Middlemarch Book Club: Part Two

Why Dorothea doesn't like Rome.

Or, The Key to All Middlemarch

In Middlemarch Book 1 we met most of the main players, Dorothea and her sister Celia, Tertius Lydgate, Fred and Rosamond Vincy, Mary Garth, Mr. Casaubon and Will Ladislaw.

In Book 2, we’re on tenterhooks to know how Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon is going. As novel readers we're craving easy gratification. We want Fred and Mary having great bants and flirting up a storm. We'd settle (maybe) for Lydgate getting his medical plans up and running in a hot way. Most of all we want a crowd-pleasing resolution of Dorothea’s love-drama.

Eliot doesn’t give us what we want. As Book 2 opens we’re plunged into local politics, surrounding a TLDR / borderline tedious subplot about the local fat-cat financier Nicholas Bulstrode choosing a chaplain for his new fever hospital. 

But as ever, Eliot’s inventiveness and technical daring carry the day.

She hooks us into the fever-hospital chaplain drama by making it clear that Lydgate's career will hinge on having to choose between voting (publicly) for the man he truly respects and the man he doesn't care about, whom Bulstrode favors. 

We know almost nothing about Tyke, Bulstrode’s pick. Eliot keeps him purposefully vague, an NPC (non-player character). But his rival, the Rev. Farebrother, bursts into the story and immediately grabs our sympathy and interest. 

We first see Farebrother at a dinner party, through Lydgate’s eyes. Like Jon Favreau in Swingers, he's the big winner at the gaming tables. The two men become friends, and there's a great scene where they have a drink together, both showing their cards, personally speaking (just to underscore Eliot's gaming metaphor). But Farebrother knows his professional fortunes are in Lydgate’s hands. He takes the high road. Can Lydgate do the same?

This piece of narrative construction concisely reveals so much about these two men, their strengths and weaknesses, pulling us into to their struggles, emotionally. 

Meanwhile we’re appalled to see careless, decadent Fred Vincy letting himself and the lovely Mary Garth down when he fails to repay Mary’s father Caleb a large sum of money. Fred has been irresponsible and selfishly exposed the whole Garth family to hardship. Mary loves Fred, she can't help it, but she's repulsed. It's such an astute depiction of a relationship where two people are attracted, but respect and trust just isn't there.

Eliot’s showing us the depths of characters who in most previous novels would be minor figures, or the butt of satire. Eliot is experimenting with how much of her characters’ dark sides, weaknesses and faults can she reveal, while deepening our attachment to them. 

Not as easy as it looks, as any writer will know.

Only toward the end of Book 2 do we get to see Dorothea on her honeymoon. She’s sobbing her heart out. She's not that into Rome. She's in a top-notch air bnb near the Spanish Steps, she's got "skip the line" tickets to the Vatican and the Colosseum, but she isn't feeling it.

Dorothea doesn’t like Rome because it’s in Rome that she's forced to confront the real nature of her new husband Casaubon. Even more unsettling, she's finding that she has a resistant, non-compliant, stubborn side to her nature she didn't understand before. She can tell, somehow, that she won't find it easy being a docile, obedient wife to an aging pedant. The reality of the bargain she's struck is hitting home. It's not pleasant.

She’s also discovering that this weird, handsome, funny, passionate guy Will Ladislaw is her soul-mate.

What Dorothea's realizing is that her own character is far more complex, contradictory and unharmonious than she thought. She's starting to see her own blindness and hidden selfishness. She's realizing that idealistic visions have dark sides; fantasies turn tragic. To put it in the terms of Roman Baroque art and architecture, she's learning that light and dark, movement and stillness, life and death, are in a constant state of ambiguous play.

She is, in short, discovering the enduring truths contained within Roman classical and Baroque art and culture. She's not observing them neutrally, as the dispassionate scholar Casaubon wishes he were, but as a living, breathing participant in the glorious chaotic mess of real life. 

Middlemarch itself is a Baroque masterpiece, a Sistine Chapel ceiling of human drama.

Notes on the text:

Middlemarch, Book 2, Chapter 20

Tune into the latest episode of our Middlemarch book club for more. Listen here.

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A brilliant point from Beatrice about Dorothea's nickname "Dodo," suggesting we should think of her as an extinct bird, a relic from the past...

Stephanie points us to an alarmingly contemporary passage in which the men of Middlemarch make careless, misogynistic comments about Dorothea, Celia and Rosamond because they think no one is listening. "Ay, to be sure, there should be a little devil in a woman," said Mr. Chichely, whose study of the fair sex seemed to have been detrimental to his theology. "And I like them blond, with a certain gait, and a swan neck."

Nora points out that the seemingly silly Sir James Chettam actually does real social good of the kind Dorothea craves, although she has rejected him as being not up to her level morally and intellectually.