A novel for Grownups

[supergee]

Middlemarch Revisited [LitHub]

Comments

[athenais]

This is a very good article you've linked to. I'm glad I read it for the insights it gives to a novel I absolutely loathe. But I gave up Eliot after Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss.

[weofodthignen]

If it was supposed to make us understand everyone's viewpoint, rather than sneering at everyone except that self-absorbed youngster who wrecks others' lives and cannot even appreciate the importance of her husband's research to him, then it fails spectacularly. Perhaps appropriate that Henry James liked it, him of the fantastically high-flown rhetoric revealing nothing except his unexplained biases.

I hope both are rotting very slowly in their graves.

[lavendertook]

Heeee--I hated Causabon and his self-absorption and his research that was all about winning an argument with another guy studying the same text; i.e. dick waving was his goal, and I loved the novel presenting it that way. And where you see a self-absorbed youngster in Dorothea, I saw an oppressed young woman trying to be the perfect research assistant to a patriarch because she wasn’t allowed to be a scholar herself, but also repressed about her own sexual drives and emotional needs, and her lack of insight was comical. The only character who got a pass at being made fun of was Mary, not Dorothea. Mary was definitely the author’s pet. So I suspected she had faults the author wasn’t telling us and we’d be disappointed with her when we least expected it.

But I was still grappling with really hating the kind of classist, competitive, and hierarchical academia the university system upholds in the US when I read Middlemarch, and I can always hate on patriarchy, so it’s easier for me to hate on Causabon and sympathize with silly, ardent Dorothea. The writer of the article, sees the novel as reading much more sympathetically to Causabon than either you or I did, which might or might not have to do with the writer being an older male scholar determined to identify with Causabon, while you and I are in agreement he was laughed at and Dorothea favored in presentation more though we feel oppositely about whether or not that was right. I do not sympathize with Causabon’s research goals and treatment of Dorothea and you do.

So you have to admit there’s a multi-vocality Elliott hit on here to get these different reactions to the treatment of her characters in the text. I’m a big fan of the novel, and good compost does takes time to make, and I hope to be that someday, too.