Reflection for:
Feb. 5 - Feb. 19, 2007 - Dr. Chris Krueger
"The Cost of Everything, or Why Everyone Should Read George Elliot's Middlemarch"
[Several years ago, I was asked to present a lecture to inaugurate a new English reading room at UCLA. I knew that at the same time I would be delivering my lecture, outside the reading room’s windows the UCLA English graduate students would be conducting a marathon reading of the 1871, 800+ pg. novel, Middlemarch, to raise funds. Grace Hunt, whom I mention at the end of the talk, was a UCLA librarian who had left money in her will to endow the reading room. I think these circumstances, and what they occasioned me to say, may be of interest as a Manresa reflection]
This is what the UCLA marathon readers are waiting 24 hours for. Not me, of course. The climax of George Eliot’s “big baggy monster,” Middlemarch. Dorothea’s climax--after turning down Sir James Chettam, after marrying the “funereal” Rev. Mr. Casaubon, after meeting “Mr. Right” (Tertius Lydgate) too late—he does, after all, share her penchant for social reform—after that nasty honeymoon amidst “the vast wreck of human ideals” which is Rome for Dorothea with her “meagre Protestant education,” after the miserable marriage, filled with disappointments and alienation for Dorothea and Edward Casaubon alike, after the shock of that mean-spirited will, disinheriting Dorothea if she marries a man she had never before considered a possible lover, after her renewed “Quixotic” plans for founding a utopian community come to naught, after Will believes he has been forever tainted in the eyes of Dorothea’s friends by the revelation of his grandfather’s shady business dealings, after she has failed to rescue Lydgate and his marriage, after all this, well, what? My extended suspended sentence hasn’t quite reproduced the tangled web of plots and subplots, dead ends and unresolved conflicts which is Middlemarch, but you get the idea. What are marathon readers waiting 24 hours, or 812 pages in my Penguin paperback for? Well, here it is. Sometime around mid-day tomorrow, the following will be read:
In an instant Will was close to her and had his arms around her, but she drew her head back and held his away gently that she might go on speaking, her large tear-filled eyes looking at his very simply, while she said in a sobbing childlike way, "We could live quite well on my own fortune--it is too much--seven hundred-a-year--I want so little--no new clothes--and I will learn what everything costs." Hmm. Anybody want his or her money back? Or the hours of your life you'll sacrifice in order to get this declaration: "I will learn what everything costs?"
It would seem to me that any reader—or audience member at a marathon reading— who’s invested enough time and energy to make it to this point should get something like “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height/ My soul can reach…” That’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of course, writing a mere 23 years before Middlemarch.
Or,
Romeo: Here's to my love! O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die...
Juliet: What's here? A cup clos'd in my true love's hand?
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end.
O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after? I will kiss thy lips,
To make me die with a restorative.
Thy lips are warm...
Yea, noise? Then I'll be brief. O happy dagger,
This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die.
This couple ends unhappily, but that’s part of the fun, no? Or, at least one might hope for Jane Eyre’s terse, but fulfilling, “Reader, I married him.” Instead, we’re supposed to be content with a payoff that sounds like the sort of remark a chastened client would make at the conclusion of a particularly unpleasant appointment with her financial advisor. “Gee. I’m that far in debt? Sorry. From now on, I’ll learn what everything costs.”
I have often sung the praises of the tradition of marathon readings in the UCLA English department, and when I learned that this year’s novel was to be Middlemarch, I was delighted, since it’s my favorite novel, and genuinely disappointed that I wouldn’t be here to enjoy the unique experience of hearing it read from the Prelude--“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 St. Theresa…”—to the Finale, “that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” In that tangled web of circumstances that Eliot tells us is life, it would have been Quixotic of me to imagine that the forces of friendship, good will, scheduling at two different universities, and Midwest Express airlines would all come together to enable me not only to witness this extraordinary performance, but to participate in it in a particularly satisfying way. Eliot would, at minimum, have had me miss my flight, if not crashed it into the Rockies. (Too sensationalistic.) Only a Rosamond Vincy would think that the UCLA English department had chosen Middlemarch for her benefit. That she, of course, would be the center of audience’s attention. That she was “that little sun” around which all the accidents of history arranged themselves into neat, concentric circles. Because what any reader who loves George Eliot has learned from her is that such desires are rank egotism, and a recipe for personal and social disaster. And yet, here we all are. Not because Rosamond is right after all, but because sometimes things do come together, not because we’ve orchestrated it, or earned it, or even wanted it to do so very much indeed, but because of a series of “random scratches” that accidentally form into a pattern that means something to us.
I teach Middlemarch in one course or another in virtually every semester. I taught it as a graduate student at Princeton, as a visitor at UCLA, and for almost twenty years at my home institution, Marquette University. I teach it in graduate courses in Victorian fiction, upper-division undergraduate courses in Victorian literature and history of the novel, and—most astonishingly to my colleagues—in the segment of the introductory survey of British literature that covers the Romantics through the Modernists. In semesters when, for obscure and inscrutable reasons it is somehow missing from my syllabuses, I miss it, refer to it in passing, urge it on my students, because of what I take to be its extraordinary explanatory power. And if I had to choose one phrase from the thousands of words that make up Middlemarch to encapsulate the novel’s import, I would choose that oddly anti-climactic sounding declaration “I will learn what everything costs.” If there is any reason for us to keep reading Middlemarch, if there is any reason to value the enduring contribution realism as an aesthetic technique and a world view, or ideology (if you prefer), has made to being human, it is the wisdom that there is no accomplishment, no victory, no justice, no reading room—no romance—unless we take to heart the realist credo “I will learn what everything costs.”
Given what I’ve confessed about my obsession with Middlemarch, it is hardly surprising that I would consider it to be the best choice for a marathon reading. But I think I can offer a rationale for my belief as well. A marathon reading is heroic because it tests our endurance. It demands patience. It demands cooperation among many readers. It demands focus. We cannot browse, as Eliot describes her realist precursor Henry Fielding as having done, over “that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.” In other words, it’s not for channel surfers. It exacts costs—from our powers of concentration, from our voices, from our posteriors. The only thing we’re sure we’ll have to show for our marathon effort is that we’ve survived. Like Dorothea Brooke Casaubon Ladislaw, we are the “foundresses of nothing.” That is, we have performed a text and when we stop it’s gone. There is no lasting monument, no historical record to be recognized by posterity once we disperse. No Carmelite order, no sainthood—maybe a lousy tee-shirt.
One misconception teachers of the Victorian novel revel in dispelling is that our artifacts are so long because Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Eliot, and the like, were paid by the page. Whatever publishing constraints encouraged the “baggy monstrosity” of which Henry James complained, there are philosophical reasons why novels in the realist tradition are so long. Their purpose is to help us to understand the elaborate and even incomprehensible complexity of causality in the modern world. The egotistical sublime of Romantic lyrics just won’t cut it. One man’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion,” as Wordsworth defined poetry, is neither unique genius, nor wholly spontaneous. It is the result of a myriad of forces, to which the realist novelist wishes to draw to our attention. Wordsworth, for example, could feel spontaneous, because, though he was orphaned young, he was born into relative wealth, in a peaceful part of England, educated at Cambridge, sustained by his sister, another long-suffering Dorothy, able to leave his lover and their child behind in France without being hounded by legal authorities demanding child support, able to marry an Englishwoman, have a family, negotiate decent contracts, buy a swell estate, and retire to become the “old sheep” of the Lake District. And that’s just what we know about him. What Eliot reminds us is that there is a largely invisible web of people, events, and conditions that sustains us, and that for every Wordsworth, there are many more “mute, inglorious Miltons” who “rest in unvisited tombs.”
Nor is the epic capable of teaching us quite what the realist novel does, for, although it equals those novels in length, it does not do so in scope. The reason that there are such reference tools as the Dickens Dictionary, or the Eliot Encyclopedia, is to help us keep track of the multitude of characters necessary to these authors' visions. Plot lines that confine themselves to the exploits of an Odysseus or an Aeneas fail to demonstrate that “there is no life that is not greatly influenced by other lives.” No character in Middlemarch, no matter how “minor,” is inconsequential. This insight is key to our ability to cope under the conditions of modernity, conditions that came into being with capitalism, empire, mass media, and globalization in the nineteenth century. Eliot tells us that as a “belated historian”—that is, as an historian within the cultural conditions of modernity—she must “concentrate all her light on disentangling this particular web.” Picture where she places herself with respect to this web.
To disentangle a web, you cannot occupy the center, but must assume a place on the margin, tugging at one strand—one plot line, one character’s life—in order to learn how it is related to every other life. This is the cost to the realist novelist—at least as Eliot understands it—of the realist world view in which every life counts. She must relinquish the author’s traditional position at the center, spinning her yarns out of herself, controlling her plot and her characters’ fates, and, though admittedly it is a pretense, construct her plot in such a way that she appears to be discovering how the whole web of society—from Sir James Chettam, and Mr. Brooke, to Bulstrode and the Vincys, to Raffles and the Dagley family of tenant farmers—are interdependent. And that is to say nothing of that great web of history. One individual cannot extract himself from this web, nor one class, nor one race, nation, or epoch, any more than the novelist herself can stand outside of the enormously complex web of history and declare “here, this is how it happened—this is how Rome was founded.”
This seems to be an enormously important lesson, and one that has not faded in its relevance in our world, especially for citizens of a nation that might be tempted from time to time to imagine that we are the authors of our own fate, and that of other peoples as well. All our actions will have far-ranging, unimaginable, and probably unintended consequences. We must try, therefore, to learn, even if imperfectly, what everything costs.
Above all, the complexity of plotting, the proliferation of characters, the shifting narrative perspectives of Middlemarch, help us to learn through the experience of reading a fundamentally ethical practice. Take those characters who imagine that they are the authors of their own fates, and those of their fellows. In his lifetime, Mr. Featherstone uses his “will”—a legal document—to manipulate the fates of his dependents, especially the hapless Fred Vincy, who places inordinate faith in that will as the deus ex machina that will extract him from the consequences of his actions, and Featherstone seeks to extend his powers through his will beyond his natural lifetime. But he is foiled. Not only does he not imagine that meek Mary Garth might thwart him, motivated not by the sort of self-interest that dictates his own actions, but by a disinterested understanding of right and wrong, but that he might be overpowered by nature itself. Stone Court ends up going to the “residual legatee,” his “natural” son, Joshua Rigg. Inheritance, as Eliot understands it, is not a function of human-authored texts—be they wills, histories, or novels—but of Nature. Joshua may be illegitimate, but he is Nature’s heir.
Because Featherstone’s will is thwarted, his estate ends up in the possession of Joshua, who in turn sells it to Mr. Bulstrode. Eliot introduces Bulstrode into her novel with images that clearly align him with the powers conventionally appropriated by the omniscient narrator:
Mr Bulstrode’s power was not due simply to his being a country banker, who knew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could touch the springs of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence that was at once ready and severe—ready to confer obligations, and severe in watching the result. He had gathered, as an industrious man always at his post, a chief share in administering the town charities, and his private charities were both minute and abundant. He would take a great deal of pains about apprenticing Tegg the shoemaker’s son, and he would watch over Tegg’s church-going; he would defend Mrs Strype the washerwoman against Stubb’s unjust exaction on the score of her drying-ground, and he would himself scrutinize a calumny against Mrs Strype. His private minor loans were numerous, but he would inquire strictly into the circumstances both before and after. In this way a man gathers a domain in his neighbors’ hope and fear as well as gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that subtle region, propagates itself, spreading out of all proportion to its external means. It was a principle of Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as possible, that he might use it for the glory of God. He went through a great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust his motives, and make clear to himself what God’s glory required. But, as we have seen, his motives were not always rightly appreciated. There were many crass minds in Middlemarch whose relfective scales could only weigh things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion that since Mr Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating and drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about everything, he must have a sort of vampire’s feast in the sense of mastery. (155-56)
Bulstrode has set himself up as God’s representative on earth, justifying the egotism that spurs him to manage his fellow Middlemarchers. Though he exerts control by reminding his debtors what their indebtedness costs them, he has achieved his own power by canceling the debt of his own sinfulness, first by concealing the natural heir of his first wife’s fortune—Will Ladislaw—then by appropriating that money at her death, and then by extracting himself from the consequences of these deeds by, as his nemesis Raffles puts it, “cutting ties with the London concern all together.” But we cannot cut ourselves off from our pasts, and our day of reckoning will come, sooner or later. Because Bulstrode has purchased Stone Court, because a letter with his address accidentally falls by the way, because Raffles accidentally discovers it, Bulstrode’s past rises up before him with an “unmanageable corporeality.” It was Raffles whom Bulstrode had commissioned on behalf of the widow of his employer at the London pawnbroking—and fencing—concern, Mrs. Julia Casaubon Dunkirk, to seek out her estranged daughter. Raffles discovers that the daughter, Sarah, who had married a Polish émigré, is dead, but that she has left a son, Will Ladislaw, who stands to inherit the Dunkirk fortune. But Bulstrode prevents this grandmother and child reunion, claims that Sarah died without heirs, and claims the widow and her fortune for himself. With Raffles’ arrival in Middlemarch, the new life Bulstrode has made for himself is terrifyingly reconnected to his guilty past. Eliot offers us a this wonderful metaphor of the persistence of the past in our present self-conceptions, and our visions of the future:
Into this second life Bulstrode’s past had now risen, only the pleasures of it seeming to have lost their quality. Night and day, without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect and fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his earlier life coming between him and everything else, as obstinately as when we look through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs on are still before us, instead of the grass and trees. The successive events inward and outward were there in one view: through each might be dwelt on in turn, the rest still kept their hold in the consciousness.(615)
Then there is Rosamond Vincy. If you have seen the recent film version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, you’ve seen a wonderful visualization of how Wilde rewrites the tragic egotism of Rosamond in the farcical manipulations of his character Cecily. Cecily, as you recall, keeps a diary—for the purposes of publication, of course. Thwarted in her desire to meet the mysterious, and therefore desirable, Ernest (brother of her guardian, Jack), Cecily is compelled to make life imitate art. In her diary, she records meeting Ernest, their courtship, their engagement, her breaking it off, her forgiving Ernest, and their impending marriage. Poor thing, she must even write his love letters to her. One of the brilliant liberties this film takes with Wilde’s text comes in Cecily’s vision of the arrival of the long-awaited Ernest. When Algernon, cum Ernest, is announced, disembarks from his hot-air balloon, and approaches Cecily, she sees him as a knight complete with shining armor, the quintessential romantic hero, riding to her rescue. This is exactly how the romance-novel reader Rosamond interprets Lydgate's arrival in Middlemarch. Conveniently, he is an outsider, so she need take no heed of the parts of his past that do not conform to the romantic plot she has constructed for her own life, she has no interest in his vocation as a physician, or his aspirations to found a fever hospital. Instead, she is convinced, that, as the narrator tells us, his arrival marks “the great epoch in her life.”
Their engagement is not the result of her planning, nor the romance novel’s inevitable plotting, however, but an accident. Lydgate, a man who has vowed not to marry before he has attained his professional goals, is visiting the Vincy house to check on Fred, who is recovering from an accident. As he is leaving, the frustrated and pathetic Rosamond sheds a tear, and without knowing why, Lydgate instinctively takes her in his arms, and without knowing how, leaves the Vincy home engaged to its charming blond daughter. Because he marries Rosamond, he goes deeply in debt purchasing her fantasies. Because of his debt, he borrows from Bulstrode and comes under his control. Because he is Bulstrode’s creature, he is called on to tend the ailing Raffles, whom Bulstrode has been coerced to house at Stone Court under threat of blackmail regarding his own past. Because Raffles dies, Lydgate is disgraced when Bulstrode is exposed, and all Lydgate’s aspirations for the fever hospital—an institution which would have studied and treated a contagious disease that demonstrates our inescapable biological interconnections—comes to naught.
Well, Terrance, you might say, this realism is stupid stuff. Learning what everything costs seems to mean that whereas, as Miss Prism tells us in Earnest, fiction is where the “good end happily and the bad end uphappily,” realist fiction is where everybody ends uphappily, and a good thing too. Not quite. We don’t have perfect knowledge. We don’t have perfect control. We don’t have the Key to All Mythologies. We don’t even understand our own motives very well, but we can use our imaginations constructively to look for those “suppressed connections” and move responsibility — and artistically — through our fragmented world. Consider how Will comes to Dorothea’s rescue, interpreting for her “unintelligible Rome.” Invited to join the honeymooning Casaubon couple for dinner, Will makes sense of Rome for Dorothea when her husband cannot.
If Will was not always perfect, this was certainly one of his good days. He described touches of incident among the poor people in Rome, only to be seen by one who could move about freely; he found himself in agreement with Mr. Casaubon as to the unsound opinions of Middleton concerning the relations of Judaism and Catholicism; and passed easily to a half-enthusiastic half-playful picture of the enjoyment he got out of the very miscellaneousness of Rome, which made the mind flexible with constant comparison, and saved you from seeing the world’s ages as a set of box-like partitions without vital connection. Mr. Casaubon’s studies, Will observed, had always been of too broad a kind for that, and he had perhaps never felt any such sudden effect, but for himself he confessed that Rome had given him quite a new sense of history as a whole; the fragments stimulated his imagination and made him constructive.(212)
We, too, can benefit from the constructive and flexible imagination of the realist novelist who depicts for us a vision of what we cannot know about ourselves. Always eager to do some good in the world, Dorothea tries to ride to Lydgate’s rescue after the Raffles debacle. What she imagines she can do for this fallen hero is to restore his reputation, using her unimpeachable influence to convince Middlemarchers to support his hospital plans. Thanks to Eliot’s narrator, we are allowed to know what Dorothea really does for Lydgate, even though her conscious intentions are never realized. The narrator reports indirectly what Dorothea and Lydgate say to one another, but also Lydgate’s unvoiced gratitude:
Dorothea’s voice, as she made this childlike picture of what she would do, might have been almost taken as a proof that she could do it effectively. The searching tenderness of her woman’s tones seemed made for a defence against ready accusers. Lydgate did not stay to think that she was Quixotic; he gave himself up, for the first time in his life, to the exquisite sense of leaning entirely on a generous sympathy, without any check of proud reserve. And he told her everything, from the time when, under the pressure of his difficulties, he unwillingy made his first application to Bulstrode; gradually, in the relief of speaking, getting into a more thorough utterance of what had gone on in his mind—entering fully into the fact that his treatment of the patient was opposed to the dominant practice, into his doubts at the last, his ideal of medical duty, and his uneasy consciousness that the acceptance of the money had made some difference in his private inclination and professional behavior, though not in his fulfillment of any publicly recognized obligation… As Lydgate rode away, he thought, “This young creature has a heart large enough for the Virgin Mary. She evidently thinks nothing of her own fortune, and would pledge away half her income at once, as if she wanted nothing for herself but a chair to sit in from which she can look down with those clear eyes at the poor mortals who pray to her. She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before—a fountain of friendship towards men—a man can make a friend of her. Casaubon must have raised some heroic hallucination in her. I wonder if she could have any other sort of passion for a man? Ladislaw? --there was certainly an unusual feeling between them. And Casaubon must have had some notion of it. Well--her love might help a man more than her money." Dorothea on her side had immediately formed a plan of relieving Lydgate from his obligations to Bulstrode, which she felt for sure was a part, though small, of the galling pressure he had to bear. (763,768-69)
Ultimately, Dorothea fails to restore Lydgate’s reputation or improve his marriage. She never knows what a precious gift she has given. This is what true charity is: the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. But the realist novelist does.
So that, every semester, and sometimes twice a semester, when I get to Dorothea’s declaration “I will learn what everything costs,” I have to fight back the tears. And it’s not just exhaustion-induced emotion, as it may have been when you marathon readers got there. It strikes me as just about the most romantic—or better, loving—thing one person can say to another. It says that whatever reality throws in our path, whatever constraints, whatever uncertainties, whatever obstacles, I will assume the costs, and do whatever I can to be loyal, decent, and loving towards you. So much better than Will’s earlier declaration to Dorothea “you are a poem!”
Grace Hunt was not a poem, she was a librarian. As far as I know, she is not considered a world-historical figure. She did not found in her lifetime a religious order, or build a monument. Historians in years to come may find little record of her life, though I trust they will find this reading room. She performed no miracles, and is an unlikely candidate for sainthood. She did know “what everything costs,” however, and left a legacy to the living, not to aggrandize herself or control us, but to give us the freedom and tools to cultivate our imaginations and read books like Middlemarch. Though she may not have lived an “epic life,” we readers of Middlemarch, “the home epic,” know that “the growing good of the world is half owning to those who lived a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” They have brought us here, by means they could not have imagined, and it has made my life better. Yours too, I hope.
“ It strikes me as just about the most romantic—or better, loving—thing one person can say to another. It says that whatever reality throws in our path, whatever constraints, whatever uncertainties, whatever obstacles, I will assume the costs, and do whatever I can to be loyal, decent, and loving towards you."
Speaking about George Elliot's Middlemarch: Dr. Chris Krueger
Find Your Potential Through The Manresa Project
