The Power of Middlemarch - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

The Power of Middlemarch

Patricia Meyer Spacks

Dorothea’s eyes followed her husband anxiously,

while he sank down wearily at the end of a sofa, E
resting his elbow supported his head and looked on
the floor. A little flushed, and with bright eyes, she
seated herself beside him, and said–

“Forgive me for speaking so hastily to you this
morning. I was wrong. I fear I hurt you and made
the day more burdensome.”

“I am glad that you feel that, my dear,” said Mr.
Casaubon. He spoke quietly and bowed his head a
little, but there was still an uneasy feeling in his eyes
as he looked at her.

“But you do forgive me?” said Dorothea, con un
quick sob. In her need for some manifestation of
feeling she was ready to exaggerate her own fault.
Would not love see returning penitence afar off, E
fall on its neck and kiss it?

“My dear Dorothea–‘who with repentance is not
satis½ed, is not of heaven nor earth:’–you do not
think me worthy to be banished by that severe sen-
tence,” said Mr. Casaubon, exerting himself to make
a strong statement, and also to smile faintly.

Dorothea was silent, but a tear which had come

up with the sob would insist on falling.

“You are excited, my dear. And I also am feeling
some unpleasant consequences of too much mental
disturbance,” said Mr. Casaubon. Infatti, he had it
in his thought to tell her that she ought not to have
received young Ladislaw in his absence: but he ab –
stained, partly from the sense that it would be un –
gracious to bring a new complaint in the moment

PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS, a Fel-
low of the American Academy since
1994, is the Edgar F. Shannon Pro-
fessor of English, Emerita, at the
University of Virginia. Her recent
books include On Rereading (2011),
Reading Eighteenth-Century Poetry
(2009), and Novel Beginnings: Experi-
ments in Eighteenth-Century English
Fiction (2006). She has also recently
prepared annotated editions of the
Jane Austen novels Pride and Preju-
dice and Sense and Sensibility.

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of her penitent acknowledgment, partly
because he wanted to avoid further agita-
tion of himself by speech, and partly be –
cause he was too proud to betray that jeal –
ousy of disposition which was not so ex –
hausted on his scholarly compeers that
there was none to spare in other directions.
There is a sort of jealousy which needs
very little ½re: it is hardly a passion, but a
blight bred in the cloudy, damp despon-
dency of uneasy egoism.

“I think it is time for us to dress,” he
added, looking at his watch. They both
rose, and there was never any further al –
lusion between them to what had passed
on this day.

But Dorothea remembered it to the last
with the vividness with which we all re –
member epochs in our experience when
some dear expectation dies, or some new
motive is born. Today she had begun to
see that she had been under a wild illu-
sion in expecting a response to her feeling
from Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the
waking of a presentiment that there might
be a sad consciousness in his life which
made as great a need on his side as on her
own.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity,
taking the world as an udder to feed our
supreme selves: Dorothea had early be –
gun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet
it had been easier to her to imagine how
she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon,
and become wise and strong in his strength
and wisdom, than to conceive with that
distinctness which is no longer reflection
but feeling–an idea wrought back to the
directness of sense, like the solidity of
objects–that he had an equivalent centre
of self, whence the lights and shadows
must always fall with a certain difference.

–George Eliot, Middlemarch, Chapter 21

I ½rst read George Eliot’s Middlemarch

(1872) at around the age of ½fteen. From
its opening pages on, I knew that it would
powerfully affect me. Obsessed in those
days with the idea of being good, I found
the novel thrilling because it initially struck
me as offering a model of female goodness
in its central character, Dorothea Brooke.
Dorothea was noble and spiritual and self-
sacri½cing. She wanted, I thought, only to
devote herself to others. When, occa-
sionally, she had a moment of anger, she
promptly repented. I wasn’t much like that
myself, except in aspiration. As I now re –
alize, I wanted to be a Victorian heroine,
only I was never willing to pay the price
in repression and limitation.

Middlemarch was indeed destined to in –
fluence me strongly, but it urged me to –
ward more than moral virtue; it helped
determine my vocation. I have spent al –
most sixty adult years pondering imagi-
native literature. Reading imaginative lit-
erature provided impetus and shape for
such a career. Eliot’s novel helped me to
realize–more accurately, to begin a long
process of realization–that productive
reading demands not only close atten-
zione, but also active intellectual and emo-
tional engagement. The intricacies of plot
and attitude that mark the mammoth
lavoro (more than 800 pages in the closely
printed Penguin edition that I read most
recently) teach the reader how to read, O
at least how to start reading. They also ed –
ucate that reader about the nature of re –
sponsibility, and of vocation.

Middlemarch did not stand alone in this
process of teaching, which depended on
my reading of numerous imaginative
works, each providing new nuances of in –
struction as it raised individual interpretive
problems. I use Eliot’s novel here partly
to represent many other novels and their
functions in my professional development,
but partly as the uniquely powerful con-
struction that it is.

Patricia
Meyer
Spacks

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143 (1) Inverno 2014

IL
Power of
“Middle –
march”

George Eliot was 50 years old when she
began writing Middlemarch, which pro-
gressed slowly, partly because the son of
her companion, George Henry Lewes, era
dying from tuberculosis during the ½rst
months of composition. Published ½rst in
eight installments during 1872, the novel
won immediate popularity and has re –
mained popular ever since, ardently praised
by other writers, including Emily Dickin-
son and Virginia Woolf, as well as by less
specialized readers. I read Middlemarch for
the second time only a few months after
my ½rst encounter with it, and I have sub-
sequently read it many times more. I sin-
gle it out as an important influence on my
academic career because its power over
me has continued to enlarge throughout
my adult life, taking different form in every
new reading. To focus on a passage that
caught my attention from the beginning
and that continues to seem crucial to me
will enable me at least to suggest shapes
that my understanding has taken and why
they matter to my endeavors as teach er
and writer about literature.

One of the narrator’s many metaphorical
interventions, the sequence that ½rst at –
tracted my puzzled contemplation at ½f –
teen turned on the grotesque and unex-
pected image of the world as an udder. “We
are all of us born in moral stupidity, tak-
ing the world as an udder to feed our su –
preme selves.” I thought I understood the
point of the sentence: everyone is an ego-
maniac. I even understood that Eliot had
made the issue of self-absorption central
to the novel. But why that peculiar ½gure
of the udder? It’s impossible to visualize
the world as an udder and dif½cult to
imagine the sense in which “we . . . all” use
it thus or just what vital fluid “we” expect
from the world. In my ½rst reading, I left
the sentence as an enigma. Yet it had be –
gun its influence: it remained in my mind.
When I returned to it, its puzzles multi-
plied. If we “take” the world as an udder,

are we taking it with our minds, thinking
the world an udder designed for our use?
In that case, our stupidity consists in con-
sidering the world what it is not. Or are
we imagined as taking in a physical sense,
grasping the metaphorical udder? If so,
we might be stupid only in believing that
we can hold onto it forever. For a time,
perhaps, hanging onto the udder actually
gives us what we seek. Only after we learn
to believe in the fact of other people do we
realize that the world must nourish more
than us; Infatti, that it might not have
enough to supply the needs of insatiable
ego.

Despite the positive association between
udders and milk, this solitary udder has a
repellent aspect. Does it belong to some
gigantic symbolic cow, or to some yet more
monstrous creature? To provide nourish-
ment, it must form part of an animal; E
an animal offering milk almost automat-
ically becomes a ½gure of maternity. Yet
no idea of maternity imbues Eliot’s rep-
resentation. The udder doesn’t give; “we”
take. The sentence suggests not nurturing,
but demand. Our moral stupidity appears
to produce instant ugliness.

This strange sentence appears toward
the end of an episode from Dorothea’s
honeymoon trip to Rome. Nineteen-year-
old Dorothea, burning with spiritual
ardor, wishes to devote herself to some
great cause. She chooses to marry Edward
Casaubon, a clergyman about thirty years
older than she, because she imagines him
as a source of learning and wisdom and
imagines herself as helping him in the
composition of his great work, a “key to
all mythologies.” Even on the wedding
trip, actuality fails to match expectation:
Casaubon provides no wisdom, E
Dorothea can ½ll no helpful role. The nar-
rated day that ends shortly after the udder
comment has begun with Casaubon re –
proaching his bride for what he takes as a
hint that he should proceed more quickly

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

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toward publication. Dorothea responds
angrily, and the newlyweds leave their
quarrel unresolved when Casaubon de –
parts for a day of research.

At his return, Dorothea apologizes for
“speaking so hastily” and declares herself
wrong, because “I fear I hurt you and made
the day more burdensome.” She does not
apologize for what she has said, only for
its possible effect. Casaubon responds,
quietly, “I am glad that you feel that, my
dear.” He does not explicitly accept her
apology, and “there was still an uneasy
feeling in his eyes as he looked at her.”
The reader must interpret what has not
been said, as well as the actual utterances,
wondering, and perhaps tentatively de –
ciding, why Casaubon continues to feel
uneasy.

In a ½rst reading–particularly the ½rst
reading of a teenager–it is easy to attrib-
ute Casaubon’s uneasiness to his inability
to endure the slightest shadow of criti-
cism, and to conclude that this sensitivity
stems from the man’s moral insuf½cien-
cies. Our sympathy readily goes out to
Dorothea, attractive, admirable, trying
hard, and only a teenager herself. Later
readings, Tuttavia, complicate the matter
–partly because of the retroactive effect
of the udder sentence. Even in my ½rst
reading, I think, I believed (as I still
believe) that Dorothea fails to apologize
for the substance, as opposed to the
effect, of what she has said because her
commitment to truth equals her commit-
ment to the marriage. She indeed suspects
that Casaubon’s failure to publish sig ni½ –
cant results from his prolonged, massive
note-taking signals timidity about expos-
ing his work to public view. (Casaubon
has been a nightmare ½gure for many
academics, with his combination of im –
possibly large ambition and ridiculously
small production.) As her husband fears,
Dorothea is already beginning to judge
him. She does not give him the uncritical

adoration that he wants. And how could
she, how could anyone, adore such a man?
Casaubon initially struck me as a villain
(not willfully evil, but effectively destruc-
tive) and Dorothea as unquestionably a
hero. It was easy to take sides.

Easy, but not adequate. Dorothea per-
sists in begging for forgiveness. She sobs
as she asks again, in “need for some man-
ifestation of feeling.” She wants love,
demonstrated love. She gets an indirect
statement of Casaubon’s satisfaction with
what she has said, a statement incorpo-
rating an erudite quotation and delivered
with a “faint smile.” In response, Dorothea
says nothing, but a tear falls from her eye.
Casaubon suggests that they are both dis-
turbed. He refrains from rebuking her for
welcoming his young cousin, Will Ladis-
law, when her husband was away. IL
narrator explains Casaubon’s motives for
self-restraint: he realizes the ungracious-
ness of scolding his wife when she has
just apologized; he doesn’t want to agi-
tate himself further; and he is too proud
to betray his jealousy, “a blight bred in
the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy
egoism.” Neither he nor Dorothea ever
mentions their exchange again.

This sequence invites psychological in –
terpretation that may advance the reader’s
understanding of both participants in the
dialogue. Only indirectly, Tuttavia, fa
such interpretation contribute to the kind
of influence I wish to claim for Eliot’s
novel. The detail about Dorothea’s attempt
at apology and its aftermath bears on the
mysterious sentence about the udder,
hence on the novel’s moral design; E
that design contributes powerfully to the
book’s continuing influence on my un –
derstanding of literary responsibility.

By “literary responsibility,” I mean the
responsibility of one who teaches and
writes about literary texts: responsibility
to students and to readers and to the texts
themselves. “Responsibility” is a moral

Patricia
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Power of
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term. Middlemarch does not concern itself
directly with literary responsibility, yet its
treatment of its characters’ moral dilem-
mas has illuminated for me what such a
concept entails.

In the passage we have been pondering,

another paragraph intervenes between
the account of the marital dialogue and
the udder sentence. Its elevated tone and
abstract language signal an important
shift. We move here from particularized
narrative to reflective meditation. Primo
we learn that Dorothea (who, as we al –
ready know, never speaks again of what
has happened) always remembers the
episode, and remembers it vividly, in the
way “we all remember epochs in our ex –
perience when some dear expectation
dies, or some new motive is born.” That
½rst person plural pronoun, intensi½ed
by the “all” that follows it, appears also in
the sentence about the udder, emphasiz-
ing that the history of Dorothea dupli-
cates in important respects that of every
other human being. With that pronoun,
the narrator claims to be telling us, her
readers, something about ourselves. Ex –
pectations die, motives arise, for every-
one. Thus our inner worlds, as well as our
outer ones, continue to change.

In Dorothea’s case, the expectation of
emotional response from her husband has
died. She sees, Infatti, that such an ex –
pectation was delusional in the ½rst place:
she has “been under a wild illusion.”
More important than the death, Tuttavia,
is the birth that accompanies it: Dorothea
feels “the waking of a presentiment that
there might be a sad consciousness in his
life which made as great a need on his
side as on her own.”

So we come to the udder, having been
reminded of Casaubon’s “uneasy egoism,"
the cause of his jealousy and of its conceal-
ment, and having learned of Dorothea’s
relinquishment of expectation. We may

expect that the ½gure, newly considered,
will shed light especially on Casaubon,
whose “egoism” has more than once
been the subject of narratorial comment.
Così, more than 100 pages earlier, IL
narrator has observed, “Mr. Casaubon,
pure, was the center of his own world; if
he was liable to think that others were
providentially made for him, and espe-
cially to consider them in the light of
their ½tness for the author of a Key to all
Mythologies, this trait is not quite alien to
us, E, like the other mendicant hopes
of mortals, claims some of our pity”
(Chapter 7). The comment, with its edge
of irony directed at “us,” although it lacks
the disturbing quality of the apparitional
udder, like that udder bears on the human
tendency to consider the world (speci½ –
cally the world of other people) in relation
to our own needs and desires.

Yet the immediate context that evokes
the udder image concerns not Casaubon,
but Dorothea, who has for the ½rst time
begun to realize that her husband may
feel as needy as she. It is easy to criticize
Casaubon for excessive self-concern, since
the self in question appears so unattrac-
tive. Celia, Dorothea’s sister, deplores her
brother-in-law’s moles and his blinking;
the reader can readily see his narrowness
of mind and heart and his inadvertent
cruelties; Dorothea already realizes that
she has married a severely limited man.
The reader receives repeated invitations
from other characters in the novel to judge
Casaubon harshly. In contrasto, Dorothea,
full of spiritual devotion, yearns to do
good. It is correspondingly easy to judge
her generously.

But when the narrator observes that
we all are born in moral stupidity, Quello
“all” includes Dorothea, who has newly
glimpsed the meaning of sharing the
moral universe with others. Dorothea is
beautiful, innocent, earnest. She doesn’t
blink all the time, and she has no moles.

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

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She asks eager questions and makes no
pedantic observations. Yet her needs do
not necessarily exceed her husband’s in
importance. Although she has early be –
gun to emerge from the universal stupidity,
as the narrator tells us, it is easier for her
to fantasize devotion to a strong, wise mate
than to accept the knowledge “that he
had an equivalent centre of self, whence
the light and shadows must always fall
with a certain difference.”

This is a complicated piece of knowl-
edge, both in its nature and in its sub-
stance. Dorothea needs to, and begins to,
conceive her husband’s unique selfhood
“with that distinctness which is no longer
reflection but feeling–an idea wrought
back to the directness of sense, like the
solidity of objects.” Wrought back to the
directness of sense: the action is dif½cult to
comprehend. The ½nal achievement of
thought in moral matters, it seems, is to
disappear, transmuted into feeling. Start-
ing with reflection, with theoretical real-
ization that others possess consciousness
as pressing as our own, we move to knowl –
edge that feels inevitable and innate. Noi
may kick a stone to prove the solidity,
thus the reality, of objects. How do we
prove the absolute reality of another con-
sciousness?

But proving is not the problem. IL
problem is knowing, in the way that
Dorothea now begins to know. She has not
known earlier, and for that ignorance the
udder sentence indicts her. Like the rest
of us, Dorothea has been born into moral
stupidity. Inoltre, she has tended to
believe in her spiritual/moral superiority
to others–to her sister Celia, Per esempio,
who, openly concerned with relatively
frivolous matters, nonetheless perceives
Dorothea’s self-deceptions and minor
hypocrisies. Dorothea remains a heroic
½gure, but the novel takes pains to dis –
abuse its readers of the idea I began with,
of her as a flawless model of goodness.

The moral insuf½ciency that Dorothea
demonstrates resembles that of every
other character that the novel has thus far
discussed in some detail; it consists in
what Eliot–well before Freud–calls
“egoism.” As the paragraph we have been
considering suggests, egoism involves a
failure of the imagination: inability to
comprehend imaginatively the feelings or
needs of others. Thus Fred Vincy, another
Middlemarch character, thinks he under-
stands his uncle, but sees in that uncle
only the reflection of his own wishes. His
sister, Rosamond, fancying herself in love
with the young doctor, Lydgate, occupies
herself, the narrator tells us, not exactly
with Lydgate, but with her relation to
him. Lydgate, far more intellectual than
Rosamond, understands the young wom –
an no better than she understands him:
he thinks only of what he wants her to be.
Dorothea has imagined her husband as
answering, or failing to answer, her needs,
rather than as someone with needs of his
own.

The paragraph that describes Dorothea
as rising above her egoism provides no
clue about what alternative ways of being
might substitute for it. Dorothea has
yearned to devote herself to a great thinker
partly because of her fantasy that she will
partake of his wisdom and learn from
him what and how to think. Given the
melancholy tone of the narrator’s sum-
mary of the human condition, it seems
possible that what now awaits the young
bride is utter subordination to a narrow,
weak, unfeeling man. Now that she real-
izes her husband’s neediness, must she
strive to satisfy his ego at the expense of
her own? At this point in the novel,
roughly a quarter of the way through, IL
text has provided no clear models of be –
havior not centered on self-imagining.
Practical-minded folk like Sir James
Chettam, Dorothea’s sister Celia, and Mrs.
Cadwallader already see Dorothea as a

Patricia
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143 (1) Inverno 2014

IL
Power of
“Middle –
march”

kind of human sacri½ce to an unworthy
Uomo. Perhaps the rest of Middlemarch will
explore the consequences of willed self-
sacri½ce.

The issues raised in the scene between
Dorothea and her husband, particularly
those articulated in the ½nal paragraph,
which introduces the ½gure of the udder,
reverberate throughout the novel and de –
lineate several of its central concerns. Tutto
conclusions are subject to change: what I
think I know after pondering a paragraph
or a page frequently turns into quite a dif-
ferent judgment as the narrator reveals
more. The sequence of different judgments
generates the process of enlightenment
that one experiences in reading.

Having read only to the scene where

Dorothea realizes her husband’s inde-
pendent needs, we still have much to learn
about the intricate structure of moral pos –
sibility that Eliot creates. Already, Anche se,
the novel has established some impera-
tives for adequate reading. Most obviously,
it has reinforced the urgency of paying
attention–in the ½rst instance, paying
attention to words. By means of strategic
recurrences of key terms, provocative
metaphors (like that udder), and radical
shifts in diction (not only from one char-
acter to another, Ma, strikingly, in the
narrator’s discourse), Eliot urges us to be
puzzled or excited or engaged or repelled.
Her uses of language often call attention
to themselves.

Così, in the middle of the brief, but mo –
mentous, conversation between Dorothea
and Casaubon, an odd sentence occurs.
Dorothea has just asked for reassurance,
inquiring whether her husband really
forgives her. A “quick sob” attends her
question. The narrator comments that she
needs some manifestation of feeling so
badly that “she was ready to exaggerate her
own fault.” Then comes the strange sen-
tence: “Would not love see returning pen –

itence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss
Esso?” The strangeness comes ½rst from the
shift in tone. This question essentially re –
phrases the point of the preceding obser-
vation about Dorothea’s need for emo-
tional response from her husband. But its
phrasing belongs to a different linguistic
universe from its predecessor. The sen-
tence about Dorothea’s willingness to ex –
aggerate her own fault is personal and spe –
ci½c. The question about love and peni-
tence employs personi½cations–“love”
seeing in the distance “penitence” return-
ing from somewhere (Dove? why?) E
greeting him or her (but the text says “its”)
with an enthusiastic kiss. The phrasing of
the question sounds vaguely antiquated
(“afar off”), possibly biblical. Is it intended
to dignify, or to universalize, the marital
exchange? To evoke the narrator’s gener-
alizing perspective? The substance of the
sentence belongs to Dorothea’s conscious-
ness, but the language does not appear to
emanate from Dorothea. Does it create a
pause in the narrative flow to draw the
reader’s attention to the signi½cance of
Dorothea’s need? We can only wonder,
trying out possibilities.

Such moments abound in this dense
nov el, always demanding and rewarding
at tention, never quite yielding up their full
Senso. The poet John Keats, in a letter
to his brothers, George and Thomas (21
Dicembre 1817), spoke of a quality he
called “negative capability”: “when a man
is capable of being in uncertainties, mys-
teries, doubts, without any irritable reach-
ing after fact and reason.” Middlemarch
often encourages such a state, making its
reader aware of possibilities and of the
impossibility of deciding among them all.
In creating such awareness, it compels us
to think about how language works. It thus
provided for me early instruction in the
discipline of attentiveness. As one who
gobbled stories for the sake of story, IO
needed to slow down, to recognize ½ction

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as not only a texture of action, but also one
of language. What could be more obvious
than the fact that the life of ½ction
inheres in words? I tended, Tuttavia, A
treat words as the medium of story–not
also as themselves part of story’s meaning.
Middlemarch revealed to me pleasures
concealed in words: pleasures of recogni-
zione, discrimination, and surprise.

And pleasure in the ½gurative resources
of common nouns. A few chapters after
the udder illuminates the nature of ego-
ism, the novel returns to the same subject
with a new ½gure. Now it invites us to
contemplate a pier glass (a tall mirror). IL
bicchiere, the narrator reminds us, O, alter-
nately, a large surface of polished steel,
“will be minutely and multitudinously
scratched in all directions; but place now
against it a lighted candle as a centre of
illumination, and lo! the scratches will
seem to arrange themselves in a ½ne
series of concentric circles round that lit-
tle sun” (Chapter 27). The next sentence
insists on the point: the scratches go in
all directions; it’s only the candle that
“produces the flattering illusion of a con-
centric arrangement.” Then the narrator
names the ½gure of speech that she is
using, calling it a parable, and equating the
scratches with events and the candle with
“the egoism of any person now absent.”
“Now absent” is a little joke: only by re –
maining on the scene, it appears, can one
avoid the danger of being criticized.

The metaphor itself, Tuttavia, conveys
no immediate criticism of anyone at all.
The candle, a “little sun,” creates appar-
ent order, as well as warmth and beauty.
The “parable” conveys none of the greed
or sel½shness of the egoism ½gured by
converting the world into an udder to
grasp. Maybe this is somehow a good kind
of egoism, as opposed to the disagreeable
kind that previous allusions have sug-
gested? No: it turns out that the narrator
is thinking of Rosamond Vincy, who sees

her brother’s serious illness and his doc-
tor’s serious mistake about it as providen-
tial means of bringing her and Lydgate
into proximity, and who self-righteously
refuses to leave papa and mama when the
younger children are sent away because
of the danger of infection. She performs
this apparent act of self-sacri½ce not be –
cause of her courage or her devotion to her
parents, but because staying with them
will enable frequent encounters with
Lydgate.

The novel takes its time enforcing full
realization of Rosamond’s moral mon-
strosity, but the seeds of that realization
lie in the candle metaphor, despite its be –
nign associations. The ½gure of the udder
that focuses the earlier discussion of ego-
ism applies speci½cally to “all,” locating
the greed and sel½shness native to the hu –
man animal. Equally speci½c, the candle
image applies to “anyone now absent,” a
more limited set. The image applies, how –
ever, with special aptness to Rosamond,
calling attention to her capacity to make
her own actions seem innocent or even
virtuous–as when she remains in the
house with her contagious brother–
although they invariably issue from fo –
cused, powerful, unmixed self-interest.
Such self-interest indeed, like the candle
flame, provides an organizing force, cre-
ating a governing pattern for Rosamond’s
life. The candle seems to reveal an order
previously imperceptible, but that order
depends on illusion. It hides a chaos of
scratches. Just so with Rosamond, who
successfully conceals even from herself the
intensity of her altogether sel½sh purpose.
This truth about Rosamond, as I’ve al –
ready suggested, emerges only gradually.
The candle metaphor marks an opening
stage of emergence. Never merely deco-
rative, metaphor in Middlemarch often di –
rects narrative development. To pay at –
tention to it clari½es movements of plot,
as well as aspects of character. The novel

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IL
Power of
“Middle –
march”

demands attention as well to many other
aspects of language: to repetition and var –
iation, to levels of diction, to implications
of tone. One must attend also to patterns
of action. Middlemarch is a good read; Esso
tells several compelling stories, in movimento
among them in unexpected ways. If you
don’t pay attention, you get lost. You might
fail, for example, to notice the parallels,
as well as the differentiations, between one
story and another. Lydgate marries a friv-
olous woman (to be sure, a woman deeply
serious about her frivolity); Dorothea
marries a pedantic, humorless man. Both
marriages prove unhappy. Narrative de –
tails reveal that their unhappiness issues
not only from the problems implicit in
characters of opposed nature, but from
the similar failings of the young doctor
who considers it women’s duty to be lovely
and soothing and the young woman who
yearns to undertake elevated forms of duty.
To remain unaware of this fact is to miss
crucial subtleties in Eliot’s storytelling.

Paying attention, that ½rst imperative
of criticism, undergirds literary percep-
zione. Middlemarch helped teach me a dis-
cipline of attention that enabled my own
study of literature and that I have tried to
inculcate in my students and to demon-
strate and encourage by my writing. IL
point is relatively simple, but the process
is complicated. Yet to formulate the nov –
el’s influence in this way risks trivializing
a profound experience. Yes, Middlemarch
demanded attentive reading, and its in –
tricacies instructed me in ways of paying
Attenzione. But in singling it out as an im –
portant influence, I am not primarily
thinking about pedagogical or critical tech –
Carino. I am responding, Piuttosto, to a con-
viction that this book changed my life and
impelled me to want to change other lives.

Much as I admired, from the beginning,

Eliot’s use of language, what overwhelmed
me was the import of that language: IL

wisdom of Middlemarch. That wisdom is –
sues not from moral pronouncements, Ma
from implications of the novel’s linguistic
choices as well as its action and structure.
The accumulated metaphors, for instance,
carry a heavy weight of suggestion. IL
mysteries of the udder image, lingering
in readers’ minds, make memorable the
ravening demands of ego, which the char –
acters’ patterns of action reiterate in real-
istic terms. The metaphor of the pier glass
not only penetrates the screens of Rosa-
mond’s self-construction. It also provides
a lasting reminder, useful throughout the
book, that things are not necessarily what
they seem. Skillful sentences slow down
and speed up our course through the nov –
el’s intricacies, urging us to reflect on hu –
man nature or to indulge in the sheer plea –
sure of witnessing it in action.

The pattern of action that makes the plot
also imparts wisdom. By constructing a
½ction around the individual life courses
of multiple characters, Eliot creates a
moral matrix embodying the possibilities
and dangers of connection. The novel’s
titolo (like that of Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Cranford, published two decades earlier)
calls attention to its creator’s primary
concern with the life of a community:
not people in isolation, not careers of will
triumphant over circumstance or external
disaster, but experiences of often inad-
vertent, often life-changing ways that in –
dividuals impinge on one another. Ex –
ploring such impingements, Middlemarch
incrementally de½nes the nature of uni-
versal human responsibility, thus helping
to clarify for me the demands of literary
responsibility.

The udder image and its context do not
receive full clari½cation until the novel’s
conclusion. Although Eliot never returns
to the odd metaphor itself, the issues raised
by it and by the little scene between
Dorothea and Casaubon remain at the
½ction’s heart. The potentially insatiable

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demands of one ego collide with those of
another. How can we imagine resolution
for such a clash?

Dorothea’s husband dies, leaving her a
large sum of money on the humiliating con –
dition that she not marry Will Ladislaw.
Nel frattempo, around Dorothea various love
relations have bloomed and faded. Fred
Vincy, under the tutelage of Mary Garth’s
father, has made himself worthy of Mary,
and she has accepted him. Lydgate has
come to realize his wife’s relentless self-
concern and the degree of unwitting
sacri½ce he has made for his marriage.
Dorothea, compelled by erotic feeling and
by romantic fantasy, agrees to marry Will,
giving up Casaubon’s wealth, which she
has felt as a burden. She bears children, E
she lives a life “½lled with emotion, E . . .
½lled also with a bene½cent activity which
she had not the doubtful pains of dis –
covering and marking out for herself”
(“Finale”). That activity centers on car-
ing for children and husband and helping
Will, who, despite his earlier fecklessness,
has become “an ardent public man,” and
½nally a Member of Parliament.

In the last paragraph of Middlemarch, IL
narrator groups Dorothea’s two marriages
as “determining acts of her life” and char –
acterizes both as “not ideally beautiful.”
Her marital choices differ from each other
in many respects, most notably in the
erotic component of the match with Will,
in his initial lack of vocation (as opposed
to Casaubon’s claim of a high calling), E
in the emotional responsiveness he sup-
plies. The novel’s concluding comments
make Dorothea’s happiness apparent, yet
a rueful tone dominates. Happy and pro-
ductive though this heroine becomes, she
has had no opportunity to ful½ll a public
role. She has not achieved sainthood. She
remains subordinate to a man, in the eyes
of the world, although the man to whom
she is helpmeet proves far more satisfy-
ing to her than his predecessor.

Contemplating this resolution in rela-
tion to the udder metaphor, we might see
in it an answer to the conundrum posed
by the conflicting needs of insatiable egos.
Perhaps the novel suggests that a female
ego differs from a male one in its capacity
for ½nding grati½cation through another.
I myself consider Will Ladislaw unappeal-
ing, in Eliot’s rendition of the character.
Through many readings of Middlemarch, IO
declared the book’s ending unsatisfactory,
though I felt the challenge of the narra-
tor’s biting comment: “no one stated
exactly what else that was in [Dorothea’s]
power she ought rather to have done”
(“Finale”). Disliking the suggestion that
female egos are uniquely suited to self-
subordination, I wanted Eliot to work out
some nobler resolution for Dorothea’s life.
But what else that was in her power ought
the novelist to have done, given the social
circumstances she chose to represent?

Over the years, I have come to believe
that the novel’s conclusion offers a more
comprehensive challenge than I had pre-
viously seen. My readiness as a twenty-
½rst-century feminist to see Dorothea as
accepting subordination because of her
gender does not actually correspond to the
implications of Middlemarch. The book
also represents a self-subordinating male
character. The Reverend Camden Fare-
brother appears rarely in the text, yet he
plays a crucial role in the action. In love
with Mary Garth, and knowing that Fred
Vincy also loves her, he deliberately warns
the younger man away from a course by
which Fred would lose Mary’s respect and
any chance of winning her. Farebrother
sacri½ces his own interest in full aware-
ness that by keeping quiet he might win
the opportunity of wooing Mary himself.
He has lived a ½nancially stringent and
socially narrow life largely because he has
long accepted the obligation to care for
his mother, his elder sister, and his aunt,
all of whom live with him. In short, he

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IL
Power of
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consistently subordinates himself, by acts
of will, to others.

Recalling that Dorothea’s realization of
another’s consciousness, the needs of an –
other ego, involved “an idea wrought back
to the directness of sense,” we may better
understand Mr. Farebrother’s importance.
Like Dorothea’s compassion for her dis-
agreeable husband, like her reaching out
to Rosamond, like her role of domestic
helpmeet, Farebrother’s intervention in
Fred’s life appears to come from an al –
most instinctual movement of heart and
mente. Farebrother embodies the moral
position that Dorothea achieves, one far
removed from that entailed in taking the
world as udder. He accepts the responsi-
bilities inherent in human connectedness.
And he is not a woman.

Farebrother and Dorothea demonstrate
a crucial moral possibility. Neither is a
paragon. We see Dorothea’s capacity for
self-congratulation even as we witness
also her self-castigation. Her initial desire
to link herself to an accomplished man
has at least as much to do with her yearn-
ing to gain from him as with her desire to
help. Her need for appreciation some-
times seems to weaken her. Farebrother
has more conspicuous weaknesses, In –
dulging in gambling, despite his clerical
status, because of his wish to increase his
½nancial resources. Both at their best,
Tuttavia, show that the ego’s universal
dominance can be set aside, at least for a
time, in the service of others.

“Service” is not quite the right word,
Anche se. Middlemarch concerns itself with
community not only in its of½cial social
sense (the town as an organized unit) Ma
also in its wider, vaguer meaning desig-
nating the social state in which human
beings participate by virtue of being hu –
Uomo, the linkages that, according to many
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century think –
ers, naturally bind people to one another.
A long tradition asserted the innateness

both of self-love and of human sympathy.
Middlemarch, with its depiction of how
even small human actions impinge on
other people in unpredictable and of ten
invisible ways, treats sympathy as a mor –
al achievement rather than an innate
virtue, pointedly providing an account of
Rosamond Vincy, who appears devoid of
the quality (as do two male characters,
Featherstone and Raffles).

“Sympathy” comes closer than “ser-
vice” to characterizing Dorothea’s lightly
sketched relationship to her second hus-
band and her children. Over the novel’s
long course, we watch Dorothea develop
generous imaginative comprehension of
other people’s burdens and yearnings. A
comprehend in this way, and to act on the
comprehension, entails not self-subordi-
nation, but self-expansion: the enlarge-
ment of understanding, compassion, E
imaginative breadth. Like all “realistic”
novels, Middlemarch concerns ways that
people live in a world of other people.
Going beyond this common topic, it con-
fronts also the question of how they might
live best. Primarily through the ½gures of
Caleb and Mary Garth, Camden Fare-
brother, and Dorothea, it suggests an –
swers. Everyone needs a vocation: a call-
ing that directs its possessor’s attention
to some form of action in the world. IL
world will not supply us with perfect mates
or ideal occupations, but it offers abun-
dant opportunities for work and for love,
through which we flourish.

A vocation–a form of work embraced

for its own sake–is almost by de½nition a
moral calling, best exempli½ed in Middle-
march by Caleb Garth, whose passion for
what he calls “business” focuses on a de –
sire to cherish and to improve his physical
ambiente. When the narrator speaks of
having “our consciousness rapturously
transformed into the vividness of a
thought, the ardour of a passion, the en –

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ergy of an action,” as she does in relation
to Casaubon, who lacks such experience
(Chapter 29), she implicitly speaks of
vocation. To teach literature, in the class-
room and on the page, provides the vivid-
ness, ardor, and energy of thought, pas-
sion, and action. It also partakes of the
moral, inasmuch as it actively seeks to
enlighten others about the nature of the
human, as revealed in the writing of the
past and the present.

Teaching is a vocation that supplies
space for work and love alike. Middlemarch
made me want to enable others to dupli-
cate my own profound and joyous experi-
ence of the book. To accomplish such an
end requires encouraging students and
other readers to see that books are indeed
in themselves forms of experience–a fact
that the young often do not know, E
that literary scholars often forget. Repre-
senting life in language, novels (to focus
on the genre I started with) permit imag-
inative reenactment not only of the actions
of others, but also of the actions’ conse-
quences and the mental and emotional
processes that precede, accompany, E
follow them. Eighteenth-century literary
critics worried about the possibility that
young women, imaginatively experiencing
the pleasures of romance, might too hastily
seek to ½nd equivalent expression in real
life. They worried also that sentimental
½ction could exhaust a reader’s capacity
to feel for others in actuality. They thus
took seriously the kind of power I want
current readers to acknowledge, and to
feel–even though the speci½c concerns of
those earlier critics may seem foolish now.
I have come to believe that the demands
implicit in the calling of teacher/scholar
parallel the kinds of moral responsibility
that Dorothea accepts: to make and rein-
force human connections; to imagine and
acknowledge and respond to the needs of
others; to use her own experience to help
recognize and alleviate pressures on her

fellow mortals. For the teacher, responsi-
bility begins in imaginative comprehen-
sion of her students and loyalty to the in –
tegrity of the literary work. It entails the
obligation to emphasize, clarify, and chal –
lenge connections between the written
record and the life it represents in order to
enable students to comprehend literature
as language with designs on its readers,
words intended to make them think and
feel, and to convey a sense of life.

We rise, ideally, from moral stupidity to
moral clarity, Middlemarch tells us. Moral
learning consists in the perception and
development of relationships and the ex –
perience of their obligations. The study
of literature, which renders relationship
in all its multitudinous and complicated
aspects, contributes to such learning–not
by providing precepts; often by making
problems of responsibility more perplex-
ing than ever (as when Eliot compels us
to ponder that udder).

In Chapters 10 E 11 of Samuel John-
son’s Rasselas (1759), Imlac, the wise guide
of the young prince, Rasselas, holds forth
on the vocation–his own vocation–of
writing poetry. The poet, he explains, must
study and record the minutiae of nature
and of all modes of life. “He must divest
himself of the prejudices of his age or
country; he must consider right and wrong
in their abstracted and invariable state. . . .
He must write as the interpreter of na –
ture, and the legislator of mankind, E
consider himself as presiding over the
thoughts and manners of future genera-
zioni; as a being superiour to time and
place.” Imlac goes on and on, his de mands
of the poet multiplying until the prince
cries out, “Enough! Thou hast convinced
me, that no human being can ever be a
poet.”

The vocation of teacher, as I have de –
duced it from Middlemarch and as I have
described it, sounds almost equally ex –
travagant and impossible. I take comfort,

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Power of
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Anche se, from Imlac, who responds to the
prince’s comment in a deflated tone, Ma
with a reasonable observation. “To be a
poet,” he remarks, “is indeed very dif –
½cult.” He fails to remark what the rhap-
sodic tone of his prescriptions for the
poet has implied: that to be a poet is also
exhilarating. Perhaps all vocations, ar –
dently pursued, partake of the impossible
and of the exhilarating. Middlemarch sug-
gests as much about Dorothea’s quest for
goodness and Lydgate’s efforts (ultimately
abandoned) toward scienti½c discovery.
Providing implicit guidance both about
what skills and what topics one might
teach in presuming to teach literature and
about why literature must be taught, IL
novel reminds us to value the pursuit of
the impossible.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze
Scarica il pdf