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A review by pripri87
Middlemarch by George Eliot
4.0
Middlemarch begins where most novels leave off: Marriage. Romance stories of our time traditionally tend to treat marriage as the natural denouement of a love story, leaving us with the impression that in marriage lies the eventual neat conclusion of all of our lives.
Yet, how often do we get to see what happens beyond marriage? How couples grow together (or apart), how they learn of and deal with their compatibility, or lack thereof? Traditional novels set all of us up for a lifetime of assumptions about what marriage is and isn’t, that many of us might only examine once we too, achieve that milestone.
The way George Eliot treats marriage in Middlemarch is refreshing, even instructive. Compatibility is not a given, as we see in the union between the story’s heroine, Dorothea Brooke and a much older, and purported scholar-Casaubon. Brooke is graceful, intelligent, exceedingly kind, and idealistic to a fault; her youthful innocence and optimism around love – that a life of purpose can beget through marrying a man she deems capable by way of his intellectual pursuits - are shattered upon the realization that her shallow assumptions about him, based on how he fashioned himself to her, are acutely flawed. Much more work is required to truly understand a man’s character, and to deduce his place in your world, than Dorothea allows herself.
Incompatibility is depicted too, in the unfolding of the rash marriage between Dr. Lydgate and his Rosamond, two personalities that Eliot expertly paints in their polar opposites. We travel alongside Lydgate’s internal battle between his duty in maintaining a happy wife, and his duty to his vocation: tending and ministering to the sick. A gifted doctor, Lydgate is constantly second-guessed, not only by his skeptical-of-change colleagues, but also by his wife, especially in his penchant for breaking with convention for new, practical and evidence-based therapies that he learns of through readings, experimentation and experience. Is this the first novel to so expertly depict medicine’s age-old clash between tradition and innovation, of the mistrust that surrounds those who try to break moulds, don’t believe merely because ‘that’s how it’s always been done”, and strive for more as intellectuals? In fact, when Lydgate’s worst comes to pass, it is Dorothea, not Rosamond, who refuses to waver in her belief in him and his character.
In each flawed union, the protagonist’s choice aligns with the stereotypes of their gender: the woman, for what the man can do for her (and in turn, how she can support him to fulfill a life’s purpose), and for Lydgate, a decision made for beauty, rather than intellect, which he deems himself to possess enough of.
In many ways, then, what Eliot demonstrates, through the lives of her protagonists, is how marriage can hinder us, in our life pursuits –what happens if our life partner detracts from, rather than enables, the things we’d like to, or hope to, achieve?
One wonders what Lydgate could have become, had he not allowed his heart to take ahold of him? As Eliot wrote, though “in brief, Lydgate was what is called a successful man”, “he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do.” Can our hoped for personal successes feel as satisfactory as meeting society’s milestones, measures we are supposed to meet because it has always been so? And Dorothea, whom Eliot describes thusly, in ending: “Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother” – it cannot only be me who wonders what may have happened had she foregone love completely, again choosing unconventionality as she once had with Casaubon? Might she have been able to lend her own hand, as she had yearned for throughout the book, to better the lives of those around her? Might this have been more fulfilling, for Dorothea, as much as for readers like myself, than the ending we are given by Eliot?
Interestingly, it is with the villain, if there is one, among Middlemarch’s occupants – Bulstrode – that we glimpse an ideal marriage (Caleb Garth’s is another, but where Garth is an upstanding, moral man, Bulstrode is decidedly not). Mrs.Bulstrode’s devotion to her husband, even in his wrongdoing, is a touching reminder of what marriage could truly be, if we are only so lucky to find such a companion. “…her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, “I know;” and her hands and eyes rested gently on him…They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him.”
Eliot’s immersive prose touches numerous themes that remain still relevant to us today. If her own life is any evidence – an unconventional live-in relationship with a married man with children (whose wife bore children by another man while married to him) – is it any wonder, that Eliot writes so progressively, so relevantly to our own world, a time so far removed from her own?
Yet, how often do we get to see what happens beyond marriage? How couples grow together (or apart), how they learn of and deal with their compatibility, or lack thereof? Traditional novels set all of us up for a lifetime of assumptions about what marriage is and isn’t, that many of us might only examine once we too, achieve that milestone.
The way George Eliot treats marriage in Middlemarch is refreshing, even instructive. Compatibility is not a given, as we see in the union between the story’s heroine, Dorothea Brooke and a much older, and purported scholar-Casaubon. Brooke is graceful, intelligent, exceedingly kind, and idealistic to a fault; her youthful innocence and optimism around love – that a life of purpose can beget through marrying a man she deems capable by way of his intellectual pursuits - are shattered upon the realization that her shallow assumptions about him, based on how he fashioned himself to her, are acutely flawed. Much more work is required to truly understand a man’s character, and to deduce his place in your world, than Dorothea allows herself.
Incompatibility is depicted too, in the unfolding of the rash marriage between Dr. Lydgate and his Rosamond, two personalities that Eliot expertly paints in their polar opposites. We travel alongside Lydgate’s internal battle between his duty in maintaining a happy wife, and his duty to his vocation: tending and ministering to the sick. A gifted doctor, Lydgate is constantly second-guessed, not only by his skeptical-of-change colleagues, but also by his wife, especially in his penchant for breaking with convention for new, practical and evidence-based therapies that he learns of through readings, experimentation and experience. Is this the first novel to so expertly depict medicine’s age-old clash between tradition and innovation, of the mistrust that surrounds those who try to break moulds, don’t believe merely because ‘that’s how it’s always been done”, and strive for more as intellectuals? In fact, when Lydgate’s worst comes to pass, it is Dorothea, not Rosamond, who refuses to waver in her belief in him and his character.
In each flawed union, the protagonist’s choice aligns with the stereotypes of their gender: the woman, for what the man can do for her (and in turn, how she can support him to fulfill a life’s purpose), and for Lydgate, a decision made for beauty, rather than intellect, which he deems himself to possess enough of.
In many ways, then, what Eliot demonstrates, through the lives of her protagonists, is how marriage can hinder us, in our life pursuits –what happens if our life partner detracts from, rather than enables, the things we’d like to, or hope to, achieve?
One wonders what Lydgate could have become, had he not allowed his heart to take ahold of him? As Eliot wrote, though “in brief, Lydgate was what is called a successful man”, “he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do.” Can our hoped for personal successes feel as satisfactory as meeting society’s milestones, measures we are supposed to meet because it has always been so? And Dorothea, whom Eliot describes thusly, in ending: “Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother” – it cannot only be me who wonders what may have happened had she foregone love completely, again choosing unconventionality as she once had with Casaubon? Might she have been able to lend her own hand, as she had yearned for throughout the book, to better the lives of those around her? Might this have been more fulfilling, for Dorothea, as much as for readers like myself, than the ending we are given by Eliot?
Interestingly, it is with the villain, if there is one, among Middlemarch’s occupants – Bulstrode – that we glimpse an ideal marriage (Caleb Garth’s is another, but where Garth is an upstanding, moral man, Bulstrode is decidedly not). Mrs.Bulstrode’s devotion to her husband, even in his wrongdoing, is a touching reminder of what marriage could truly be, if we are only so lucky to find such a companion. “…her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, “I know;” and her hands and eyes rested gently on him…They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him.”
Eliot’s immersive prose touches numerous themes that remain still relevant to us today. If her own life is any evidence – an unconventional live-in relationship with a married man with children (whose wife bore children by another man while married to him) – is it any wonder, that Eliot writes so progressively, so relevantly to our own world, a time so far removed from her own?