Middlemarch and Me

I can’t count the number of times I’ve read George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Eight times? Ten times? I read it at least three times during my undergraduate years, and maybe another two or three times in graduate school. After that I found that it nourished the soul to read it at least once every decade.

I first read Middlemarch when I was 19. I read it as a romance about Dorothea, an altruistic heroine who wants to do something meaningful with her life. In an earlier century she would gladly have been a nun—a Saint Theresa. But in the enlightened 1830’s, such radical career choices are not readily available to young ladies of the English landed gentry. Dorothea makes some idiotic choices in her journey, including a brief, loveless marriage. In the end, she renounces her late husband’s sizeable fortune to marry her true love. Best of all, she still has her own (not inconsiderable) inheritance to carry her and the true love over life’s roughest shoals. I thought this was grand, but then I was 19—when all of life is viewed through a pulsating, roseate scrim of hormones. (For me, blood lust had nothing to do with violence and everything to do with the panting desire to make babies.)

In these early readings, Dorothea’s quest for a meaningful love made her the central sun around which the 300+ pages of lesser, annoying characters orbited. Never mind that there were scandal, murder and other interesting marriages in the mix. Never mind that Dorothea’s true love was more of a cipher (with a ravishing curve to his nose and a divine mop of brown curls) than a realistic man. The story was about Dorothea’s choices in love, and not my literary criticism.

I revisited Middlemarch at 29, and it was like reading the book for the first time. Middlemarch was about making responsible choices in a life partner. This time around, Dorothea is a bona fide twit whose choices made me want to reach out and slap some sense into her. Her first marriage is to Edward Casaubon, a dried out husk of a man—lifeless, loveless and lacking in either passion or charity. Dorothea thinks of him as a latter day Saint Augustine. But who in her right mind wants to marry Saint Augustine? In fact, Dorothea believes that it would be a blessing to marry a blind Milton if she could be his handmaiden. In the absence of a suitable medieval monk or tortured genius as a suitor, she settles on Casaubon, whose overwhelming draw is a rambling treatise about ancient mythology at which he has been hacking away for 30 years. Dorothea, anxious to improve the world, wants to be Casaubon’s amanuensis, a helpmate in bringing his key to all mythologies to a bookstore near you. And who wants to sit across from either Saint Augustine or Milton over breakfast? Imagine either of those rays of sunshine beaming at you over orange juice and oatmeal.

Dorothea has already passed on two perfectly wonderful possibilities. The first is Sir James, a neighboring member of the local gentry who is eligible, appropriate and attractive in every sense of the word: he’s of suitable age and fortune, physically appealing, good natured and wild about Dorothea. But who would want any of that? The second, Doctor Tertius Lydgate, is as blind as Dorothea; the two meet and pass each other like ships in the night, each dismissing the other as not meeting his and her own ideal image of a mate. Lydgate, intelligent, handsome and fired with noble ambitions about the newly burgeoning sciences, arrives in Middlemarch with the intention of spending his days practicing medicine and his nights performing medical research. Meeting Dorothea at a social function, Lydgate thinks the lovely girl isn’t his cup of tea. And with that, he makes a bee-line for Rosamund, a beautiful bubblehead, whose own life ambitions are more in line with fine society and fine furniture than refined science. Lydgate and Rosamund are quickly married and Lydgate’s noble goals are just as quickly forgotten. Rosamund ruins him with debt (fine furniture doesn’t come free, you know) and Lydgate’s own choice of patrons in Middlemarch’s tight little community smears him with the taint of murder. The bottom line from this reading: Everyone seems hell-bent on marrying in haste and repenting at leisure. With a few notable exceptions, no one seems to talk to their prospective or current spouses to find out who they really are and what they really want. And on those few occasions when the minds do manage to meet, one or the other partner is disappointed, heartbroken or horrified.

By this time in my own life I clearly understood that prospective life partners should be chosen with an eye to bearable breakfast conversation, a companionable personality and a world view that is tolerably close to one’s own. Marriage is about compromise and acceptance as much as it is about love. The question is not, as Carole King put it, Will you love me tomorrow?. The real question is, Will I love you tomorrow…and all the days that follow?. (Was it Christie Brinkley who said that being a genius didn’t make Billy Joel a nice person? Or maybe that was Claire Bloom reflecting on her unhappy marriage to Philip Roth….) If you shudder at the thought of returning your beloved’s stare over the breakfast table, give it up. It ain’t gonna work. If your prospective life partner is a virago or a dybbuk, no amount of money or genius will make it worth your while or your life. And if their outlook on life makes the blood run cold in your veins, consider yourself forewarned. In the end, compatibility is everything. Marry a mensch.

As I approached my 40th birthday, I went through an 18 month-long maelstrom about the meaning of life. More accurately, Peter went through the maelstrom. We were on vacation in Kennebunkport, walking on the beach, when the angst hit me like a mallet. And so I let Peter have it. What is the meaning of life? Who are you? Why am I married to you? Why are we here? Is this all there is? Birthdays have no such hallucinatory effect on Peter, so when this storm hit, he was taken by surprise. I treated him to a similar tirade almost daily from September 1990 until my 40th birthday in March 1992, and he patiently let it flow over him. That’s what you call love. If he had dished that out to me for a year and a half, I’d have disemboweled him. On the morning of the looming 40th birthday, I woke to the prospect of a birthday celebration at the office and a lovely dinner out with Peter. Like it or not, life moves forward. Get used to it. Peter was relieved to find the rabid virago was gone and I was back. I, in turn, was thrilled to realize that I had, indeed, wisely married a good-hearted mensch.

Around this same time, Middlemarch enjoyed a pop culture revival. It was made into a BBC Masterpiece Theater serial, and all across England yuppies were staging Victorian dinner parties replete with mutton, butlers and period costumes. I settled for rereading the book, and this time the book was about community and how one lives out one’s role in it. The neighbors, business associates, family members and community concerns that make up the warp and woof of our adult lives now stepped forward with their own demands and concerns. In this reading, railroads and the industrial revolution creeps toward England’s bucolic countryside, the very real limits of family finances determine whether sons go to college (or not) and political discussions rage about the value of spending money on refurbishing dilapidated peasant cottages (or not). Even more clearly, the theme of What goes around, comes around flows faintly but steadily throughout the book. There are good eggs and bad eggs in every age and every setting—and while the good eggs warm the cockles of the heart, it’s the self-righteous hypocrites, meddling know-it-all’s and rich relations wielding their money like an auction gavel who capture the imagination.

Throughout the book, Nick Bulstrode, Middlemarch’s powerful banker and most upstanding community pillar has bullied, cheated and shortchanged strangers, family and business associates. He barely registered on my seismic scale in earlier readings, but this time I found it positively gratifying when Bulstrode turns out to be a pious fraud who has spent years concealing his early history of theft, duplicity and deceit. With the discovery of his sordid story and with the suspicious death of a former associate who was blackmailing him, Bulstrode is publicly shamed and broken. At this lowest moment of his life, another minor character comes forward in a moment of sublime grace: Bulstrode’s wife, Harriet, wordlessly promises him her continued love and forgiveness. Grace comes in many shapes and forms. And this time it arrives in the form of Harriet Bulstrode—a gentle, middle-aged dumpling of a woman whose love for her husband is mature and infinite even in the face of public disgrace.

I’m 59, and it’s time to read the book again. I wonder if, this time, I will feel more empathy for the bloodless and sickly Casaubon? The rest of the middle-aged characters will, no doubt, have more to impart to me this time around, too. I can’t wait to be enlightened.