The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

If you have just finished reading "Middlemarch", this is the book for you.

George Eliot

This is a book that does three things: firstly, it takes you on a guided tour of places associated with George Eliot, and tells you all about her life, and her struggle to escape the limiting parameters she had grown up with. Secondly, it is a considered appreciation of the novel and guides you in your understanding of why this book is rated so highly. Thirdly, the narrative also acts as a kind of autobiography, telling you about the development of Rebecca Mead as a writer and as a woman.

So we have not one but two good writers to enjoy when we take up this book. Eliot is quoted liberally from her letters and novels, and Mead takes the role of a knowledgeable guide to her life and works who is also prepared to open up to the reader and share her personal experiences, some of which are similar to Eliot's.

I have to quote from the book to give you a feeling for how it works, and for me it works beautifully and is a delight to read, but I have had to cut it a lot:

One morning in late spring I caught the train from London to Nuneaton. I'd only been to the Midlands once before, when I was eighteen, on a week-long school trip spent on a barge that wended its way through the area's network of canals.... The journey takes about an hour on the fast train, which further flattens the fields and pastures and turns the canals into leaden streaks alongside its tracks.

The Midlands are lacking in drama, topographically speaking, and George Eliot is the great advocate of the loveliness to be found in their modest plainness. In chapter 12 of Middlemarch, she paints a picture of the land in which she grew up that is as attentive to each facet and flaw of its subject as the portraits by Dutch masters she admired. "Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood," she writes. "The pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and the trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew..." 

The countryside I saw through the train window wasn't at all like the coastal English landscape of my youth,... , but the note of nostalgia in Eliot's description resonated with me. It was more than twenty years since I'd lived in England, and returning always induced a melancholy in me... These days when I took the train from London to my hometown I was always struck by the understated beauty of the countryside. I'd failed to appreciate it when I was immersed in it...

I first moved to New York to do a graduate degree in journalism, expecting to return to England after a year... Much of the time I felt like I was wasting time. But I also got a part-time job at a magazine where I did research for writers and answered the phones and even wrote a few short pieces, learning skills and gaining experience that only a real deadline and a real pay cheque could provide....

.....

My train arrived in Nuneaton, a market town ten miles north of Coventry. There's a bronze statue of George Eliot in the centre of town, where she sits on a low wall, awash in long skirts, thick hair resting on her shoulders, eyes cast down, a book at her side. Not far away, past slightly dilapidated chain stores, there's a pub named for her, the George Eliot hotel...

A rather romantic (modern) statue of George Eliot

Also within Riversley Park is the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery, which owns a substantial collection of objects related to George Eliot, many of them acquired from local families. When I visited, the gallery in which the collection was usually displayed was being repainted, and Catherine Nesbit, the museum's manager, took me into an upstairs room where the objects were being stored. Wearing latex gloves, she drew items out of boxes one by one and carefully unfolded the tissue paper they had been wrapped in, as if they were the most precious and unexpected of Christmas presents.

.... I thought of a letter George Eliot wrote to Harriet Melusina Fay Peirce, an American activist on behalf of women's welfare... "I was too proud and ambitious to write: I did not believe that I could do anything fine, and I did not choose to do anything of that mediocre sort which I despised when it was done by others," she wrote. I imagined her as a stiff, self-conscious, inhibited girl, warily examining herself for signs of greatness, too proud and too fearful to lay paper to desktop and try.

Griff House, Nuneaton, according to Mead it is impossible to imagine as it was.

As it was when George Eliot grew up there.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

It seems to me that this book's theme is the problem in male/ female relationships due to the inequality of education and employment which existed in European society in the nineteenth century, and continues to exist in many societies to this day.

To start with, if Dorothea had been able to achieve something (intellectual, spiritual or practical) on her own behalf she would not have been so keen to assume a role as a man's helpmeet. Secondly, if she had had sufficient education to engage with Mr Casaubon intellectually, she wouldn't have overvalued his intellectual capability, and then married him on those grounds. As it was, she took him at his own (very high) opinion, and he was insecure, suspicious and jealous when he realised that she might see that he was not as capable as she had first supposed. Dorothea is a fine person but is very conscious that she is, as a young woman who has no particular role in her community, considered less influential and effective than other adults, and is at the mercy of her advisers whenever she wants to take action. She wants to take action by marrying Will, who is a stranger to her society, and she finally grasps (it seems to take several bolts of lightning to show her) that she can take the initiative and do this if she wants to.

Mary Garth is the only woman in the story who is independent in that she earns money as an old man's housekeeper/ maid. She has in front of her a good role-model in the shape of her mother, who is educated to a certain level - school-teacher level -, can teach her own children and complete household tasks at the same time. Mary - like the rest of her family - seems to have a stock of confidence and self-possession that help her to weather her changes in fortune without self-pity. If she had had more education and more independence she would have been able to marry the man she loved without any problem - but the story is about Fred's development into maturity, not hers. She is already mature in that her emotions are fixed and stable, and she can take care of the elderly and of children without questioning her role. That is all she needs to be able to do.

The trouble that one grieves over the most is that of the Lydgate/ Rosamund relationship. Lydgate has high ideals and wants to be able to contribute findings to medical science.

even with close knowledge of Lydgate's character: for character too is a process and an unfolding. The man was still in the making .. and there were both virtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding... Lydgate's conceit was of the arrogant sort, never simpering, never impertinent, but massive in its claims and benevolently contemptuous. He would do a great deal for noodles, being sorry for them, and feeling quite sure that they could have no power over him:... Lydgate's spots of commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, ... that distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardor, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without his telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons.

(Note that the author is ironic about furniture coming before women. The furniture doesn't matter but the lack of judgment about women becomes his undoing.)

 He wants a funded hospital so that he doesn't have to depend on selling quack medicines to keep himself in funds: he doesn't believe in them. He wants to use his brain; to observe illness and what causes and hinders it like a modern scientist. However, his fellow doctors are jealous of his superiority of manner and dislike his lofty ideals. He meets Rosamund regularly to admire her singing and for a pleasant flirtation but she is determined to have him, finding his gentlemanly manners as attractive as his titled connections.

The marriage works well as long as she responds to being his cherished pet, but Rosamund has no intellectual projects and is easily bored. She enjoys flirting with Lydgate's cousin and disobeys Lydgate's proviso that she doesn't ride a spirited new horse. Disappointment follows in which Lydgate seems to be the kindest and most forgiving of men. However, Rosamund has not changed... She can't understand Lydgate's work, she can't understand his priorities or ambitions. She can only tell him he hasn't made her happy. Making R. happy means indulging her whims. She has none of Dorothea's religious selflessness nor Mary Garth's common sense. She is a child in that she can't identify with an adult's preoccupations, and the novel tells us clearly that she has never even thought about where money comes from. Here is the result of her lack of proper education: had she been educated to the idea that she must make her own money to pay for her own fun she would have been good at it because she is clearly intelligent in a way, will act on her own  initiative and doesn't lack confidence.

But poor Lydgate with his high ideals! finding himself in debt, losing his good reputation and with useless interference and a grudging attitude from Rosy, he starts hitting the opiates and betting on himself in the billiard-hall. "Glittering-eyed" and full of nervous energy, he plays well for most of an evening, but can't stop when he starts to lose. Fred steps in and stops his run.

Happily Lydgate had ended by losing in the billiard-room, and brought away no encouragement to make a raid on luck. On the contrary, he felt unmixed disgust with himself the next day...

 He at last gets the loan, but it's tainted and compromised and leads to his character being suspected of corruption.

He felt himself becoming violent and unreasonable as if raging under the pain of stings: he was ready to curse the day on which he had come to Middlemarch. Everything that had happened to him there seemed a mere preparation for this hateful fatality, which has come as a blight on his honorable ambition, and must make people who had only vulgar standards regards his reputation as irrevocably damaged. ... His marriage seemed an unmitigated calamity; and he was afraid of going to Rosamond before he had vented himself in this solitary rage, lest the mere sight of her should exasperate him and make him behave unwarrantably. 

Dorothea knows what to say and Rosamond doesn't because R can't even begin to imagine how her husband feels (here there's a class rift; she comes from trade and he comes from the officer class, thus notions of honour very important to him): D. says:

I know the unhappy mistakes about you. I knew them from the first moment to be mistakes. You have never done anything vile. You would not do anything dishonourable.  

The Lydgates' is a more gripping story because it's all imperfections and compromises - having married they have to make great adjustments, and neither would have married the other if they had been more analytical about what they really expected or wanted beforehand.

But sometime in the future: "he once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains."   EXTRAORDINARily rude and resentful thing for Lydgate to say!

This book certainly makes one wonder if one understands the hopes and dreams and even moral priorities of one's husband, and in fact, makes one worry that one doesn't understand him well enough. It would be helpful if a man were more communicative - but George Eliot had a wonderful breadth of understanding of different mixtures of strengths and weaknesses in characters of both genders, and she makes one feel ashamed of one's shortcomings in this area.

The book has a number of clergymen in it and within the novel none of them talk about religion. Only the most hypocritical character does. None of the characters is held up to be judged by the tenets of Christianity in so many words, but they show a changing society where town and trade, with their own values, are playing a larger part, but the contribution of the landowning class is still needed.

How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton part 2: Character in realist fiction vs modernist fiction

Here is Prof. E. writing about an important change in literature, and he makes the changes seem clear and easily understood. I have edited drastically taking out some of his examples:

One of the achievements of the great European realist novel, ... is to illustrate this weaving of character and context. Characters in this kind of fiction are seen as caught up in a web of complex mutual dependencies. they are formed by social and historical forces greater than themselves, and shaped by processes of which they may be only fitfully conscious. ... As George Eliot puts it, there is no private life that has not been influenced by a wider public one.

 Characters in the realist tradition are generally presented as complex, credible, fully rounded individuals. Many of them seem a lot more real than the people next door. 

The modernists are in search of new modes of characterisation, suitable to a post-Victorian age. ...The typical realist character tends to be reasonably stable and unified, ... As such, it reflects an era when identity was felt on the whole to be less problematic than it is today. People could still see themselves as the agents of their own destinies. they had a fairly acute sense of where they stopped and other people began. their personal and collective history, for all its ups and downs, seems to represent a coherent evolution, one which was more likely to issue in felicity than in catastrophe.  

 Modernism, by contract, pitches the whole concept of identity into crisis.... Once you start to see human consciousness as unfathomably intricate, it is hard to contain it within the well-defined limits of Walter Scott's Rob Roy or Robert Louis Stephenson's Jim Hawkins. Instead, it begins to spill out over the edges, seeping into its surroundings as well as into other selves....Woolf's fiction, where identity is more elusive and indeterminate than it is in Trollope or Thomas Hardy. ...It can involve a traumatic sense of loss and anxiety. Having too little identity can be quite as disabling as having too much.

If the self is bound up with its changing experiences, then it no longer has the unity and consistency of Bunyan's Everyman or Shakespeare's Coriolanus. It is less able to recount a coherent story of itself. Its beliefs and desires do not necessarily hang together to form a seamless whole. Neither do the works in which such characters appear. 

T.S. Eliot is also disdainful of mere consciousness, and largely indifferent to individual personality. what seizes his attention are the myths and traditions which shape the individual self.... and these forces lie far below the individual mind, in a kind of collective unconscious. It is here that we all share in the same timeless myths and spiritual wisdom.

There is another reason why the idea of character as Balzac or Hawthorne knew it no longer seems feasible in modern times. This is because in an age of mass culture and commerce, human beings come to seem increasingly faceless and interchangeable. We can ... not distinguish easily between Vladimir and Estragon. ...Leopold Bloom ... is sharply individualised, yet he is also an anonymous Everyman whose thoughts and feelings could be almost anybody's. His mind is magnificently banal.

So interesting, because one thinks that both views are true at the same time!  Is that possible? I don't know about Bloom because one book I keep meaning to read is James Joyce's Ulysses. will I ever? When there are so many great books to read?

There was something I was going to write about and I forgot what it was before I had time to write it in my blog, and now I feel very cheated, because whatever it was is now lost forever. I do fear I have the dementia that comes from having too much to do in the way of dreary job tasks. But my mother's dementia is worse than it was, because she is confused about her money now, and I am afraid that she will start to give her small pot of money away to an undeserving cause. She will then forget she has done it and wonder what has happened.