Middlemarch: The Chatty Bits (Spoilers Go Here)

This is the chatty uncensored thread for comments about Middlemarch. Where are you in your reading? What ideas are coming up in your head as a result? What bits are slowing you down? There's such a lot of hesitation in taking on Middlemarch as pgmcc noted when this particular title came up in a discussion on my own reading thread. There was a mix of "Oh, I would love to read that in an in-depth way" and "OMG, gave it a shot once and never, never made it through." So let's see what unfolds here and maybe it will become clear why everyone acknowledges Middlemarch as the Greatest 19th C British Novel but then subsequently veers off from engaging with it.

Or maybe if I read this thread I won't have to read the book!

Kinda kidding.

I'm in the "OMG, gave it a shot once and never, never made it through." camp. I have it as an audio, but downloading it from Project Gutenberg is a possibility as well.

I read this several years ago for another group on LT and I adored it. I'm not rereading it, but I think I need to refresh my leaky memory somewhere. Wikipedia perhaps...

I read this first for pleasure in my first year at uni and loved it. The BBC adaptation was on TV at the time, 8 episodes that correlated to the 8 sections of the novel. I read each part before that week's episode and really enjoyed both versions. I think I found it a fairly easy read because there were so many interesting characters and their stories that if one got a bit dull I knew someone more interesting would be taking over soon. I probably can't fit in a reread at the moment but I'll be following this thread with interest.

This is one of the few novels I've bothered to read twice because I loved it so much. I will be watching this thread, and I might even comment!

I started the novel this afternoon, and I've just finished Book I. I'm finding myself quite caught up in it and not having to push at all. I can't see a reason to space the reading out over eight months when it's just beckoning me on.

everyone acknowledges Middlemarch as the Greatest 19th C British Novel Not sure about that. I read it in 2010 and liked it more than P&P or Wuthering Heights, but not as much as Jane Eyre or anything by Thomas Hardy (I know, most people find Hardy depressing now). Don't think that I'll read it again just now, but am interested in other people's thoughts.

Due to my spectacularly short memory I can't recall enough of the book to make sense of my brief note after reading it, so i'll just put it below verbatim.

"At first i felt i was drowning in character analysis, but later it got more gripping. Much better dialogue than Silas Marner. I wanted to slap almost every character, except Mrs Cadwallander (but she was a frightful snob)."

I also see that I have tagged the book "dodo". No idea why. Let me know if you come across any reference to dodos when reading it, cheers.

>7 MrAndrew: I'm pretty sure Dodo is Dorothea's nickname. I think this is the first almost completely serious post I've ever seen from you and I'm not sure whether to be pleased or horrified. ;o)

I don't know if this means I've been snoozing during some English class (I was not the snoozing type, but you never know), but I had never heard of Middlemarch before it was mentioned in a bunch of threads here. Apparently it's well-known... I'm wondering whether I should try it. I love most Jane Austen books and also liked Jane Eyre (but couldn't stand Wuthering heights. Didn't finish it, in fact). How does Middlemarch compare?

Since spoilers are allowed here: this isn't a spoiler, exactly, but I did see the BBC miniseries a few years ago, and so I know that Dorothea's story doesn't end with her marriage to Casaubon. There's some excitement to look forward to.

I also heard Casaubon pronounced: the BBC actors said CASS-o-bon.

>9 zjakkelien: I'd say the most obvious differences between Middlemarch and Jane Eyre/Wuthering Heights/Austen are that Middlemarch has a much larger cast of characters, with 3 main stories and several more sub-plots taking place. Also, it lacks the Gothic/suspense element of the Brontes' work. The characters are a more diverse bunch than those in Austen's novels, being of all different classes, and the stories don't end upon marriage - in fact, more of the novel shows what happens after the marriage plot ends. Another, immediate difference is that Middlemarch is considerably longer than anything by Austen and Bronte, but I found it a relatively fast read. Middlemarch also shows the effects of changes in society, technology and science on its characters, touching on the impact of the railways and medicine, among other things. (It's more like Charlotte Bronte's Shirley in that respect.) So it gives you a bigger picture of life in Victorian England.

Have started the audio book. Was on the treadmill and I figured, what the hell. It can't get more boring than this. So I'm up to the point where Dorothea has accepted Mr. C by letter and the presenter of useless kick-me dogs is out of the running. Unless the mail gets intercepted or something.

I like the catty relationship the sisters have and I hope we see more of it because it was the only interesting thing so far.

Snickering at the characterization of poor Sir James as the "useless kick-me dogs" presenter...

Regret to inform you that the mail goes through...

And between the two, Dodo and Celia, it's pretty clear that Celia had the greater share of common sense when it came to grasping human behavior. Dodo might have had more of the intellect on her end.

>9 zjakkelien: I like what Sakerfalcon indicates as the differences between the Brontes and Eliot. I would just add that Eliot tried hard to be a realist where the Brontes went for excitement.

And like the rest of you, I'm finding that I'm enjoying Middlemarch far more now than I did way back. Perhaps I'm noticing now that Eliot really did try to indicate that Dodo was a girl in her teens with overly romantic and unrealistic expectations of what marriage was supposed to be. Before I just thought she was none too swift. (It's within the realm of possibility that I was that stupid as well when I was her age and it's uncomfortable to be reminded of that aspect...)

Yeah and by naming her Dodo. :)

>11 Sakerfalcon: >14 jillmwo: Thanks for your comments! It sounds interesting enough, I downloaded it from Gutenberg. I'm not sure if I'll like the large number of characters, but perhaps in this kind of book it will work for me.

Phew. This is hard going. Mr. Brooks's opinion of the weakness of the female intellect is really making me lose patience. He keeps on about it and I'm ready to quit. Is this something that gets thrown in his face because it's pure bullshit or what?

>17 Bookmarque: See that's where the book would be easier to deal with than the audio. I believe I skimmed much of Mr. Brooks' BS while cursing him none too silently.

You may be right, clam. Now Sir James is going on and on about how young Dodo is and how she can't know her own mind, etc (unless of course she chose him, then she'd be a certifiable genius). That she picked someone else goads him so much that he doesn't want anyone to have her even if he can't. It's the woman as property thing that is killing me. I know it's the age in which it was written, but it was wrong then and it's wrong now. The circumstances don't make it easier to take.

Doesn't it help that Eliot knew it was wrong and that's why she's addressing the issue? It helped me. Though I'm pretty sure I wanted to climb into the book and throttle a few people.

Well, we can't change history any more than we can change the existing static text of Middlemarch. Men in the 19th century were disinclined to allow the idea that women had intelligence or insights equal to their own. And really, I find Mr. Casaubon far more irritating than I do Mr. Brooke. Mr. Brooke is well-intentioned, even if mutton-headed. Mr. Casaubon is chained and buried within his own mental construct and seems utterly without empathy or consideration.

I have made it through Book One of Middlemarch even if I haven't posted all of the various chapter summaries over on the Masterthread. This is moving much more readily than I'd thought it would.

I just wanted to share one thing over here. Has anyone else noticed how cleverly Eliot opens the novel with a very tight focus on just one family and the two sisters in it before she expands the lens moving into Book Two? We go from the one family and immediate neighbors to the larger number of families in the County. We have other sets of siblings to look at now. Very nicely crafted.

(This is why I have to read more slowly than most. Otherwise, in my haste to gulp down the story whole, I miss all the good bits of how the author made it work.)

And Bookmarque, you were great to point out the relationship between the two Brooke sisters coming out at times as cattiness. Of course, by the time we hit the interactions between Fred and Rosamund, we're well aware that siblings can be really quite rude to one another.

Has anyone here read Eliot's essay SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS? (That's a link to the text on Gutenberg, there are probably other online.) I think it provides, among other, some interesting insight in how Eliot regarded characterisation of women in fiction and perception in life.

(I've read Middlemarch too long ago to comment usefully, but I do remember I had great sympathy for Dorothea the ignorant smart girl and the unfortunate idealism and daydreams that pushed her into a terrible marriage. Gotta say that part rang far more believable than the romance with Will!)

Ugh. I think I'm done with this. I'm blanking out entirely for minutes at a time only to be rudely jerked back into the story by some man coming into a room and ordering the women out of it so he can speak to another man. WTF? I know it's my modern sensibility, but it's so insulting that I can't take any more.

>24 Bookmarque: Oh, no! Really you're done? Or do you just need a break from it?

>23 LolaWalser: Did I just read an essay from the 1800s complaining that women write too many Mary Sues? Huh.

Yeah, it's just not doing it for me, jillmwo. It's boring so I can't find anything in it to make me put up with the insulting parts.

There's a Green Dragon in the story! I assume it's the name of a pub; there's mention of billiards being played there. Was it a common name, I wonder, or did Tolkien perhaps borrow it from Eliot?

I'm not having any trouble at all with the attitudes expressed. Far from taking them personally, I don't even take them as the author's, any more than I assume that a villainous character in any story is committing acts that the author condones or advocates.

I honestly don't see why anyone gets angry when fictional characters voice opinions that were perfectly suitable to their time, place, and position in life. Are we to pretend that no one ever thought differently from the way we do now? Disliking and rejecting particular views doesn't seem to me to require wholesale rejection of reading matter in which such views are expressed. I can't imagine what fiction would be like if there were no differences of opinion among characters and everyone we met agreed with us. (And if present-day sensibilities were current a hundred and fifty years ago, I'd have to say, well, then, we haven't made much progress, have we?)

>26 sandstone78:

Ha, yes, exactly, I thought "she's totally describing a fanficcy Mary Sue!" This had me in stitches:

The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. {Etc!}

The SAME clichés, still abounding in terrible literature.

Mind you--I go with the negative definition of "Mary Sue"/"Gary Stu", as badly constructed characters in either female or male version (preposterously well-endowed, fascinating etc.)

If you mean me, Meredy, you know I read old books with assholes in them a plenty. This one though is just so tedious that I can't put up with the insulting bits. And let's face it, that women are less than human is insulting no matter what was in vogue when expressed. Differences of opinion are one thing, blatant, constant, unrelenting hatred and belittling of my gender is another. There's only so much I can take. I'll have my progress in more palatable forms.

>30 Bookmarque: I don't. Or, not just you. It's a sentiment I've seen expressed often by many readers around here, and truly, I don't understand it. I'm not condemning it. I'm saying just what I said: I don't understand it.

The presumption does seem to be that one specific variety of assholery in a fictional character is insupportable to read about, as if the author were endorsing it, even though that sort of test apparently isn't applied to any other set of views. If a reader couldn't stand the spectacle of any views that differed from his or her own, that would at least make some sense to me. And for what it's worth, I don't see any hatred in this book.

There could hardly be a clearer case, I think, of readers' experiences of a book differing drastically depending on what they bring to it.

Middlemarch is just too boring to put up with the insulting bits, that's what it is with this one. For example, I'm reading Run to Earth a Victorian sensation novel where a lot of the same views of women as subhuman exist. No agency, no brains, no capacity for understanding, easily duped and emotional rather than rational. It's there, but the story is exciting and the characters over the top. In short, I like it. I'm enjoying it so that the limpid females too conditioned not to stand up for themselves don't clobber me over the head with their lack of agency.

Middlemarch though is a snoozefest so that every time Brooks or one of the other entitled, pompous windbags goes on about how no woman should bother to learn to read because painting or embroidery is taxing enough for their little minds, I kind of lose mine a bit. There's not enough upside for me to put up with it.

Does that help?

Interesting. I didn't find the book boring at all. Long, yes. Chewy, definitely.

Tomato, tomahto. :o)

Funny. I found it crunchy, with an aftertaste of almonds and hints of persimmon.

Actually i leant towards the "it's boring" side. But given the appeal that it appears to have for readers whose opinion i respect, i wondered if my lack of interest was due to my white, male, middleclass, middleaged perspective.

Bookmarque, correct me if i'm mistaken but I believe that you were put off by the insulting contribution of the privileged males in the story. My assumption was that the author was trying to shine a light on those types, and not actually supporting their prevalent worldview. Do you agree with that but you find it irritating nonetheless, or dost i presume too much?

I'm tempted now to try a re-read and see if i find it more engaging the second time around. Maybe i should read some related literature first to get more context, like lolawalser's excellent link above. Suggestions welcomed.

You're close MrA. Pretty much every time one of them opened his mustachioed lips it was to denigrate half of the population. And with nothing else even mildly interesting going on to keep me attached to the story, it had to go. I don't care why Eliot included it, she should have written a better story.

Could have used more dinosaurs with laser beams attached to their heads?

Goes without saying, really.

Are they ill tempered?

frickin' ill-tempered.

lol.

Before you all lump me in with the classics shunning philistines, let’s take Jane Austen for some contrast with Eliot. Austen (ok, not Eliot’s contemporary, but work with me) had the ability to show the ridiculous as ridiculous in her novels. She had a sense of humor and more importantly, of irony. My experience with Eliot so far is that she had none. And no humor either. All serious. No nuance or editorial, leaving everything up to the reader to decide. In this case, whether her depiction of misogyny should be disapproved of or, gasp, even noticed. I noticed and unfortunately her dry litany of the extreme quotidian made me fall asleep. She didn’t bind me to her story either with characters, situations or authorial attitude/editorialization. Maybe she does later, but frankly it’s too dull to find out. There’s just nothing sparkling here to light up my brain. Not like Austen. or Dickens. or Braddon. or Collins.

>39 Bookmarque: And I find her humor subtle, acerbic, and quite astonishing at times. She throws off one-liners as if she had an infinite supply of them, deftly characterizing one or another, foibles and all, with frank and yet somehow charitable sketches. She has so many beautiful minor characters that I almost savor them more than the main ones: Mrs. Garth, for instance, an educated wife of an improvident man, who accepts her lot and yet vigorously drills her children on grammar and classical history while scrubbing the laundry; or an old woman who stealthily steals sugar from the bowl in her son's house so she can lavish it on the poor; or the townsmen arguing over local politics. I loved their argument about the hospital chaplainship so much that I wanted to highlight it all.

Eliot sees into the human heart like nobody else. She depicts the inner lives of characters with a loving yet unsparing intimacy that almost makes her seem divine. She never ridicules her weak ones, though she can be very hard on the unscrupulous ones, but nonetheless exposes them all in a way that often makes us smile--sometimes lightly, sometimes sadly--at human folly, her gentleness making it safe for us to say privately, "Oh, dear, I'm like that too," or "I wouldn't have avoided that misstep any better than he did."

Dorothea's grand, horrible mistake in marrying Mr. Cold Fish Casaubon is just a setup for what follows.

I'm glad you find it so. I'm leaving it in my rear view though.

>34 MrAndrew: I rather suspect that the aftertaste of almonds that you reference is really the poisonous cyanide that Bookmarque has experienced in her taste of Middlemarch. (Ar-ar-ar. Yes that was really labored humor, but I'm posting late at night and its hard to be clever at this hour.) And I don't think that's because Bookmarque is a classics-shunning philistine. (Not least because she knows enough to use the term "philistines" correctly in this context which I find actually find quite companionable in her.I like you, Bookmarque! Although I will say that I find both Austen and Eliot to be good in use of irony.)

But I remember when I first attempted Middlemarch, I couldn't bear to continue to read about the train-wreck that was Dorothea's marriage. Oblivious to all the clues (as most 19 year-olds would be) but sometimes I think I really would have got on better with Celia as a friend.

Onwards!

Edited because I make lots of typos and spelling mistakes when I'm tired.

I haven't quite processed the significance of Book Two as yet, although I have finished it. But my general feeling about Middlemarch is that it seems to be about vocation (not in the religious sense, but rather in the occupational sense). What are you best suited to do in this world? Lydgate is clearly fortunate in learning early on what it is he is most interested in and thus most motivated to do in his professional life. We're presented with a number of professional clergy -- many of whom recognize their own misfit in the role. Fred knows he's not cut out to be a clergyman; Camden Farebrother suspects he's not altogether in the right vocation. So a lot of this seems to be to be about not just the Reform Act regarding church and state, but also about encouraging individuals to work out what their individual passion/interest might be. (So far, I don't see this as a great novel of feminism, but I do see it as a great novel about the idea of growing into one's Self.) It's one of Casaubon's great internal fears - I suspect - that he won't be capable of framing his great theory of everything. It's why he's still puttering.

This book appears to be rather painful. Poor Dorothea sobbing alone in her honeymoon hotel.

>43 jillmwo: I'm nearly finished with Book III.

I can see the theme of vocation, but I don't think it's the main one. In one respect the book seems to be about what I sometimes think every British novel and BBC adaptation seems to be about, namely, marriage and money. But Eliot, of course, goes deeper. From where I am, less than halfway through, I'd say a major theme is reality versus illusion, or maybe versus idealism.

Or maybe it's something like this passage in Chapter VIII of Book II, when Dorothea is crying in her hotel room:

Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames can hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

This line also comes to mind:

When you take a class-ridden society with no ability to address its emotions, and let it simmer for a thousand years, you frankly have the perfect recipe for drama.

That's not from Eliot, of course. It's from the DVD advertisement for BBC America (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjgYIQuMciI ), which I've seen countless times on Netflix rentals and never fail to enjoy as entertainment in itself.

>45 Meredy: I also enjoyed the bit about hearing words pronounced properly ;)

>46 hfglen: Yes, I always smile at that too. In fact, there are quite a few good lines in that promotional piece, and sometimes I enjoy it more than the program that follows. The Pythonesque animation contributes quite a lot as well. I hope the creator got a bonus.

So my question today is whether what Mary Garth did was ethical. She knew that Peter Featherstone wanted to destroy his second will and instead revert his legacies to what appeared in the first will. However, Mary refused to do as he asks and refuses to burn the second will. Now, that might have been right insofar as saving Fred's soul and teaching him self-sufficiency; we know Mary Garth only wants what's best in the long run for the man she cares for. But was it appropriate and ethical for her to thwart the dying man's last wish as to who might benefit from his wealth? Whose rights take precedence in such a situation?

Discuss.

>48 jillmwo: I thought the question of ethics, to her, was entirely a matter of whether she were willing to insert herself into his business and expose herself to any accusation of wrongdoing. Her refusal was independent of what was in the wills. It was not about teaching Fred a lesson, it was about keeping her own hands scrupulously clean. Regardless of her affection for Fred, Mary is a young woman who knows her own mind and also knows how to look out for herself.

She was not responsible for the fact that old Featherstone, a cantankerous SOB as she well knew, wanted to play games with his relatives and hopeful heirs, nor that he left the resolution of the matter until he knew that he was close to his last breath. Those were all his choices, and she was under no obligation to mitigate the consequences for him or anyone else. He thwarted his own wishes; that was not on her.

So I think she did right, and made a tougher choice than probably most of us would have.