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[two asks reading: “so i've been reading middlemarch, and it's p good so far (figure if someone says a book is their fav, it's worth checkin out, and u seem like u have Good Taste). if it's not too open-ended, could u say/gush what it is u like about it so much?” / second ask “this might be a weird question but what was ur favorite thing about middlemarch? i haven't really read any victorian literature n was wondering what you get out of it” end image description]

so!! Middlemarch was written as part of a trend towards literary realism that occurred at the tail end of / as a reaction to literary Romanticism. some relevant trends in Romantic long-form fiction included the use of characters and plots in a way that was potentially idealised and almost allegorical; and a “marriage plot” structure that meant the book would end with one or more suitable marriage(s) or engagement(s) that resolved the conflicts explored in the novel. George Eliot, herself influenced by a general trend towards realism in Northern Europe in the 1840s, was a major leader of that trend in English literature. see, for example, this famous passage in Adam Bede (long but bear with me):

It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her—or I turn to that village wedding, kept between four brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart-pots in their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable contentment and goodwill. “Foh!” says my idealistic friend, “what vulgar details! What good is there in taking all these pains to give an exact likeness of old women and clowns? What a low phase of life! What clumsy, ugly people!”

But bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome, I hope? I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have not been ugly, and even among those “lords of their kind,” the British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions are not startling exceptions. Yet there is a great deal of family love amongst us. I have a friend or two whose class of features is such that the Apollo curl on the summit of their brows would be decidedly trying; yet to my certain knowledge tender hearts have beaten for them, and their miniatures—flattering, but still not lovely—are kissed in secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron, who could have never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles. Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty—it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world—those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore, let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things—men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers—more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist.

so this was a pretty wholesale rejection of a lot of recent & contemporary trends in literature on George Eliot’s part. see also her essay “The Natural History of German Life,” & Daniel P. Gunn “Dutch Painting and the Simple Truth in Adam Bede.”

a lot of our modern expectations for how novels should be written and how fictional characters should be portrayed date from around this time. we want novels to engage our sympathies through complex and realistic characterisation, rather than depict characters that act out an idealised plot tending towards the illustration of an idea. for Eliot the most important aspect of literary realism is that it should encourage sympathy for, and respond in some way to the readers’ actual living engagement with, the homely average people whom everyone encounters every day. Romanticism may have expanded the acceptable range of literary, poetic, and tragic subjects from kings & aristocracy to include & even idealise the peasantry, but Eliot argues (again see “The Natural History of German Life”) that this very idealisation is a fault of that literature.

what’s so interesting about Middlemarch is that it takes the two tendencies in Romantic fiction detailed above--an idealised view of characters & the marriage plot--and turns them each on their head. the book doesn’t neatly end with one or several marriages: rather, it begins with those marriages. the marriages don’t resolve conflict, but rather form the conflict that’s going to be explored in later pages. we watch [vague spoilers] two marriages, as well as the spouses’ idealised views of each other, fall apart throughout the course of the book. Dorothea’s passion for the spiritual and metaphysical [real spoilers] was sublimated onto a man who, we come to find, doesn’t intend to bring Dorothea very much into the exalted glow of his work, and, we slowly come to suspect, doesn’t even really know what he’s talking about. Rosamond discovers that Lydgate is less rich, and Lydgate that Rosamond is more.. materialistic, than either expected. [end spoilers] as the plot progresses, we come into a complex view of the characters that troubles the romantic images that each person had formed of their spouse during their courtship. the novel is as much a practical call to avoid idealising others, to have sympathy with people in their real, flawed state, and to consider such momentous decisions as matrimony & choice of vocation seriously before undertaking either, as it is a literary experiment.

and yet one of the things that I enjoy most about Middlemarch, along with the general structure of the inverted marriage plot, is the fact that it does ultimately [spoilers!] end with two happy marriages. despite the reaction of some contemporary critics to the novel, it’s not unrelentingly dismal. Eliot writes that Dorothea “never repented that she had given up position and fortune to marry Will Ladislaw, and he would have held it the greatest shame as well as sorrow to him if she had repented. They were bound to each other by a love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it.” this bit of romance reminds me of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, of which the Norton Anthology of English Literature says (9th Edition, Volume D, p.19):

There were, of course, writers who resisted these [Romantic] poetic engagements with fantasized landscapes and strange passions. [...] Jane Austen had her heroine in Persuasion, while conversing with a melancholy, Byron-reading young man, caution him against overindulgence in Byron’s “impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony” and “prescribe” to him a “larger allowance of prose in his daily study.” And yet this heroine, having “been forced into prudence in her youth,” has “learned romance as she grew older.” The reversal of the sequence that usually orders the story line of female socialization suggests a receptivity to romance’s allure--the allure of the improbable--that links Austen to the spirit of the age.

& we’ve got something a bit similar here. the heroine, after taking us on a very long journey during which we were meant to have learnt prudence along with her, rediscovers (not learns) romance--but it’s a romance of a very different sort that’s based on compatibility of age and temperament, & a more realistic expectation of what she can expect to do with her life (& there’s a dig about the ways in which Victorian women were limited in terms of career that can be interpreted in a few different ways). plus Ladislaw’s work is at least a bit more practically and externally oriented than Casaubon’s.

[end spoilers] so my favourite things about Middlemarch are the way in which it combines romance and realism, how it (& the rest of George Eliot’s ouvre) deals with convincingly with passion and sentiment without being overblown or affected, and how it refuses at every turn to behave how you think it should behave.

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