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…….