Bulstrode's Sordid Past

I was really interested by Eliot's presentation of Bulstrode's secret. Time after time, she made comments that implied a deep, dark, secret; constantly foreshadowing the future reveal. For example, Eliot said, "It was not that he was in danger of legal punishment or of beggary..." (Page 380). This affirmation of the legality of Bulstrode's actions is something that could have come straight from Bulstrode's own mouth - and something that does.

With all the build-up Eliot presents for the secret, the actual reveal (to the reader, at least) is somewhat anti-climactic. While I was certainly taken aback by the deceit Bulstrode employed in purposefully lying to his first wife about the location of a daughter who would prevent Bulstrode's inheritance, it seemed like the repeated affirmations of the legality would require something much much worse.

However, something much worse does in fact happen - as a result of Bulstrode's original secret. Bulstrode, in his determination to protect his secret, kills the man who would threaten to tell it. It is interesting that it is Bulstrode's fear for his original "dark" secret that forces him to do some real damage. It almost seemed like a soap-opera - every plot twist imaginable seemed to come about as a result of Bulstrode's fear of Mr. Raffles: deceit, murder, problems within family relationships. And yet, I can't help but wonder if Bulstrode might have been better off if he were just upfront about the whole ordeal. In my mind, at least, the truly damning evidence against Bulstrode is not the secret in itself, but the means that he employs to keep the secret hidden.

You Can't Outrun Your Fate

As we talked about earlier in class, there is always “something” going on in Middlemarch. Eliot consistently describes “something” happening within her characters that changes their perceptions of their lives and those lives around them. In particular, I noticed that Eliot writes, “And yet he felt as if something had happened to him with regard to her” (123). This quotation explains how Will begins to feel attached to Dorothea. Later in the novel, Eliot writes, “Something was keeping their minds aloof, and each was left to conjecture what was in the other,” in regards to Will and Dorothea (337). What is this something that Eliot keeps writing about? How is it that a narrator that can penetrate the minds of characters cannot pinpoint this something?

A character or theme that we tend to overlook is Fate. Eliot delicately balances self-determination and fate. She represents this balance through the theme of gambling throughout the novel, especially with Fred, who loses everything, and Farebrother, who gambles but still makes an honest living. Each character has their own motivations, but Eliot illustrates that not everything can be planned. This something that keeps drawing Will and Dorothea together is fate. Their paths inevitably intertwine although they cannot bring themselves to be honest with each other. They try to stay away based on their own reasoning, but Eliot proves that fate has different plans for them.

Lydgate's Introduction and an Echo of Dorothea

When I was first introduced to Lydgate, I initially thought Lydgate was unlike any other character in the novel Middlemarch. I was especially interested in thinking and pursuing the idea of the strange in novel as we talked about in class. His presentation into the world of Middlemarch is far from the unknown we see when most characters are introduced in novels. He did not feel like the stranger some would cast him as. The questions (what makes a stranger? how do we distinguish the stranger from the regular cast of characters?) did not seem to relate to him. However, as I dug deeper into the novel I came to the realization that events and the characters in the world of Middlemarch are not as straightforward as they may seem. However, if the reader looks at Lydgate’s character introduction as a mirror of Dorothea the arch he takes in the novel starts to make some more sense.

Lydgate’s character is not unlike Dorothea in that he has moral ideals and the belief that things should and could change. He is an altruistic character that comes from a higher social class, but does not care about money the way other characters in the novel do. In essence, while there is a social hierarchy present in the story, and he could be one of the gentry, he would rather accept a role as someone fighting for the common good.

Lydgate’s character mirrors the maturation of Dorothea in some instances. They are both moralistic characters that want to make change in Middlemarch and they both are interested in finding relationships. In both instances the characters pursuit of their romantic interests send them into the dark downward spiral. What is interesting is the comparison of these two characters. Dorothea knows this community and befalls the same emotional darkness that Lydgate will later in the novel. Once Lydgate engages in his romantic entanglements he loses the shield of the stranger. He is very much in the world of Middlemarch and thus privy to the same gloom that all the characters in the novels feel.

The change from initial introduction of Lydgate to what befalls him later in Eliot’s novel is striking. When somebody as good and morally strong as Lydgate is thrust into the dire circumstances he will be, the reader understands nobody is safe.

What does Dorothea see in Casaubon?

The more I read about Dorothea and Casaubon's relationship, the easier I find it to forget how they got there in the first place. I keep wondering how Dorothea found herself married to someone who treats her so coldly, someone who she doesn't really seem to love. When I went back to look at Chapter 3 with the events from the later chapters and books in mind, though, it all kind of fell into place for me.

When Dorothea falls in love with Casaubon, she doesn't fall in love with him, the man. She falls in love with the potential he brings-- potential for her own personal growth beyond what has been made available to her up until this point. "The union which attracted her," we read, "was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path."

So it shouldn't be altogether surprising to Dorothea that there isn't any substantial amount of tenderness or affection in her marriage; it wasn't what she was looking for in the first place. Throughout the first few books, I've been finding myself comparing Casaubon to Sir James Chettham and wondering how Dorothea could in her right mind choose someone who seems so dull and cold in comparison (he brought her a puppy!). But when I think about her motives, it really does make sense. Marrying a man who would listen to all of her suggestions, who would build cottages that she plans even if those plans aren't particularly well informed, isn't going to "deliver her" into enlightenment. Dorothea, like Rosamond, isn't content with the normal ways of Middlemarch; the two women are just looking for different ways to escape what they perceive as that province's mediocrity.

Dorothea sees her own education as a way to get away from what she feels are the trivialities of her day-to-day existence. In the absence of an opportunity to perform charitable deeds or come up with lofty plans for more cottages, she wants to work to make a difference in the world around her. The fact that Casaubon leaves her to make footnotes (and later, that he is unable to work and leaves her without anything meaningful to do) takes away exactly what she thought would be gratifying about her marriage. She and Casaubon wanted different things from the get-go: where he wanted someone to fill his empty rooms and take over the domestic portion of his life that he had ignored for so long, she earnestly wanted to improve herself.

In Chapter 3, we see Dorothea go to the library to better prepare herself to talk with her new potential suitor; we see her amazed that in his mind she sees "reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought." After reading through more of the book and looking back at this chapter, I really sympathized with her (reading uncritically, I know): she wasn't really thinking about the man in front of her, but she was using the potential for a relationship to consider all of the possibilities that she hoped would come about in her life. Dorothea had never before come across someone who she thought could show her the intellectual world she didn't know how to be a part of. She was looking for a teacher, and she found one in the man whose life experience was "a lake compared with [her] little pool!"

Dorothea's engagement to Casaubon seemed unconventional to me at first. The courtship didn't appear to be like any other I had seen before; it seemed so dispassionate. But I realized that I shouldn't have been looking at Dorothea's interactions with Casaubon to find the excitement that is usually present between new lovers. Dorothea fell in love with the idea of what the future could hold for her-- she was finally going to be able to rise above the restrictions put upon her by her position in society and her gender, and that idea was more romantic than the gestures of affection that Sir James Chettam could offer her. It's sad to think about how those aspirations don't come to be when thinking about her honeymoon and the months that follow, but looking back at this chapter at least gave me a better idea of how she got there.

The Jewelry Box

Within the first chapter of Middlemarch, we are introduced to Dorothea Brooke, who seems to be the main subject. She is described as an ideal Puritan who is beautiful, but plainly dressed. Her religious fervor, while focused on bringing good to the world, is seen as a potential hindrance to her marriage opportunities, at least according to her uncle, Mr. Brooke. However, men find her bewitching.

The novel starts off with Dorothea's move to Middlemarch and the subsequent effect she has on some of the men who live there. Her Puritan ways do not seem to be a problem here. Yet, within the first couple of pages, we see one of the first interactions Dorothea engages in within the novel, which subsequently is the first interaction between Dorothea and her sister, Celia.

Celia approaches Dorothea to ask her to split the jewelry from their mother's jewelry box. Celia timidly asks her sister to try on some of the jewelry, and perhaps even take some. Dorothea ends up taking a ring and matching bracelet and leaves the rest for her sister. Celia, again timidly, asks Dorothea if she will wear the jewelry in public, which sparks Dorothea's temper.

What does this scene mean? It is clearly an insight into Dorothea's character, as we later find out that Celia plays little to no role in the rest of the novel. Dorothea is initially described as beautiful, despite her plain attire, and perfectly Christian. She is, in every way, the ideal woman. She is from a decent background with all the right values and morals. However, this initial interaction really shows the discrepancy between Dorothea-described and Dorothea in reality. Celia's timid attitude in approaching her sister illustrates that Dorothea is perhaps not as perfect as the audience is initially is meant to believe, which can be seen later, when she actually loses her temper. Additionally, by taking the ring and bracelet for her own, Dorothea demonstrates a sort of vanity that is direct contradiction to the Puritan values she so vehemently upholds. Beyond this, the question of whether she will wear the jewelry out in public foreshadows a pattern in Dorothea's character that we see throughout the novel. There is a gap between the ideal Dorothea and the real Dorothea. The ideal Dorothea is the one that falls in love with Casaubon, lectures her uncle on his lack of participating in socially responsible projects, who, simply put, has lofty ideals; this is the way we are introduced to Dorothea and also the way she views herself. In reality, Dorothea has a short temper, finds herself superior to others, and is the Dorothea that Celia sees (and the audience also sees after their interaction). It is the Dorothea that becomes more exposed as her marriage with Casaubon continues. The mask of ideal-Dorothea slips away to reveal not the societal image that she (and others) have created, but an inner reality that hides itself from the public eye of Middlemarch.

Lydgate and Rosamond's Engagement

I hope I'm doing this correctly... Anyway, I was really interested by the haste I felt was employed to Rosamond and Lydgate's engagement - a haste that is pretty uncommon in a book as long as Middlemarch. While one could make the argument that the engagement was, in actuality, somewhat prolonged, considering the reader finds out about Lydgate's admiration of Rosamond in Chapter 11, in the course of Chapter 31, Lydgate completely changes his mind as to his feelings about Rosamond and marriage.

The Chapter starts off with a conversation between Mrs. Plymdale and Mrs. Bulstrode, who are speaking about the supposed engagement between Rosamond and Lydgate (which was, at the time, completely false). After Mrs. Bulstrode speaks to Rosamond and ascertains that Rosamond has ignored all other suitors for Lydgate while she was still unsure of his intentions, Mrs. Bulstrode immediately sets out to set Lydgate straight.

While Lydgate avoids Rosamond for a time, the first time he sees her again, he is suddenly overcome by the realization that he loves her and walks away from the encounter engaged to Rosamond.

What changed? What happened to cause Lydgate to be open to marriage, which he had completely denounced just a few pages earlier? I don't know that there is an answer, but I think it's an example of how Eliot doesn't really go into the details of how the happy couples of the novel are made, such as Celia and Sir John. Instead, Eliot is concerned with the undoing of couples, such as Dorothea and Casaubon.

Lydgate and Rosamond's engagement, to Eliot, would then be nothing more than a necessary plot twist. While Eliot elaborately describes their courtship so that the reader understands that the intentions towards marriage are one-sided, when the courtship comes to fruition, Eliot rushes to get the plot point out.

Indeed, Eliot only says, "In half an hour he left the house an engaged man, whose soul was not his own, but the woman's to whom he had bound himself" (pg. 190). However, in the same chapter (a strikingly small chapter), Eliot writes that Mrs. Bulstrode asked Mr. Bulstrode "to find out in conversation with Mr Lydgate whether he had any intention of marrying soon. The result was a decided negative" (pg. 187).

The reader sees no true change of heart in Lydgate, but is just supposed to accept the fact that one moment Lydgate has no intentions of marrying and the next is engaged to Rosamond. My guess is that to Eliot it doesn't matter, because it is the less interesting plot point than the sympathy unrequited love can invoke.

Prelude

OK, I’m going to start this off with a somewhat pedantic though heartfelt post.

I want to make a key disclaimer, though: I’ve been orbiting this novel for almost a decade now; there’s no need to respond to it in the same vein. In other words, I’m being honest by bringing in a range of outside thoughts that this novel triggers—but other folks in this blog will be equally honest (and likely more entertaining) if their responses come from their own relationship to the text as first-timer readers (I don’t think Eliot would have liked the term “newbies).

So: it’s fascinating to me that that a novel called “Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Middlemarch.jpg; for some reason the Norton edition omits that crucial subtitle) would begin not inside the world of Middlemarch itself (“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into belief by poor dress” is a very respectable country-house beginning) but off in Spain, with St. Theresa of Avila (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_of_Ávila). The opening sentence is flat-out demanding:

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?

It almost dares the reader to say, “uh, not me…” I read it as serving notice from the beginning that even though you want to throw yourself into the romantic story you see unfolding (within three chapters the beautiful heroine is engaged) you are also going to be asked to think, well, deep thoughts about Spain, the Crusades, and medieval passions. (interestingly in the American first edition, published in Harper's magazine, which we have here in the Brandeis archives--ask Sarah Shoemaker, sshoemak@brandeis.edu and she'll pull it out--the Prelude is omitted, which gives awhole different feel to the novel, I believe.)

The reader also realizes early on that the novel demands some thinking about women’s work in the world: because the passage makes clear that like or hate her, Theresa was able to do solid work in the world: “she found her epos in the reform of a religious order.” By contrast—and here the real story of the novel starts to sneak in—there are later Theresas who had no such luck:

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.

In other words, there is in modern life a misfit, in which many are at once like and unlike Theresa; so the story we are about to hear concerns not only struggling to do one’s work, but also perhaps struggling even to find a mechanism and a framework within which that work can get done (and you can bet that the traditional domestic role for a middle-class woman of the mid 19^th century is not it…)

Finally, the Prelude ends in a way that Foucault would have appreciated: touching sex and desire without quite spelling it out. Theresa herself may be a heroic figure for the Spanish struggle for nationhood (and in fact in “The Spanish Gypsy” later in her career Eliot proved herself very sympathetic to the nation-building of minor European peoples) but it’s impossible to ignore another side of who she was: the subject of a famous and famously erotic statue by Bernini from 1652, one that Eliot herself very likely saw in her 1860-1 travels in Italy (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Teresabernini.JPG).

It’s a doozy of a statue, and like a lot of devotional work, it leaves it very unclear whether you’re seeing someone who is devoted to a “higher cause” or overcome by physical desires. I think that’s a fascinating way to think about what Dorothea herself later has to discover about herself.

The final two sentences offer us the chance to think abot Dorothea as a starved Theresa—or a misplaced water-fowl. But both possibilities are tinged with a physical yearning that is made stronger by not being explicitly spelled out:

Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed

Well, that’s what I think of when I (for the 100^th time) read this tiny chapter. Looking forward to hearing what others think of subsequent ones…….

Welcome to the Blog

Hi Everyone. Chapter by chapter, let's make our way through the novel, tracking the actions and the characters we care about as we go....Everybody posts! I'm taking on the persona of the (doomed and cranky) old scholar Casaubon....