Review: Middlemarch by George Eliot

"The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills." Friedrich Nietzsche's line in Thus Spake Zarathustra elegantly sums up the role of women at the time George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who like the Brontë sisters hid behind a male pen name, wrote her 1870s Victorian classic Middlemarch (1871/72), and it also applies to the time period of her book, masterfully describing pre-Victorian provincial English life before the first British Reform Bill of 1832, which brought minor improvements to a small portion of the (male) population; Eliot also incorporates some truly superb character studies. Since the novel is complex, I recommend you buy a copy with footnotes, such as the Wordsworth Classics budget paperback edition, and because there is a marvellous and remarkably faithful serialised BBC TV adaptation (1994), I urge you to read the book and watch the miniseries. My short feminist review can only analyse a fraction of the content.

There are two main exemplary (proto-) feminist characters in Middlemarch, a town seemingly based on the West Midlands town of Coventry. Dorothea is an unlikely role model for contemporary feminists. An attractive and intelligent young woman, she wants to give up the aristocratic, but in her view decadent, the pastime of horse riding; she is a Puritan with a tendency to moralise, is more inclined to kneel devoutly and pray alongside a beggar than to flaunt jewellery, and is philanthropic to a fault. Having embodied the nonconformist Christian ideals she was brought up with, one of the best aspects of which is a quest for universal education, including that of women, Dorothea feels attracted to Casaubon, a stodgy, selfish clergyman scholar twenty-seven years her senior, whose manners she considers "very dignified; the set of his iron-grey hair and his deep eye-sockets" [sic] reminding her of a painting of Locke. She falls for a caricature of a Biblical prophet, not a flesh and blood person. Although her eyesight is inherently poor, Dorothea is willing to further ruin her eyes learning to read Greek and Hebrew characters in bad light conditions to assist her husband in transcribing material for his magnum opus, a monumental "Key to All Mythologies", which he wishes to be remembered by. Her innocent attention to Will Ladislaw (apparently a corruption of the Polish name Władisław), an artist cousin of Casaubon whose grandmother married below her station (Will is "the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker" in the eyes of the prejudiced inhabitants of Middlemarch) prompts Casaubon to cut Dorothea out of his will if she subsequently marries Ladislaw. Dorothea's sense of social justice is so pronounced that she is disappointed when she finds that even the poorest inhabitants of her husband's parish are well provided for so that she wishes she lived near a slum instead where she might spend her inheritance on improving the living conditions of those who live in misery. Tragically, Dorothea is reminiscent of Greta of Fridays for Future, or of Petra Kelly, the German Green Party politician who wanted to save the world and who allegedly agreed to commit suicide along with her partner because she was unable to achieve this goal. Luckily, however, our protagonist is able to show enough willpower to overcome some of the hurdles faced by members of her sex, although she resignedly confesses: "I used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things." It is in such subtle lines that Eliot’s feminist subtext shines through.

Eliot's portrayal of men, such as Dorothea's former suitor, Sir James Chettam, is equally fascinating. On the surface, upper-class squire Sir James is an ideal marriage partner, but he is of the – rather tedious - "hunting-shooting-fishing" set. As long as he is attracted by Dorothea's intellect and beauty, he worships her every utterance, and to win her heart even agrees to help her with her scheme to house poor people. When she jilts him, he settles for the second-best option: Celia, Dorothea's pragmatic, boringly conventional sister, and yet Sir James is so jealous of Casaubon that when the clergyman dies (without finishing his scholarly project), he considers it obscene that the young widow might want to re-marry. Eliot's humour excels in her character of Mrs. Cadwallader, a nosey, interfering busybody and would-be matchmaker, who belittles her lethargic clergyman husband by telling all and sundry that she married down the social ladder, although she is hardly of legitimate noble descent: "a lady of immeasurably high birth, descended as it were from unknown earls..." When profane Celia admits to her that she dislikes funerals, Mrs. Cadwallader scolds her, saying: "Oh, my dear, when you have a clergyman [brother-in-law Casaubon] in your family you must accommodate your tastes: I did that very early. When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn’t have the end without them." In the screen version, Mrs. Cadwallader, who in the book is a younger woman whose youngest child of several is a mere six, is played by an elderly woman for better effect in that medium.

Dorothea Brooke, Reverend Casaubon and Will Ladislaw in the background. Source: BBC or British Broadcasting Corporation

There is a scene where the upper-class Brookes enter a room and see the socially inferior, middle-class Vincy family, who have made their fortune in trade. Although Dorothea's uncle knows he must interact with the Vincy’s for political reasons, to socialise with this family is a taboo. Here, Eliot introduces us to a woman whose character she describes with delightfully malicious irony: vain, extravagant social climber Rosamond Vincy, who sees young Dr Lydgate as a mere stepping stone towards escaping from "provincial" Middlemarch and getting to know the latter's wealthy, baronial relatives. Although Lydgate cannot really afford to get married, hormone-driven "mug" that he is, he falls for Rosamond's charms:

"The Vincy’s house, with all its faults [...] nourished Rosamond, sweet to look at as a half-opened blush rose, and adorned with accomplishments for the refined amusement of man." In Eliot’s wonderful turn of phrase, Rosamond "never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made an irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date. Think no evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary: in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide."

In other words, Lydgate is a "sucker" for a pretty, manipulative girl who sings and plays the piano, and before long he finds himself heavily in debt thanks to the couple's new, spendthrifty lifestyle. Mary Garth, on the other hand, is a true, almost modern Eliot role model, and although she is considered plain, she has two suitors: young Reverend Farebrother, and Fred, Rosamond's good-for-nothing failed university student brother. As Mrs. Vincy says to Farebrother’s mother: "It is a pity she is not better-looking." Mrs. Farebrother recognises that her qualities lie elsewhere:

"I like her countenance. We must not always ask for beauty, when a good God has seen fit to make an excellent young woman without it."

Mary knows exactly what she wants, playfully explaining to Fred, whose social status is higher than hers, that she will only marry him if he "shapes up" and does not become a clergyman, an occupation forced upon him by his father. In this way, she manages to reform Fred, although I as a reader could not bring myself to believe that the "new Fred" was any more exemplary than Will, Dorothea's new partner with a passion for reformist politics (which would have meant neglecting Dorothea in the long run.) Eliot was no doubt enough of a realist to face the fact that marriages were not "made in heaven", at least not in her day. Contemporary feminists make the mistake of criticising Eliot's harsh portrayal of both men and women, but if you respect the fact that she was writing in an age when women were forced to take a back seat in a decidedly patriarchal world, and if you scrutinise her subtle feminist subtext, forgiving her in the process for the moralist Victorian undertones, you realise what a pioneer of women's rights and liberal reforms she really was. I certainly look forward to reading her oeuvre.

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