Middlemarch

Best Substack scam ever

A month ago it suddenly seemed like ton of people on Substack seemed to be reading Middlemarch, and since I’d bought a copy last year at The Portobello Bookshop, I gave in and jumped on the bandwagon though bandwagons are typically not my kind of thing.

My (certainly incomplete) theory about why Middlemarch suddenly became popular is that the plot has a little of everything— political drama, romantic drama, work drama, family drama, backstabbing, humiliation, unrequited love, loads of gossiping locals, a romantic but demented scene taking place during a sudden thunderstorm, and at least two rich men finding ways to fuck things up even from beyond the grave. This is one of the reasons so many people re-read Middlemarch, which, in turn, could be why so many are Middlemarching right now. It’s also full of absolute zingers (I was laughing and gasping at lot more than expected) and the language is a big ice cream sundae at all times, and since it’s over 800 pages you can just get in and forget about the world for a good long while. (I wonder why so many readers would want to do that at this particular moment..?)

A painting on the cover of one of the Penguin editions. It’s supposed to be Lydgate and Dorothea, but doesn’t it seem like it should be Dorothea and Will?

For the first few hundred pages I kept kicking myself for having not read it when I was in my twenties. It was Dorothea’s story line that made me feel such regret— Dorothea who confuses awe for love, who confuses supplication for love, who is miserable in her unilateral devotion to a man she considers a genius but for some reason doesn’t know where this misery is coming from. She’s bright enough to be aware of the sexism that surrounds her, but like a drowning person swimming directly into the current instead of at a slant, she’s unable to take meaningful action against it.¹

I mentioned this to a girlfriend who’s a a few years younger than me, but who did read Middlemarch in her early 20s (at a mutual friend’s urging), but my friend concluded she still made all the same mistakes she would have made without having read it. (That is, playing the delicate ingenué to mercurial, seemingly wise yet always much older men who actually want a secretary and a mother, not an equal partner.) So perhaps this is an empty regret; maybe there’s no story that can really sufficiently warn you away from your own bad judgement.

When I was about halfway done, I was hanging out with my friend Zoe and when she asked me how I was doing, I began obsessively summarizing the plot to her thus far. (I kept interrupting myself by asking if it was boring, and she was just laughed and said it wasn’t.) I told her how I felt Dorothea plot line was so sharp, that it could have saved me from many stupid years in my thirties, and she reminded me of a way I’d once described that time to her— He was like “I’m the best, I’m the best, I’m the best,” and I was like, “you’re the best, you’re the best, you’re the best” and I thought that was what a relationship was.

Damn. I love it when a friend remembers something you said about yourself years back and it happens to apply directly to a fictive woman from two centuries ago.

In general, classic literature is a great way to see how unoriginal our mistakes are, and it accomplishes this in a way that contemporary books typically can’t. The manners, laws, clothes, customs, language, hierarchies, freedoms, and restraints are all different and yet the basic ignorances and pitfalls lurking in the human spirit remain. When reading such stories set in the present, it’s easy for a reader to get hung up on the details, to over-interpret, to make too many associations and assumptions about qualities in the characters and settings that are ultimately insignificant.

Then, on page 141, for some reason I realized how utterly bonkers the George Eliot’s narrative voice is. Though it remains reliably in third person, flitting in and out of people’s heads and describing everything from on high, it also dips into moments of insanity by breaking the third person narration to start a chapter like this:

“A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and nor dispersed over that temping range of relevancies called the universe.”

At which point the voice moves directly onto the story at hand with, “At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any one interested in him…”

She’s making a case for why she’s writing a work of history (in a way) by way of fiction, and why she can’t write history the way it was written in Fielding’s day because her environment is so different. And that’s great, but as a choice to make 141 pages into your story, I find it thrillingly wild. This is just one example of such point of view madness.

“The new settler Lydgate” is also one of my favorite characters— a charming workaholic doctor and scientist who’s new in town— probably because of one piece of his backstory that begins around page 150. Like many of the other characters, he’s in a constant battle between his ideals and the limits of the life he finds himself living.

Lydgate lived in Paris for a while before coming to Middlemarch and that he once developed an obsessional crush on an actress, falling “in love with her this actress, as a man is in love with a woman whom he never expects to speak to.” ²

He goes to see her in a play every night, though “her acting was ‘no better than it should be,’ but the public was satisfied.” The play features her husband, too, “playing the part of her unfortunate lover.”

“Lydgate’s only relaxation was to go and look at this woman, just as he might have thrown himself under the breath of the sweet south on a bank of violets for a while, without prejudice to his galvanism, to which he would presently return. But this evening the old drama had a new catastrophe. At the moment when the heroine was to act the stabbing of her lover, and he was to fall gracefully, the wife veritably stabbed her husband, who fell as death willed.”

The heroine swoons and Lydgate leaps onstage, “making the acquaintance of his heroine by finding a contusion on her head and lifting her gentle in his arms.”

Obviously the actress is low key canceled, though “some of the actresses’s warmest admirers were inclined to believe in her guilt, and liked her the better for it (such was the taste of those times); but Lydgate was not one of these.” She is released from legal custody, declared technically innocent, and though Lydgate sees her around for a while, she soon vanishes from Paris “without warning, forsaking her little court of admirers.”

Her disappearance just makes Lydgate more curious about her, as disappearances so often will, and though he’s first sorrow stricken and hopeless, “Hidden actresses, however, are not so difficult to find as some other hidden facts.” She’s gotten a gig out of town and when Lydgate shows up in her dressing room she doesn’t seem pleased to have been hunted down.

‘Are all Englishmen like that?’ she wonders. He proposes marriage to her, naturally, and “she looked at him in silence with a melancholy radiance,” and he gazes back, “full of rapturous certainty.”

Instead of answering the proposal, she ignores it and then tells him that the night she killed her husband was an accident. He says he knows and calls it “a dreadful stroke of calamity that bound me to you the more.”

Then, after a pause, she clarifies. “I meant to do it.”

Lydgate goes pale, trembling. Her husband must have been brutal to her, he offers. No, she says, “he was too fond.”

“And you planned to murder him?”

“I did not plan: it came to me in the play — I meant to do it.”

Before he goes out she offers him this:

“You are a good young man… But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.”

Lydgate, thus rejected, decides that marriage is simply not for him.

Anyway, I have a bunch more random notes about Middlemarch, but really you should just lose your phone for a few weeks and read it.

1. This footnote could be a spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read it yet so if you like surprises stop reading now, but for those who have read it already— are we supposed to think she’s done “the right” thing in the end by yet again pulping her life over a man she barely knows? Are we supposed to think she and Will actually have a chance to make a meaningful and sustainable life together? What happened to her plans to be single forever, or even for a few years?

2. I was under the impression that it was only in the 20th century that it began to be permissible to end a sentence with a preposition like this, but I suppose not? Anyway, I still think it typically sounds better when you don’t end a sentence with a preposition and if I’d been Eliot’s copyeditor, I would have urged her to adjust this sentence.