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.
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.
Mr. Arthur Brooke the uncle is a delightful comic character who has forgotten every book he ever read seemingly but “went into everything very deeply at one time.” Discovering the subtle humor of Eliot has taken me a number of readings. In college where I took a course on middle March and portrait of a lady I was swept up by Dorothea’s idealism and bored by the other characters but now I relish the minor incidents and subplots much more. Thank you for embarking us on this...
Thank you, Ann! “Jane Austenesque” in Mona’s summary also seems spot-on. Mr. Brooke reminds one a bit of Henry Woodhouse in Emma, though the differences are important.
"Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation."
... yes Eliot is not easy reading for quote most unquote people ... including me ..
I sometimes think one can pass over a certain amount of incomprehension and still get pleasure out of a book, but if it becomes too much, one can't; and you do sort of learn a writer's language, and the language of a time, as you go. But a person doesn't have to decipher everything! Hard to get what "eccentric" is doing here exactly. Maybe its meaning was somewhat different then.
Agree, agree, agree! I think one can feel at home in Eliot’s language once one allows her broader worldview and cultural context to settle in. Read Daniel Deronda recently. With Gwendolyn there and Dorothea here Eliot is particularly concerned with attractive women who are also very smart and want to be more than adornments to the men they marry. Their struggles to find fulfillment outside traditional expectations drive their plots. Eliot, being homely herself, poses this challenge to her beautiful female heroines. She wants to be honest about the power of appearances. Of course the ultimate example of this is Daniel’s mother, the opera singer who abandoned her role as mother to pursue her role as artist.
David! Hi! Welcome! So interesting. I wonder if she innerly feared that she could not persuade readers to care about a not-beautiful heroine. Perhaps we non-beautiful women all feel that if we could be perceived as we are we would have the magnetism that society grants the beautiful. I read Daniel Deronda long ago, but I remember being puzzled by its understanding of Jewishness. I was urged to read it by a writer friend--the journalist Jonathan Mirsky--after a long discourse from him that I don't remember about the significance for English literature and society of how she handled it, when I was supposed to be taking corrections or something at the NYRB.
Thanks for writing back! I think where Eliot really resides in Middlemarch is in the character of Mary Garth. The young woman of outer ordinariness and inner beauty who helps Fred become an adult. The beautiful creatures that the eligible men flock to like Rosamond Vincy are a kind of mystery to her and she experiments with them to discover how their characters are formed. In Rosamond’s case her beauty ultimately translates into shallowness and, though one can’t say it’s really her “fault,” the destruction of Lydgate, who ends up losing his integrity and his scientific focus. Dorothea is a different case: more self-aware, more concerned with inner growth. Her mistake is that she feels she can be a helpmeet to Casaubon, who in the end is a fraud and, in despair, resents Dorothea for her youth and her sacrifice. I love Eliot, but in a different way than I do Tolstoy.
I agree, we learn a writer’s language as we go. When I was reading French novels in school, I found if I could get through the first 100 pages, the rest was easy, as writers tend to use the same vocabulary and sentence structure throughout. In Middlemarch, I concur, it is not necessary to understand everything to enjoy the story as it unfolds and I find myself inspired to read up on the “The Catholic Question “ and Henry of Navarre. This adds a delightful secondary enjoyment brought by the novel.
I'm finding too that when I realize I've sort of missed something, and I go back to look at it more closely, it unfolds something really delightful. The bits that may at first seem to be asking a lot reward attention.
That's interesting! I read the ”pride at being ladies” definitely as something within Dorothea and Celia (if not the narrator or Eliot), as part of their willingness to dress simply and also something that perhaps feeds subterraneanly Dorothea's sense of her specialness. I felt touched by the wand of destiny when that article brought up Middlemarch!
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.
Like a dance! When I read this as a young person—with living parents and not yet a mother myself—I like the narrator, as Mona notes, passed over their orphanhood without noticing the gulf it represents. Another new thing to experience.
Still learning how to navigate notes vs. comments. Thanks for creating this summer excursion. Four generation of women in my family have earmarked pages of Middlemarch.
This comment so articulately describes Eliot’s deft impasto, her quick flicking with the brush that sets up years of their sisterhood. There was so much happening between the sisters in the exquisite little scene of Eliot’s: Dodo fighting things out with herself, and Celia attempting—maybe for the first time ever—to separate herself from Dorothea’s authority as the eldest. Casket indeed.
"Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it." So much of Dorothea can be seen here, and so much of the novel's underrated comedy. I find "Middlemarch" *funnier* each time I read it.
See too the great quote Dan Sofaer surfaced above re Mr. Brooke. It got me thinking about how there's a shading over time of one's appreciation--beginning in the bright glow of idealism and aspiration, and shadowing into human variety and foibles, that we maybe relish more once we've discovered that we're in the end more foibles than idealism.
I am thrilled for this reading journey! I fell in love with Virginia Woolf through reading To The Lighthouse guided by Mona’s insightful, witty, and down to earth commentary and along with other passionate readers, as part of an A Public Space project.
For years, Middlemarch has loomed cumbersome, daunting on my Should reading list. I tried it on my own several times, losing any real desire to read further just a few pages in. I can not remember what might have been going on in my life during these prior failed attempts, but I do expect the hyper serious Prelude might have played a role in me not wanting to read on. I laughed reading Mona’s breath of fresh air advice to just skip the Prelude!
Years ago I heard Margaret Atwood, at a reading in Albany, NY, talk about the polarized reactions of different generations of women to Middlemarch: young women reading it thought, oh no, that is not truth, or at least that won’t happen to me at all, and older women thinking, oh, yep, this speaks truth to their experience, nodding their heads.
Thank you Mona and Ann for getting me reading Middlemarch... finally. I planned to, obediently, just read Chapter One and have now read ahead a few chapters with pleasure.
Although the recommendation was to skip the Prelude, in fact it is of significance in introducing Dorothea Brooke, who aspires, like Saint Theresa, to spiritual asceticism and service, but whose gender will always thwart her aspirations. Eliot's choice of name "Dorothea" is also important -- gift of God. Chapter One reveals that Dorothea Brooke/Miss Brooke is indeed a mixed blessing, a hybrid. She is a plain beauty, a moneyed orphan, a would-be social activist who takes delight in emeralds, skilled in architecture and village planning, expert at riding, etc. In other words, a most modern woman. Will she be able to brook the obstacles in this marriage plot? The Prelude, as in music, sets the tone and prepares us for the central theme of the novel: a heroine yearning for goodness and an unbounded larger, spiritually fulfilled life -- yet trapped by the mundane realities of gender and domesticity. However, Eliot's genius crafts for Dorothea Brooke a different fate than Flaubert's Mme Bovary (1856).
The final line of the Prelude filled me with compassion: "Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognisable deed."
Yes, certainly, the Prelude raises important themes. I followed directions and didn't reread it this time myself, but I think perhaps the argument against it is that in setting Dorothea up in advance as a martyr it sounds perhaps too dire a note at the outset. We would perhaps be better off meeting Dorothea without preconceptions, and finding in her character joy and possibility, maybe a bit of danger, without knowing where it will lead.
I just finished reading Commitment and I was struck, as I also finished reading Mona's commentary on the first chapter of Middlemarch, not only her highlighting of Eliot's focus on physical appearance, which I'd always paid attention to - but what I hadn't thought enough about, which is Dorothea's passion for drawing and her vision of herself as an architect. Not to belabor comparisons, but two of the characters in Commitment also "draw" and one draws up plans, like Dorothea, to "house" marginalized (as we say now) populations. Again, not to exaggerate similarities - but I was interested in the like sensibilities. Anyway, this is such an engaging and inspiring project - thanks to Mona and to Ann Kjellberg.
You’ve got me rushing to read Commitment along with. I agree that making plans is an important Dorothea activity but is not this part of a belief in human perfectibility and the need to realize belief in action. Or “conduct,” may be a better word. Eliot mentions in passing an “infant school which she had set going in the village,” so she sees herself as an educator as well, and in her relations to others there is an impatient prodding to make them do and be better.
This is so wise. In that respect she is different from Commitment's Walter. He wants to help out, relieve pain, create security. One suspects that simple well-being is less than what Dorothea wants from her villagers.
I had exactly this thought! I felt, when I read Mona's comment, a little pang that I had shared the speaker's (as Michael suggests above, perhaps channeling here the conventional world) "offhandedness" about Dorothea's project. At the end of Commitment Mona mentions Middlemarch in the acknowledgments, and I wondered if Dorothea informs a little the delineation of Walter. Lina, like Celia, gets a bit impatient with her sibling's self-seriousness.
Another cool thing about the first chapter is the oblique way Eliot intimates that we are in a different time (Mr. Peel on the Catholic Question=Catholic Reform bill of 1829) without quite burdening us with the cumbersome conventions of the historical novel. i'd be interested in knowing why she chose to set the novel forty years or so back.
There's a very complicated game she's playing with the dating of the novel, the precise time it ends in particular, and in relation as well to the time of her writing; and it draws in the ironic tone of some of the narrator's commentary too, esp as it regards questions of moral improvement and reform. I'll wait and see what Mona says before going on about it, but a lot of major Victorian novels are set back a bit in time--Vanity Fair certainly, and most of Dickens depicts a time before the railroad.
Fascinating. Thanks, Michael. I also thought of Hardy’s sense of the past. As I recall, Tess is sort of time-marked by a certain education act that gave her access to a different world and way of speaking. He makes a point of that.
Oh wow this is a fascinating line of inquiry. I was also thinking about it with reference to the writers they talk about. It's a shock that Mr. Brooke almost met Wordsworth. Making writers and ideas that were well established in the future (her present) to be fresh and untried seems to create a kind of intellectual instability, or to raise the possibility of alternative outcomes in the shape of ideas.
Did later meet Wordsworth (dined with him) but I appreciate the “almost” inasmuch as he missed him at college and then took away little or nothing from the later encounter other than the chance to drop his name.
Or if that seems unduly harsh, there is irony anyhow in the summoning up of the master of rural simplicity and solitude in this hyper-social way at a posh dinner party.
That is interesting! As someone who knows next to nothing about English history, and has English as their second language, I am really excited about details like this.
I think Mona might return to this question. I saw in something she sent me a mention of the novel being set in Eliot's grandparents' generation. The time of our youth is a time we can look at with a bit of retrospection, but also intimacy, perhaps.
Yes, that seems right. Also, Eliot says it was a more innocent time, innocent “of future goldfields...that gorgeous plutocracy...” so she may be interested in recovering something from that more innocent, romantic time and fathoming the intervening social change.
I too have been wondering about when the story was set (time period) and am glad others are too. It has been a something my mind has been puzzling over.
Felix Holt, Radical is set around the 1832 Reform Bill as well, and there in the opening Eliot is much more explicit about her ambivalence about the ways technology and is changing the old ways of life in the Midlands. She was in some ways conservative, suspicious of too rapid, non-organic changes in society. Her father was a Tory, and the Wordsworthian part of her clung to happy memories of early days?
I do experience these layers as a bit mysterious. That there were in her time probably received ideas about the authors whose names she drops that are more complex than what we remember about them. I feel too that part of the story is that they (or the girls at least) live away from the city and don't travel. They participate in the metropolis only when their uncle brings them a pamphlet or something. it's not really clear to me how up Dorothea is on the goings-on of her age.
Written pre-Freud, the intrapsychic influences in Middlemarch are left for the contemporary reader to ponder. The realism of the experiential learning of these two young women in the context of their confusing and bewildering lives is a compelling dynamic. Their struggle to come to terms with decision making without the benefit of a constant female mentor is a theme I often ponder each time I read this book.
I love a story with sisters! Celia, the younger,--who has always felt yoked and beholden to her older sister's opinion (but also in awe)--has private thoughts about Dodo. These two love one another, but are already clearly at odds. The scene with the jewelry reveals so much about their (shaky) world views. It seems the first chapter is setting us up to see the different trajectories of these two women vis a vis marriage. And now with two men coming to visit--well, which sister for which man?
So true! I often think that adult siblinghood is such a powerful and under-explored experience, so much attention gets paid to childhood. Reading this chapter as a full grown-up showed me something about the way my sister sees me. I love the way the chapter pivots to this seemingly fleeting episode (or maybe Dorothea wants us to think of it as fleeting), which shows us so much, like peering into a gem and seeing a refracted image of the surroundings.
I was also struck by the sisters' relationship - and actually really moved by it, especially by Celia's patience (though she does get annoyed internally, I don't think she shows it?) and her nuanced understanding of Dorothea. I last read Middlemarch about 30 years ago and honestly, I didn't remember Celia at all (if prompted, I'd probably have guessed she's Dorothea's sister). I adored Dorothea and am expecting to this time around, as well - but she likely wasn't always easy to live with. I love it that I've already found another character, Celia, to feel connected to and curious about. During my first read it was all Dorothea, all the time.
An art to making room for everyone! I've read a lot of the books people are talking about but don't remember them as well as these folks who are teaching them!
I love your thoughts on this opening. The opening of the box reminds me of Pandora, of course, and the courtship box choice in Merchant of Venice, where the correct casket is made of lead.
Wikipedia on Emerald myth: "The virtue of the Emerald is to counteract poison. They say that if a venomous animal should look at it, it will become blinded. The gem also acts as a preservative against epilepsy; it cures leprosy, strengthens sight and memory, checks copulation, during which act it will break, if worn at the time on the finger.
Oh that's interesting! I feel exasperated or something like it with Dorothea! Whereas Newland Archer you know exactly where he's from, what he has to overcome ..It's a delicious tension in Age of Innocence, as I recall not having read it in a while! Dorothea is coming into view as not living in the world exactly ... inexperienced, confused, obstinate, her head in the clouds of her religion ... she can't see what's in front of her. It is interesting how Eliot and Wharton both use society as part of their structures ..
I am so happy that my friend Elizabeth invited me to join this Summer Reading Group! I just finished reading Chapter 7 and this morning is my first opportunity to read Mona’s notes and our comments. Reading through the comments and thinking again about Chapter 2 and our introduction to Dorothea, I am struck by something. I have done quite a bit of reading about Giftedness and the ways in which gifted individuals are different from others, not better, just different. The gifted are often described by others as being too intense, extreme in their views, interests and actions. Seeing what others do not see, completely missing things that are obvious to others. This sounds like Dorothea. Often the gifted are misunderstood. Will Dorothea be understood? I can’t wait to find out!
Others have commented on how sad the social constraints that were put on these young girls are. Yes, indeed. These societal constraints are still present today. I myself was encouraged to pursue The Arts over Mathematics in 1980’s. I grew up in a very Edwardian household replete with arcane dos and don’ts. My mother, to this day is happiest when she can let someone else, “Daddy”, manage everything for her. I find it fascinating how these British mores have been present in my life and I applaud the young people who today are so bravely standing up to them and refusing to be constrained by them.
Welcome! I'm so glad Elizabeth invited you too! Such interesting observations. I hadn't thought about giftedness, but I think you are quite right that it is a modern way of regarding something that would in Eliot's time have come off looking a bit like Dorothea—maybe like we now think of these traits as being perhaps hard-wired but in Dorothea's time they would have been considered voluntary or willful. And you are reminding me to see lots of these constraints in my own experience! Certainly women still feel less invited to be adventurous and buck conventions than someone like ... Sam Bankman-Fried.
Thank you for your kind welcome Ann! Yes to your comments and observations. Women regrettably are still judged for having strong opinions or being outspoken when these traits in men are tolerated even admired. I find it interesting how we as readers are responding to Dorothea. Are judging her? Or accepting her as she is?
Possibly or just responding to her behavior in the way society has trained us to respond without actually thinking about what we are doing and why. Dismissing someone without out taking the time to know them or putting a label on someone when you first meet them because it's easier and that is what everyone around you is doing.
This is such a wonderful conversation! I'm so enjoying reading through everyone's notes here. Throwing in a few very lightweight thoughts:
-I appreciated Mona's note on my favorite line from chapter one: "The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it." I found this quite funny on a first read and then devastatingly sad on the second.
-Going into my first chapter of Middlemarch, I'd just finished HBO's Succession, another story in which "intimacy, shame, jealousy and competition" between siblings is very much in the foreground. I've been thinking a lot recently about the similarities and differences between great TV and great novels^. And I'll say -- launching into the world of Middlemarch really took the sting out of coming to the end of Jesse Armstrong's great TV show. As effective as Succession was as a drama, there's something really exciting about inhabiting the world of a novel alongside a great narrator (and hopefully with a group of friends) that I don't think TV can replicate.
So with you on Point One! Like, she cannot even imagine an equal relationship with a man as a source of pleasure. And likewise re Succession. I thought Succession was great, but I don't think it takes anything away from it to say that the characters were very limited, narrow and small. That was part of the point: they had been morally and emotionally stunted by their experience. I keep making the comparison with Jacobean drama, where flawed characters bring disaster on themselves without ever really seeing why; whereas in Shakespeare, for instance, even the most compromised characters have layers and layers of awareness. For me there are other shows from the era of great TV that have more of the richness of the nineteenth-century novel: Breaking Bad, The Americans. Succession was a brilliant exercise in a very constrained premise. But now you've got me on something I've been brooding about! Sorry to go on and on!
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.
Mr. Arthur Brooke the uncle is a delightful comic character who has forgotten every book he ever read seemingly but “went into everything very deeply at one time.” Discovering the subtle humor of Eliot has taken me a number of readings. In college where I took a course on middle March and portrait of a lady I was swept up by Dorothea’s idealism and bored by the other characters but now I relish the minor incidents and subplots much more. Thank you for embarking us on this...
That sounds like me! This is such a nice point, says something about the way we understand character over time.
Thank you, Ann! “Jane Austenesque” in Mona’s summary also seems spot-on. Mr. Brooke reminds one a bit of Henry Woodhouse in Emma, though the differences are important.
Ah, that's right--Arthur. Thanks. And that's the name of Celia's child as well.
I'm teaching both "Middlemarch" and "The Portrait of a Lady" in a class this coming fall. Hoping my students have the same response!
Dorothea Brooke and Isabel Archer are neighbors in my psyche.
"Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation."
... yes Eliot is not easy reading for quote most unquote people ... including me ..
I sometimes think one can pass over a certain amount of incomprehension and still get pleasure out of a book, but if it becomes too much, one can't; and you do sort of learn a writer's language, and the language of a time, as you go. But a person doesn't have to decipher everything! Hard to get what "eccentric" is doing here exactly. Maybe its meaning was somewhat different then.
Agree, agree, agree! I think one can feel at home in Eliot’s language once one allows her broader worldview and cultural context to settle in. Read Daniel Deronda recently. With Gwendolyn there and Dorothea here Eliot is particularly concerned with attractive women who are also very smart and want to be more than adornments to the men they marry. Their struggles to find fulfillment outside traditional expectations drive their plots. Eliot, being homely herself, poses this challenge to her beautiful female heroines. She wants to be honest about the power of appearances. Of course the ultimate example of this is Daniel’s mother, the opera singer who abandoned her role as mother to pursue her role as artist.
David! Hi! Welcome! So interesting. I wonder if she innerly feared that she could not persuade readers to care about a not-beautiful heroine. Perhaps we non-beautiful women all feel that if we could be perceived as we are we would have the magnetism that society grants the beautiful. I read Daniel Deronda long ago, but I remember being puzzled by its understanding of Jewishness. I was urged to read it by a writer friend--the journalist Jonathan Mirsky--after a long discourse from him that I don't remember about the significance for English literature and society of how she handled it, when I was supposed to be taking corrections or something at the NYRB.
Thanks for writing back! I think where Eliot really resides in Middlemarch is in the character of Mary Garth. The young woman of outer ordinariness and inner beauty who helps Fred become an adult. The beautiful creatures that the eligible men flock to like Rosamond Vincy are a kind of mystery to her and she experiments with them to discover how their characters are formed. In Rosamond’s case her beauty ultimately translates into shallowness and, though one can’t say it’s really her “fault,” the destruction of Lydgate, who ends up losing his integrity and his scientific focus. Dorothea is a different case: more self-aware, more concerned with inner growth. Her mistake is that she feels she can be a helpmeet to Casaubon, who in the end is a fraud and, in despair, resents Dorothea for her youth and her sacrifice. I love Eliot, but in a different way than I do Tolstoy.
I would love a Tolstoy reading list from you. I have read the great big novels but never knew quite where to go next.
Hi Ann. Worlds away from Joseph B.!
I agree, we learn a writer’s language as we go. When I was reading French novels in school, I found if I could get through the first 100 pages, the rest was easy, as writers tend to use the same vocabulary and sentence structure throughout. In Middlemarch, I concur, it is not necessary to understand everything to enjoy the story as it unfolds and I find myself inspired to read up on the “The Catholic Question “ and Henry of Navarre. This adds a delightful secondary enjoyment brought by the novel.
I'm finding too that when I realize I've sort of missed something, and I go back to look at it more closely, it unfolds something really delightful. The bits that may at first seem to be asking a lot reward attention.
Sir James stands corrected!
That's interesting! I read the ”pride at being ladies” definitely as something within Dorothea and Celia (if not the narrator or Eliot), as part of their willingness to dress simply and also something that perhaps feeds subterraneanly Dorothea's sense of her specialness. I felt touched by the wand of destiny when that article brought up Middlemarch!
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.
Like a dance! When I read this as a young person—with living parents and not yet a mother myself—I like the narrator, as Mona notes, passed over their orphanhood without noticing the gulf it represents. Another new thing to experience.
Still learning how to navigate notes vs. comments. Thanks for creating this summer excursion. Four generation of women in my family have earmarked pages of Middlemarch.
What a beautiful thought!
This comment so articulately describes Eliot’s deft impasto, her quick flicking with the brush that sets up years of their sisterhood. There was so much happening between the sisters in the exquisite little scene of Eliot’s: Dodo fighting things out with herself, and Celia attempting—maybe for the first time ever—to separate herself from Dorothea’s authority as the eldest. Casket indeed.
Indeed! (Quick flick of the brush yourself!) And then in the next chapter Eliot keeps the tune going with just a line or two.
"Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it." So much of Dorothea can be seen here, and so much of the novel's underrated comedy. I find "Middlemarch" *funnier* each time I read it.
See too the great quote Dan Sofaer surfaced above re Mr. Brooke. It got me thinking about how there's a shading over time of one's appreciation--beginning in the bright glow of idealism and aspiration, and shadowing into human variety and foibles, that we maybe relish more once we've discovered that we're in the end more foibles than idealism.
Thank you for mentioning the comedy. I am finding so much of Middlemarch hysterical! Laughing out loud in fact. A treat!
Me too!
I am thrilled for this reading journey! I fell in love with Virginia Woolf through reading To The Lighthouse guided by Mona’s insightful, witty, and down to earth commentary and along with other passionate readers, as part of an A Public Space project.
For years, Middlemarch has loomed cumbersome, daunting on my Should reading list. I tried it on my own several times, losing any real desire to read further just a few pages in. I can not remember what might have been going on in my life during these prior failed attempts, but I do expect the hyper serious Prelude might have played a role in me not wanting to read on. I laughed reading Mona’s breath of fresh air advice to just skip the Prelude!
Years ago I heard Margaret Atwood, at a reading in Albany, NY, talk about the polarized reactions of different generations of women to Middlemarch: young women reading it thought, oh no, that is not truth, or at least that won’t happen to me at all, and older women thinking, oh, yep, this speaks truth to their experience, nodding their heads.
Thank you Mona and Ann for getting me reading Middlemarch... finally. I planned to, obediently, just read Chapter One and have now read ahead a few chapters with pleasure.
Hooray! Welcome aboard. I wonder if this generational difference will manifest itself.
Although the recommendation was to skip the Prelude, in fact it is of significance in introducing Dorothea Brooke, who aspires, like Saint Theresa, to spiritual asceticism and service, but whose gender will always thwart her aspirations. Eliot's choice of name "Dorothea" is also important -- gift of God. Chapter One reveals that Dorothea Brooke/Miss Brooke is indeed a mixed blessing, a hybrid. She is a plain beauty, a moneyed orphan, a would-be social activist who takes delight in emeralds, skilled in architecture and village planning, expert at riding, etc. In other words, a most modern woman. Will she be able to brook the obstacles in this marriage plot? The Prelude, as in music, sets the tone and prepares us for the central theme of the novel: a heroine yearning for goodness and an unbounded larger, spiritually fulfilled life -- yet trapped by the mundane realities of gender and domesticity. However, Eliot's genius crafts for Dorothea Brooke a different fate than Flaubert's Mme Bovary (1856).
The final line of the Prelude filled me with compassion: "Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognisable deed."
And how many even have the confidence of a "long-recognisable deed"?
Yes, certainly, the Prelude raises important themes. I followed directions and didn't reread it this time myself, but I think perhaps the argument against it is that in setting Dorothea up in advance as a martyr it sounds perhaps too dire a note at the outset. We would perhaps be better off meeting Dorothea without preconceptions, and finding in her character joy and possibility, maybe a bit of danger, without knowing where it will lead.
I just finished reading Commitment and I was struck, as I also finished reading Mona's commentary on the first chapter of Middlemarch, not only her highlighting of Eliot's focus on physical appearance, which I'd always paid attention to - but what I hadn't thought enough about, which is Dorothea's passion for drawing and her vision of herself as an architect. Not to belabor comparisons, but two of the characters in Commitment also "draw" and one draws up plans, like Dorothea, to "house" marginalized (as we say now) populations. Again, not to exaggerate similarities - but I was interested in the like sensibilities. Anyway, this is such an engaging and inspiring project - thanks to Mona and to Ann Kjellberg.
You’ve got me rushing to read Commitment along with. I agree that making plans is an important Dorothea activity but is not this part of a belief in human perfectibility and the need to realize belief in action. Or “conduct,” may be a better word. Eliot mentions in passing an “infant school which she had set going in the village,” so she sees herself as an educator as well, and in her relations to others there is an impatient prodding to make them do and be better.
This is so wise. In that respect she is different from Commitment's Walter. He wants to help out, relieve pain, create security. One suspects that simple well-being is less than what Dorothea wants from her villagers.
I had exactly this thought! I felt, when I read Mona's comment, a little pang that I had shared the speaker's (as Michael suggests above, perhaps channeling here the conventional world) "offhandedness" about Dorothea's project. At the end of Commitment Mona mentions Middlemarch in the acknowledgments, and I wondered if Dorothea informs a little the delineation of Walter. Lina, like Celia, gets a bit impatient with her sibling's self-seriousness.
Another cool thing about the first chapter is the oblique way Eliot intimates that we are in a different time (Mr. Peel on the Catholic Question=Catholic Reform bill of 1829) without quite burdening us with the cumbersome conventions of the historical novel. i'd be interested in knowing why she chose to set the novel forty years or so back.
There's a very complicated game she's playing with the dating of the novel, the precise time it ends in particular, and in relation as well to the time of her writing; and it draws in the ironic tone of some of the narrator's commentary too, esp as it regards questions of moral improvement and reform. I'll wait and see what Mona says before going on about it, but a lot of major Victorian novels are set back a bit in time--Vanity Fair certainly, and most of Dickens depicts a time before the railroad.
Fascinating. Thanks, Michael. I also thought of Hardy’s sense of the past. As I recall, Tess is sort of time-marked by a certain education act that gave her access to a different world and way of speaking. He makes a point of that.
The English Education Act of 1870, though turning to the text I am less sure of the importance of this.
Oh wow this is a fascinating line of inquiry. I was also thinking about it with reference to the writers they talk about. It's a shock that Mr. Brooke almost met Wordsworth. Making writers and ideas that were well established in the future (her present) to be fresh and untried seems to create a kind of intellectual instability, or to raise the possibility of alternative outcomes in the shape of ideas.
Did later meet Wordsworth (dined with him) but I appreciate the “almost” inasmuch as he missed him at college and then took away little or nothing from the later encounter other than the chance to drop his name.
Or if that seems unduly harsh, there is irony anyhow in the summoning up of the master of rural simplicity and solitude in this hyper-social way at a posh dinner party.
That is interesting! As someone who knows next to nothing about English history, and has English as their second language, I am really excited about details like this.
I think Mona might return to this question. I saw in something she sent me a mention of the novel being set in Eliot's grandparents' generation. The time of our youth is a time we can look at with a bit of retrospection, but also intimacy, perhaps.
Yes, that seems right. Also, Eliot says it was a more innocent time, innocent “of future goldfields...that gorgeous plutocracy...” so she may be interested in recovering something from that more innocent, romantic time and fathoming the intervening social change.
I too have been wondering about when the story was set (time period) and am glad others are too. It has been a something my mind has been puzzling over.
Felix Holt, Radical is set around the 1832 Reform Bill as well, and there in the opening Eliot is much more explicit about her ambivalence about the ways technology and is changing the old ways of life in the Midlands. She was in some ways conservative, suspicious of too rapid, non-organic changes in society. Her father was a Tory, and the Wordsworthian part of her clung to happy memories of early days?
I do experience these layers as a bit mysterious. That there were in her time probably received ideas about the authors whose names she drops that are more complex than what we remember about them. I feel too that part of the story is that they (or the girls at least) live away from the city and don't travel. They participate in the metropolis only when their uncle brings them a pamphlet or something. it's not really clear to me how up Dorothea is on the goings-on of her age.
Me too!
Written pre-Freud, the intrapsychic influences in Middlemarch are left for the contemporary reader to ponder. The realism of the experiential learning of these two young women in the context of their confusing and bewildering lives is a compelling dynamic. Their struggle to come to terms with decision making without the benefit of a constant female mentor is a theme I often ponder each time I read this book.
That is a very suggestive angle of approach.
I love a story with sisters! Celia, the younger,--who has always felt yoked and beholden to her older sister's opinion (but also in awe)--has private thoughts about Dodo. These two love one another, but are already clearly at odds. The scene with the jewelry reveals so much about their (shaky) world views. It seems the first chapter is setting us up to see the different trajectories of these two women vis a vis marriage. And now with two men coming to visit--well, which sister for which man?
So true! I often think that adult siblinghood is such a powerful and under-explored experience, so much attention gets paid to childhood. Reading this chapter as a full grown-up showed me something about the way my sister sees me. I love the way the chapter pivots to this seemingly fleeting episode (or maybe Dorothea wants us to think of it as fleeting), which shows us so much, like peering into a gem and seeing a refracted image of the surroundings.
I was also struck by the sisters' relationship - and actually really moved by it, especially by Celia's patience (though she does get annoyed internally, I don't think she shows it?) and her nuanced understanding of Dorothea. I last read Middlemarch about 30 years ago and honestly, I didn't remember Celia at all (if prompted, I'd probably have guessed she's Dorothea's sister). I adored Dorothea and am expecting to this time around, as well - but she likely wasn't always easy to live with. I love it that I've already found another character, Celia, to feel connected to and curious about. During my first read it was all Dorothea, all the time.
Dan Sofaer says something similar above about Mr. Brooke and the other minor characters.
I am having trouble following some of these comments which reference other authors and other books; can we stay a bit more on topic with Middlemarch?
I love the references to other books! Many of us have read some of these classics and enjoy comparing.
An art to making room for everyone! I've read a lot of the books people are talking about but don't remember them as well as these folks who are teaching them!
We'll do our best! Thank you for the reminder.
I love your thoughts on this opening. The opening of the box reminds me of Pandora, of course, and the courtship box choice in Merchant of Venice, where the correct casket is made of lead.
Wikipedia on Emerald myth: "The virtue of the Emerald is to counteract poison. They say that if a venomous animal should look at it, it will become blinded. The gem also acts as a preservative against epilepsy; it cures leprosy, strengthens sight and memory, checks copulation, during which act it will break, if worn at the time on the finger.
Checks copulation! Ominous for Dorothea!
Oh that's interesting! I feel exasperated or something like it with Dorothea! Whereas Newland Archer you know exactly where he's from, what he has to overcome ..It's a delicious tension in Age of Innocence, as I recall not having read it in a while! Dorothea is coming into view as not living in the world exactly ... inexperienced, confused, obstinate, her head in the clouds of her religion ... she can't see what's in front of her. It is interesting how Eliot and Wharton both use society as part of their structures ..
I am so happy that my friend Elizabeth invited me to join this Summer Reading Group! I just finished reading Chapter 7 and this morning is my first opportunity to read Mona’s notes and our comments. Reading through the comments and thinking again about Chapter 2 and our introduction to Dorothea, I am struck by something. I have done quite a bit of reading about Giftedness and the ways in which gifted individuals are different from others, not better, just different. The gifted are often described by others as being too intense, extreme in their views, interests and actions. Seeing what others do not see, completely missing things that are obvious to others. This sounds like Dorothea. Often the gifted are misunderstood. Will Dorothea be understood? I can’t wait to find out!
Others have commented on how sad the social constraints that were put on these young girls are. Yes, indeed. These societal constraints are still present today. I myself was encouraged to pursue The Arts over Mathematics in 1980’s. I grew up in a very Edwardian household replete with arcane dos and don’ts. My mother, to this day is happiest when she can let someone else, “Daddy”, manage everything for her. I find it fascinating how these British mores have been present in my life and I applaud the young people who today are so bravely standing up to them and refusing to be constrained by them.
Welcome! I'm so glad Elizabeth invited you too! Such interesting observations. I hadn't thought about giftedness, but I think you are quite right that it is a modern way of regarding something that would in Eliot's time have come off looking a bit like Dorothea—maybe like we now think of these traits as being perhaps hard-wired but in Dorothea's time they would have been considered voluntary or willful. And you are reminding me to see lots of these constraints in my own experience! Certainly women still feel less invited to be adventurous and buck conventions than someone like ... Sam Bankman-Fried.
Thank you for your kind welcome Ann! Yes to your comments and observations. Women regrettably are still judged for having strong opinions or being outspoken when these traits in men are tolerated even admired. I find it interesting how we as readers are responding to Dorothea. Are judging her? Or accepting her as she is?
Or really talking about things in ourselves that we either welcome or reject?
Possibly or just responding to her behavior in the way society has trained us to respond without actually thinking about what we are doing and why. Dismissing someone without out taking the time to know them or putting a label on someone when you first meet them because it's easier and that is what everyone around you is doing.
Yes. GE gives plenty of clues as to ways we might prematurely dismiss Dorothea.
Necessary Tolstoy reads in addition to AK and W&P: The Cossacks, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murat. 😊
Thank you SOOO much! I realize I have been paralyzed n the face of the grandeur of it all.
Happy to accommodate. I’d like to ask your advice about something too. Can we do it via email?
Sure! Akjellberg@bookpostusa.com
Thanks!
This is such a wonderful conversation! I'm so enjoying reading through everyone's notes here. Throwing in a few very lightweight thoughts:
-I appreciated Mona's note on my favorite line from chapter one: "The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it." I found this quite funny on a first read and then devastatingly sad on the second.
-Going into my first chapter of Middlemarch, I'd just finished HBO's Succession, another story in which "intimacy, shame, jealousy and competition" between siblings is very much in the foreground. I've been thinking a lot recently about the similarities and differences between great TV and great novels^. And I'll say -- launching into the world of Middlemarch really took the sting out of coming to the end of Jesse Armstrong's great TV show. As effective as Succession was as a drama, there's something really exciting about inhabiting the world of a novel alongside a great narrator (and hopefully with a group of friends) that I don't think TV can replicate.
^https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/books/review/are-the-new-golden-age-tv-shows-the-new-novels.html#:~:text=Television%20is%20not%20the%20new,in%20mind%20the%20novel's%20weirdness.
So with you on Point One! Like, she cannot even imagine an equal relationship with a man as a source of pleasure. And likewise re Succession. I thought Succession was great, but I don't think it takes anything away from it to say that the characters were very limited, narrow and small. That was part of the point: they had been morally and emotionally stunted by their experience. I keep making the comparison with Jacobean drama, where flawed characters bring disaster on themselves without ever really seeing why; whereas in Shakespeare, for instance, even the most compromised characters have layers and layers of awareness. For me there are other shows from the era of great TV that have more of the richness of the nineteenth-century novel: Breaking Bad, The Americans. Succession was a brilliant exercise in a very constrained premise. But now you've got me on something I've been brooding about! Sorry to go on and on!