Lisa's Reviews > Middlemarch

I am leaving Middlemarch!

I can't believe it, after spending so much time with them, I am now done, moving on, moving out, like Lydgate and Bulstrode and Ladislaw and Dorothea. Middlemarch is a state of mind, and you can drop it or it can drop you.

In my case, I feel it dropped me, for I would have clung on to it even after turning that 918th page that was the final one! Does that make me more of a Bulstrode then, rather than a Dorothea? Well, obviously I am quite like the Middlemarch men in general, feeling there can't be anyone comparable to the wonderfully stubborn and idealistic Dorothea!

The gossipers got it all right, of course. Dorothea was not a "nice woman", marrying an illusion first and a passion next. A "nice woman" would have married greed first and ambition next, and she would have been the most respected woman in town, if she kept reasonably stupid and pretty.

I always feel a bit sorry for my immediate environment when I read one of the "big novels" for the first time, for just like Dorothea, I find it hard to play the nice and pretty and detached part that decorum expects of a lady reader. I live and breathe the book, and I get angry and frustrated and annoyed with the course the story takes. I have spent evenings muttering about Bulstrode, and mornings yelling at Rosamond, the female nightmare that the 19th century prided itself in creating as an expensive form of decorative art for conventional society (- all art is quite useless, said a wild and wise man!). I have worried with Fred and scolded with Mary, and felt for Farebrother, and told Lydgate to dump his wife and run.

I have meddled with Mrs Cadwallader, telling her that HER meddling is going in the wrong direction, and that she is setting up people for unhappiness and failure. And I have wondered at the genius of George Eliot, who must have been the most intelligent and perceptive person within the country she called home. And I have wondered how lonely she must have felt as a result of that great mind she carried around in that deeply misogynistic and conventional society.

How must the Rosamunds of her environment have suffocated her! How must the very concept of matrimony and conventionality have struck her as a road to hell? In Dorothea's brave words, her insight shines through:

"Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings."

And as the novel comes to a close, one wonders a bit if Dorothea ever felt a pang of regret that she married twice, nice or not nice as her matches may be called. One wonders if that second marriage wasn't the greatest sacrifice of all, and not because of the lost fortune, but because of the destructive principle she recognised herself. Bound to a man by the disapproval of society, would the passion stay, or would conventional awfulness take its place? Who knows? George Eliot herself only knows why she made Dorothea respectable rather than a free spirit in the end.

For after all, the whole novel is about suppressed sex. An affair (or two) would have cured that nicely...

Best of the best, and that's my blooming rage speaking in rankings!