Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)

George Eliot. Middlemarch. Pub. 1872. Ed. David Carroll and Felicia Bonaparte. Oxford: World's Classics, 2008. Print.

• Pub in 8 serial bi-monthly parts 12/1871-12/1872, then 1872 4 vols by Blackwood
  • reintroducing characters on 307ff as a strategy related to serialization?
• Good for: novel and information, built for anthologization 77-8, 392, 527-8, 693 (Price 2000); bildungsroman and information genres (like David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850)); 253 discussion of print culture and characters looking to literature to make sense of the world: Brooke does so in a silly way by comparing Ladislaw to Shelley; DB models herself on religious history; Rosamond and her annuals (254); metafictionality and character 261; epigrams and the performance/creation of cultural consumption; 431 novel and newspaper

General

• set 1829-32, pre Reform Act
• 9 Eliot tweaking lazy physiognomy description in saying that Celia looks more worldly-wise than D
• 26-7 D's wonderful reverie leading to "I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here -- now -- in England"
• 40-1 subverting(?) or altering anyway the marriage plot which puts marriage of main character at end; a genre signal: not classical comedy or romance
• 92 “Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays” — Fred Vincy was on to something!
• 132 "that tempting range of relevancies called the universe"
• 169 Lydgate "feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity."
  • 175 the "petty medium of middlemarch" compelling L to vote against his free choice
• 179 interesting about Ladislaw:

Why was he making any fuss about Mrs Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something had happened to him with regard to her. There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet."

• 181ff outrageously powerful about Dorothea's inner life in Rome after marriage
• 192 discussion about painting and D's difficulty understanding it mirroring the more highminded convo Ladislaw has with Neumann in the previous chapter
• 235 Interesting little passage as Caleb Garth muses on the network of labor "by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed"
• 257 "the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman's world, where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid" -- makes me think of Lady d in Bleak House (1853)
• 261 "but why always Dorothea?" -- highlights a central issue with realist characterization, as Woloch 2003 argues: "This passage...insist[s] that the balance between different kinds of characterization - and the asymmetrical space that different characters occupy within the novel - is relevant to the significance of the novel as a whole."
• 263 wonderful sympathy and pity for Casaubon
• 307ff Ch 34 interesting: the narrative creating space to introduce the different character groups to themselves around Featherstone's funeral
• 392 again the didactic, analytical opportunity sympathy for Casaubon affords the narrator
• 410 striking that in the same chapter where D mentions Casaubon's new note organization system that Lydgate describes Ladislaw as "rather miscellaneous and bric a brac"
• 431ff Ladislaw and Brooke discussing Reform and their newspaper's response
• 466-7 Celia tells D about Casaubon's will, then her reaction
• 485 Mary: Fred would only become a clergyman to satisfy "imbecile gentility" -- one sympathizes
• 510ff Will's and D's confrontation in the library
• 519 railroads coming, and inspiring suspicions
  • small industry after: manganese, mill, stone pits
• 523 directly narrated unrest against technological change to agrarian life: compare to Shirley (Charlotte Brontë, 1849) and North and South (Gaskell, 1855)
• 527-8 nice little homily about work from Caleb Garth
• 533 tension between vincy and Garth in the sense of where the business and clerk class fit in social hierarchy: again North and South is a useful intertext from a little later (in setting)
• 577-8 passage about memory as an open wound for Bulstrode
• 584 Bulstrode confesses to Will
• 666ff Bulstrode pays Lydgate's debt and then allows Raffles to be accidentally overdosed with opium
• 693 D "people glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbor": this is a moral imperative that echoes at least from Bleak House, when Esther eschews Jellyby and Pardiggle models for helping those nearest her, to Howards End, with its central concern with seeing the world steady or whole, coming down on the side of personal relations. But is this liberal Christian humanism scalable?
• 706-8 Mrs Bulstrode's plight delicately rendered, and their honest support for one another
• 739 D's "dark night of the soul" in spiritual anguish after admitting to herself she loved Will, like Maggie's the night she dies in The Mill on the Floss (1860)

CLP Seminar 2-18

• stands in as synecdoche for achievement of C19 realism -- for a reason
• Dickens: drama from diametrically opposed good/bad characters
  • Trollope: rewrites C19 mid-century fiction so that no one is really bad (says so in The Warden (Trollope, 1855) and Barchester Towers)
    • good characters trapped by history and circumstance, work against other good characters working against his interests
    • conflict arises but characters don't create it
    • he satirizes D as "Mr. Popular Sentiment" in The Warden
  • Eliot working in the Trollopian tradition: real conflict between good people
• creating a world with complex social situations that (may) preclude easy judgment
  • Bakhtin - creating a simulacrum of the world - what all art does but this does it unusually completely, trying to do it perfectly
    • and yet the material and publishing contingencies that go into making it such -- see Brake 2001
• l/u Emily Eden, Semi-Detached House
• Eliot wants you to take everyone seriously: 3rd person narrator adopting 1st person pronoun to signal this (77-8, "But at present..."), stepping out and interpreting how they're judging each other
  • this bit too looks like it's perfect to be put in an anthology or gift book -- Price 2000
• 36-7 delicacy of the way she wants to position them all with Brooke recounting Casaubon's proposal
  • D embraces the Victorian marriage ideal of separate spheres but Mr. Brooke is the one offering "life isn't cast in a mould" -- she's judging with too little knowledge
• Casaubon's Key
  • l/u Balthazar article about this in Literature and Theology
  • world mythologies as corruptions of divinely revealed Hebrew thought that creates Bible
  • this idea had some purchase in 1830s but the Higher Criticism was pushing it: Strauss -- Bible not as received history but a tissue of historical cultures (inspired, but not literally)
  • when Ladislaw says Casaubon is stumbling around, he's right: it's an untenable hypothesis
• the problem isn't that DB marries a man who's too old: it's that she marries a man who's building a sand castle with the tide coming in
• 65-6 Sir James & Cadwallader: a world of people who mostly think well of each other but don't have enough info to judge
  • and, socially, the only people who could really say something to DB are Brooke or Celia, so the question is really "should we talk to Brooke to talk to DB?"
• Casaubon is well-off, the curates do his work for him in the unreformed church - like Stanhope in Barchester Towers (who lives in Italy and makes money from his curates), but not over the top
• characters looking to literature to make sense of the world: Brooke does so in a silly way by comparing Ladislaw to Shelley; DB models herself on religious history; Rosamond and her annuals
• Franco Moretti (paraphrased): "close reading only makes sense in a religious context"
• Is Lydgate right to look down on the Keepsake (253-4)?
  • epigrams as performance of literary consumption and production
• Ladislaw, DB and art (178ff)
  • Naumann kind of a proto-German Pre-Raphaelite
  • "language gives a fuller image" - what is critique and what is celebration?
  • Eliot does this through dialogue rather than in her didactic narratorial voice
  • breathing "change from moment to moment" - also the aesthetic experience, duration of encounter with work of art vs. painting
  • Romanticism - art as close to an expression of the divine as we're going to get
  • "hook or claw": like "ideas like spilt needles" earlier
  • Ladislaw critiquing this idea of the work of art as an expression of the universe, what it's straining toward: what does GE think of Romanticism? (it seems like the irresolution is hers)
• Lydgate things he can do good, solve real world problems, independent of circumstance, and he can't
  • l/u Amanda Anderson on this and Arnoldian disinterestedness in Vic Debates
• 349-50: Free indirect discourse (free in that it's not nailed down to a specific person, rather filtered)
  • people framing themselves and their experiences through literature
  • Eliot is a non-religious writer who wants to see what religion looks like from the inside
  • Ladislaw wants to throw himself at her feet (wants to be in a Balzac novel), but something in Dorothea, her "simplicity," holds him back
  • Casaubon writing to WL without consulting D: totally within his right
  • how Eliot works here: facts of D feeling, "innocently at work" -> the spiritual situated by the material -> the "spiritual air" in a middle class boudoir (the miniatures), D's ascetic taste
  • the miniatures, which are a part of her interior life, are a way into memory -> raises a general ethical question -> leads to representation of her thought
  • the representation of the real and the representation of thought (moving well away from narrator into DB's mind)
  • D sees a clear injustice and is sure Casaubon will do the right thing, but of course he won't
    • she's responding to circumstances and reality but still an idealist
    • if the question were purely ethical, would he see it? Would Aunt Julia's disinheritance be a problem he'd recognize? So she doubly misjudges him: missing his jealousy and his sense of justice
• interlaced narrative method - she represents this in ch 27 on 248: "these things are a parable" (like the framing in The Mill on the Floss (1860))
• Fred and Farebrother (p. 634ff)
  • The Moonstone's plot could be resolved in one honest conversation, Middlemarch forestalls that because things actually are complicated
  • Here they have such an honest conversation, Farebrother warning Fred that you have to get it right or I'll propose -- shoring himself against a sin of omission
• Will and Rosamond discovered by D on 731
  • there's no way out for Will - he would ruin Rosamond's reputation by telling the truth. It's beyond his power to fix
  • but like Fred in the scene with Farebrother, it's Rosamond who has a mind-expandingly bad moment

Theme tracking

Reading/writing

• 18 D offering to organize her uncle's papers and indirectly Casaubon's, like a secretary
  • i bet secretarial manuals would be a good source for practical information organization
• 23 contrast between Casaubon's reading notebooks and "the shallows of ladies'-school literature"
• 36 Casaubon "a little buried in books," but D sticks up for him
• 65 Casaubon's blood "all semicolons and parentheses" under a microscope, jokes Mrs Cadwallder
• 103 bindings at Stone Court "the scanty bookshelves, of which the chief glories in dark calf were Josephus, Culpepper, Klopstock's Messiah, and several volumes of the Gentleman's Magazine."
• 115 epigram about classing men and classing books by binding or author as insufficient(?), "tell me how you class your wealth of books, / the drifted relics of all time."
• 134 Lydgate and books and vocation ("intellectual passion") - again here a Cylopedia article about the anatomy of the heart
• 158 Lydgate associates bachelorhood (perhaps clergy specific) with collections of books and natural objects when he meets Farebrother
• 187 Powerful metaphors about Casaubon being lost in trivia, and again turning to D sorting his notes into volumes
• 195-6 Ladislaw pretty simply annihilates Casaubon's project: he's not aware of German philiogy
  • again on 207-8
• 209 the poems "are wanted to complete the poet" - very felski or latour - poems are non human actors!
• 218 Mrs Vincy comparing herself to Mrs Garth: the epistemology of class, of what a gentle woman needs to know, tied to knowledge of school textbooks and trade knowledge of their materials. Super interesting.
• 230 Mrs Garth's grammar lesson whilst rolling pastry
• 253 "He [Plymdale] had brought the last Keepsake [annual], the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time"
  • ff a nice little discussion of 1820s popular print: Countess of Blessington, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Waverley (Scott, 1814
• 293 "I am a great bookman myself," returned Mr Trumbull, "I have no less than two hundred volumes in calf, and I flatter myself that they are well selected."
• 314ff Featherstone's will
• 336 Brooke buys the local newspaper the Pioneer and installs pro-Reform Ladislaw as editor (B compares L to Shelley)
  • 347 D refers to it as "conduct[ing] the paper" -- perhaps then Dickensms use of that in the header for Household Words isn't uncommon?
  • 355 Chettam and Cadwalladers complaining abt newspapers fighting
• 446ff the Casaubons' books and notetaking before C dies -- rich
• 506 D rejects Casaubon's Synoptical Tabulation

Materiality

• 8 interesting (and useful for me) that the gendered question of idealism vs materialism is pitched in Dorothea as between books and fabric

She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in guimp [fabric trimmings] and artificial protrusions of drapery.

• 20 Celia "notions and scruples were like spilt needles"
• 23 again this pattern of very tangible figures for the world of ideas: "he thinks a whole world of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror"
  • 441 shrinking from finding out an engraving is actually common like the utility of Ladislaw's passion for D
  • 514 related phenomenon: architectural metaphors for inner life
  • 692 farebrother to D: character isn't marble
• 160ff Farebother's entomological collection
• 192 the spatial metaphors Will uses for Casaubon's "mouldy futilities" mirroring those D uses in the previous chapter, windowless corridors
• 198 passage about solidity of objects and feeling
• 248 parable about scratching glass
• 251 rosamund fantasizing about furniture immediately after the narrator says she doesn't bother distinguishing flirtation from love
• 393 Casaubon's suspicion and jealousy of Ladislaw and Dorothea "constantly at their weaving work"
• 552 rosamund's epectarions about furniture after marriage, and Lydgate's subsequent debt
• 584ff Bulstrode's wealth (which could have been Ladislaw's if not for B's duplicitity) based on highly profitable pawnbroker

Shakespeare references

NB that there's an Eliot Ms notebook with quotations at the Folger:

Notebooks of George Eliot, labelled "Miscellaneous quotations" and "Interesting extracts" [manuscript], 1868 August-ca. 1870, ca. 1879.
Link

• 7 epigram to ch 1 from Beaumont and Fletcher, which she almost certainly knew from Dyce's eds
• 62 Chettam compared D to Desdemona (Othello) in having the "perversity... not [to have] affected a proposed match that was clearly suitable"
• 87 epigram from jonson every man in his humour
• 129 Mary uses juliet/Romeo and Ophelia/hamlet as examples of lovers in teasing Fred
• 192 Narr (privileging D's voice) compared smiling Ladislaw to Ariel in Tempest
• 197 Casaubon uses some Two Gentlemen against D
• 199 Ladislaw sketching Marlowe's Tamburlaine
• 226 epigram from Sonnet 34 ln 11-12
• 243 epigram from Troilus and Cressida
• 249 quoting from sonnet 22
• 265 quote from Macbeth
• 284 epigram from tempest
• 294 epigram from 2 Henry VI for Ch when Featherstone dies
• 321 epigram from Samuel daniel Tragedy of Philotas
• 386 epigram Twelfth night rain it raineth every day
• 390 epigram from henry viii
• 406 narr compared D to Imogen from Cymbeline, or at least her dress to one appropriate for an actress playing imogen
• 436 Ladislaw quotes song from Middleton's The Witch
• 545 epigram most of sonnet 93
• 565 epigram from Shallow in 2 Henry IV
• 628 epigram from Measure
• 673 another epigram from Measure
• 724 epigram from Henry V
• 731 C uneasy at D's "Hamlet-like raving" after she sees Ladislaw with Rosamond
• 752 epigram from Sonnet 50
• 780 "Mary was not discontented that she brought forth male children only" Macbeth