A couple of weeks ago I posted about an article on Scott I found at The Reader Online. I’ve since spent quite a bit of time exploring the website for The Reader Organization, including learning more about the affiliated “Get Into Reading” program, the “Reading in Practice” MA at the University of Liverpool, and The Reader Magazine itself. Yesterday I also downloaded Issue 29, currently available for free from the website. I am fascinated and energized by what I have found, especially in the magazine, which includes, along with a range of new poetry and fiction, several examples of a genre of writing (or criticism) I have been trying to imagine for about 18 months, namely serious literary commentary written for (but not underestimating) a non-academic audience. For instance, Issue 29 includes a sort of round-table on Wordsworth’s The Prelude with contributors including Stephen Gill, Michael O’Neill and David Wilson; an essay by A. S. Byatt on “the ways that novelists have taken up the slack after the absconding of God. Post-Darwin, post-Freud, human identity is an arena of DNA and sex. Can science and our own biological reality offer a route away from our narcissism?”; essays on Conrad; book reviews; and much more, including features specifically designed to help “readers connect.” I highly recommend downloading it for yourself and taking a look at this publication, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Perhaps you will find yourself surprised and frustrated, as I am, to be learning about it so belatedly. (Though maybe it is already widely known and I was just unaware of it. Do I blame myself–for having academic ostrich syndrome–or distance–as I am not aware that the magazine has distribution in Canada?) Perhaps you will also find yourself inspired, as I am, to see such a reconciliation between ‘readerly’ and academic approaches to literature–and grateful to the internet, for making connections and discoveries like this possible…I’m not aware of another publication (or organization) quite like this one, in its joint attention to contemporary and ‘classic’ texts–though I’d be happy to learn that there are such.
Author: Rohan Maitzen
This Week in My Classes (June 11, 2008)
Yes, I’m teaching again. And hooray for that, I say: it puts a lot of energy back into my days, plus it gives me people to talk to as my colleagues head off on research trips or out to their cottages. I’m about a week into Women and Detective Fiction, an upper-level seminar I’m offering in our spring session–which means we are meeting 10 hours a week to get in a term’s worth of material in less than a month. Although the pace of these courses can be somewhat frenzied, I like the concentration they create: for once, all of your students’ attention is on your class, for one thing, and when you refer to the last book you read, they can usually remember it, because you just wrapped up discussion on it yesterday.
So after doing some early classics and some Miss Marple last week, yesterday we finished up with Gaudy Night. As I told them, it is a novel I expect to become more important and resonant to them as we get further along in our readings. For me, it’s plenty resonant already–indeed, it’s one of my top 10 novels, period. But it has never been a popular success when I’ve taught it. Its preoccupations–with the life of the mind, with the relationship of intellectual integrity to other kinds of honesty and commitment, and with the challenges of balancing head and heart, work and life–are perhaps too abstract for many students, or too remote (so far) from their own experiences of either love or education. I admire the unity of the novel, in which the detective plot and the romance plot turn (as Sayers said she meant them to) on the same point. Reacting against the puzzle mysteries of the era, Sayers remarked that “the reader gets tired after a time of a literature without bowels,” and in Gaudy Night she set out to humanize the genre and restore it to what she saw as the higher standards of its 19th-century forebears, such as the works of Wilkie Collins and Sheridan LeFanu (on whom, one of many nice metafictional touches, Harriet Vane is doing a research project while at Oxford). Harriet’s own detective fiction undergoes a similar transformation over the course of the novel, too. But most of all I enjoy the relationship between Peter and Harriet, which I read as one of the most successful fictional attempts I know of to imagine both the challenge and the realization of an equal partnership between two equally independent and intellectually demanding characters. What more satisfying proposal–thematically, politically, romantically–is there in a novel than Peter’s to Harriet at the end? OK, maybe I exaggerate. Maybe.
Tomorrow we move to P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, then Death in a Tenured Position, so we go from Oxford to Cambridge and then to Harvard. Then we’re into the feminist revisions of hard-boiled private eyes, with Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, and then Prime Suspect, and then we’re done, all by June 27. I have been meaning to add an example of lesbian detective fiction into the reading list, and I should probably work to bring it more up to date–Prime Suspect (the one we’re doing) is from 1992, so that doesn’t seem so current anymore. Even the first time I worked on it with a class, one of the students laughed at the “dated” hair and fashions. I couldn’t see what she meant at all! That made me feel old, alright. Ruth Rendell and Elizabeth George are two likely candidates, I suppose, though I don’t see anything that interesting in terms of genre in George’s novels (though I think highly of most of them). Who’s out there doing something new with the form? Suggestions always welcome, especially as I’m not actually an avid mystery reader –I tend to stick with the authors I know I like, and to get irritated by gimmicky special interest ones (crossword puzzles, catering companies, bed and breakfasts, home repairs, quilting…you know the type).
Adam Bede at The Valve
At my instigation, The Valve is hosting a Reading Project this summer. We’ll be collectively working our way through George Eliot’s Adam Bede; here’s the schedule:
June 17 Book 1 Chapters 1-5June 24 Book I Chapters 6-11
July 1 Book I Chapters 12-16
July 8 Book II (Chapters 17-21)
July 15 Book III (Chapters 22-26)
July 22 Book IV (Chapters 27-35)
July 29 Book V (Chapters 36-48)
August 5 Book VI and Epilogue
August 12 General Discussion
Anyone interested is welcome to read along. The idea is to complete the specified chapters by the date given. A post will then go up at The Valve soliciting comments. People who keep their own blogs are free to do their posts at ‘home’ and put links to them in the Valve threads. At least to begin with, there are really no other rules. Come over and play!
Related Links:
The Victorian Web’s George Eliot page
George Eliot Resource Page (Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Nagoya)–includes information about the George Eliot Fellowship
BBC Warwickshire George Eliot Photo Archive
George Eliot biography (from a nice student project at the University of Virginia)
Adam Bede searchable etext (Princeton)
Adam Bede etext (Adelaide)
“George Eliot” by Virginia Woolf
Buy the Book:
Take That! Poetry as Punishment
Here’s a nice variation on the “Changing Lives Through Literature” approach to crime and punishment:
The criminal justice system in Ripton, Vt., prescribed poetry, of all things, as punishment — and we hope rehabilitation — for 25 teenagers (townies all) who broke into Frost’s old summer house in the woods last December. They trashed it during a snowy night’s bout of drinking and partying.
Skeptical at first, Mr. Parini, who teaches at nearby Middlebury College, accepted the invitation to teach the wayward teens. He did not pull any iambic punches in class last week.
One lesson was built around “The Road Not Taken,” Frost’s caution on the fateful choices that crop up in the dense woods of life. Harsher still was the choice of “Out, Out,” Frost’s account of a youth’s precious life spilling away in a sawmill accident amid the heedless glories of Vermont.
“They seemed shaken to their foundations,” said Mr. Parini, not that surprised. “A wake-up call: don’t waste your life.” (read the rest here)
My Teachers: An Appreciation
This post is my 200th at Novel Readings, and I’d like to turn it into something of a special occasion.
A month or so ago, finding myself in “a bit of a posting slump” after wrapping up my series on “This Week in My Classes,” I asked for suggestions about things to write about. I recently received this nice suggestion by email from Tom Wood: “How about a post on a teacher/scholar whose work has had a significant influence on you?” I really liked this idea, because I still think with admiration and gratitude of several teachers whose influence, support, and guidance shaped my life in ways exceeded only by the love and direction provided by my parents. So, for this 200th post, I thought I’d take up Tom’s suggestion and celebrate them.* Now that I’m a teacher myself, I reflect often on the potential we have, in this profession, for making a difference in someone’s development. If you had a particularly memorable or influential teacher, I hope you’ll post a comment telling me about them!
It is impossible to overestimate the importance the right teacher at the right time can have on a student, though it may be impossible to foresee what will turn to be “right” ahead of time. In my own case, I think of my sixth grade teacher, Mr. James. I hadn’t wanted to be assigned to his class, as he had a reputation for being brilliant but eccentric and sort of scary–all of which he was, and indeed still is! But he was the right teacher for me after all: he saw something in my moody, bookish 12-year-old self that caught his interest enough for him to lend me extra books and encourage me to be less fearful about the differences between my own strengths and the qualities that earned other students ease and popularity with their peers. I think, too, of the indomitable Joni MacDougall, who browbeat me into being a better writer and let me, as a nerdy tenth grader, visit her History 12 class to give a presentation on Richard III (when I say “nerdy,” I mean that I was the youngest member–at least to my knowledge–of the Richard III Society of Canada). Later, when she had moved to a different school, she invited me to speak to her social studies class on the Industrial Revolution. Both teachers intimidated, bullied, and pressured me; both also, in equal measure, inspired and motivated me. Somehow, they had an idea of what I was capable of that exceeded my own, and by urging me to cultivate my own interest in reading and history, they started me along my career path well before I could have articulated anything like academic ambition for myself.
But probably the most influential moment, and the one I never saw coming, was my enrollment in D. G. Stephens’s first-year English class at UBC. I nearly missed it: I had registered for another section, but after the first class meeting I was told that I had to switch to what they called a “Z” section (I had done well on a placement test, I think). So I showed up in Dr. Stephens’s class for the next meeting (and, I distinctly remember, had to write an in-class essay on the seven deadly sins, about which everyone else had been forewarned). Prior to taking his class I had fully intended to major in history. I was a lifelong avid reader, but a complete skeptic about literary interpretation: when I thought about literary criticism at all, which was almost never, it seemed to me an exercise in second-guessing, or just plain guessing–in seeing what wasn’t there. In retrospect, I think this dismissive attitude was partly the result of growing up in a house full of devoted readers: I took reading for granted and didn’t see why or how it could be complicated.
So what happened to me in Dr. Stephens’s class? Obviously, whatever it was, it changed my mind about a lot of things. But it wasn’t because he was messianic. His teaching style is probably best described as “understated,” in fact.** I particularly remember the way he would make a comment and then scan the room, looking for responses, which were slow and hesitant in coming (his demeanor was, or I remember it as being, a bit intimidating–wryly ironic, a bit cynical). Many of his remarks were actually very funny, and I came to believe he was looking around to see if anyone got the joke. (I do that too, now: it’s a good way to see who’s paying attention.) But I don’t remember that he ever cracked a real smile himself. When he asked the class a question, I often wondered what mysterious answer he had in mind. Whatever I was thinking seemed too obvious to be right, and clearly hardly anybody else would hazard a guess. But it was frustrating not to have more discussion, and one day we had read a poem I really liked (it was Robert Graves’s “The Cool Web“) and I finally put my hand up and ventured some replies to his questions about Graves’s language and how particular words fit the central ideas of the poem. He seemed pleased! My answers were good! I knew what he was talking about! Things started to fall into place. He wasn’t making things up, because I could see them there too, in the poem, and thinking about how the details of form and language built up the whole piece made the poem better, more pleasurable, more exciting to read. It was like something coming into focus, something I (as someone who had always loved to read both fiction and poetry) had always seen, but had never really looked at.
I actually have all of my old undergraduate essays (it’s a good exercise in humility to look them over, especially during marking season). I certainly didn’t get all As in his class. What I did get was a sense of the rewards of interpretation, of lingering over details, of making a specific connection with a text. It probably helped me that Dr. Stephens was not a showy teacher, and it certainly helped me that he was a rigorous one as well as a witty one. I didn’t give up the idea of majoring in history. Instead, I became the first UBC student to do a combined Honours degree in English and History (back in the olden days, interdisciplinarity was not the norm). I had many excellent teachers in both departments, and superb mentors for my Honours thesis in James Winter and Jonathan Wisenthal. But I dedicated my thesis to Dr. Stephens, with gratitude.
*I realize that Tom’s question may have been meant to elicit more about scholarly and critical, rather than personal, influences. I’m still thinking about that dimension of influence. No question, I have learned a lot from many teachers and scholars. But is that the same as having been “influenced” by them? And have any of them actually inspired, moved, or motivated me? (If not, is that a problem or a loss?)
**My search of the UBC website for pictures or other details about Dr. Stephens to link to revealed that he won a “Master Teacher” award in 1974 and 1977 (fully a decade before I took his class), so clearly I wasn’t the only student he impressed. This raises the further question for me of whether UBC had, at that time, a deliberate policy of putting senior and well-regarded faculty in their first-year classrooms.
Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (I)
I’m about 300 pages into A Suitable Boy, and I thought it might be useful (and, frankly, motivating) to commit to blogging my way through it, as I did with He Knew He Was Right last summer. Actually, the two novels have some features in common so far. First, both give a whole new meaning to the concept of a “slice of life” novel: call it, perhaps, a “swathe of life”! Both are multiplot novels organized around a variety of households. Both emphasize character, plot, and setting over overtly aesthetic or literary effects or themes–though with 900 pages of the Seth novel to go, that could change. Both also are told in a fairly flat prose style; so far, I would say Trollope is the livelier narrator, more playful and intrusive, with a wider variety of styles. Seth’s writing here is certainly descriptive, evocative of a specific time and of specific places, but (so far) it lacks the intensity of An Equal Music. The first-person narrator there is a key difference, of course, but third-person narration can be more engaging or intense than I am finding A Suitable Boy so far: it seems tepid or distanced.
This effect, however, may be purely in my mind, the result of the difficulties I am having getting close to the novel myself. As someone who reads long books professionally, I wasn’t intimidated by this one (though I continue to be frustrated by the logistical problems it raises because I literally can’t fit it into my tote bag for those precious stolen moments of pleasure reading). But I’m not doing as well as I’d expected. For one thing, I’m really struggling to keep track of who the characters are. I keep flipping back and forth to the handy family trees in the front. Presumably I will get better at this as I press on.
A more difficult problem for me is my unfamiliarity with the milieu of the novel, meaning not so much the bold outlines of the historical context (though my relative ignorance is certainly being impressed upon me) as the details of dress, food, and social and religious customs invoked on every page. I’m longing for a glossary! Scott provided one for his non-Scottish readers; Ahdaf Soueif, much more recently, provides a very helpful one in In the Eye of the Sun (from “Abu-l-rish: a popular district in South Cairo” to “Zebiba: a raisin; a brown mark that appears on the skin of the forehead as a result of much praying”). Soueif is self-evidently concerned with orienting (no pun intended) readers from outside the culture she writes about, a concern that is thematically appropriate to a novel itself preoccupied with cross-cultural communication and the intricate ways literary language participates in defining personal and national identities. Why does Seth see no need to provide a similar aid to his readers? Or, if he recognized this as a potentially useful thing to include, why did he opt against it? Maybe the fault lies in me. Am I particularly ill-informed–do most readers get all the allusions and know all the vocabulary? Am I supposed to be content to get only an approximate sense of so many details? Am I just lazy not to be reading with a stack of reference books beside me? Or is this a deliberate strategy of alienation for readers on the ‘outside’? I’m not finding this an overwhelming problem; I’m certainly learning as I go along.
Update: I went over to Sepia Mutiny for some more information about this book and one of the first things I found was a comment about the absence of a glossary:
A Suitable Boy: … the publisher asked, can we have a few more foreign characters to appeal to the foreign market… that’s why I was rather surprised that the… interminable book about a rather obscure period of Indian history in the ’50s… without war, without the assassination of prime ministers, without… much in the way of sex… without even a glossary… was successful outside India…
Whether to include a glossary: You can describe what a duck is, but if somebody hasn’t even seen a duck… If someone’s read Dickens… they have certain references to the geography of London… that we don’t get. But as long as the writer’s not trying to be particularly obscure… we give them latitude…
These are “liveblogging” notes from an interview Seth did with members of the South Asian Journalists Association; the complete interview (which I hope to listen to soon) is archived here.
If I Had a Million Dollars…
A member of the VICTORIA listserv just brought this to our attention:
GREAT EXPECTATIONS – DICKENS’ WRITING DESK AND CHAIR TO BE OFFERED AT CHRISTIE’S IN JUNE WITH PROCEEDS TO BENEFIT GREAT ORMOND STREET HOSPITAL
Yes, it’s the set seen in this famous engraving “The Empty Chair.” Christie’s expects the set to go for L50,000-L80-000.
Some People Read Scott, Anyway!
My previous post inspired Amateur Reader to reflect on the joys and challenges of Scott, with engaging posts on The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, and Redgauntlet so far:
The word that Scott can’t escape is “slack”. Rarely is he in a hurry to get anywhere, so he requires patience, perhaps too much at times. The story of The Heart of Midlothian is not told with anything resembling efficiency.
But AR acknowledges the charms of Scott’s inefficiencies, giving due attention, for instance, to Madge Wildfire in Heart of Midlothian and Wandering Willie’s Tale in Redgauntlet. I think we agree that there’s more to life than “push[ing] the story forward.” (In a comment at AR‘s place, I tried to imagine Dickens being efficient. Sometimes perhaps writers should do things just because they can–Joe’s hat falling off the mantel in Great Expectations, or the head of Charles I in David Copperfield. Constrain that imagination and maybe you don’t get Krook’s spontaneous combustion, or Miss Havisham and her wedding cake….)
Another interesting comment: “Honor and loyalty – Scott returns to this theme repeatedly. Perhaps one reason we do not read Scott so much now is that we our ideas about honor have changed too much since Scott’s time.” Scott isn’t afraid to showcase virtue, either: I’m thinking of Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian, almost certainly too steadfast to be the heroine of a novel by any other 19th-century novelist.
Still, the evidence of my very small sample (including those commenting at WutheringExpectations) is not overwhelming in Scott’s favour. No question, he’s not a crowd-pleaser, but I’m reminded of the annoying ads for local brewery Alexander Keith’s: “Those who like it, like it a lot!”
Who Reads Scott Anymore?
Skipping back along a chain of links this morning, I found myself at this article in “The Reader Online” by Brian Nellist, a long-time member of the English faculty at the University of Liverpool (and, among many other things, co-editor of the edition of Margaret Oliphant’s Hester that I recently used in my graduate seminar on Victorian Women Writers). Titled “People Don’t Read Scott Anymore,” the article pushes off from the scene of Mr. Ramsey reading Scott in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which “Charles Tansley their intellectually arrogant house-guest has declared ‘People don’t read Scott any more’ and Mr Ramsey, who does, needs to confirm that what he admires is still alive on the page.” “The answer to Tansley’s taunt,” Nellist proposes,
is experto crede, not ‘Trust the professional’, heaven forbid, but ‘have faith in the man who’s tried it’ and that means because literature allows us all that privilege, ourselves reading.
He follows this up with a fascinating and detailed account of the experience of reading Scott, particularly The Antiquary, the novel Mr. Ramsey is reading in To the Lighthouse. Some samples:
Scott is a historical novelist not mainly because he is interested in inventing a new genre or likes picturesque effects but because the past provides a medium through which he establishes the difference, between himself and the reader together, from the characters (in the whole range of his moods there is no single character who can be identified directly with the novelist himself). This difference does not express the Modernist apprehension of the isolation of personality within its inevitably over-evolved identity but the opposite, a sense that we can after all in part understand lives inevitably beyond our own experience. Scott uses history and picture to maintain his balance between the warmth of knowing where the characters are coming from to admit their inevitable helplessness, and yet preserve a stoical silence over our incapacity to inhabit the same human space. . . .
Scott requires of us not that Paterian aesthetic of intensity but a generous acknowledgement of permanent difference to which we are to bring heart and mind in understanding, the older idea of sympathy in fact. Sympathy makes rational objections, moral dissent, even though the text provides a basis for it, an irrelevance in the face of greater considerations: the ‘facts’ are more complex than any ideas we might have about them. . . . Sympathy is the bit of freedom given to the reader when we look at characters who seem, like Scott’s do, so gripped by the circumstances of their lives that their own freedom has been smothered by habit. What is for us the sharpness and individuality of his characters is often for them within the novel a painfully circumscribed identity: we laugh but often they don’t.
The article is well worth reading in its entirety.
And now here’s the question: Is it true that people don’t read Scott anymore? I admit I haven’t read The Antiquary, but I’ve read a modest number of Scott’s novels and until this year have persisted in including Waverley on the syllabus every time I teach the early 19th-century novel course here. My special affection for this smart, funny, poignant, satirical, self-conscious novel was begun and fostered by my studies with Harry Shaw at Cornell, and repeated re-readings and, especially, re-teachings have only enhanced the pleasure I take in it (though, sadly, I can’t be as confident about the pleasure my students have taken in it, though I have found that you can predict someone’s overall success in the course pretty well from whether they ‘get’ the humour in Waverley). My favourite exam “sight passage” (future students take note) is from the end of Chapter 16:
[Waverley] had now time to give himself up to the full romance of his situation. Here he sate on the banks of an unknown lake; under the guidance of a wild native, whose language was unknown to him, on a visit to the den of some renowned outlaw, a second Robin Hood perhaps, or Adam o’ Gordon, and that at deep midnight, through scenes of difficulty and toil, separated from his attendant, left by his guide. — What a variety of incidents for the exercise of a romantic imagination, and all enhanced by the solemn feeling of uncertainty, at least, if not of danger? The only circumstance which assorted ill with the rest, was the cause of his journey — the Baron’s milk-cows! This degrading incident he kept in the background.
Waverley and the excesses and errors of his “romantic imagination” obviously provide much of the comedy, at least for the first two-thirds or so of the novel (along with the Boring Baron of Bradwardine)–I always recommend to my students that they count the number of times “our hero” trips, falls down, or is carried injured or unconscious away from some potentially heroic situation. But the best scene for grasping what I take Nellist to be talking about, in terms of Scott’s engagement with the past, is Fergus’s trial, including Evan Dhu’s heart-stoppingly sincere offer of his life in exchange for his feudal master’s:
Evan Maccombich looked at him with great earnestness, and, rising up, seemed anxious to speak; but the confusion of the court, and the perplexity arising from thinking in a language different from that in which he was to express himself, kept him silent. There was a murmur of compassion among the spectators, from the idea that the poor fellow intended to plead the influence of his superior as an excuse for his crime. The Judge commanded silence, and encouraged Evan to proceed. ‘I was only ganging to say, my lord,’ said Evan, in what he meant to be an insinuating manner, ‘that if your excellent honour and the honourable Court would let Vich Ian Vohr go free just this once, and let him gae back to France, and no to trouble King George’s government again, that ony six o’ the very best of his clan will be willing to be justified in his stead; and if you’ll just let me gae down to Glennaquoich, I’ll fetch them up to ye mysell, to head or hang, and you may begin wi’ me the very first man.’
Notwithstanding the solemnity of the occasion, a sort of laugh was heard in the court at the extraordinary nature of the proposal. The Judge checked this indecency, and Evan, looking sternly around, when the murmur abated, ‘If the Saxon gentlemen are laughing,’ he said, ‘because a poor man, such as me, thinks my life, or the life of six of my degree, is worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it’s like enough they may be very right; but if they laugh because they think I would not keep my word and come back to redeem him, I can tell them they ken neither the heart of a Hielandman nor the honour of a gentleman.’
There was no farther inclination to laugh among the audience, and a dead silence ensued.
(Haven’t read it? You really should! Here’s an etext, though you’ll probably want an edition with lots of notes.)
Let’s see: I’ve also read The Bride of Lammermoor, The Heart of Midlothian, The Talisman, Kenilworth, Old Mortality, Ivanhoe, and Redgauntlet (on which I actually published an article once). That’s not really very many, considering the man’s vast output, but I’d consider it a good sampling. I am also the owner of a battered copy of Quentin Durward inscribed to my grandfather as a Christmas gift in 1910, from the boys’ school he attended. (I’m guessing that he was more excited about Quentin Durward than he was the volume of Mrs. Hemans’s poems they gave him in 1912 “for good conduct”!)
So, what about it, dear readers (to use a very Victorian address)? Do people read Scott anymore? What Scott have you read, what are your favourites, and what would you say is special about the experience he offers us as readers?
Zadie Smith on George Eliot: the “Secular Laureate of Revelation”
In The Guardian this weekend, there’s a nice long piece by Zadie Smith on George Eliot. (Thanks to Nigel Beale for making sure I didn’t miss this.) Though I would quibble over some details (I don’t agree, for instance, with the characterization of Middlemarch as “messy”), I am impressed at the level of detail and thoughtfulness in Smith’s discussion. She starts with Henry James’s assessment of the novel–well-travelled territory, but she finds her own way through his specific obtuseness about the significance of Fred Vincy. “[Y]ou can see why Henry didn’t have much time for Fred,” she says, but she offers a compelling analysis of Fred’s significance to both the philosophy of the novel (which she carefully addresses in terms of Eliot’s affinities to Spinoza) and to its form, in which there are of necessity many centers, not just one. A sample:
Fred is in love with a good girl; a girl who does not love him because he is not worthy; Fred agrees with her. Maybe the point is this: of all the people striving in Middlemarch, only Fred is striving for a thing worth striving for. Dorothea mistakes Casaubon terribly, as Lydgate mistakes Rosamund, but Fred thinks Mary is worth having, that she is probably a good in the world, or at least, good for him (“She is the best girl I know!”) – and he’s right. Of all of them Fred has neither chosen a chimerical good, nor radically mistaken his own nature. He’s not as dim as he seems. He doesn’t idealise his good as Dorothea does when she imagines Casaubon a second Milton, and he doesn’t settle on a good a priori, like Lydgate, who has long believed that a doting, mindless girl is just what a man of science needs. What Fred surmises of the good he stumbles upon almost by accident, and only as a consequence of being fully in life and around life, by being open to its vagaries simply because he is in possession of no theory to impose upon it.
A bit later on,
If Fred didn’t love Mary, he would have no reason to exercise his imagination on her family. It’s love that makes him realise that two women without their savings are a real thing in the world and not merely incidental to his own sense of dishonour. It’s love that enables him to feel another’s pain as if it were his own. For Eliot, in the absence of God, all our moral tests must take place on this earth and have their rewards and punishments here. We are each other’s lesson, each other’s duty. This turns out to be a doctrine peculiarly suited to a certain kind of novel writing. Middlemarch is a dazzling dramatisation of earthly human striving.
I don’t feel Smith is as smart about the form of Middlemarch as she is about some of its themes and philosophical interests. Near the end she remarks that the novel “seems to hint at those doubts in the efficacy of narrative that were to follow in the next century. Why always Dorothea, why heroes, why the centrality of a certain character in a narrative, why narrative at all? Eliot, being a Victorian, did not go all the way down that road.” I don’t see “why narrative at all?” as one of Eliot’s questions–which may, perhaps, have something to do with being Victorian, but Smith’s phrasing has the patronizing undertones of modernism. Eliot was not trying to get away from narrative (is that even possible?) but to revise it, and particularly to get away from linearity (which may, in fact, be what Smith means by “narrative”). She tackles the problem Carlyle identified (a century before the “next century” Smith refers to) about the “efficacy of narrative”–“narrative is linear, action is solid”–with a construction full of complex returns, repetitions, and doubling back, as well as the famous shifts in point of view epitomized, as Smith notes, in the question “But why always Dorothea?”
I also think Smith is not being careful enough when she moves, at the end of her piece, to make Middlemarch a stand-in for a totalizing category of the “19th-century English novel.” Middlemarch does things no other novel did in the 19th century. But so, in a very different way, did Vanity Fair or Bleak House or Barchester Towers. She wants to lump them all in together for her own polemical purposes, to reject what she sees as a lingering Victorianism and call for something new:
That 19th-century English novels continue to be written today with troubling frequency is a tribute to the strength of Eliot’s example and to the nostalgia we feel for that noble form. Eliot would be proud. But should we be? For where is our fiction, our 21st-century fiction?
These objections seem a bit odd coming from someone who has often been labelled “Dickensian,” though (as I’ve briefly discussed before) this label seems only loosely applicable in her case. What exactly does she mean by it? Presumably she means that many novelists today use techniques and conventions also used in the 19th century–but surely this does not a 19th-century novel make. Victorian novelists have been understood as writing historical novels about their own present–this investigative impulse may also continue in the work of contemporary novelists. But the world itself has changed; isn’t there novelty in that alone? Eliot talks about the effects of a “microscope directed on a water drop”–but changing the slide, while keeping the equipment, is not necessarily a conservative or nostalgic choice. You use the tools you need to get the job done. Can’t novelists read their world and craft their insights into narrative without losing credibility? To me, this call to ‘make it new’ is an unnecessary polemical flourish at the end of a good piece, the most important talking point of which should really be,
It’s a mistake to hate Middlemarch because the pollsters love it. That would be to denude oneself of one of those good things of the world that Spinoza advised we cling to.
Novel Readings 