Between Aspiration and Accomplishment

 

THE GULF BETWEEN ASPIRATION

AND ACCOMPLISHMENT:

REBECCA MEAD ON SAINT THERESA

AND "MIDDLEMARCH"

“Middlemarch—both the novel and the fictional town for which it is named—is limited by the constraints of ordinary life.”

Among the most enduring of 19th-century novels there are a handful with opening sentences that have achieved proverbial status. Consider Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” or Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” These are lines as memorable and as often-reached-for as a Shakespearean verse. Brough the conjunction of irony and verity, each opening sentence aspires to universality and conveys to readers that they are in safe authorial hands.

It would be hard, however, for even the most devoted aficionado of George Eliot to argue that the opening sentence of Middlemarch should be numbered among the greats in terms of memorability, effectiveness, or enticement. The novel opens with a Prelude—not so much an introduction to the novel’s characters or context as an announcement of its themes. It begins with a rhetorical question: “Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand in hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?” Modern-day readers, invited at the outset of what is a dauntingly long book to reflect upon their familiarity with the life of a 16th-century Spanish saint, might be forgiven for meekly responding, “Er, me?”

George Eliot—who was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819, and who adopted her masculine pen name in 1857 when she published her first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life—was herself very familiar with the life of Saint Theresa, a Spanish noblewoman of passionate religious conviction who first joined a religious order when she was twenty years old, and who, over the subsequent almost half-century, became an influential theologian, mystic, and religious reformer. The opening sentence of Middlemarch refers to an incident in which the young Theresa and a sibling, seized with precocious religious conviction, set off from Ávila with the intention of being gloriously executed for their faith by non-Christians, only to be thwarted by family members who stopped them in their outing.

It is described in Saint Theresa’s autobiography, which Eliot would doubtless have read multiple times and in different languages: in 1867, three years before Middlemarch was published, she sought out a Spanish-language copy while on a trip through Spain, and seems to have been mildly irked when, in a bookshop, an effort was made to sell her a photograph instead. Eliot might have expected that her contemporary readers would be at least somewhat familiar with the Life of the saint—which is, modern-day readers may be surprised to discover if they look at it, approachable and even winningly ironical in its depiction of its narrator’s early religious ardor. “As soon as I saw it was impossible to go to any place where people would put me to death for the sake of God, my brother and I set about becoming hermits,” Saint Theresa writes of the abortive effort at martyrdom cited by Eliot. “We contrived, as well as we could, to build hermitages, by piling up small stones one on the other, which fell down immediately; and so it came to pass that we found no means of accomplishing our wish.”

Eliot’s opening sentence is ironical, too, though a reader who is new to her voice may not immediately discern the irony amidst the more off-putting elements of Eliot’s prose, such as the alarming capitalization of “Time” and the invoking of an obscure-ish saint. Middlemarch has acquired such a forbidding reputation of literary gravitas that a reader embarking upon it for the fist time may not be primed to expect humor, but it is there from the start, if in subtle form. The novel’s opening sentence suggests that the author is taking no less an object for her novelistic consideration than “the history of man” and the “experiments of Time”—even though, as the reader has been informed by the novel’s subtitle, these large themes are to be explored within the narrow framework of “A Study of Provincial Life.” Like Saint Theresa herself, the novel has epic ambition.

But, also like the young Theresa, Middlemarch—both the novel and the fictional town for which it is named—is limited by the constraints of ordinary life. The novel’s first sentence may not be pithy; it may even be clunky. But with it, Eliot establishes what is to be her theme, developed with complexity throughout the novel: What happens when grand aspiration dwindles into lesser accomplishment?

Grand aspirations are everywhere in Middlemarch, not least nurtured within the breast of Dorothea Brooke, the nineteen-year-old heroine to whom the reader is introduced as soon as the generalities of the Prelude give way to the specifics of the narrative. (“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress,” the fist chapter of Book One of Middlemarch begins—a much more inviting way to start a story.) Dorothea, we can safely assume, has read the autobiography of Saint Theresa.

With the first sentence, Eliot establishes what is to be her theme, developed with complexity throughout the novel: What happens when grand aspiration dwindles into lesser accomplishment?

When we are first introduced to her, it is through the eyes of more conventional Middlemarch dwellers, whose regard for the as-yet-unmarried Dorothea’s high birth and good manners is qualified by the disquieting sense that she also has some unfortunate habits, such as kneeling down on a brick floor to pray by the side of a sick laborer or having “strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books!” Even Dorothea’s most fond allies, her family, are skeptical of her predilection for self-denial. “She likes giving up,” remarks Dorothea’s more down-to-earth sister, Celia, with comic generalization. And the ironical voice of the novel’s narrator has fun with Dorothea’s high-minded religiosity, noting, apropos of Dorothea’s fondness for horseback riding, that “she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.”

Dorothea’s inclination is not to withdraw to a cloister for a life of private devotion, however. Today we might recognize her motivations to be not so much religious as social and ethical: She wants to do good in the world, which in her case is provincial England around 1830. Dorothea wishes to reform the lives of the tenant farmers on her uncle’s property not by improving their souls for the hereafter, but by building them new and better cottages for the here and now. Early in the novel Dorothea marries a clergyman, Edward Casaubon, but her attraction to him is not due to any exemplary faith on his part, but rather because she believes—mistakenly, it turns out—that he has a great mind, and that by participating in a minor way in his intellectual project, she might contribute to the greater good of the world.

About halfway through Middlemarch—after considerable marital disappointment, among other developments—Dorothea gives an account of the form of religious belief that she has come to hold, which is personal rather than canonical: “Bat by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

To depict Dorothea’s youthful piety, George Eliot drew on her own. Eliot grew up in far humbler circumstances than did her heroine: as the daughter of a land agent on a country estate in Warwickshire, she might have anticipated a career as a farmer’s wife, not as the editor, critic, novelist, and poet that she became. Enormously gifted intellectually, she attended school until the age of sixteen, and thereafter continued her studies with tutors while also keeping house for her widowed father. In her teens, she turned her capacious mind to questions of theology, and, like her heroine in Middlemarch, went through a period of devout observance and even ostentatious denial. She disapproved of singing, other than of hymns, and renounced the reading of fiction as a frivolous distraction. “I am ready to sit down and weep at the impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing even a fraction of the sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books and in life,” she wrote to a friend in 1839, when she was the age of Dorothea at the outset of Middlemarch. “Have I then any time to spend on things that never existed?”

By the time Eliot became the author of Middlemarch, thirty years on from writing that letter, she had long been what we would now call agnostic, having undergone a crisis of faith in her twenties and come to the conclusion that the tenets of the church could not stand up to intellectual scrutiny. But Eliot maintained her own adherence to the credo expressed by Dorothea in Middlemarch: that individual acts of goodwill, however small, contributed to the widening of the skirts of light, and the narrowing of the struggle with darkness. Eliot characterized herself as a “meliorist,” a word that she believed was of her own coinage, deriving from the Latin word melior, which means “better.”

Meliorism might best be understood as a belief that the world is gradually improving, or can gradually be improved, through individual, incremental actions in the direction of good. Eliot had come to believe, contrary to her youthful skepticism about the utility of fiction, that the depiction of “things that never existed”—the writing of novels—might itself be a way of making the world better. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures,” she once explained.

By this measure, even the mere activity of reading a novel can be a way of bettering the world, if in doing so the reader expands their capacity for sympathizing with the choices and predicaments of characters whose circumstances may be profoundly different from their own, but whose moral and ethical dilemmas are completely recognizable. The social world of Dorothea Brooke, a daughter of the English landed gentry in the early 19th century, may be unfamiliar to a modern-day reader of Middlemarch; in many ways the conventions of her life, and the expectations that attend her, are as peculiar and obsolete as the practice of riding sidesaddle, the activity that Dorothea so looked forward to renouncing.

On the other hand, the larger world of the town of Middlemarch—which, Eliot shows her readers, is experiencing political upheaval in the form of the Reform Act that extended the franchise beyond the upper classes, and which is bracing itself for the possible spread to its precincts of the global cholera pandemic that occurred in the 1820s and 1830s—has more in common with our own time than we might at first imagine.

Meanwhile, Eliot’s rendering of her characters’ consciousnesses as they come to terms with the disjunction between aspiration and accomplishment needs no explanatory footnote. “For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective,” Eliot writes of Dorothea near the outset of the novel. “What could she do, what ought she to do?” This is a state of mind that a young reader of today will likely recognize, just as Saint Theresa would have done five hundred years ago.

If readers can be forgiven for grumbling at the first sentence of Middlemarch, the novel’s last sentence is rightfully regarded as one of the greatest ever written. No spoilers—it won’t be quoted here. A first-time reader will have to arrive at it in their own time—after weeks or even months spent in the company of George Eliot and the struggling, erring human creatures who inhabit the fictional town of Middlemarch. Suffice it to say that that the sentence returns to the theme established at the novel’s beginning—the question of what counts as accomplishment for that large majority of individuals who may not have the capacity or the context to achieve the spiritual grandeur attained by the remarkable female saint with whom the book opens. What might the rest of us aspire to? Now read on, reach the ultimate sentence, and see the light widen.

_________________________________________________

Excerpted from the Restless Classics edition of Middlemarch by George Eliot. Published by Restless Books. Introduction copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Mead. All rights reserved.

Rebecca Mead

Rebecca Mead has been a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine since 1997. She is the author, most recently, of My Life in Middlemarch (Crown, 2014).

Middlemarch 2021

The Hidden Narrative in Middlemarch That 2021 Readers Will Spot

Diana Rose Newby on George Eliot's Approach to Contagion

By Diana Rose Newby

---

February 12, 2021

 

When Taylor Swift first released the track list for her latest cottagecore album, a certain corner of literary Twitter lit up over the title of its eighth song. A little sadly for us, the lyrics of “Dorothea” don’t support the connection we quickly drew to Dorothea Brooke, fictional heroine of George Eliot’s Victorian novel Middlemarch. But regardless of whether Taylor had Eliot’s provincial character on her mind when she named the track, our reaction to it encapsulated the novel’s uncanny ubiquity in recent months. Since the start of the pandemic, it’s felt to me as though everyone has been reading Middlemarch.

On the face of it, this surge of interest in Eliot’s best-known work might seem unremarkable. But there’s a not-so-obvious reason that the 19th-century novel may have felt newly relevant for 2020 readers. Eliot probably conceived Middlemarch as a story about contagion—a plot with epidemic written into its core. And if we read it closely, the finished product is still “about” contagion. Middlemarch, in other words, is a pandemic novel without the pandemic.

You won’t have come across Middlemarch in the pandemic lit listicles that have proliferated this year. On its surface, this isn’t a contagion narrative—it’s a Victorian marriage plot. Eliot follows the lives of two protagonists, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, as each makes an unfortunate match: Dorothea to the mediocre and moody academic Edward Casaubon; Lydgate to town beauty Rosamond Vincy, who turns out to be scheming and spoiled. It’s through Lydgate, a young physician, that the novel veers most closely toward an explicit concern with contagious disease. When he moves to Middlemarch, Lydgate aspires to work at a fever hospital, with plans to open “a new ward in case of the cholera coming to us.”

Cholera never does come to Middlemarch in the way that Lydgate anticipates, yet Eliot’s notes for the novel indicate that she initially had different plans. In her Quarry for Middlemarch, the notebook where Eliot worked out the details and the order of the draft novel’s plot, she also recorded her extensive research into the highly contagious disease. In particular, she documents the progress of the Asiatic cholera pandemic of 1826-37, which reached Britain, where it would claim thousands of lives, in 1831. Published in 1871-72, Middlemarch spans the years between 1829 and 1832; as Mary Wilson Carpenter, for one, has pointed out, this historical setting exactly overlaps with cholera’s arrival on English soil.

 

While this conjuncture finds only oblique expression in the completed text—“cholera” appears all of nine times across the novel’s 86 chapters—the epidemic occupies a more prominent place in the pages of Eliot’s Quarry. She scrupulously charts the timeline of its appearance in Britain: “Quarantine to guard against it in England June 13, 1831. First cases occur at Sunderland Nov. 4. [A]ppears at Rotherham, Feb. 10, 1832 …” These notes also register the British government’s initial failure to prepare for the epidemic’s arrival, even as cholera made its way through Scotland and the northern regions of England. “Hitherto the legislature had been silent,” she writes, until “[a]ll at once, without apparently having lighted in any intermediate place, the disease appeared in London,” finally prompting a series of bills to be “hurried through Parliament”: political negligence that, for many contemporary readers, will strike a familiar chord.

For Eliot, the figure of contagion takes on more metaphoric weight, structuring her pervasive focus on the risks and obligations of sociality.

Even where the Quarry turns from this historical documentation to plans for Middlemarch, cholera maintains an evident foothold in the writer’s mind. Eliot folds the epidemic into her schema for the novel’s plot at one of its most pivotal intervals. On a folio with the header “Will Ladislaw and Dorothea,” she outlines the series of events that unite Dorothea with Casaubon’s cousin Will, whom Dorothea eventually marries after her husband’s untimely death, and despite Will’s unseemly intimacy with the wedded Rosamond:

Will, going on as Editor of the Pioneer, comes to Lowick to see the Farebrothers, has an interview with Dorothea. They part with a sense of being divided by destiny. Dorothea has projects about filling her life: tells Sir James & Celia that she will never be married again—Celia’s boy will have everything. She will go on some heroic errand of carrying away emigrants, etc. Meanwhile, the cholera. Will does not go away & gets more intimate with Mrs. Lydgate.

Meanwhile, the cholera. On the one hand, this tiny sentence tells us nothing new about cholera in Middlemarch; it relegates epidemic to a fleeting, background blip, the white noise of the novel’s larger world. On the other, it illuminates contagion as the interstitial force that shaped Eliot’s vision for the book, and which lingers in Middlemarch despite the fact that cholera was mostly excised by the final draft. The probability of epidemic remains “meanwhile”—ever-present, perhaps inevitable, yet easily overlooked. And I don’t just mean epidemic in a literal sense: for Eliot, the figure of contagion takes on more metaphoric weight, structuring her pervasive focus on the risks and obligations of sociality.

 

At its etymological roots, “contagion” distills the precarious possibilities that inhere in communal life. Combining the Latin prefix con- (together) with the basis tangere (to touch), the word indexes the necessary hazards of contact, the anxious threat of connectedness. These perils are central to Middlemarch, even and especially where actual contagious disease recedes into invisibility. Other forms of contagion gain purchase instead: infectious emotions, the transmission of gossip, the exposure of toxic truths. Spouses make each other sick, are drawn to other people helplessly, dangerously. Professional relationships cause cross-contamination when reputations are wounded by allies’ mistakes. In myriad ways, Middlemarch illustrates the ease with which we get tangled in the infectious web of our neighbors’ lives.

The metaphorical “logic of contagion” that Tina Young Choi has also observed in Middlemarch is arguably nowhere more powerful than in the downturn of Lydgate’s luck. A brilliant doctor with a promising career before him, Lydgate suffers not only from Rosamond’s selfishly manipulative influence, but also from his relationship with the sanctimonious evangelical banker Nicholas Bulstrode, who wants to fund the fever hospital. When multiple skeletons emerge from the closet of Bulstrode’s seedy past, the fallout hurts Lydgate almost as much as it destroys Bulstrode’s standing in Middlemarch. It’s not that Lydgate has committed any crime which can be proven on legal grounds; rather, he’s deemed guilty by association—“blighted,” as he puts it, “like a damaged ear of corn.” This is no throwaway metaphor: variations of the phrase “blight on Bulstrode & Lydgate” appear repeatedly throughout Eliot’s notes. As the Quarry attests, Eliot long planned to frame this turn of events in terms of infectious disease, the kind of contagion that might consume entire communities.

Moreover, and beyond the story of any single character, contagion’s organizing logic informs the whole of Middlemarch’s plot. Over the novel’s course, Eliot traces the links that bind all of her characters in a network of physical and emotional exchange. Here again the Quarry is telling: as represented in her notes, Eliot’s careful sequencing of points of contact between characters bears more than a passing resemblance to the way she plots and replots the cholera epidemic’s chronology. First recounting cholera’s geographic movements throughout England, she later revisits the epidemic in order to situate it within a more scaled-back sociopolitical history; on a list simply titled “Dates,” cholera appears right in the middle, between the 1830 “Opening of Liverpool & Manch[ester] Railway, April” and 1833’s “Reformed Parliament, Election Jan[uary].” Likewise, she fills the Quarry’s pages with various formulations of the social “conditions” and “elements” that are context for character relationships, and that alternately make these relationships blossom or rot.

In both cases, what seems to interest Eliot are the subtle forces of causality that interlink seemingly unrelated people and events. The finished novel gives sprawling shape to the scope of these links; among the most-discussed features of Middlemarch is the vision it evokes of social entanglement in all its depth and reach. In so doing, the novel also expresses a view of interconnection as potentially poisonous—an impression that mere proximity to other people will propagate shared harm. At the level of sheer form, Middlemarch’s multiplot structure is a contact-tracing map.

For those familiar with 19th-century fiction, Eliot’s treatment of epidemic might not seem to distinguish her from other novelists of her time. Whole books have been written about the prominence of contagion in the Victorian literary imaginary; a marker for the physical body’s very real vulnerabilities, contagion also harbored symbolic potential for writers of the period. It was a favored device in the novels of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, who used communicable illness to sentimental ends, often to critique the social inequities that made certain groups of people more susceptible than others to disease. Conversely, metaphors of contagion were also made the vehicle for racist and xenophobic rhetorics. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, links its eponymous vampire with the idea of transmissible disease, and is commonly read as representing Victorian anxieties about colonial relations and miscegenation.

Eliot makes the case for a mode of social consciousness in which all actions are measured by their effects on the community.

In Middlemarch, however, Eliot’s political and moral investments don’t take their fullest emotional force from pity or fear toward the potentially infectious other. Instead, it’s the potentially infectious self to which she draws her readers’ gaze. Again and again, Middlemarch stresses how readily we ourselves can hurt our neighbors by becoming conduits for contagion, both literally and otherwise. By virtue of the closely networked nature of social life, Eliot’s characters regularly transmit harm to the other people crowded in their sphere, often without knowing or intending it. “You don’t mean your horse to tread on a dog when you’re backing out of the way,” as the benevolent surveyor Caleb Garth explains; “but it goes through you, when it’s done.”

For Eliot, this way of thinking works in service of an ethics that we might understand as contingent accountability. In her didactic way, she makes the case for a mode of social consciousness in which all actions are measured by their effects on the community, and in which the responsibility for these effects is understood as collective. Through the logic of contagion, Middlemarch coaxes readers toward a sense of self as embedded in a meshwork of relations with people whom our choices intimately affect, however removed from us those people may seem. As Eliot’s storytelling maintains, we have an obligation to these connections; they require us to cultivate practices of ongoing harm reduction and care.

If many of us found ourselves turning to Middlemarch with new or renewed attention last year, perhaps it’s because the novel offers a framework for grappling with the existential dilemmas forced on us by COVID-19. Eliot shows us one way of reconceiving the self in a time of pandemic: a radical decentering that shifts our perspective from individual life to the interdependent health of the web. In both content and form, Middlemarch enacts the collectivist mindset required to reckon with contagion across multiple scales—from the local, neighborly level of wearing a mask and staying home, to the greater abstraction of locating the self in a contact-tracing sprawl. All in all, the novel serves as a relevant guide for navigating the unfamiliar vantage points that our present crisis opens up.

 

At the same time, however, crisis isn’t the point of Middlemarch. Because Eliot buries contagion beneath the finished novel’s surface, she tenders its collective ethics not as an urgent response to emergency, but as a necessary precept of social membership in a more general, everyday sense. Eliot treats contagion, or things like contagion, as a latent condition of communal being: a sometimes hidden yet continuous context underpinning public life. This approach becomes all the more essential for contemporary readers on the other side of 2020, with the pandemic continuing to drag on and crisis burnout setting in. What Middlemarch gives us is a sustainable model for attuning ourselves to contagion’s probability—a more careful, patient way of living with and for others, even after disaster subsides.

Screenshots taken from the Harvard Library’s Digital Collections, which are open for sharing and adapting under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

 

 

Diana Rose Newby

Diana Rose Newby is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Politics/Letters, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, an edited volume on the health humanities, and a pedagogy handbook for early-career college instructors. A native of California, she currently lives in Harlem with her partner and their cat.

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