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Sherien
read and liked
Elizabeth's
review of Middlemarch (Penguin Classics):
"Oh, my constant companion, the time has come for us to part. How shall I bear it? What will this estrangement do to me? George, please, tell me how can I go on?
I am feeling a little melodramatic. It may be that George Eliot has been my co...more
Oh, my constant companion, the time has come for us to part. How shall I bear it? What will this estrangement do to me? George, please, tell me how can I go on?
I am feeling a little melodramatic. It may be that George Eliot has been my constant companion for two months and now that we are done, I am not sure, really, how to get back my old reading life. Middlemarch is that good, and that bad. I read this book everywhere: five states, four airports, trains, taxis, at home, in hotels, at bars, in museums. I managed twenty pages at a time for weeks. I made all of my friends (goodreads and others) regret I had ever picked it up again. But here I am on the other side and I can, with certainty say that this is a fantastic book, with some of the most ponderous, boring, absurd, and painful passages, particularly when a character decides that he or she must say something, that I have read this year (and that's saying quite a bit considering).
I haven't read anything like it. I was reminded of Wives and Daughters more than once. I think Elizabeth Gaskell had been impressed, just all of us, with this achievement. George Eliot gave us a perfect representation of top several layers of the social strata in a provincial English town in the second quarter of the nineteenth century - that cusp of industrialization that later Victorians loved to return to so often. She gave us the doctor, the rectors, the wealthy and their dependents. She gave us their wives and their enemies (not usually the same thing) and she gave it to us in a detail that was necessary to create a deep understanding of nearly all of them. Celia, introduced to us very early on, disappeared quickly for hundreds of pages, and I regretted her loss the entire time, because, in just that little, early glimpse of her, I had come to enjoy her company so much.
But eight hundred pages of the littleness of everything: the plate, the widow's cap, the crepe, the wagon, the price of paper, and the smocks the field hands wore. Each thing was important. Each item was examined, described, laid by, and woe-be-to-the-reader who did not remember the details five hundred pages on. Added to that, the dialog was sometimes laughable. Here's Dorothea Casaubon:
I am glad you have told me this, Mr. Lydgate. I feel sure I can help a little. I have some money, and I don't know what to do with it -- that is often an uncomfortable thought to me. I am sure I can spare two hundred a-year for a grand purpose like this. How happy you must be, to know things that you feel sure will do great good! I wish I could awake with that knowledge every morning. There seems to be so much trouble taken that one can hardly see the good of!
I know when I feel pressed upon by my own good fortune, I often complain of it to the guy trying to collect money for the homeless. I often go on about how I have sat in my comfortable home and thought that I would like to do something but haven't been clever enough to walk next door to the church and offer some small sum to help where it might do the most good. Am I also so totally stupid as to think that the other person is sure of anything? Who exactly is sure of anything?
Seriously, no one talks like this, not even in the nineteenth century, unless you were a character in a book, and even then, it still sounds awkward. (If you're really looking for awkward nineteenth century dialog, by the way, I recommend Uncle Tom's Cabin without hesitation). Would Lydgate really have stood there, staring at her stupidly while she prattled? But, but, the feeling is true. My god, the woman could write truth. Truth. She knew how to create feeling in her readers. She knew how to show pain, sorrow, regret, love, fear, panic, snobbishness, pettiness, meanness, cheapness, worry, meekness, modesty, arrogance, stupidity, and joyous kindness.
When I finished I read Virginia Woolf's essay on Eliot, published in 1919. Woolf wrote the slightly misquoted comment about the Middlemarch being a book for grown-ups. Here's the text:
But to the reader who holds a large stretch of her early work in view it will become obvious that the mist of recollection gradually withdraws. It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.
Somehow the "imperfections" part doesn't seem to make it onto the dust jackets.
What are these imperfections, you ask?
I am so glad you asked!
Woolf noticed that Eliot had some trouble with her heroines. That while there is greatness in their struggle, their dialog is dull! (Yes, I'm talking so much Woolf because I am so pleased to be supported in my feeling about this book by her). She is very funny about it too, but I feel I cannot, in good conscious, spoil her joke by quoting it to you.
Middlemarch is a brilliant book. I can see everything Eliot is doing there with the small concerns, the importance of money, the class relationships, the local politics, the impact of national agendas such as the voting reform bill, the status of women. What she's doing with the wives and their disillusionment is so smart. The whole thing about is faith and its loss and the struggle to be good, the struggle to be a proper wife to a man one cannot understand and who does not bother to understand you. You can't really consider yourself well read in women's literature without investing in these women.
So to not like the book, to find the prose boring, to see the humor and just be annoyed by it, is really frustrating. I am disappointed in myself as a reader because I can appreciate all these things that she's doing but I am unable to engage in them. I feel like I have failed in a challenge. And I feel like I have failed because I am an undisciplined reader. I flit from one book to another without often having my feelings, ideas, or attention challenged. I don't have to. I can read whatever I want. It is one of the great things of being a modern reader. It is also a shame. This book deserved more than I was capable of giving it.(less)
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Sherien
took the never-ending book quiz.
"a good book!"
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