I noticed three things this time, reading Chapter One, “Miss Brooke.”
Our first introduction to Dorothea, our young heroine given to spiritual ambition, begins with a description of her beauty, a kind of beauty thrown into relief by plain dress.
“Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” opens Daniel Deronda, another novel by George Eliot, published five years later.
Reading about George Eliot, it’s remarkable how many writers comment on her looks.
Henry James described her (in a letter to his father) as “magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous. She has a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth and a chin and jaw-bone qui n’en finissent pas …”
Vita Sackville-West described George Eliot as “one of those authors of whom it is almost impossible to think without instantly recalling their physical appearance.”
Virginia Woolf, in the Times Literary Supplement (of all places,) wrote, “One cannot escape the conviction that the long, heavy face with its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power has stamped itself depressingly upon the minds of people who remember George Eliot, so that it looks out upon them from her pages.”
Few photographs of Eliot survive. According to one biographer, she avoided the camera.
Eliot characterizes Dorothea by means of comparison and contrast with her younger sister, Celia (their nicknames are, respectively, “Kitty” and “Dodo”). They both feel “pride” at being “ladies.” Though not aristocrats, they’re aware that, for two generations back, there were no yard-measuring or parcel-tying forebears. Hmm. This may rub Americans the wrong way, until we remember here, that in that same Times Literary Supplement piece about Eliot, Virginia Woolf felt it relevant to mention that Eliot “was the granddaughter of a carpenter.”
Dorothea is intense. She’s passionate, enamored of greatness. She does things like suddenly kneel down and pray on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer “as if she thought herself living in the time of the apostles.” Though she is regarded as an heiress, her neighbors in north-east corner of Loamshire consider her less “marriageable” than her sister Celia, who is more amiable, less intense, easier.
The two are orphans. Our narrator makes so little of this that, instead of telling us what ages they each were, she seems to round the difference by saying that they were “about twelve years old” when they “lost their parents” and never tells us how their parents died. Not much is made here or anywhere else about this colossal loss (We’re told dryly that they each had “seven hundred a year each from their parents”). We learn they were educated for seven years between an English family and a Swiss family and that now, when Dorothea is twenty, they had been living in the custody of their uncle, Sir James, a doddering, Jane Austen-esque “man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions and uncertain vote.” (Eliot often characterizes with wildly disparate qualities.)
Mr. Brooke has bucked the custom of the county by listening to Dorothea and not finding a middle-aged proper woman to “guide them” as their companion, mostly because he can’t stand the thought of having such a virtuous woman about the house. Dorothea, we are told, retained very “child like views of marriage.” She images marriage to a great man, someone like Milton “when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure.” Certainly not the “amiable” baronet next door, James Chettam, “who said ‘exactly’ to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty.”
The “really delightful marriage” she imagines “must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.”
Once we’ve dispatched with the introductions, we’re set up for a scene today. James Chettam is coming to dine accompanied by Edward Casaubon, “noted in the county as a man of profound learning, understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history; also as a man of wealth enough to give lustre to his piety, and having views of his own which were to be more clearly ascertained on the publication of his book.”
The marriage plot has been cocked and loaded.
But the scene we see first is not the dinner with the two men. It’s the sisters, alone. We learn, offhandedly, that Dorothea has set up an infant school in the village and loves to draw plans for buildings, better dwellings for the workers, on her uncle’s estate. She’s drawing when Celia comes in to ask about dividing their late mother’s
jewels. Their uncle gave them to Dorothea and she hasn’t looked at them or thought about them for six months. Celia has been thinking about them.
Dorothea haughtily dismisses the idea, saying that of course they would never use them, provoking Celia to invoke their dead mother and argue that “surely there are women in heaven now who wore jewels.”
Celia says that to leave the jewel box unopened would show a lack of respect for their mother, but we know that it’s not only her late mother Celia is thinking of. There is an ancient and eternal tradition of women and jewels. Dorothea clarifies: Celia can use these adornments, even if she won’t. “Souls have complexions too.”
Though the young Brooke women have managed to forgo frippery, will they prove to be as strict about jewels? The jewelry, luxurious and in contrast to the ribbons and frills emerging from the newly ascendant mills and millinaries, seems to imply tensions between the spirit and the body, the eternal and the right now.
The jewels spread out made “a bright parterre” on the table. We’re told that it’s no “great collection.” But there are amethysts set in “exquisite gold work,” a pearl cross with five diamonds, and emeralds.
For a bit Dorothea resists, calling the jewelry “trinkets” and saying that to wear it would make her dizzy as if she were pirouetting (another thing she wouldn’t do, dance), but then the sun passed beyond a cloud and set a gleam on the table and she notices the emeralds. Bewitched, she puts them on. She tries to justify her attraction to them, to square the pleasure they give her with her asceticism as Celia urges her to keep them, while also thinking that the emeralds would become her even more than purple amethysts and noting that if her sister were to be consistent, she would refuse the jewels.
The light of the emeralds proves irresistible. Dorothea picks up her pencils to draw again, with the emeralds on her fingers and wrists, “like fragments of heaven.” She thinks they will “feed her eyes.”
Celia asks if she will wear the jewels in company. Dorothea makes a joke: “Perhaps,” she said, rather haughtily, “I cannot tell to what level I will sink.” Later, she makes a gesture of reconciliation. “Come here and look at my plan; I shall think I am a great architect, if I have not got incompatible stairs and fireplaces.”
Celia pardoned her. “Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia’s mind towards her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions.”
Mona Simpson is the author of seven novels, most recently Commitment, which appeared this spring.
Join us with your thoughts here in the comments! We’re posting late on Sunday so we will return on Monday to consider! Read Chapter Two for Sunday, June 11.
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Portrait by London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company, after Mayall, albumen print, circa 1881 (1858), National Portrait Gallery; portrait by Samuel Laurence (~1860); watercolor by Mrs. Charles Bray (1842); portrait by Francois d’Albert Durade (1850)
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I love that line about the parcel-tying forebears, but it's not precisely the voice of the narrator, of "Eliot," but rather one of the many instances when she ventriloquizes the common prejudices of the world she's writing about; like the one a few pages later when we read that "Sane people did what their neighbors did." Sometimes I think of it as the voice of Mrs Cadwallader...
Parenthetically--Sir James is not their uncle, but rather the suitor. Their uncle is plain Mr Brooke, I can't remember if he's ever given a first name.
More parenthetically--I was teaching the novel this fall when the New Yorker article on the death of the English major came out, with its line about Middlemarch being too hard and too long for today's students. Mine all knew about the article, and they uniformly said that yes , it's hard, but they had a real sense of achievement in the reading.
I love how the intimacy, shame, jealousy and competition between the two sisters is dramatized through the jewels in the “casket.” GE leverages the pearl cross to express Dodo’s feelings of superiority, but Celia jabs back with the comment about Dodo’s neck. I love the unexpected reversal of Dodo coveting and claiming the emeralds for herself and how Celia thinks they might suit her better and tries to sell Dodo on the agates. It seems that Dodo has the upper hand but then it is Celia who “pardons” Dodo at the end of the chapter. Also, the inheritance and division of the mother’s jewels provides a window into how each sister holds the loss from years past. Beautiful.