Middlemarch

Celia, maybe, gets what she wants—and without it costing too much. Maybe some others, too. Side characters, Ben and Letty if the misogynists don’t get her, Trumbull, Farebrother who seems pretty capable of satisfaction. Otherwise it’s a mess: all the errands are thwarted, none of the consequences quite foreseen, the optimisms cruel and the generous attempts falling into error and ruin and rejection.

At least for the first eight hundred pages or so it goes this way. We’re in Middlemarch, an English county grumpily approaching modernity, home to bankers and lawyers and kinda bad doctors, and we’re mostly watching the novelized class: upper-middle, funded enough to have interiority but not so well-funded it’s destroyed by wealth. Dorothea Brooke is sort of a DSA heiress, young and very hot and quite excited about the power of progressive ideas. She’ll marry an old clergyman, Casaubon, whose intellectual project excites her, and find it less exciting than she’d hoped. Tertius(!) Lydgate is a young doctor, more contemporary in his approach than some, excited about his academic potential. He’ll marry the gorgeous but narrow Rosamond, get entangled with the banker Bulstrode, and find it less victorious than he’d hoped. Fred Vincy, Rosamond’s brother, is supposed to be a clergyman but isn’t into it, expects wrongly to inherit. He’ll make a number of mistakes before realizing he’s just supposed to tend to a garden—and marry Mary Garth. There’s also Casaubon’s nephew Will Ladislaw, Dorothea’s dad the crummy politician, Jack Chettam, the supercilious banker Bulstrode, and—really, the whole village.

That’s the first thing that stands out about the book: how it’s everyone. Here there’s not a distinction between protagonist and not, between Bovaryish main and village foil—it’s just everybody, or as close to everybody as you can still bind between covers. And so the novel’s social in a deeper sense than you sometimes see—social not just in that it has to do with people relating to each other, or with dinner parties, but in that it’s fundamentally concerned with the terrain of the social.

It’s sort of conventional to account for the function or value of fiction with reference to intersubjectivity—reading, or reading of a certain kind, is practice in thinking what it might be like to be a different person, and that can make us better to each other. In most books, though, there’s room for about one other person to be drawn that richly. They’re named Pamela, or Emma, or Jane Eyre, or Pip, and we can feel a little of their personhood, how it collides with others around them.

What we sometimes get there, though, is one really realized person, operating within the difficult constraints made by a set of other characters who are mainly names—motivations, too, sometimes, situations and urgencies, but mainly names. And so the empathetic expansion we get from these novels is still something like parallel to our own experience of individualism—being someone else, vital and bothered by names, is kind of like being us, vital and bothered by names. The forms of the vitality and the names of the botherers vary, of course, and this does help us get away from our own little stucknesses. But there’s a way in which even reading these great novels still lends an image of our world as composed of individuals, individual pressures and individual overcomings, all separated and denominated by individual threats. A kind of suburbs, then—all these separate stories, growing behind their separate fences.

Middlemarch, the town, is kind of a suburb—but I think the biggest thing that Eliot makes from the length and the everyoneness is a kind of overcoming of that individuation that so tempts the form. It’s true that there’re individuals here, of course—Dorothea and Tertius and Rosamond and Fred and Will, even Nicholas. But because the book’s so generous with its time we’re able to see how the pressures on each of these leads, rather than coming from mere names or constraints, come so often from one another’s narrownesses. Tertius is proud and a little scornful; Rosamond is also proud and a little impulsive, and for a while they’re menaces to each other, each one scrabbling at the other for deliverance and both drowning in the process. Nicholas hurts them too—partly a patron of Tertius, he’s under enormous pressure and gives an implicating gift that’ll end up running them out of town. Partly the menace comes from names—the threatened country doctors and opinionated bartenders and small-businessmen’s-wives who mark a kind of chorus in the book’s second half—but the moods of the names are always rooted in how some other textually-whole person, equally vital and equally pressured, has been put other some other pressure. We really see the social here in a huge sense, how our realities abut and sometimes pinch each other’s, how problems and pressures reverberate through a whole system.

And communication is imperfect: often problems arise through people not quite saying what they mean, being too socially constrained or simply too scared. When they fail in these ways assumptions are made: often hindering ones. By the book’s end our four mains—Dorothea and Will, Tertius and Rosamond—all lie in enormous interpersonal risk, of never getting married or having the marriage go bad. It’s Dorothea, original and final protagonist, who saves the day—by managing, at the book’s last moment, to save everyone by being honest and vulnerable in a way people haven’t managed to be for eight hundred pages or so. It’s heroic—perhaps we’d say it shows the human social, the strucutre of need and care and mutuality that runs between two hearts, at last breaking through society, the structure of behavior and expectation created to manage that humanity. We want the insulation of society, I think, want it to keep us safe--but must be, like Dorothea, brave enough to break its rules when it begins to harm us. She’s, in some sense, an emotional revolutionary.

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Intensifying much of the drama is money. The Vincys haven’t got any, Tertius has spent more than he should have, Rosamond can’t comprehend how to use less of it. But having it creates problems too: Casaubon’s money, bound to his shamed vengeance against Will, creates a huge difficulty for everyone late on. And Bulstrode’s town-patron money, money for new hospitals and country repairs and various rational or religious improvements, turns out to have darkness in origin and expression both. The accumulation was a moral crime and the anxiety proceeding from that criminality creates further crimes, ends up producing the final impossibility for Lydgate.

Of course this is all historically connected. Lydgate, who brings to town a recognizably improved approach to medicine and is mostly punished for therefore, is the clearest example. But everywhere there are efforts at improvement—Dorothea’s rational idealism matches Lydgate’s methodological rationalism matches Brooke and Ladislaw’s eagerness for political reform. Even Bulstrode, ultimatley something like the villain of the novel, is a reformer. These characters, unlike many we’ve read before, recognize that they’re part of a historical project—and feel they can do something about it, feel they and history can be on one another’s side. It’s part of how they get into trouble: maybe reform is coming, to medicine or politics or belief, but it isn’t here yet and folks around town don’t always want it to arrive. You can be on the better world’s side, yes—but that’s all you get. And since it isn’t here yet it may not be able to take your side very helpfully.

Related to these characters’ faith in history is their faith in youth itself. This is maybe the deepest root of their collective trouble.  Our core group, with the possible(?) exception of Will, are young and pretty fortunate in their birth or their capacities, and at the start of the novel they seem to trust this good fortune as a kind of promise—gifted with being smart or hot or hard-working or more than one, they expect to be gifted further. And they’re not quite right. In fact it’s their certainty that time will be generous to them—Fred’s that he’ll find a good horse, Tertius that good modern medicine will be embraced, Dorothea that an initially captivating husband will prove a good one—that gets them in the most trouble. They blunder in good faith, into situations that aren’t great but which they suppose will be redeemed by their own good faith and the world’s tendency to honor them, and then they keep blundering, sure deliverance is just around the corner.

Rosamond isn’t the protagonist but maybe the clearest example: when things get tough she’s sure that things will be resolved simply by being rosamund and wanting things to improve, and—well, she’s wrong. Being Rosamond and asking nicely doesn’t help at all. And so the book shows us how their greatest assets—their youth, and their gifts, and their enthusiasm—lead them into the worst situations. This kind of thing—this chording among the many characters, how without a singular ‘all about so-and-so’ focalization the themes and patterns among the many characters come to seem the book’s truer concerns—is another of the book’s magisterial effects of length.

And so, you know? It’s weird. For a book that’s so renowned for its length and its absolute 19centuriness, for a book you think is going to be all drawing-rooms and circumlocutions and wistful thoughts about marriage, it’s—well, there’s a lot of that stuff. But it’s also, profoundly—profoundly! About young people, and what they believe in, and how they get thwarted and otherwise fucked. It’s the novel I’ve read in which the new world struggles, most visibly and most movingly, to be born.