We feel less and less as if we are still in a world which contains a definite heroine. Dorothea is utterly absent from the end of Book One and even before that she seemed to recede from her own final engagement party
A thing I noticed when Eliot's takes us into Casaubon's view in Chapters 7 and 10 was what a modern character he seemed, like something out of fin-de-siecle Vienna. He is surprised by the "shallow rill" of his feeling upon his engagement; he is disappointed that delight did not seem to await him where convention promised it. He is conscious of a "flatness" in himself. When he decides that the poets had exaggerated the force of masculine passion, it feels like the post-romantic ennui of the other Eliot, T. S. See Milosz: "The heart does not die when one thinks it should … From year to year it grows in us until it takes hold, / I understood it as you did: indifference." Next Middlemarch installment coming later today!
I still have so many questions. Why do bodies, health, physical symptoms have such prominence in our first exposure to Middlemarch society (second half of Ch. 10)? Lady Chettham and Mrs. Cadwallader go on and on about Mrs. Renfrew and even Mr. Vincy has something to say about physiology by the end of the chapter. One answer is it sets up the entrance of Lydgate into the plot, but that seems an overly mechanical response. Talk about one's body and other bodies somehow characterizes this class of people. They have achieved a social status that makes their sneezes of interest. Perhaps it's a form of mystification. When you are discussing medicine, you are not discussing power, money or anything like that. Still, I don't fully understand it. It seems oddly familiar, reminds me of people I know or maybe of The Magic Mountain. One would think it was the perfect set-up for Lydgate to enter a world of medically obsessed people, plenty of potential patients, unless their talking about their bodies is not of a desire to be healthy, only masked social distinction in which case he may get caught in an irrational maze trying to get patients. I realize this is only one dimension of a dense social world we've been exposed to in these chapters.
I wonder if some of this reflects Eliot's perception of life and conversation in rural England, where she grew up compared to the more sophisticated smalltalk of the intellectual circles in which she now moves in London. She may be gently poking fun at the People she has left behind and their concerns
Good question! I was wondering myself. Maybe it was that sickness and death were so much more a prominent part of life then and medical knowledge still in its infancy in a way. The causes of disease were mysterious, and mysteries prompt speculation, surmise, and silliness .. good fodder for a novel, anyway.
Glad you share some of my bafflement!. “Some people make fat, some blood,and some bile-that’s my view of the matter.” Mrs. Cadwallader seems to rely on her own version of a theory of the humors. “Two sorts of potatoes,” is also a daring analogy.
Glad you share some of my bafflement. “Some people make fat, some blood,and some bile-that’s my view of the matter.” Mrs. Cadwallader seems to rely on her own version of a theory of the humors. “Two sorts of potatoes,” is also a daring analogy.
Maybe there's a comparison afoot between GE's way of doing fiction and Lydgate's way of doing medicine: based on observation and understanding rather than guesswork and mythology.
“Eliot endowed Lydgate with her own intellectual vigor, but she also gave him a vein of petty-minded prejudice which she had encountered in others, to her own detriment.” (From the Rebecca Mead book Mona mentioned in an earlier post)
Will and Casaubon are both dreamers (unless you believe that finding the key to all mythologies is a doable task), with the resources to pursue their interests. Both have good taste in women. Fred is a dreamer, too, about a future of wealth. He’s not always smart, but he is wise enough not to become a clergyman and he also has good taste in women. Lydgate is a striver – a book-smart dreamer of sorts, but without the wealth. He knows what he likes in a woman and it’s not Dorothea, it’s Rosamond. Each one is much more interesting than Chettam. To be continued . . .
I find it interesting how art in this society is considered sort of second-class. Casaubon disdains Will reading poetry, Fred reading novels is considered a sign of his frivolity, and Dorothea is dismissive of Italian culture as somehow less serious than all the theology that she reads. Lydgate finds Rosamond's accomplishment a sign of her womanly virtue but doesn't consider it comparable to his sort of study. I wonder if Eliot is building up a case for a certain sort of art: delightful, enjoyable, but also serious in its moral thinking and study of human ways.
“And there are may blanks left in the weeks of courtship, which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.”
Ch. 10
Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.”
“. . . even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin.”
. . . for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, to act fatally on the strength of them all.”
Ch. 11
Fred: “I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets”
Rosamond: “Fred’s studies are not very deep. . he is only reading a novel.”
Ch. 12
“Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty’s intentions about families.”
Mary:” If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”
Mary: “Blameless people are always the most exasperating”
The Mary Garth love story is one of my favourite strands of this novel, although maybe one of the least prominent. If Eliot wrote this in 1869, she may have had in mind a rather similar plot in another splendid novel: Dr Thorne, by Anthony Trollope, which had come out ten years earlier. Here we have another Mary beloved by a Frank, rather than Fred, and she is also poor but dearly loved by all. Her fate will also depend (and I'm trying not to give any spoilers here) on the last will and testament of a wealthy old man she is helping to nurse. Like Mary Garth, she is not seen as a beauty, but has a strong personality. Trollope says 'she was far from being tall, and far from being showy', and her usual quiet demeanour made her outbursts of passionate opinion all the more striking. This sounds remarkably like Mary Garth. Both girls have to face the fact that the men they love are significantly less mature and sensible than might be hoped, and will have to grow up a bit if they are to deserve their women. I'm a great Trollope fan, and I would encourage anyone who doesn't know him to try the Barchester Chronicles once they have put down the masterpiece that is Middlemarch!
I’ve begun to rent some audible audio books for when I walk or drive. Not as nice as reading, but great for catching up on classics I’ve missed. Trollope sounds perfect. Would you recommend Barchester Chronicles as my introduction?
Let me know how you get on. Its one of the shortest, and a bit technical, but it introduces Septimus Harding and his two daughters, and his son in law Grantly. Its sets you up beautifully for the great comic creation in Book 2 of Mrs Proudie and Mr Slope.
Wait til you meet Mrs Proudie and Mr Slope! The BBC did a wonderful TV adaptation (last century!) with Alan Rickman - it is one of the best bits of television ever, if you can track down any of it online!
From Ch. 11: "But anyone watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand."
A slow preparation of effects, sounds like a description of the novel we are reading.
Best to keep in mind destiny's odd sense of humor, but somehow that is not so easy to do in the moment ..
Who does Rosamund sound like here: "Rosamund silently wished that her father would invite Mr. Lydgate. She was tired of the faces and figures she had always been used to - the various irregular profiles and gaits and turns of phrase distinguishing those Middlemarch young men whom she had known as boys."
Dorothea!
Foreshadowing from the master's hand? Destiny being shown to us?
And she sounds like Dorothea in her back and forth with her brother Fred. "Why should you expect me to oblige you by hearing you play the flute, any more than I should expect you to oblige me by not playing it?"
Celia and Fred must love their siblings despite their faults.
And there's something similar in the way in which Rosamund sets her sights on Lydgate just as Dorothea does with Casaubon, if you strip away the extraneous differences. " .. a stranger was absolutely necessary to Rosamund's social romance, which had always turned on a lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher, and who had no connections at all like her own." Up to this point Rosamund had "remained indifferent and fastidiously critical towards both fresh sprig and faded bachelor." But Lydgate she thinks is her "ideal." Idealism again. We have already seen where that can lead ..
But like Mary, Dorothea has no wiles. We have 4 young women in play whose fates are being variously dealt with in both romantic and unromantic terms.
You can see that Dorothea needs Rosamund as Rosamund needs Dorothea -- they light one another's authentic selves up. The merging of the two manuscripts must have been the physical end of something that was in the offing earlier, as if for a while GE was unknowingly writing with two brains ..
Maybe Amanda means in our minds as readers (I can't remember how they relate to each other, reading this as though for the first time mostly!). Eliot so clearly gins our affection for Dorothea, and does little to encourage it for Rosamond. The pair of them seems a bit like Eliot asking herself the question--what is aspiration? what makes it worthy and what makes it venal? how can women express aspiration in a world in which they only experience the future through men?
What a good point! Both men meet their aspirations, aspirations that they have to deflect onto men because they can't realize them on their own. Dorothea's "mistake," as it looks to us now at least, is fidelity to the past, an inability to see ahead. I wondered if Eliot was not able to move forward with the original version because in her first configuration the intellectual woman was not beautiful or rich--she did not have power to move the story.
I sense certain characters on a wheel of fortune, that, like the wheels of the wool mills of England, will be turning. I'm also reading Victoria Findlay's new book, Fabric, and it opened my eyes to the importance of wool manufacturing there. The phrase, "pull the wool over" someone's eyes probably refers to the wool wigs worn by judges. There are a lot of snap judgments in these chapters, and one senses some woolly ones.
The introduction to my Oxford edition by David Russell mentions that the arrival of railways at this time was having a disruptive and modernizing effect on the old village life. I was just reading Shane Bauer's book on the US prison system, which points out that ahead of the Civil War the South tried to set up its own cotton manufacture so as not to be so dependent on the industrial north, and this was taken over by the penal system as a way of continuing to exploit free labor after abolition. The sheep-stealer is one of the only individual unfortunates we have seen so far. Sheep were certainly important to English rural life, but was the transition from home industry to mechanized (capitaliized) industry a part of the background here? Science, rationalism, associated with breaking up old ways and moving economic power out of the village.
Two things leap out at me, reading these chapters. One is a memory: I was riding the M98 bus in New York during a heavy rainstorm, sort of trundling down the Harlem River twenty years ago. That's where I first read those lines of Mrs Cadwallader about Casaubon: "Somebody put a drop [of his blood] under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses." And I laughed out loud, really snorted unattractively, and got stared at.
Why that memory? I think I was encountering an authorial voice I hadn't read before, a tone or pitch I hadn't heard as an adult. I still have not read widely among 19th-century authors but somewhere I recall how comically cruel Edith Wharton could be describing an overweight woman, or Flaubert, peerlessly mean towards some bumbling provincial. Compared to them, Eliot's kind of a miracle. Throughout these chapters in particular she keeps teaching me how to read this novel by fostering this strange and moral tone, this attitude, speaking about each one from many angles, but without judging anyone too harshly, or too soon, even if I might want to start slotting them into types. (Which is a form of dismissal.) What does it amount to, if not a moral vision? She looks with utmost clarity but never drops that tone. Never at the expense of good manners. Causaubon's blood being so anemic it was comprised of punctuation ... dear God! It's like something out of P.G. Wodehouse. Except it's given to a character, not Eliot. A chapter later she'll say he looks like a "death's-head skinned over for the occasion" and it comes as a shock, to me, because even though it's perfectly in character for Mrs. Cadwallader to say it, I feel how harsh it is. I've already gotten to know that death's head myself, a little, and I take little pleasure in the judgment. I'm starting to feel compassion.
So I guess that's the second thing. George Eliot's program of exploring character is not merely to assess each herself -- which she does smartly, and sort of gently, from all sides, leaving room for error -- but to have everyone assessed and discussed and reconsidered, eventually, by everyone else. These chapters are where I start to get a sense of a larger program at work, that moral vision, if that's really what I'm reading. Yes, I think. That's a small town. That's community, for both good and ill. You're in close quarters. Judgments therefore need to be provisional, and compassion might end up being the way we survive.
I was so interested in how the "I" popped up in her defense of Casaubon. She has the other characters diminish one another and then she, the author, steps in to defend them (they are her own creations after all), just when we are about to dismiss them. I was interested in the phrase, "Our vanities differ as our noses do." The suggestion to me seemed like a part of the moral vision is refusing to reduce people to types.
My, yes. Isn't there a part somewhere in the middle where she begins a chapter with Dorothea, and then interrupts with the "I" to say, "Dorothea? Why am I always talking about Dorothea? Surely there are others ..." and so forth.
"Our vanities differ as our noses do" feels like Eliot's postcard memo to herself, tacked up above the writing-desk.
Thanks for another great guiding through these chapters. I like your point about Dorothea's disorienting disappearance. It may not be an accident that she starts to disappear precisely when we are called on to think of Casaubon's inner life. And indeed, the one exchange between the newlyweds in Chapter Ten is unpromising. Casaubon is wishing Dorothea could have her sister with her in Rome so he would feel "more at liberty" and with a flash of intuition (like Isabel Archer's noticing as in a picture something is between Madame Merle and Osmond) she sees his driven scholarly selfishness. He has promised her a role in his research, but he has no intention of living up to that promise once he gets in range of the Vatican Library mss collection. Not yet sure if Lowick is inauspicious. I love the description of the view from the house: SW lime trees and SE yew trees. "Dark bookshelves in the long library." "a blue-green world with a pale stag in it." And there is Will, sketching one of the yews, who hears her voice, like an aeolian harp, and who laughs without malice, but even without Will, I think there is a lot of quaint beauty and promise in her new environs, but am unsure...
So right about how Eliot skates on the edge of sentimentality (with Mary's plainness) and of cliche (with Rosamond's falling in love) only to pull back.
I was struck by Eliot's attention to small physical details in these chapters: Fred "warming the soles of his slippers"; Mr. Featherstone with his "whole scale of grimaces as a muscular outlet to his silent triumph"; Rosamond with "every never and muscle ... adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at."
I loved that about the soles of his slippers too! I noticed also right around there how expressive these masculine accoutrements are. Chettam lets his whip fall when he learns of Dorothea's engagement, and then examines the sole of his boot "with much bitterness" when he's talking with Cadwallader about it, and Fred stands with his back to the fire and beats his boot with his whip while Featherstone is needling him.
A thing I noticed when Eliot's takes us into Casaubon's view in Chapters 7 and 10 was what a modern character he seemed, like something out of fin-de-siecle Vienna. He is surprised by the "shallow rill" of his feeling upon his engagement; he is disappointed that delight did not seem to await him where convention promised it. He is conscious of a "flatness" in himself. When he decides that the poets had exaggerated the force of masculine passion, it feels like the post-romantic ennui of the other Eliot, T. S. See Milosz: "The heart does not die when one thinks it should … From year to year it grows in us until it takes hold, / I understood it as you did: indifference." Next Middlemarch installment coming later today!
Does anyone know how far we are to read for next time?
Through chapter 16.
Thanks, Janice : )
For what it's worth, I put an updated schedule in the header here books.substack.com/s/read-along. We're picking up the pace!
I’m having the nicest time reading middlemarch and then getting to come here and read your/everyone’s thoughts ☺️☺️
Me too, Sadie! I'm so glad this is part of my summer : )
So glad to have you Sadie! Sorry I am slow getting caught up on the comments this week. I really missed you guys. Busy with prisons...
I still have so many questions. Why do bodies, health, physical symptoms have such prominence in our first exposure to Middlemarch society (second half of Ch. 10)? Lady Chettham and Mrs. Cadwallader go on and on about Mrs. Renfrew and even Mr. Vincy has something to say about physiology by the end of the chapter. One answer is it sets up the entrance of Lydgate into the plot, but that seems an overly mechanical response. Talk about one's body and other bodies somehow characterizes this class of people. They have achieved a social status that makes their sneezes of interest. Perhaps it's a form of mystification. When you are discussing medicine, you are not discussing power, money or anything like that. Still, I don't fully understand it. It seems oddly familiar, reminds me of people I know or maybe of The Magic Mountain. One would think it was the perfect set-up for Lydgate to enter a world of medically obsessed people, plenty of potential patients, unless their talking about their bodies is not of a desire to be healthy, only masked social distinction in which case he may get caught in an irrational maze trying to get patients. I realize this is only one dimension of a dense social world we've been exposed to in these chapters.
I wonder if some of this reflects Eliot's perception of life and conversation in rural England, where she grew up compared to the more sophisticated smalltalk of the intellectual circles in which she now moves in London. She may be gently poking fun at the People she has left behind and their concerns
Oh wow. Mind is abuzz. For some reason had never considered comparing Eliot's massive novels with Mann's.
Good question! I was wondering myself. Maybe it was that sickness and death were so much more a prominent part of life then and medical knowledge still in its infancy in a way. The causes of disease were mysterious, and mysteries prompt speculation, surmise, and silliness .. good fodder for a novel, anyway.
This was my first thought.
Glad you share some of my bafflement!. “Some people make fat, some blood,and some bile-that’s my view of the matter.” Mrs. Cadwallader seems to rely on her own version of a theory of the humors. “Two sorts of potatoes,” is also a daring analogy.
Glad you share some of my bafflement. “Some people make fat, some blood,and some bile-that’s my view of the matter.” Mrs. Cadwallader seems to rely on her own version of a theory of the humors. “Two sorts of potatoes,” is also a daring analogy.
Maybe there's a comparison afoot between GE's way of doing fiction and Lydgate's way of doing medicine: based on observation and understanding rather than guesswork and mythology.
I’d be interested in following that comparison.
“Eliot endowed Lydgate with her own intellectual vigor, but she also gave him a vein of petty-minded prejudice which she had encountered in others, to her own detriment.” (From the Rebecca Mead book Mona mentioned in an earlier post)
Will and Casaubon are both dreamers (unless you believe that finding the key to all mythologies is a doable task), with the resources to pursue their interests. Both have good taste in women. Fred is a dreamer, too, about a future of wealth. He’s not always smart, but he is wise enough not to become a clergyman and he also has good taste in women. Lydgate is a striver – a book-smart dreamer of sorts, but without the wealth. He knows what he likes in a woman and it’s not Dorothea, it’s Rosamond. Each one is much more interesting than Chettam. To be continued . . .
I find it interesting how art in this society is considered sort of second-class. Casaubon disdains Will reading poetry, Fred reading novels is considered a sign of his frivolity, and Dorothea is dismissive of Italian culture as somehow less serious than all the theology that she reads. Lydgate finds Rosamond's accomplishment a sign of her womanly virtue but doesn't consider it comparable to his sort of study. I wonder if Eliot is building up a case for a certain sort of art: delightful, enjoyable, but also serious in its moral thinking and study of human ways.
GE’s pearls of wisdom in these chapters:
Ch 9
“And there are may blanks left in the weeks of courtship, which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.”
Ch. 10
Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.”
“. . . even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin.”
. . . for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, to act fatally on the strength of them all.”
Ch. 11
Fred: “I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets”
Rosamond: “Fred’s studies are not very deep. . he is only reading a novel.”
Ch. 12
“Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty’s intentions about families.”
Mary:” If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”
Mary: “Blameless people are always the most exasperating”
Love all these! Thank you for highlighting them!
I think my favorite is the slang of poets one ... gives me the chills! in a good way!
The Mary Garth love story is one of my favourite strands of this novel, although maybe one of the least prominent. If Eliot wrote this in 1869, she may have had in mind a rather similar plot in another splendid novel: Dr Thorne, by Anthony Trollope, which had come out ten years earlier. Here we have another Mary beloved by a Frank, rather than Fred, and she is also poor but dearly loved by all. Her fate will also depend (and I'm trying not to give any spoilers here) on the last will and testament of a wealthy old man she is helping to nurse. Like Mary Garth, she is not seen as a beauty, but has a strong personality. Trollope says 'she was far from being tall, and far from being showy', and her usual quiet demeanour made her outbursts of passionate opinion all the more striking. This sounds remarkably like Mary Garth. Both girls have to face the fact that the men they love are significantly less mature and sensible than might be hoped, and will have to grow up a bit if they are to deserve their women. I'm a great Trollope fan, and I would encourage anyone who doesn't know him to try the Barchester Chronicles once they have put down the masterpiece that is Middlemarch!
Thank you so much for this suggestion! I was already wondering how I would comfort myself when this is over.
I’ve begun to rent some audible audio books for when I walk or drive. Not as nice as reading, but great for catching up on classics I’ve missed. Trollope sounds perfect. Would you recommend Barchester Chronicles as my introduction?
Likewise. Getting so many more books into my life. And I tend to be a bit more relaxed about what I listen to--plotty books do better.
Absolutely. Start with The Warden, and if possible choose the versions read by Timothy West. He has just the perfect voice!
Thank you so much!
Thanks! Will rent tomorrow!
Let me know how you get on. Its one of the shortest, and a bit technical, but it introduces Septimus Harding and his two daughters, and his son in law Grantly. Its sets you up beautifully for the great comic creation in Book 2 of Mrs Proudie and Mr Slope.
Hi Sarah,
Thanks so much for recommending The Warden. I’m loving it and will listen to Book 2 when I’m done.
Wait til you meet Mrs Proudie and Mr Slope! The BBC did a wonderful TV adaptation (last century!) with Alan Rickman - it is one of the best bits of television ever, if you can track down any of it online!
From Ch. 11: "But anyone watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand."
A slow preparation of effects, sounds like a description of the novel we are reading.
Best to keep in mind destiny's odd sense of humor, but somehow that is not so easy to do in the moment ..
Who does Rosamund sound like here: "Rosamund silently wished that her father would invite Mr. Lydgate. She was tired of the faces and figures she had always been used to - the various irregular profiles and gaits and turns of phrase distinguishing those Middlemarch young men whom she had known as boys."
Dorothea!
Foreshadowing from the master's hand? Destiny being shown to us?
And she sounds like Dorothea in her back and forth with her brother Fred. "Why should you expect me to oblige you by hearing you play the flute, any more than I should expect you to oblige me by not playing it?"
Celia and Fred must love their siblings despite their faults.
And there's something similar in the way in which Rosamund sets her sights on Lydgate just as Dorothea does with Casaubon, if you strip away the extraneous differences. " .. a stranger was absolutely necessary to Rosamund's social romance, which had always turned on a lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher, and who had no connections at all like her own." Up to this point Rosamund had "remained indifferent and fastidiously critical towards both fresh sprig and faded bachelor." But Lydgate she thinks is her "ideal." Idealism again. We have already seen where that can lead ..
But like Mary, Dorothea has no wiles. We have 4 young women in play whose fates are being variously dealt with in both romantic and unromantic terms.
You can see that Dorothea needs Rosamund as Rosamund needs Dorothea -- they light one another's authentic selves up. The merging of the two manuscripts must have been the physical end of something that was in the offing earlier, as if for a while GE was unknowingly writing with two brains ..
Hmm, you’re ahead of me on the two women’s needs for each other, D and R. I’m just now catching up so haven’t read into Book Two.
Maybe Amanda means in our minds as readers (I can't remember how they relate to each other, reading this as though for the first time mostly!). Eliot so clearly gins our affection for Dorothea, and does little to encourage it for Rosamond. The pair of them seems a bit like Eliot asking herself the question--what is aspiration? what makes it worthy and what makes it venal? how can women express aspiration in a world in which they only experience the future through men?
What a good point! Both men meet their aspirations, aspirations that they have to deflect onto men because they can't realize them on their own. Dorothea's "mistake," as it looks to us now at least, is fidelity to the past, an inability to see ahead. I wondered if Eliot was not able to move forward with the original version because in her first configuration the intellectual woman was not beautiful or rich--she did not have power to move the story.
I sense certain characters on a wheel of fortune, that, like the wheels of the wool mills of England, will be turning. I'm also reading Victoria Findlay's new book, Fabric, and it opened my eyes to the importance of wool manufacturing there. The phrase, "pull the wool over" someone's eyes probably refers to the wool wigs worn by judges. There are a lot of snap judgments in these chapters, and one senses some woolly ones.
Hope you’ll say more!
The introduction to my Oxford edition by David Russell mentions that the arrival of railways at this time was having a disruptive and modernizing effect on the old village life. I was just reading Shane Bauer's book on the US prison system, which points out that ahead of the Civil War the South tried to set up its own cotton manufacture so as not to be so dependent on the industrial north, and this was taken over by the penal system as a way of continuing to exploit free labor after abolition. The sheep-stealer is one of the only individual unfortunates we have seen so far. Sheep were certainly important to English rural life, but was the transition from home industry to mechanized (capitaliized) industry a part of the background here? Science, rationalism, associated with breaking up old ways and moving economic power out of the village.
Two things leap out at me, reading these chapters. One is a memory: I was riding the M98 bus in New York during a heavy rainstorm, sort of trundling down the Harlem River twenty years ago. That's where I first read those lines of Mrs Cadwallader about Casaubon: "Somebody put a drop [of his blood] under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses." And I laughed out loud, really snorted unattractively, and got stared at.
Why that memory? I think I was encountering an authorial voice I hadn't read before, a tone or pitch I hadn't heard as an adult. I still have not read widely among 19th-century authors but somewhere I recall how comically cruel Edith Wharton could be describing an overweight woman, or Flaubert, peerlessly mean towards some bumbling provincial. Compared to them, Eliot's kind of a miracle. Throughout these chapters in particular she keeps teaching me how to read this novel by fostering this strange and moral tone, this attitude, speaking about each one from many angles, but without judging anyone too harshly, or too soon, even if I might want to start slotting them into types. (Which is a form of dismissal.) What does it amount to, if not a moral vision? She looks with utmost clarity but never drops that tone. Never at the expense of good manners. Causaubon's blood being so anemic it was comprised of punctuation ... dear God! It's like something out of P.G. Wodehouse. Except it's given to a character, not Eliot. A chapter later she'll say he looks like a "death's-head skinned over for the occasion" and it comes as a shock, to me, because even though it's perfectly in character for Mrs. Cadwallader to say it, I feel how harsh it is. I've already gotten to know that death's head myself, a little, and I take little pleasure in the judgment. I'm starting to feel compassion.
So I guess that's the second thing. George Eliot's program of exploring character is not merely to assess each herself -- which she does smartly, and sort of gently, from all sides, leaving room for error -- but to have everyone assessed and discussed and reconsidered, eventually, by everyone else. These chapters are where I start to get a sense of a larger program at work, that moral vision, if that's really what I'm reading. Yes, I think. That's a small town. That's community, for both good and ill. You're in close quarters. Judgments therefore need to be provisional, and compassion might end up being the way we survive.
I was so interested in how the "I" popped up in her defense of Casaubon. She has the other characters diminish one another and then she, the author, steps in to defend them (they are her own creations after all), just when we are about to dismiss them. I was interested in the phrase, "Our vanities differ as our noses do." The suggestion to me seemed like a part of the moral vision is refusing to reduce people to types.
My, yes. Isn't there a part somewhere in the middle where she begins a chapter with Dorothea, and then interrupts with the "I" to say, "Dorothea? Why am I always talking about Dorothea? Surely there are others ..." and so forth.
"Our vanities differ as our noses do" feels like Eliot's postcard memo to herself, tacked up above the writing-desk.
Thanks for another great guiding through these chapters. I like your point about Dorothea's disorienting disappearance. It may not be an accident that she starts to disappear precisely when we are called on to think of Casaubon's inner life. And indeed, the one exchange between the newlyweds in Chapter Ten is unpromising. Casaubon is wishing Dorothea could have her sister with her in Rome so he would feel "more at liberty" and with a flash of intuition (like Isabel Archer's noticing as in a picture something is between Madame Merle and Osmond) she sees his driven scholarly selfishness. He has promised her a role in his research, but he has no intention of living up to that promise once he gets in range of the Vatican Library mss collection. Not yet sure if Lowick is inauspicious. I love the description of the view from the house: SW lime trees and SE yew trees. "Dark bookshelves in the long library." "a blue-green world with a pale stag in it." And there is Will, sketching one of the yews, who hears her voice, like an aeolian harp, and who laughs without malice, but even without Will, I think there is a lot of quaint beauty and promise in her new environs, but am unsure...
A lovely observation! The description of the place itself seems to draw us in the direction of different poles.
Yes!
So right about how Eliot skates on the edge of sentimentality (with Mary's plainness) and of cliche (with Rosamond's falling in love) only to pull back.
I was struck by Eliot's attention to small physical details in these chapters: Fred "warming the soles of his slippers"; Mr. Featherstone with his "whole scale of grimaces as a muscular outlet to his silent triumph"; Rosamond with "every never and muscle ... adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at."
I loved that about the soles of his slippers too! I noticed also right around there how expressive these masculine accoutrements are. Chettam lets his whip fall when he learns of Dorothea's engagement, and then examines the sole of his boot "with much bitterness" when he's talking with Cadwallader about it, and Fred stands with his back to the fire and beats his boot with his whip while Featherstone is needling him.