Middlemarch: Book Five

George Eliot had the most equivocal of minds. We’ve noticed that she sees pride as the most dangerous human quality, with the power to keep those in its grip from each other, from community, and from love. She has the capacity to chop down every character’s fondest vision of him or herself, challenge their pride, ironize their most prized vanities.

In Book Four she doesn’t limit her attack on pride to foolish pride—unless in her Christian view all pride is foolish pride—she is arguing against something more noble than proud ambition, she is taking on ambition itself.

And the possibility of human reform is deftly sewn throughout.

It’s startling, right in the first pages of Book Five, when Dorothea drops in at the Lydgate’s house and finds Rosamond with Will, how overtly the characters speak of their relative class positions in society. The narrator opens by saying that class habits were more differentiated then (in the thirties) than at the time of her writing (the 1860s). Rosamond is so overt about exactly who is above and beneath them and thrilled to be visited by local royalty (i. e., Dorothea). She mentions to her husband Lydgate that they, via his birth, are at least the equal of Will Ladislaw.

I had somehow considered these distinctions of rank to be more private. I’d imagined them as something people didn’t even speak of.

Dorothea is wearing a sort of soft, shapeless, white wool frock while Rosamond is in a dress “so perfect that no dressmaker could look at it without emotion” and no ordinary citizen could look at without being aware of its expense. Though, to my ear, Rosamond’s stylishness is described unfavorably (in comparison to Dorothea), it’s fun to remember that there was a little Rosamond even in George Eliot. Once she achieved financial security, she hired a fashionable architect who not only renovated her London house but also picked out clothes for her. After years of being excluded from “good” London society, she enjoyed going out and about in finery.

But the real power of Book Five derives from complex confused emotions.

Last week, in Book Four, we’d already seen a tender scene of intimacy and emotional chemistry between Will and Dorothea. Now she steps into Lydgate’s house and realizes that Mrs. Lydgate is alone with Will and that they’ve been singing and playing music together. She feels uncomfortably confused. She (of course!) in complete Dorothea-style has not fully admitted to herself the nature of Will’s feelings for her or considered their implications, not to mention feelings she may have for him. (It’s easier for her to think of him primarily in terms of how she can help him—as a wrongfully disinherited relative.)

Thus, this accidental eavesdropping and then seeing him with Rosamond (beautiful and dressed to the nines), sets off a riot of vague dark feelings in Dorothea. She can’t or won’t quite name her discomfort as jealousy or betrayal or the terrible sense that something she believed was pure and delicate and real—their fragile connection—might be just something he does with married women, so instead she labels her unease as being caused by impropriety—the impropriety of Will being alone with a married woman. Then she has to acknowledge that her husband has shown displeasure, displeasure that she hasn’t heeded, at her own private meetings with Will.

George Eliot does not probe Dorothea’s POV very deeply in this chapter. We are left with “her mind was evidently arrested by some sudden thought.” The reader is not told the thought. We only learn that she leaves the room “hardly conscious.”

Indeed.

What Eliot has been doing for a while is cultivating the allure of a forbidden romance, taking advantage of the feelings that spring up, seemingly inevitably, when love is impossible. Consider the difference between the heat and tenor of Dorothea’s conversations with Lydgate and her conversations with Will.

Lydgate has no sexual attraction to her; Will of course does. With Will, we see the two of them opening like “two flowers.”

What makes this possible, for Eliot, is the absolute sanctity of marriage for not only Dorothea but almost every other character in the book.

Pity the poor contemporary American novelist. The delicate, natural, expansive-seeming sweetness of falling in love without the possibility of consummation is pretty much removed from our toolkit.

Now, the only reason to stall consummation is that one or more parties feels ambivalent or disinterested. Yawn.

Dorothea’s relationship with Lydgate is matter-of-fact and helpful. She will give him money for his hospital. She no longer is taken up with cottages for the poor—she has been too busy with her husband’s illness. She envies Lydgate’s ability to do pure good.

“How happy you must be, to know things that you feel sure will do great good! I wish I could awake with that knowledge every morning. There seems to be so much trouble taken that one can hardly see the good of!”

Not only her husband, but many writers often feel this: So much trouble taken and for what. So many Saturday afternoons inside at a desk. I’m sure I’m not the only writer haunted by the memory of a “book barn” once visited in Vermont, filled with hundreds of thousands of out-of-print books. This, too, of course, is a problem of misplaced pride.

In a mercantile economy, Lydgate is challenging some “genteel” assumptions. The Middlemarch he arrived at did not pay for doctors’ services, wisdom, or diagnoses. The Middlemarchers paid—they believed—exclusively for pills, potions, “draughts, boluses and mixtures,” which put the physicians in the position of commissioned salesmen. “It is in that way that hard-working medical men may come to be almost as mischievous as quacks,” Lydgate says. ‘To get their own bread they must overdose the king’s lieges; and that’s a bad sort of treason.”

It’s easy to admire Lydgate’s pure scientific passion and his confidence that he can deliver enlightened good care to his patients, while advancing the scientific study of cells. Yet this passion doesn’t sit well with everyone. Some of the townspeople fear that Dr. Lydgate is after their organs and bones, once he “too daringly” asked the relatives of a dead woman to let him “open the body.”

He tries to explain matters to his beloved wife. “The only way” the early physician Vesalius “could get to know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from graveyards and places of execution.”

She answers, “Do you know, Tertius, I often wish you had not been a medical man.”

He begs her not to think this. “That is like saying you wish you had married another man … It is the grandest profession in the world … To say that you love me without loving the medical man in me, is the same sort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach but don’t like its flavor.”

Though we see that his lack of tact will cause him trouble, we’re still rooting for him. Farebrother, a true friend to Lydgate, is cautious. He advises Lydgate to watch his budget (“take care not to get hampered about money … try and keep clear of wanting small sums that you haven’t got”) and to maintain his independence from Bulstrode. The narrator says of Lydgate, in at this early time of his marriage and his reception in Middlemarch (mixed but promising, with some “miracle cures” attributed to him, some detractors, but some advocates), that “there was something very fine in Lydgate’s look just then, and any one might have been encouraged to bet on his achievement.”

What Eliot has been doing for a while is cultivating the allure of a forbidden romance, taking advantage of the feelings that spring up, seemingly inevitably, when love is impossible. Consider the difference between the heat and tenor of Dorothea’s conversations with Lydgate and her conversations with Will.

Lydgate has no sexual attraction to her; Will of course does. With Will, we see the two of them opening like “two flowers.”

What makes this possible, for Eliot, is the absolute sanctity of marriage for not only Dorothea but almost every other character in the book.

What do we bet on him?

Will represents the opposite of a definite passion. He believes in John Russell’s bill for electoral reform, but warms up to working by necessity, for money, with others, not for lofty, overly ambitious ends. “It is undeniable that but for the desire to be where Dorothea was, and perhaps the want of knowing what else to do, Will would not at this time have been meditating on the needs of the English people or criticizing English statesmanship: he would probably have been rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too artificial, beginning to copy ‘bits’ from old pictures, leaving off because they were ‘no good,’ and observing that, after all, self-culture was the principal point.”

Yet, nonetheless, “he was rather happy; getting a great deal of fresh knowledge in a vivid way and for practical purposes, and making the ‘Pioneer’ celebrated as far as Brassing (never mind the smallness of the area; the writing was not worse than much that reaches the four corners of the earth).”

When Mr. Brooke compliments Will he’s pleased. “It is a little too trying to human flesh to be conscious of expressing one’s self better than others and never to have it noticed, and in the general dearth of admiration for the right thing, even a chance bray of applause falling exactly in time is rather fortifying.”

This is probably how Eliot felt about some people liking her books.

Will knows he’ll never be what he’d like to be in relation Dorothea, but he “cared little for what are called the solid things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to have within him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, was like the inheritance of a fortune.”

He truly is the opposite of proud: “I am a fool.”

Will and Lydgate enjoy arguing about life and politics, annoying Rosamond, who is becoming bored in married life, once the great drama of her life (the conquest of status, via marriage) has been settled.

Note the deftness of this little exchange between the newly married couple:

“‘What vexed you?’

“‘Oh, outdoor things—business.’

“It was really a letter insisting on the payment of a bill for furniture. But Rosamond was expecting to have a baby, and Lydgate wished to save her from any perturbation.” George Eliot brings us into the next stage of their marriage—pregnancy, children, the evidence of a successful intimate life (she slips in Celia and Sir James’s baby in just the same way) and also lets us know that Lydgate has not been able to completely follow Farebrother’s wise advice.

Dorothea and Casaubon’s marriage seems to have run its course. Dorothea understands that it will never be the “fuller sort of companionship” she’d hoped for. And now, finally, Mr. Casaubon, sensing his mortality, wants her to work with him, long hours of the day. She yearns for work which would be “directly beneficent like the sunshine … and now it appeared that she was to live more and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labor producing what would never see the light.”

Casaubon frantically tries to extract from her the devotion he once could have so easily had. At the beginning, she’d begged him to let her in, to let her help him. Who knows; is it too farfetched to imagine that if he’d taken the risk of fully exposing his notes, his work, his doubts, all of it, to her they could have talked it out, separated the wheat from the chaff, published, perhaps not a “key” to “all mythologies” but something authentic?

Dorothea is depressed: “Books were of no use. Thinking was of no use. It was Sunday, and she could not have the carriage to go to Celia, who had lately had a baby. There was no refuge now from spiritual emptiness and discontent, and Dorothea had to bear her bad mood, as she would have borne a headache.”

Late at night, Casaubon asks her to promise that she will carry out his wishes after his death.

“Whatever affection prompted I would do without promising,” she says.

“But you would use your own judgment: I ask you to obey mine; you refuse.”

She stalls for time and struggles with the decision, imaging herself “sifting those mixed heaps of material, which were to be the doubtful illustration of principles still more doubtful.” She’s lost all faith in “the trustworthiness of that Key which had made the ambition and the labor of her husband’s life.”

At the same time, she pities him. Unlike him, she has the ability to question her own integrity. “And had she not wished to marry him that she might help him in his life’s labor?—But she had thought the work was to be something greater, which she could serve in devoutly for its own sake. ”

Here is another example of pride. Is it really noble to wish to attach yourself to a mission conditionally, only if you are not mistaken about its greatness?

“It would be refusing to do for him dead, what she was almost sure to do for him living. If he lived as Lydgate had said he might, for fifteen years or more, her life would certainly be spent in helping him and obeying him.”

Bizarrely, we witness Tantripp (who is physically described for the first time in Chapter 48) have a small butler-lady’s maid flirtation the day of Mr. Casaubon’s death. How weird that we should learn here that she is a “solid-figured woman who had been with the sisters at Lausanne.”

Dorothea’s egoism is tested. She realizes she must make the promise to her husband, though “neither law nor the world’s opinion compelled her … only the ideal and not the real yoke of marriage.”

But before she has a chance to deliver her self-sacrifice, Mr. Casaubon dies.

Friendship again proves to be a great leavening force. Sir James looks after Dorothea’s reputation, while sequestering her with Celia and Celia’s new baby. In light of the codicil, he has a typical concern about Dorothea’s “dignity,” which probably still derives from his own romantic affections for Dorothea—he might not like the idea that Dorothea favored Will.

Mr. Brooke logically argues that it would have been worse if “he had made the codicil to hinder her from marrying again at all, you know.”

“I don’t know that,” says Sir James. “It would have been less indelicate.”

Mr. Brooke avoids sending Will Ladislaw away, as Sir James wishes, for he, too, has his pride, which is leading him to run for Parliament. It would have been “highly inconvenient to him to part with Ladislaw at that time, when a dissolution might happen any day, and electors were to be convinced of the course by which the interests of the country would be best served. Mr. Brooke sincerely believed that this end could be secured by his own return to Parliament: he offered the forces of his mind honestly to the nation.”

Celia, who had been a source of good sense when Dorothea became carried away with her romance (“There would be nothing trivial about our lives. Everyday-things with us would mean the greatest things. It would be like marrying Pascal”) now has her own moment of pompousness, as she watches every slight movement of “baby,” calling “nurse” constantly. She believes he is “Bouddha in a Western form.”

She can’t bear that her sister should be in mourning for an dead husband who was dull and old when alive while baby is here now, a central, poised being.

She tells her sister the truth about the will.

“It is as if Mr. Casaubon wanted to make people believe that you would wish to marry Mr. Ladislaw—which is ridiculous … Mrs. Cadwallader said you might as well marry an Italian with white mice! But I must just go and look at baby.”

Dorothea feels everything change. Even when her husband had asked her for a pledge of obedience after his death, she’d never imagined that would pertain to anything besides her devotion to the Key to All Mythologies. Realizing his hidden jealousy she now, experiences a “sudden strange yearning of heart towards Will Ladislaw.”

Her most immediate impulse is to go to Lowick, to see to her business, to tend to the matter of the “living there,” for which Lydgate recommends Farebrother. It’s a testimony to the freedom of friendship and the depth of understanding possible between two people who have never engaged in any kind of flirtation. Lydgate tells Mr. Brooke and Sir James to “let Mrs. Casaubon do as she likes … She wants perfect freedom, I think, more than any other prescription.”

Dorothea can’t seem to think of Will without trying to help him, a mission which has been greatly complicated by her husband’s will. “About this property many troublous questions insisted on rising: had she not been right in thinking that the half of it ought to go to Will Ladislaw?—but was it not impossible now for her to do that act of justice?”

When she returns to Lowick, she searches Mr. Casaubon’s desk, hoping to find some written words of explanation, some expression of his personal feeling for her, and she finds nothing.

Of all the characters whose pride and overly high aims are set in motion in these hundred pages, none gets a comeuppance as vivid as poor Mr. Brooke, whose speech is undone by a comic effigy launched by an opponent that is pelted with vegetables and rotten eggs while he speaks, at the same time a ventriloquist echoes and mocks his phrases. And of course there’s no speaker in all of this novel more easy to mimic.

Finally, even decent Mr. Farebrother has a disappointment, though his long-deferred hope can hardly be blamed on excessive pride. Happily, Dorothea gives him the living, which eases his financial troubles. He won’t even take credit for his good luck, saying, after his mother says that the position is well deserved, “when a man gets a good berth, mother, half the deserving must come after.”

His dependents openly wish he would marry Miss Garth, and he responds, “You talk as if young women were tied up to be chosen, like poultry at market; as if I had only to ask and everybody would have me.”

Fred then comes to ask him to go to Mary Garth, to do his bidding.

He reveals his own affection for her, when he tells her of Fred’s love: “When the state of a woman’s affections touches the happiness of another life—of more lives than one—I think it would be the nobler course for her to be perfectly direct and open.”

This is how he learns that the woman he loves, loves Fred.

“Decidedly I am an old stalk,” he thinks, “the young growths are pushing me aside.”

Will senses that people are thinking of him as an opportunist. He doesn’t want to be seen as an opportunist, trying to marry a rich widow. He dreams of doing wonders, perhaps after five years of writing about politics he would gain “distinction” and “would not seem to be asking Dorothea to step down to him.” He begins to imagine “a career which at five-and-twenty seemed probable enough in the inward order of things, where talent brings fame, and fame everything else which is delightful.”

But George Eliot leaves his hopes to be dashed in a later chapter and instead introduces a whole new plot involving the shady Mr. Raffles, in Middlemarch to threaten and harass Mr. Bulstrode, who is perhaps the most dangerous kind of proud of all—the religiously proud.

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Mona Simpson is the author of seven novels, most recently Commitment, which appeared this spring.

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Image: William Fettes Douglas (1822–1891), Interior at Haddon Hall

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