Finally Middlemarch #4

So already, I have only about two hundred pages of Middlemarch left to read, so I've just gone from believing I would always be reading Middlemarch* to fearing that someday I won't be.* Finishing a great long book is always a mixed blessing for me. Yes, it's a chance to go on to another great long book, if I'm lucky enough to find one relatively quickly. But it also feels like a farewelll to a dear friend who's moving to a time zone that will make regular connecting a challenge. Given the way great long books memorably create whole worlds filled with redeeming and infuriating features, characters, and situations, it always takes me a while to want to extricate myself from them. I need time and space to look back on and relish them before I'm ready to switch allegiances and embrace devotion to the next great long book.  

Recently, Middlemarch has been making me angry. While Fred Vincy avoids "disagreeableness," his sister Rosamund actively despises it as a downright affront: heaven help even her husband, Lydgate, if he exudes anything less than lighthearted complacency, let alone suggests that she understand their financial difficulties and make efforts to live more frugally. Mr. Bulstrode's bluster, self-righteousness, and flaws seem modeled on those of Michael Henchard, the main character in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge--which makes him a great deal like a number of current-day politicians. There's just too much in the whole novel that brings to mind Gwendolyn Fairfax's comment in Wilde's satirical The Importance of Being Earnest: "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing."** I wish I understood the history of the dominion of form and style in British and American books*** about the upper classes and those aspiring to membership in them.

But it's Dorothea who's been on my mind because she and the novel's world are so mismatched. She has an abundance of the two things that other women--and also men like Fred--want: time and money. But to her mind, "'I have too much already'" (392), and what she really wants is purpose rather than the idleness generally associated with time and money by others in her world. No Rosamund could ever understand either of Dorothea's attitudes. It's her atypical desire for purpose that leads Dorothea to marry Casaubon, also a mismatch for her: her plan to have her marriage to Casaubon "bring guidance [--and therefore purpose and direction--] into worthy and imperative occupation" does not pan out, leaving her "not yet freed her from the gentlewoman's oppressive liberty: . . .." (274)**** 

So what else is the "failure" of this marriage about, besides the cold smallness and insecurity of Casaubon and Dorothea's quick decision to marry him on the basis of her unsupported fantasy of who he is and what he and she shall become through their shared devotion to his work? In general, what chances for a marriage of equals marked by moral purpose does any woman like Dorothea have in Middlemarch? Especially if it's the inclination of such a woman to seek after "unbecoming knowledge" (268)?

At the moment, I'd say those chances are really slim. Plenty of the men in the story like Dorothea, but that guarantees no full acceptance for a woman who's genteel and well-mannered but not truly "subordinate" (563). I was feeling hopeful about Will Ladislaw until Eliot described his reaction to Dorothea's passionate twin declarations that "'we don't mind how hard the truth is for the neighbours outside our walls'" and that '"we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands'" (389):

"For a moment, Will's admiration was accompanied with a chilling sense of remoteness. A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her nature: nature having intended greatness for men." (389).

There's no real response to Dorothea's statements; just some words from her uncle about how "Young ladies are a little ardent" (390). As for Will, just as soon as he acknowledges Dorothea's "greatness" to himself, he categorizes it as unnatural for one of her gender. It's her unnaturalness that causes him to experience her as less lovable, allowing him to think of his withdrawal of feeling as natural--and, frankly, as her fault. No shame needed.

Moments later, when a family dog approaches her, Dorothea pets him, "for she was always attentive to the feelings of dogs, and very polite if she to decline their advances" (390). Dorothea is more respectful of and responsive to the dog's feelings than her uncle and Will are to hers*****!

Shades of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: Dorothea has a great deal of "freedom from" but very "little freedom to," as Aunt Lydia would put it.***** If she marries again, I hope she weds someone I can respect. No wonder Mary Anne Evans decided to call herself George Eliot!

* Screen shot of photo on https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/318868/middlemarch-by-george-eliot-foreword-by-rebecca-mead/9780143107729/
** Quotation #10 in The Importance of Being Earnest/Study Guide: https://www.coursehero.com/lit/The-Importance-of-Being-Earnest/quotes/ 
*** Screen shot of photo on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/244179611019672301/?lp=true
**** Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Edited by Rosemary Ashton, Penguin Books, 2003.
***** Screen shot of photo on www.vetstreet.com: "What you should know about petting a dog." http://www.vetstreet.com/our-pet-experts/what-you-should-know-about-petting-a-dog
****** Sorry I can't give you a page number: I simply remember this from all those years I taught Atwood's novel at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.