casaubon when he seems to be the only person with similar intellectual pursuits within her radius.
One of the lines I marked was “The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on.”
To recognize, through her education, that she herself desired to explore her capacity to those limits, and expected and yearned for her relationship/marriage to be a part of that – seems to be one of the most Romantic expectations of what the world has to offer her (and she it.)
How unfortunate for Dorothea (and naive of her) that she is steadfast in her belief of this ideal to the point of putting on blinders of indications that the relationship will not develop in such a way.
This was one of the first sentences I underlined, among many. Sorry, future readers of my copy of Middlemarch. I went all fangirl on this writing:
“A man’s mind – what there is of it – has always the advantage of being masculine – as the smallest birch tree is of a higher kind than the soaring palm – and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality.”
I was upstate with my husband that weekend, and every time we had to make a decision like when to have dinner or which route to take, I would defer to him by saying I AM A MERE SOARING PALM TO YOUR BIRCH TREE. He thought I’d gone round the twist.
This is too funny!
BE the birch tree, Krissa! 😉
I love this bit, explaining why she loves / is marrying Casaubon:
“But something [Dorothea] yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearning but not instructions, what lamp was there but knowledge? Surely learned men kept the only oil; and who more learned than Mr. Casaubon?”
“Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.” God bless you, Celia Brooke, you practical minded little dummy. I love you so much.
She’s so blessedly wrong-headed at times. Love!
And while I remember the whole book on a basic level from reading it ages (and ages, let’s face it: I’m old) ago, and the writing in particular as being delicious, the one absolutely stuck-in-my-mind interaction was Celia & Dorothea and the casket of mom’s jewelry. It’s so exactly how my sister & I would have been: ‘oh, no, you take everything, I’d never wear that stuff!’ then ‘well, of course you should have all the emeralds. Even though you JUST SAID you’d never wear them. Whatever. My stuff is probably preferable to your shiny beautiful entrancing emeralds anyway.‘
I’m rereading this for the first time; can I just say that the foreshadowing is relentless and terrifying? It adds a much more fatalistic aspect to reading it than I felt last time.
Gary Oldman as Casaubon. That is all.
Oldman’s too attractive.
Or….I thinks so, anyway. A secretly hot guy would be no good for Casaubon. Shouldn’t he be totally repellant?
Has anyone else been noticing the chapter headings? My favorite is from Chapter IV: “1st Gent: ‘Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.’ 2nd Gent: ‘Ay, truly: but I think it is the world that brings the iron.'” I see this as a rallying cry for sympathy for most of the characters – they, as we all, make decisions and choose courses of actions based on the world around us as much as on ourselves.
And this one, oof: “[…] there was nothing external by which he [Casaubon] could account for a certain blankness of sensibility which came over him just when his expectant gladness should have been most lively […]” To ultimately realize your happiness depends on yourself and attitude, regardless of the course of action you decide upon (given the iron the world provided you for the occasion)…
There are so many instances in this novel where I’ll be reading along enjoying the plot unfolding when I suddenly find myself in the middle of a sentence that is so resonant/painful to contemplate/striking I have to pause.
One thing I love about this novel is the style of Eliot’s writing. For most chapters, Eliot wraps up the scene we just witnessed with a poignant thought or observation about the time, the characters, humanity in general. It makes the novel very readable and easy to relate to.
I think Eliot makes Dorothea beautiful, not to emphasize her goodness, but rather to show how limiting beauty could be for a woman at this time. Chettam only really loves Dorothea because she’s beautiful. Causabon contemplates marrying her because she is beautiful (and she worships him). No one other than her sister really sees her true character. If Eliot really wanted to use beauty as a short-hand for good, then Rosamund Vincey would not be the problem she is. Mr. Brooke almost sees Dorothea’s true nature (stubborn, fanatical, thirsty for knowledge), but he dismisses it because she is young. Mrs. Cadwallader seems to have much more agency and that may be, partially, because she is not classically good looking. Celia is one of the more appealing characters in this section because she is so practical and clear-eyed. She doesn’t love Chettam, excatly, (or at least not in the quasi religious way her sister loves Causabon), but she is operating by the rules of her society and getting what will best suit her.
And in that sense Celia and Chettam are perfect for each other. He didn’t really have his heart set on Dorothea, just she was the sister who seemed most likely to be marriageable, that’s how it seems to me. Casaubon, on the other hand, does certainly assess Dorothea’s virtues, being beauty and goodness and an industrious mind, but he sees them only as things which would befit him in a wife, not as things to love about someone. Which in a twisted way makes him and Dorothea perfect for each other too – the classic narcissist and the classic self-effacer go hand in hand, just not so much as equal partners.
“…to show how limiting beauty could be for a woman at this time.”
Yes. Also, in this respect, look at Mary Garth. (Who might be my favorite character in Middlemarch, although to be frank, I have about eleven favorite characters in this book.) Mary Garth gets ignored by everyone except Fred Vincy because she’s not pretty; and because she’s not upper class; and yet she is the best woman in the book, I’d argue. Well, outside of Celia and Dorothea, who are also both excellent women. But not as tough and steadfast and unswerving as Mary.
Like a few other readers, I’m lagging a bit behind (finishing up Chapter 10). Already soooo much great language. Certainly, one of my favorite sentences to this point:
“We mortals, men & women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast & dinner time; keep back the tears & look a little pale about the lips, & in answer to inquiries say, ‘Oh, nothing!’ Pride helps us; & pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.”
I’m in awe of Eliot’s character development. In a great many novels, the reader is presented with characters that seem more or less fixed (which is to say the reader easily recognizes them throughout the work.) In “Middlemarch,” Eliot’s characters seem to develop more gradually & with new insightful details revealed along the way. For me, the result is a constant reassessment of each character. I like that … a lot.
I don’t at this point in my reading feel connected to any one character more than another. I wouldn’t necessarily talk to Causabon at a sit-down affair, but he might be interesting in a bloated, overly self-conscious way while briefly bellied up to a bar. One would definitely have to be tipsy & humming a tune in your head to filter out a lot of nonsense.
I find Mr. Brooks to be the most irritating character, because he just prattles on about anything & everything. If you’ve done or experienced something, you can be sure Brooks has done it before you & perhaps, he thinks, in a much more interesting & considered way.
First meeting with Ladislaw left me cold & unimpressed. I feel like he’d be a self-entitled “internet entrepreneur” sitting around a Silicon Valley bar all day talking about himself if “Middlemarch” were set in contemporary times. And he’d always be in close proximity to a mirror. I’ve met the type before.
Celia, I find charming but suspect a small dose would go a very long way. I wouldn’t go out of my way to seek her company. I love that she seems always to say exactly what she thinks..
Dorothea seems like a lot of my friends … minus the obsession with religion & 19th century sexual mores. She’s definitely smart, opinionated & a bit self-righteous. I relate to her attempts to find a meaningful place in the world. I can’t wait to see how her character develops.
Eliot wrote during the Industrial Revolution. Literature went through a lot of change during this period. However, we are only concerned with the well-off thus far. Poor & working people are only mentioned as objects in the aspirations of middle-to-upper class fulfillment. I am anxious to see if this changes.
At this point, that’s more than I thought I’d have to say. I look forward to hearing everybody’s impressions.
True that the character development is beautifully done, and Middlemarch itself is a great character, gradually revealed.
George Eliot’s narrator’s tendency to aphorism is interesting to me in a lot of ways; I’m really liking the back-and-forth pull, which other people have already pointed out, between the action of the story and the narrator’s pauses for reflective observation. I haven’t quite formulated all my thoughts about it, but I can’t resist quoting some favorite lines from this section:
“He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons: it seemed strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable.” (I love how when Eliot satirizes people’s habits of thought, it’s impossible not to recognize them as one’s own habits of thought, even as one is smiling at Sir James and his ENTIRELY RATIONAL FEELINGS, WHAT, EVERYONE FEELS THE WAY I DO.)
“But any one watching keenly the steady convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.”
“Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.” (Speaking of the limitations of beauty. I can’t stand Rosamond for most of the novel, but moments like this go a long way toward explaining her.)
“‘What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?’ said Sir James. ‘He has one foot in the grave.’
‘He means to draw it out again, I suppose.'”
Also, Celia on the subject of people who “talk well on all subjects”: “‘They must be very dreadful to live with. Only think! at breakfast, and always.'” BLESS.
I confess to having been off-put by Dorothea (at least at first) when I first read this novel. But on this reading I’m really getting a sense of how intellectually stifling her environment has been. Her education has been limited to “the shallows of ladies’ school literature” and the “tinkling and smearing” that make up a young lady’s artistic and musical accomplishments. No wonder she’s so religious; that’s pretty much the only acceptable outlet for her desire for learning and action. And no wonder Casaubon seems like a genius to her. Who’s she going to compare him with, after all?
“…when Eliot satirizes people’s habits of thought, it’s impossible not to recognize them as one’s own habits of thought…” Yes, this, exactly. Every time I read the book I’m trying to figure out which character I MOST identify with (Farebrother, it has been Farebrother for the last 8 years), but I keep tripping up on the fact that I recognize thought patterns in all of them!
I am frantically re-reading to catch up, but something that occurs to me this time is that Dorothea is also right, if only by accident, that the people around her would not be able to tell if Casaubon is a genius.
“And no wonder Casaubon seems like a genius to her. Who’s she going to compare him with, after all?” Yes! This is what I keep thinking. There’s so much foreshadowing that makes you want to say NO DOROTHEA DONT DO IT but at the same time, of course she’s enamored of Casaubon. Who else can offer her what she thinks he can?
My first boyfriend, when I was 20, was 10 years my senior and I thought he was soOOoo intelligent and soOOooooo worldly. I’m now 31 and realize that he wasn’t actually all that smart and worldly and amazing, he was just older and full of himself, is all. But how can you know, if you have no-one to compare to? And how much more so in Dorothea’s environment, where she really, really has no one to compare to, and no other outlets, besides? I’m pulling for you, Dorothea!
I think that’s the joy of re-reading stuff as you get older. At least for me. I’m so much more tolerant and understanding of literature in which people create their own personal tragedies – Edith Wharton used to drive me insane.
I have a reflex anti-Dorothea instinct, because she is so effing earnest. But I am supressing it.
How about Mickey Rourke?
Casaubon must look like the man who proposes to Keira Knightly in Pride and Prejudice. Celia’s insights were spot on and DoDo never once took them into consideration.
Now I want to see the alternate fictional universe where, before her marriage, Dorothea meets Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins as an old married couple…
Aaaaand this is where I started weeping on the DC Circulator:
Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labours; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him
Reminds me of this moment from Chapter 12 (Rosamond and Mary talking about the Vincys’ governess):
“Yes; but Miss Morgan is so uninteresting, and not young.”
“She is interesting to herself, I suppose.”
On The Millions this morning, Gary Shtenygart added an excellent note to the reading of Middlemarch, for anyone who is too steeped in Russian novels to handle all the quiet fortitude:
“First, I would insert some hot Russian emotion into the chilly scenes by hand. So if a character is carrying on some abstruse conversation about standing for parliament or whatever, I would interrupt it in my mind with: “And then Casaubon Casaubonovich threw himself around her neck and cried violently.” Problem solved.”
Casaubon Casaubonovich! That made me laugh.
Off Tolstoy: Every ardent, naive, worthy 19th century heroine is unhappy in her own way. See esp. Isabella Archer and Natasha Rostova.
Toasties~ According to my Kindle I am 1% complete w this book and so far it is BREATHTAKING and I AM IN LOVE and THANK YOU NICOLE.
“With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness;…” MY GOD.
I am still reading this very slowly but need to comment on Dorothea’s stance on puppies! ON PUPPIES! She is such an indifferent B to Sir James it is remarkable. And UGH to marriage old Clergy man! You want to go to college and a Congressional internship not marriage to this dude! Dotty uncle is very subtly and tactfully trying to tell you this is a bad deal! :le sigh:
OK, the Causabon in the movie in my mind is Peter Capaldi at his driest and most gaunt. I can’t attach a picture, can I? Like this: bit.ly/19KmdV2 Because I imagine him as sort of dejuiced, in contrast with Dorothea, who is so young and so fresh, emotionally and physically. (Peter Capaldi is a major silver fox IRL, but he does do dejuiced really well.)
But has anyone noticed that Causabon is totally writing the Golden Bough? Which was published after Middlemarch, but it reminds me of that so much. Frazer, the GB author, was later criticized for never having done any fieldwork but just working on the works come before him.
We haven’t got to Fred Vincy yet, have we? Because the part about the horse-trading is so painful I can barely read it…
I know I'm way way late to the party, but I just found this website and am so excited that people were discussing one of my favorite books! I have a lot of sympathy for Dorothea, and feel like I get her because I was somewhat similar. I first read Middlemarch and Sense and Sensibility when I was 15-16 or so, and I totally ignored the message in Middlemarch (or else I actually just didn't see myself in Dorothea), while internalizing from S&S that trying to be with someone your age whom you find attractive will get you burned, and older, "ugly" men are the responsible choice, because they are kinder. (I was also pretty much raised by wolves and had to educate myself about human relationships via literature, so I often took distorted lessons from these books). Anyway, the result was that I attached myself as an undergraduate to a sort of older graduate student Casaubon because I knew I had no survival skills from my family of origin, and the fact that he could teach them to me made him attractive. I had less than no clue about sexual attraction or following my own feelings or instincts, or about emotional compatibility in particular (I didn't even know that was a Thing). I didn't find him a genius or anything, though he certainly saw himself as such, and it took a few years to understand that my lack of survival skills were a big part of what he found attractive about me, and he was trying to do his best to keep me from acquiring them. But yes, I feel for her, and can see how she could do what she did. I'm also very personally glad that she ended up with Ladislaw, though he seems kind of high-maintenance.