January 23, 2025
Middlemarch is a portrait of a small Midlands town on the eve of sweeping changes (the Reform Bill, the railroads). Though the novel has a set of interlocking storylines (Dorothea and Casaubon, Dorothea and Wil, Lydgate and Rosamond, Fred and Mary, Bulstrode’s fall), the central—and most intriguing—character has to be Dorothea, whom the narrator describes as a kind of failed saint:
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.
That Dorothea’s spiritual intensity does not match her outward accomplishments does not really strike me as a kind of tragedy. In fact, as the ending of the book suggests, though she “lived faithfully a hidden life,” nonetheless “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive.” Eliot implores that though our surroundings and our neighbors might seem regular, many of those folk are Dorotheas making our lives better in ways that remain obscure to us. Dorothea being a hidden saint highlights one of the main themes of the novel: that ordinary life is filled with extraordinary things, if we could only pay attention to them. As Eliot writes,
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
The great power of the novel is the “keen vision” of Eliot, able to see the complexity of life even in a small town. I think this power achieves its apex in Eliot’s portrayal of the doomed marriages of Dorothea and Casaubon, and Lydgate and Rosamond, especially in the parallel frustration that Dorothea and Lydgate, both characterized by an inner intensity that constantly rubs against the external constraints imposed by the world, feel in trying to reach out to their unfeeling partners.