Middlemarch

A book review written a year after the book was read is not a review per se. I cannot bank on a spontaneous rush of thoughts. I no longer have the ephemeral influence of the author's style on my writing. The role of memory is now paramount. I have my dog-ears and annotations of course. And copious notes. The novel in question though is Middlemarch. This is going to be a waste of time. 

Still, I am heavily jet-lagged in super hot Delhi (45C/115F). We tried to get the air conditioner in the main bedroom to work. The repair men changed a filter. Then they replaced the condenser. I am very sure I inhaled some coolant gas while they explained to me, at the close of day, that the compressor is not working either and needs to be changed. So no AC. Maybe today they'll fix it.

Like all great novels (what a cliched start; face-palm), Middlemarch is many novels in one. In recent years, it has been listed as one of the greatest novels ever written. A recent biography of Marry Ann Evans, aka George Eliot, by Claire Carlisle recounts how mid-Victorian society found her life scandalous and unacceptable. For over 25 years, Eliot lived with a married man, the journalist and scientist GH Lewes, whom she called her husband. When Lewes died, she married -- this time officially -- a man many years her junior. As Carlisle puts it, everyone obsessed about her and "The Marriage Question." 

The marriage question is certainly one of the themes in Middlemarch. Set in 1830s England, Middlemarch is a small pastoral town. Dorothea Brooke is a young idealist. She is fiercely ambitious but frustratingly constrained by the conservative era she inhabits.

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.

Despite the "meanness of opportunity," Dorothea wants to make a difference in her community. Marriage may be the only way out, the only way she can pursue her goals, to find someone who supports her endeavours in a patriarchal world.

She thinks that Edward Casaubon, a distressingly archetypical academic, will be the right husband. Mr. Casaubon who is a few decades older seems erudite and in control of the higher arts. Surely, Dorothea could assist Casaubon's grand pursuits. Not as an equal, that would be impossible. But she could help?

Dorothea's marriage is ultimately a failure. Casaubon has no time for Dorothea. He is insecure. A failed academic. He is supposedly out to finish his magnum opus but Dorothea gradually realises he will never get it done.

These minor monumental productions were always exciting to Mr Casaubon: digestion was made difficult by the interference of citations, or by the rivalry of dialectical phrases ringing against each other in his brain.

Edward Casaubon's Sisyphean pursuits contrast with those of Tertius Lydgate, a freshly minted doctor. He embodies the age of science and reason.  He has spent years in France learning the most recent advances in medicine. His commitment to the scientific method falls afoul of the medical orthodoxy in Middlemarch, who subscribe to the necessity of prescribing many pills to satiate the expectations of the patient.

One of the facts quickly rumored was that Lydgate did not dispense drugs. This was offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive distinction seemed infringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with whom he ranged himself; and only a little while before, they might have counted on having the law on their side against a man who without calling himself a London-made M.D. dared to ask for pay except as a charge on drugs. But Lydgate had not been experienced enough to foresee that his new course would be even more offensive to the laity; and to Mr. Mawmsey, an important grocer in the Top Market, who, though not one of his patients, questioned him in an affable manner on the subject, he was injudicious enough to give a hasty popular explanation of his reasons, pointing out to Mr. Mawmsey that it must lower the character of practitioners, and be a constant injury to the public, if their only mode of getting paid for their work was by their making out long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.

Yet Lydgate remains a defiant idealist. He is incredibly ambitious and seeks deep discoveries that will grant him eternal glory. He does not want to marry because that could be an unnecessary distraction. He is confident his self-discipline will guard him from indiscretions. Love is for weaker men.

Lydgate capitulates spectacularly. He not only falls in love with someone, the very pretty Rosamund Vincy, he deludes himself he can handle the inherent conflict between his wife's expectations for a comfortable, luxurious life, with his own ascetic desire to throw himself into his work. Another failed marriage. 

The marriage question thus comes to haunt the novel. Dorothea and Lydgate are stuck. A passage encapsulates what I think the novel tries to achieve.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poverty or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's 'makdom and her fairness', never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of 'makdom and fairness' which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their  vocations in a. daily course determined for them in much the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shaped after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than their process of gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly; you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions; or perhaps it came from the vibrations of a woman's glance.

As a man, imagining Lydgate and what he would or wouldn't think comes fairly intuitively to me. It's with Dorothea that I remember first grappling with the idea (I think was 15) that women characters could be described very differently by women authors. Dorothea comes to terms with her situation with compromise and resilience. She is willing to change her natural instincts -- to an extent -- for Casaubon. But she is also silently resisting. There is no grand rescue mission she undertakes. There are no sudden moves. She is working at life, she can't save her marriage, she handles it with innate maturity. I can certainly imagine the trajectory Dorothea takes if I were writing (a very sub-par novel). The subtle difference lies in the punches she pulls and the way she thinks through them.

The lives of the upper class intersect in a town as small as Middlemarch. She gets to know Lydgate. Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's cousin, enters the scene too. Ladislaw is an artist with no heart in art, a wanderer who lives on Casaubon's support, and who is driven by emotions as much if not more than sense. Dorothea is exasperated by any speculation about her friendship with men.

'I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom she is grateful. I should have thought that I, at least, might have been safe from all that. I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.'

How Dorothea uses her agency is what defines the story. I would think that Dorothea's decisions wouldn't be wholly satisfactory from a feminist perspective. Given Eliot's own life, and the bold decisions she took through it, and the force of her erudition and humanism, it is interesting to ask why. I think part of the reason is that the novel is a work of some pessimism, a portrayal of how things tend to come to be rather than an active normative account.

Middlemarch is a complex novel about idealism, marriage, and class divides. It has romance and tragedy. Scandals too. Like all eternally great works of literature, it deserves multiple re-reads. 

'That depends. To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion --- a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.'