by Rebecca Mead
Her implacable expectation leads Lydgate to rent a house beyond his means and equip it with furniture and tableware he cannot afford, and if it’s easy today to decry Lydgate’s assumptions about women’s purpose in the world, it’s altogether less easy to condemn his fiscal miscalculations. One of the ways in which the world of Middlemarch seems disconcertingly familiar is in its depiction of the dangers presented by ready credit: Henry James called Lydgate’s story “a tragedy based on unpaid butchers’ bills, and the urgent need for small economies.” Rosamond’s social aspiration leads her to ingratiate herself with Captain Lydgate, one of Lydgate’s well-born but personally inconsequential cousins. (She and the Captain go riding after Lydgate has expressly forbidden it; as a result Rosamond miscarries her first child.) She tells Lydgate she wishes he had been something other than a doctor—concerned with “skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits of things in phials, and quarrels with everybody, that end in your dying miserably.” With prettily expressed contempt, Rosamond reveals her utter incompatibility with what is essential about Lydgate. “To say that you love me without loving the medical man in me, is the same sort of thing as to say you like eating a peach but don’t like its flavour,” he tells her, with mournful, resigned humor.
Eliot endowed Lydgate with her own intellectual vigor, but she also gave him a vein of petty-minded prejudice which she had encountered in others, to her own detriment. It’s no wonder that he is so vividly drawn—nor that readers, halfway through Middlemarch, clutched at the glimmer of hope that he might be redeemed by a woman like Dorothea belatedly entering his traditions. A different writer might have staged that redemption, as readers of the finished book observed. “Had the author consulted the properties of romance and the fitness of things, [Lydgate] should have married Dorothea,” is how the Times reviewer drily put it.
Eliot had expertly dissected the properties of romance in an essay called “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1856, immediately before she began writing her own fiction. It’s an acid taxonomy of terrible popular novels and their predictable heroine, of whom Eliot writes, “her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity.” Men in such novels are similarly lacking in complexity; their role is to accompany the heroine “on her ‘starring’ expedition through life. They see her at a ball, and are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on a riding excursion, and they are witched by her noble horsemanship.”
Who read novels like these? Women like Rosamond Vincy. The reading of fiction is one of the feminine accomplishments Rosamond cultivates in anticipation of a proposal from Lydgate. Along with sketching landscapes and practicing her music, “she found time also to read the best novels, and even the second best.” Rosamond doesn’t just read novels; she imagines herself at the center of one of their overwrought plots: “ ‘If I loved, I should love at once and without change,’ said Rosamond, with a great sense of being a romantic heroine, and playing the part prettily.” Rosamond is inexperienced enough to see herself as starring at the center of an implausible story with an inevitable happy ending.
In his Life of George Eliot, John Walter Cross gave an intriguing account of Eliot’s creative method. “She told me that, in all that she considered her best writing, there was a ‘not herself’ which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting,” Cross wrote. Of all the characters Eliot attempted, “she found Rosamond’s the most difficult to sustain.” That is easy to believe. For most of Middlemarch, Rosamond is an exercise in beautiful triviality, with her blonde plaits and her graceful neck and her dress “of a fit and fashion so perfect that no dressmaker could look at it without emotion,” a characterization that shows Eliot at her most cuttingly epigrammatic. (Dorothy Parker could not have put it better.) Rosamond is so dreadful that to channel her spirit for long would tax the most resilient of mediums, and Lydgate’s awful realization of what he has committed himself to in his marriage—his recognition that “life must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation, as it is by men who have lost their limbs”—is an authentic, everyday tragedy.
Some readers have felt that Eliot hates Rosamond, and that she denies her the sympathy that she shows her other characters. But I don’t think that’s quite right. Eliot does not make Rosamond stupid—she is “clever with that sort of cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous,” Eliot writes. “Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness.” But she clearly shows that Rosamond has been stunted by an education and upbringing that have prepared her for a life of pettiness and conventionality, and readied her for no vocation beyond marriage. Eliot repeatedly refers to “poor Rosamond,” and these references are not ironic: Rosamond also deserves the reader’s pity. Lydgate’s understanding of her before their marriage was as paltry as her comprehension of him. His suggestion for resolving their economic crisis—that she surrender their house to her onetime suitor Ned Plymdale and his new bride—is asking her to give up everything to which she has ever aspired. It is saying he likes a peach without liking its flavor. Lydgate has no more access to Rosamond’s emotional reality than she does to his. He is unable “to imagine fully what this sudden trial was to a young creature who had known nothing but indulgence, and whose dreams had all been of new indulgence, more exactly to her taste.”
Eliot had never been indulged as a young woman, but she knew what it was to be in the unbearable situation of wanting the impossible, and trying to find any way to postpone a reckoning with reality. “I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions,” she had told Spencer, after begging him to allow her to live under impossible conditions, with the absence of reciprocal love. She brings her own stubborn insistence on the impossible to an understanding of Rosamond’s tearful recalcitrance.
This isn’t to suggest that Eliot is generous toward Rosamond. Near the end of the novel she stages a harrowing attack on Rosamond by Ladislaw, about whom Rosamond has been indulging in misplaced romantic fantasies. After that, Rosamond has a humbling encounter with Dorothea, in which she comes as close as she ever does to empathizing with another individual’s crisis. But even then, Rosamond’s fractional insight is limited and fleeting. Eliot punishes Rosamond—or punishes women like her, through her—in granting her only the view of the world surrounding her own image in a mirror, a circumscription that cannot be overcome unless she steps away from the looking glass.
Eliot does not allow Rosamond to grow into anything beyond the beautiful bloom from which her name derives, with its irresistible fragrance and its concealed thorns. (In Daniel Deronda, the novel that came after Middlemarch, Eliot would challenge herself to draw a more nuanced portrait of a self-involved beauty, Gwendolen Harleth, who may be the most complicated heroine in her fiction.) At the end of Middlemarch, Rosamond is as self-centered and as conventional in her convictions as she ever was, with the added savor of self-righteousness earned through what she regards as her sacrifice. “She simply continued to be mild in her temper, inflexible in her judgment, disposed to admonish her husband, and able to frustrate him by stratagem,” Eliot writes. Lydgate calls her his basil plant, because “basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.” And to the end Rosamond insists on seeing the world as if it were governed by the rules of conventional romance, responding to this barbed endearment by asking Lydgate why, then, he had married her rather than Dorothea, “whom he was always praising and placing above her.”
Elizabeth Malleson, an educator with whom Eliot was acquainted, once recalled an occasion during the serial publication of Middlemarch when she ran into Eliot and Lewes as they walked arm in arm along Regent Street, in London. “We stopped in the busy street to talk—I to utter lamentations for Lydgate in his relation to Rosamond, she smilingly to insist upon the inexorable fate dr
amatically necessary for her story,” Malleson wrote afterward. As always, though, with Eliot, Lydgate’s fate is not imposed upon him. “Character too is a process and an unfolding,” Eliot writes of Lydgate in an early chapter of the book, when what will become of him is still uncertain. He builds his fate for himself, through his words and his actions and his inactions, until there is no other story that can be told about him.
HERBERT Spencer never married. He outlived Eliot, dying in 1903 at the age of eighty-three. In his seventies he decided that he would like to experience some semblance of family life, and so he rented a house near Regent’s Park that he shared with a pair of sisters, procured for him by a friend. The sisters, genteel ladies who had fallen on hard times, took care of his housekeeping in exchange for the home he supplied them.
After his death they wrote a memoir titled Home Life with Herbert Spencer. The book is a quirky mix of gossip and homage, and it paints Spencer as a decidedly odd bird. He blocked his ears with custom-made stoppers when parlor-room conversation became too trying. He insisted on his bed being made with a pleat down the center of the upper sheet, so that he could move more freely in the night. He liked to wear what sounds like an oversize knitted onesie—“compounded in such a way that he only had to step into it and with one pull was fully clad in boots, trousers, and coat”—which the sisters called his “woolly bear.” They recount his objection to a plain woman whom they once invited to visit: he ate alone in the drawing room rather than having to face someone “so ugly” over the dining table. Having Spencer in the house was interesting in the way that having a baby in the house is interesting, they say: one cannot but remark upon “the last thing ‘it did,’ the last thing ‘it said,’ and the last thing ‘it ate.’ ”
On one occasion one of the sisters tactlessly remarked to Spencer that it was a shame he had never had children or grandchildren himself. She then tried to compensate for her rudeness by saying that if he had become a father the world would have been denied his most important work, A System of Synthetic Philosophy. “No, but there might have been a ‘sympathetic’ philosophy,” he replied—a reference to the sister’s earlier garbling of the name of his book. Spencer spoke with “a whimsical laugh for the old joke,” the sisters write, “and yet with a touch of pathos in his voice, as he seemed for a moment to realise what he had lost by giving up his whole life to the completion of his work.” At the end of his life, Spencer must also have wondered what his work had lost through his domestic and romantic renunciation.
When, after her rejection by Spencer, Eliot began living with George Henry Lewes, she and Spencer forged a friendship on new grounds. She sometimes adopted a faintly patronizing, teasing tone toward him, the gentle revenge of the rejected upon the rejecter. Sofia Kovalevskaya, who would become Europe’s first female professor of mathematics, at the University of Stockholm, remembered being introduced to Spencer at a gathering in the Priory in 1870, when she was nineteen. “I must warn you that he denies the very possibility of the existence of a woman mathematician,” Eliot archly told Kovalevskaya. “He admits that from time to time a woman might appear who equals the average level of men in intellectual capacity, but he argues that an equal woman always directs her intellect and insight to the analysis of her friends’ lives and would never chain herself to pure abstraction.”
Eliot’s own analysis of the lives of others has far outlasted Spencer’s abstractions, with Middlemarch her masterwork of sympathetic philosophy. With hindsight, it seems obvious that Eliot had a fortunate escape from life as Mrs. Herbert Spencer, encumbered by a crotchety spouse in earplugs and a woolly bear. (What becomes of the brilliant young woman who knowingly forfeits reciprocal love, after disillusionment with her spouse sets in? There’s a subject for a novel.) And while it’s impossible to know for sure, it seems likely that had Marian Evans become Marian Spencer, she would not also have become George Eliot. Though Spencer later claimed that he had early on encouraged Eliot to write fiction, she did not find her fictional voice until she was loved by someone who saw beyond her capacity for brittle cleverness—in whose company she did not feel the need to be on her emotional guard. Even so, her experience with Spencer informed her understanding. He was part of her education, as Dorothea was part of Lydgate’s education, and as all our loves, realized or otherwise—all our alternative plots—go to make us who we are, and become part of what we make.
Chapter 5
•
The Dead Hand
“The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.”
—MIDDLEMARCH, CHAPTER 53
I woke early and looked out of my hotel window to see pigeons alighting on the roof of the Examination Schools on Oxford High Street. More than twenty years earlier I’d entered that building for my final exams, wearing an academic gown and carrying a mortarboard, and I’d barely been back to Oxford since. A lot had changed. The boutique hotel I was staying in used to be a pub, appointed in oak and brass and reeking of beer and cigarette smoke. Patisseries had multiplied on the High Street. Leaving my hotel to walk outside, I tried to turn down Logic Lane to peer up at the window of what had once been my room, dark, narrow quarters in an unglamorous modern block, not the airy eighteenth-century chamber I’d hoped for. But there was a security gate blocking my way, and I was no longer entitled to the code.
I walked along the narrow pavement of Merton Street, past huddled stone cottages and knots of students with exactly the same jagged haircuts and black clothes that my friends and I had worn, and there was something disconcerting about seeing the fashions of my youth revived in the site of my youth. I remembered my own circuits around this city: wandering through Christ Church Meadow, from which Oxford always looked more like a landscape by Constable than a place one actually got to live in; or rushing across the cobblestones of Radcliffe Square to get to an Anglo-Saxon tutorial. Translating Anglo-Saxon was laborious, but I could glimpse the strange beauty of the poetry, with its bifurcated lines and internal alliteration. We read accounts of battles written in the late ninth century during the reign of Alfred the Great, who, according to legend, both burned cakes and founded my college. I remember the thrilling realization that I was seeing English literature being born—witnessing an author trying to invent prose narrative. The syntax was often confusing, so that it was hard to tell who did what to whom—the text dissolved into repetitions, “and then,” “and then,” “and then,” like a child’s early attempts at composition—but there was a sustained, urgent striving to tell a story. I realized with a sense of wonder that the books I loved were a later expression of this same effort. This history of reading and writing was my cultural inheritance, a centuries-long chain of readers and writers in this centuries-old city.
I was studying English literature because I loved books, a common enough motivation among students of literature, but I soon discovered that love didn’t have much purchase when it came to our studies. It was the mideighties, the era of critical theory—an approach to literature that had been developed at Yale, among other distant and exotic locales. I’d never heard of critical theory before I got to Oxford, but I soon discovered that it was what the most sophisticated-seeming undergraduates were engaged by. Scholars applied the tools of psychoanalysis or feminism to reveal the ways in which the author was blind to his or her own desire or prejudice, or they used the discipline of deconstruction to dispense with the author altogether. (Thus, J. Hillis Miller on George Eliot: “This incoherent, heterogeneous, ‘unreadable,’ or nonsynthesizable quality of the text of Middlemarch jeopardizes the narrator’s effort of totalization.”) Books—or texts, as they were called by those versed in theory—weren’t supposed merely to be read, but to be interrogated, as if they had committed some criminal malfeasance.
Oxford was hardly a crucible of high theory, but theory was in the air, and it was intriguing. Knowing which books to read or which lectures to attend was like knowing which clubs played the best music, and reading Michel Foucau
lt on the history of sexuality seemed a lot more exciting than reading Alexander Pope. I once went to a seminar in the college rooms of a don who was well known in Oxford and beyond for his application of Marxist theory to literature. (“Splendid library, of course, with soft carpet, couches, etc. such as become a sympathizer with the suffering classes,” as Eliot wrote of Dickens.) I don’t recall which author was the object of that particular inquisition, but I do remember the way the room was crowded with the don’s acolytes. Monkish-looking young men with close-shaven heads wearing black turtle-necks huddled with their notebooks around the master, while others lounged on the rug at his feet. It felt very exclusive—and, with its clotted jargon, willfully difficult. Under such influences I wrote, for part of my finals, an extended feminist critique of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which, appropriately enough, clogged a friend’s printer, like a lump of undigested food.
GEORGE Eliot visited Oxford for the first time in May 1870. She and Lewes traveled up from London by train in the morning, then had lunch with their hosts, Mark Pattison, the Rector of Lincoln College, and his wife, Emily Francis Pattison. Afterward they took a walk through the city—which, Eliot wrote in her journal, “on this first view was rather disappointing to me.”