It’s a short week, thanks to the Remembrance Day holiday. It’s also the last week on Middlemarch in both my classes. My graduate seminar has already met; following a good presentation raising questions about the relationship of different characters (especially Dorothea) to political reform, we had some lively discussion about the feminist critiques (and defenses) of Middlemarch raised in our cluster of secondary readings for the day, and then moved to questions about the role of desire in the novel and about Rosamond and how far the novel realizes its ostensible project of sympathy where she is concerned. Inevitably there were topics we wanted to talk about but couldn’t. The same will be true in my undergraduate class this afternoon: it’s always a challenge deciding what to cover, with a novel so capacious in its interests and complex in its plot and structure. I’ll use some time to clarify ways the novel’s final events, especially, of course, the climactic encounter between Rosamond and Dorothea, work out the novel’s central ideas about egotism, altruism, and sympathy. Then I think we’ll debate whether Dorothea’s ending is a failure, and if so, of what, and with what effects. I like to bring in some of the many criticisms of Will Ladislaw, whom Henry James early on called “the only eminent failure in the book”: “he is, in short, roughly speaking, a woman’s man.” Then there’s Gilbert and Gubar’s rather different take: “Will is Eliot’s radically anti-patriarchal attempt to create an image of masculinity attractive to women.” In Approaches to Teaching Middlemarch, Juliet McMaster notes that “[her] students have strong responses to Will…and that their responses are often (though certainly not always) aligned with their sex. Usually, the women like him, the men don’t. As a way of setting the cat among the pigeons, I have sometimes suggested to my classful of young men and women that the male reader tends to object to Will because he is jealous of him.” I like to encourage students to look for thematic reasons why Will does (or does not) make the ‘right’ partner for Dorothea, at least of the options she has. And as for the debate about whether the ending is happy, I usually bring in other novels with less problematic romantic conclusions (Pride and Prejudice, for instance) and ask them to think about the effects of satisfaction vs. the effects of dissatisfaction. A. S. Byatt remarks (in the DVD feature we watched last week) that one thing Virginia Woolf may have meant by calling Middlemarch a novel “for grown-up people” is that it is a novel that does not “pander” to the fairy-tale form. And yet Dorothea herself is happy in her choice: it seems important to separate our own possible dissatisfactions from her judgment–as well as to think about the implications of or reasons for our differences of view (a very Middlemarch thing to do!).

Despite the best efforts of Tropical Storm Noel, it looks like our regularly scheduled programming can go ahead this week. So it’s Middlemarch again, and after working hard the last two weeks on sympathy, morality, and point of view at a more or less personal level, I think this week we’ll shift our focus to politics. My undergraduates (unless this group is wildly atypical) will have at best only a dim idea of the novel’s historical context, so it’s time for a walk-through of some basic information about the 1832 Reform Bill. Then we can consider Mr Brooke as a ‘progressive’ candidate. We’ll take another look at the party in Chapter 10, in which Brooke invites a “rather more miscellaneous” crowd than Mrs Cadwallader quite likes. Then we’ll look closely at the visit to Dagley’s farm in Chapter 39, a section which ties class and political perception to aesthetics and point of view:

Mr. Brooke got down at a farmyard-gate, and Dorothea drove on. It is wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we are blamed for them. Even our own persons in the glass are apt to change their aspect for us after we have heard some frank remark on their less admirable points; and on the other hand it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never complain or have nobody to complain for them. Dagley’s homestead never before looked so dismal to Mr. Brooke as it did today, with his mind thus sore about the fault-finding of the ” Trumpet,” echoed by Sir James.

It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque, might have been delighted with this homestead called Freeman’s End: the old house had dormer-windows in the dark red roof, two of the chimneys were choked with ivy, the large porch was blocked up with bundles of sticks, and half the windows were closed with gray worm-eaten shutters about which the jasmine-boughs grew in wild luxuriance; the mouldering garden wall with hollyhocks peeping over it was a perfect study of highly mingled subdued color, and there was an aged goat (kept doubtless on interesting superstitious grounds) lying against the open back-kitchen door. The mossy thatch of the cow-shed, the broken gray barn-doors, the pauper laborers in ragged breeches who had nearly finished unloading a wagon of corn into the barn ready for early thrashing; the scanty dairy of cows being tethered for milking and leaving one half of the shed in brown emptiness; the very pigs and white ducks seeming to wander about the uneven neglected yard as if in low spirits from feeding on a too meagre quality of rinsings, — all these objects under the quiet light of a sky marbled with high clouds would have made a sort of picture which we have all paused over as a ” charming bit,” touching other sensibilities than those which are stirred by the depression of the agricultural interest, with the sad lack of farming capital, as seen constantly in the newspapers of that time. But these troublesome associations were just now strongly present to Mr. Brooke, and spoiled the scene for him.

I find it useful to bring students’ casual assumption that universal suffrage is an obvious good up against Dagley, which of course is just what George Eliot wants to do as well. To give them a fuller sense of the intellectual context for ‘progressive’ intellectual opposition to the rapid expansion of suffrage, I usually bring in bits of Carlyle, such as the “Democracy” section of Past and Present, which juxtaposes impassioned lamentation for “the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers” (“Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.”) with an equally impassioned refusal to accept democratic solutions:

Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk thereon…. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise; and keep him, were it in strait-waistcoasts, away from the precipices! … Liberty requires new definitions.

I might bring in some of Mill’s cautions about the tendency of democracy towards mediocrity: “No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so far as the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided … by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few” (On Liberty). And there’s always Culture and Anarchy, too, for some choice tidbits about the pros and cons of the Englishman’s fetishization of his “right to do what he likes.” (“And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it,” as George Eliot points out.) These examples prepare students for what they often, initially, find the oddity of George Eliot’s cautious approach to democracy, which I usually illustrate with examples from Felix Holt and the later “Address to Working Men (by Felix Holt)”:

“And while public opinion is what it is—while men have no better beliefs about public duty—while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace—while men are not ashamed in Parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petty private ends,—I say, no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our condition. For, take us working men of all sorts. Suppose out of every hundred who had a vote there were thirty who had some soberness, some sense to choose with, some good feeling to make them wish the right thing for all. And suppose there were seventy out of the hundred who were, half of them, not sober, who had no sense to choose one thing in politics more than another, and who had so little good feeling in them that they wasted on their own drinking the money that should have helped to feed and clothe their wives and children; and another half of them who, if they didn’t drink, were too ignorant or mean or stupid to see any good for themselves better than pocketing a five-shilling piece when it was offered them. Where would be the political power of the thirty sober men? The power would lie with the seventy drunken and stupid votes; and I’ll tell you what sort of men would get the power—what sort of men would end by returning whom they pleased to Parliament.” (Felix Holt–the Radical?)

Now, the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it tends to produce such disorder by giving any large number of ignorant men, whos notions of what is good are of a low and brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their hands, and may do pretty much as they like. (Address to Working Men)

“Would you want Dagley to vote?” is a crudely reductive version of the questions George Eliot is raising–but at the same time, it rather goes to the heart of the problems she identifies for us, and I think it will generate some useful discussion. In turn, our consideration of the novel’s class politics (if that’s the right way to label these issues) prepares us to consider its gender politics once we’ve read to the end.

It’s all Middlemarch, all the time this week (and next week, and the week after that). And even so, I know I will end up worrying about all the things we didn’t talk about. In my undergraduate lecture class, we’ll focus today on the novel’s structure and how it reinforces important ideas and themes. In particular, we will examine the complex chronology of some key sections, looking at the way the narrative goes back in time in order to bring us to an event from a different perspective. One of my favourite examples is at the end of Chapter 27 (the chapter which, appropriately, begins with the famous pier glass passage). It’s a chapter mostly chronicling the developing relationship between Lydgate and Rosamond; it concludes with Sir James Chettam’s servant stopping Lydgate as he walks with Rosamond, to take him to Lowick. As we learn, he is needed there because Casaubon has had some kind of heart attack. In Chapter 27, the incident is important, not as part of Casaubon’s story, but as part of Rosamond’s (more evidence for her satisfied theory that Lydgate is a cut above her other Middlemarch suitors) and part of Lydgate’s (a sign that his practice is beginning to flourish, despite his having alienated some of Peacock’s former patients by his innovative methods). The incident (we figure out later) takes place in March. But Chapter 28 begins in January, taking us back to Dorothea and Casaubon’s return from their dismal honeymoon and then following the stories of her growing disillusionment, his creeping jealousy about Will Ladislaw, and his diminishing health–bringing us up to the attack in Chapter 29. “But why always Dorothea?” asks the narrator as Chapter 29 opens–and of course the novel models the morally necessary movement of our attention and sympathy among different points of view. I often invite the class to come up with some kind of graphic representation of many people arriving at the same event (our class meeting, say), but coming from many different perspectives and all having slightly different experiences. The results, usefully, tend to look either like a tangled web or a giant hairball (the latter once they realize the advantages of working in 3-D for showing simultaneous but different strands). How can a narrative recreate these effects? I usually end up quoting Carlyle’s remark that “narrative is linear, but action is solid.” The formal challenge for the novelist is substantial, as are the mental demands on the reader. Later (probably next week) we will look at another pattern of repetition in which a place (such as Dorothea’s blue-green boudoir) or an event (such as the first time Dorothea sees Will and Rosamond together) is revisited in light of new information. In these cases we have internal or mental movement working to the same ends as the chronological and other disruptions in today’s examples.

In my graduate seminar, the discussion will be less choreographed, which means I can look forward to some surprises–always refreshing with a novel you teach often. I know we will begin with a presentation on Dorothea and women’s education, which is a promising lead in to many key issues in the novel. Our secondary readings for this week are primarily contextual: George Levine on George Eliot’s determinism, and Bernard Paris on her ‘religion of humanity.’ We are certainly getting a third distinct model of authorship: we have worked with Charlotte Bronte, who (at least as quoted in Gaskell’s biography) emphatically demanded freedom for her imagination and refused to write except as the spirit moved her; then with Elizabeth Gaskell, whose strongest motivation is social reform and reconciliation; and now with a writer whose vision of fiction is highly philosophical. In her commitment to the novel’s capacity to cause change, even improvement, GE is closer to Gaskell than to Bronte. Levine argues that to GE “a belief in the possibility of some kind of occurence not usually produced by the normal workings of the laws of nature became to her one of the positive signs of moral weakness. . . . [she] believed it morally reprehensible to rely on the unlikely or unusual, even if there is a remote chance that it might happen” (272). I don’t recall any specific comments from GE herself about this aspect of Jane Eyre, including Bronte’s own defence of the mysterious communication between Jane and Rochester (about which Gaskell quotes Bronte saying, “But it is a true thing; it really happened”). (In an 1848 letter, young Mary Ann, having just read Jane Eyre, sounds a critical note: “I have read Jane Eyre, mon ami, and shall be glad to know what you admire in it. All self-sacrifice is good–but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcase.” We might want to discuss how far her concept of the nobility of self-sacrifice has shifted by the time she gives us Dorothea’s “submission” to Casaubon’s needs, characterized in Chapter 43 as the reassertion of a “noble habit of the soul.”) The Levine and Paris articles are both from the early 1960s: given my recent fretting about the pressure to turn our critical attention to ourselves, or to a text’s unconscious aspects (the things it says without knowing or meaning to) rather than to the conversation it is overtly trying to have with us, these are interesting examples of rather different priorities. I certainly think that they are more broadly valuable than some of the more esoteric readings of Middlemarch: any responsible reader of the novel needs, or would benefit from, some grasp of its philosophical underpinnings. But we’ll be looking at some samples of other readings that work against the grain as well, including another “classic” with J. Hillis Miller’s “Narrative and History,” and we’ll ‘go meta’ ourselves when we consider the vexed status of the novel among feminist critics.