Notes on Middlemarch

Patrick Mooney
English 233
1 November 2010

Epigraphs

David Higdon, George Eliot and the Art of the Epigraph: four major tendencies — structural allusion, abstraction, ironic refraction, and metaphoric evaluation—may be delineated. She also uses epigraphs to describe characters, to present a character's unconscious thoughts, and to argue for realistic presentation, but these epigraphs are few in number. (134)

Ex.: Epigraph to ch. 2 (Don Quixote). Ex.: Epigraph to ch. 24 (Shakespeare's sonnet, when Fred is about to disappoint Mr. Garth in the matter of the loan).

Comparative Fates

Dorothea—Celia: Dorothea was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense. (7, ch. 1) [. . .] The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers, was generally in favour of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking, while Miss Brooke's large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and striking. (9, ch. 1)

Casaubon's mother—Casaubon's aunt Julia: There is not even a family likeness between [Casaubon's aunt] and your mother. No. And they were not alike in their lot. (76, ch. 9)

Ladislaw—Fred: I have always been blamed for thinking of prospects, and not settling to anything. (367, ch. 37)

{many others}

Marriage

Laure: I do not like husbands. I will never have another. (153, ch. 15)

Dorothea—Casaubon: I should learn everything then [. . .] It would be like marrying Pascal. (29, ch. 3). Casaubon determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was. (63, ch. 7) [T]he large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither. (195, ch. 20) The clear heights where she expected to walk in full communion had become difficult to see even in her imagination; the delicious repose of the soul on a complete superior had been shaken into uneasy effort and alarmed with dim presentiment. (274, ch. 28) Ladislaw: A man was bound to know himself better than that, and if he chose to grow grey crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business to be luring a girl into his companionship. (360, ch. 37) [T]his nightmare of a life in which every energy was arrested by dread. (375, ch. 37) [T]here had entered into the husband's mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts. (418, ch. 42)

Celia—Chettam: Sir James did not regard his future wife in the light of prey (61, ch. 6). Celia: Mrs Cadwallader, I don't think it can be nice to marry a man with a great soul (56, ch. 6). Dorothea: I do believe you could not marry better, Kitty. Sir James is a good, honourable man. (277, ch. 28)

Lydgate—Rosamond: Lydgate looks to marriage to provide an opportunity for reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven. (95, ch. 11) Ever since that important new arrival in Middlemarch she [Rosamond] had woven a little future, of which something like this scene was the necessary beginning. [. . .] Mr Lydgate suddenly corresponding to her ideal, being altogether foreign to Middlemarch, carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good family, and possessing connections which offered vistas of that middle-class heaven, rank; a man of talent, also, whom it would be especially delightful to enslave: in fact, a man who had touched her nature quite newly, and brought a vivid interest into her life. (117-18, ch. 12) Poor Lydgate! Or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing. (165, ch. 16) [A]ltogether Lydgate had to confess to himself that he was descending a little in relation to Rosamond's family. [. . .] it was at least one delightful thought that in marrying her, he could give her a much-needed transplantation. (350, ch. 36)

The Garths: She had been magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in teapots or children's frilling [. . .] apt to be a little severe towards her own sex, which in her opinion was framed to be entirely subordinate. [. . .] she might possess education and other good things ending in tion, worthy to be pronounced emphatically, without being a useless doll. (242-43, ch. 24) Caleb: A woman, let her be as good as she may, has got to put up with the life her husband makes for her. Your mother has had to put up with a good deal because of me. (257, ch. 25)

The Bulstrodes have a rather interesting marriage, but a discussion of it is probably best reserved for next week.

Science/Medicine

Lydgate's search for the primitive tissue (148, ch. 15) runs parallel to Casaubon's search for an interpretive basis for all mythological thought. In fact, medical/scientific metaphors are often used explicitly by the narrator to point toward structural aspects of the novel: the microscope revealing tiniest hairlets of causes (59-60, ch. 6)¹; the search for new connections and hitherto hidden facts of structure (148, ch. 15). Many characters also take science as the model for knowledge: Mr Brooke [. . .] felt that women were an inexhaustible subject of study, since even he at his age was not in a perfect state of scientific prediction about them! (40, ch. 4) The metaphor of disease is also frequently applied to moral questions: Fred was not a gambler: he had not that specific disease in which the suspension of the whole nervous energy on a chance or risk becomes as necessary as the dram to the drunkard. (235, ch. 23) Also, on Peter Featherstone: For the old man's dislike of his own family seemed to get stronger as he got less able to amuse himself by saying biting things to them. Too languid to sting, he had the more venom refluent in his blood. (306, ch. 32)

But at that period there was no sort of reasoning which was not more or less sanctioned by men of science. (353, ch. 36)

Mr. Brooke's genetics: that sort of thing doesn't often run in the female line. (46, ch. 5) Jane Waule's: I'm your own sister, constitution and everything. (106, ch. 11)

Casaubon's Key, Dorothea thinks, would reconcile complete knowledge with devoted piety. (25, ch. 3) Farebrother is a contrasting example, a cleric/naturalist.

Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that his ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his professional brethren would by-and-by recoil on himself. He [Wrench] threw out biting remarks on Lydgate's tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get himself a factitious reputation with credulous people. (262, ch. 26)

For the heroic times of copious bleeding and blistering had not yet departed, still less the times of thorough-going theory, when disease in general was called by some bad name, and treated accordingly without shilly-shally — as if, for example, it were to be called insurrection, which must not be fired on with blank-cartridge, but have its blood drawn at once. (142, ch. 15)

The current state of medical knowledge general to the town is apparently based on a loose theory of humors, as demonstrated by the conversation at the final engagement party for Dorothea and Casaubon: Everything depends on the constitution: some people make fat, some blood, and some bile, according to Mrs. Cadwallader (90, ch. 10) Physiognomy is also a current theory: Lady Chettam says that Lydgate is supposed to be wonderfully clever: he certainly looks it — a fine brow indeed. (91, ch. 10) Dr. Wrench is bilious; his wife is lymphatic. (259, ch. 26) This is a rather far cry from Lydgate's interest in the philosophy of medical evidence (125, ch. 13).

Dorothea: I believe devoutly in a natural difference of vocation. (223, ch. 22)

Ladislaw: You see I come of rebellious blood on both sides. (366, ch. 37)

Education

Lydgate: with our present medical rules and education, one must be satisfied now and then to meet with a fair practitioner. (125, ch. 13)

For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to young ladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr Casaubon's talk about his great book was full of new vistas; and this sense of revelation, this surprise of a nearer introduction to Stoics and Alexandrians, as people who had ideas not totally unlike her own, kept in abeyance for the time her usual eagerness for a binding theory which could bring her own life and doctrine into strict connection with that amazing past, and give the remotest sources of knowledge some bearing on her actions. (86, ch. 10)

[I]n taking a wife, a man of good position should expect and carefully choose a blooming young lady — the younger the better, because more educable and submissive. (278, ch. 29)

Mary Garth: I have tried being a teacher, but I am not fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own way. (137, ch. 14)

Mr. Brooke: We must not have you getting too learned for a woman, you know. (388, ch. 39)

Mrs. Lemon's finishing school: the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female — even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage. (96, ch. 11) Rosamond never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date. [. . .] Nature had inspired many arts in finishing Mrs Lemon's favourite pupil, who by general consent (Fred's excepted) was a rare compound of beauty, cleverness, and amiability. (268, ch. 27)

Mr Bulstrode condemns Mrs Vincy beyond anything for her flightiness, and spoiling her children so. (106, ch. 11)

Perception and Misperception

Celia: You always see what nobody else sees; it is impossible to satisfy you; yet you never see what is quite plain. (36, ch. 4)

Dorothea: I am rather short-sighted. (30, ch. 3)

Each character possesses an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference. (211, ch. 21)

Fred Vincy: Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions. [. . .] It describes a sensation in your little nose associated with certain finicking notions which are the classics of Mrs Lemon's school. (100, ch. 11)

Dorothea: I am fond of knowing something about the people I live among [. . .] One is constantly wondering what sort of lives other people lead, and how they take things. (326, ch. 34)

Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labours; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be to heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a piece in our consideration must be our want of room for him. (84, ch. 10)

[W]hy always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? [. . .] Mr Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us. (278, ch. 29)

Dorothea: I have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives would look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they could be put on the wall. (220, ch. 22)

Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his relation to her. (166, ch. 16)

… it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view. (66, ch. 7)

[I]t is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. (264, ch. 27)

She [Dorothea] was as blind to his [Casaubon's] inward troubles as he to hers; she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts which claim our pity. She had not yet listened patiently to his heart-beats, but only felt that her own was beating violently. (200, ch. 20)

Probabilities are as various as the faces to be seen at will in fretwork or paperhangings: every form is there, from Jupiter to Judy, if you only look with creative inclination. (303, ch. 32)

Dorothea [. . .] was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception; and now when she looked steadily at her husbands failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness. (365, ch. 37)

To Uriel watching the progress of planetary history from the Sun, the one result would be just as much of a coincidence as the other. (412, ch. 41)

End Notes

References