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Trade paperback, 853 pages
Published 2003 (originally 1871-72)
Acquired October 2012
Previously read December 2012
Reread December 2019 |
Middlemarch by George Eliot
In the British climate there is no incompatibility between scientific insight and furnished lodgings: the incompatibility is chiefly between scientific ambition and a wife who objects to that kind of residence. (679)
Middlemarch is
the Victorian scientist novel. If you want a novel about a scientist whose epistemological virtues do not carry over to his personal life, this is it. And if you want a novel about perception, this is it: this novel is about how people perceive other people, how people perceive others’ perceptions, how the novelists perceives people’s perceptions of other’s perceptions. It’s hard to write about, because every idea you have resonates backward and forward through the novel, and soon you’re taking in all 800-plus pages of it in order to make a simple point. The original draft of the
Middlemarch section of my book was 9,000 words (25 pages), which honestly isn’t too bad, except it needed to share a chapter with Kingsley’s
Two Years Ago, and besides: what can you say about Tertius Lydate that hasn’t already been said? There’s so much, and Anne DeWitt’s
Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge UP, 2013) and Ian Duncan’s “George Eliot and the Science of the Human” (
A Companion to George Eliot, 2013) largely reflect the way I see him already. My real interest in
Middlemarch is in Dorothea Brooke, who I would argue is a descendant of
Two Years Ago’s Grace Harvey.
So I reread
Middlemarch last fall in order to revise my chapter. I took over 3,500 words of notes on it, which didn’t bode well for cutting, but as it currently stands, I got the discussion of
Middlemarch down to 7,500 words (18 pages). I did this by cutting material on Lydgate as well as some extended discussions of related issues that weren’t necessary to make my point about Dorothea. So this post here is a reworked version of my cut material, which mostly focuses on attempts to see “systematically”: to come up with all-encompassing theories that manage to account for everything.
Tertius Lydgate, like Tom Thurnall in
Two Years Ago, comes to a rural community with ideas of medical reform and a scientific way of seeing. Unlike Tom, Lydgate has few inclinations toward natural history: Lydgate’s interests lie in human tissues, as he seeks knowledge of the fundamental structure of biology. Lydgate believes that to tackle a problem he must see systematically: “The more he became interested in special questions of disease, such as the nature of fever or fevers, the more keenly he felt the need for that fundamental knowledge of structure” (147). Knowledge of the whole is necessary for the understanding of the parts, because the parts and the whole are interrelated—Lydgate will not be able to carry out reform of medicine as a practice until he has found “the primitive tissue”: “No man, one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its parts – what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the nature of the materials.… Here would be another light, as of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of things, and revising all former explanations” (148). Lydgate’s understanding of his own work is as a form of sight: a light cast into the darkness in order to see what no one else can see. With that vision, he plans to reform the way the medical profession operates, and thus save lives.
In addition to changing the way the science of medicine works, Lydgate will also need to change a social practice: the operation of medical hospitals. He is hopeful that Middlemarch might be the place to make this happen, telling Bulstrode the banker (who funds the hospital), “A fine fever hospital in addition to the old infirmary might be the nucleus of a medical school here, when once we get our medical reforms; and what would do more for medical education than the spread of such schools over the country?” (124). Lydgate sees the village as a space where medical reform can be carried out in microcosm, a model for the potential reform of the nation. If Lydgate can implement his scientific changes to treatment with success at the Middlemarch hospital, he believes—quite ambitiously—that the improvements will spread throughout the nation. Lydgate hopes to systematize medical knowledge as a foundation for national regeneration. Gaining access to the underlying structure of biology will enable this to happen.
Lydgate is a better medical man than the old-fashioned ones who precede him in his town, despite the fact that they are physicians, and he a mere surgeon. (They hold doctorates, whereas he does not, though he is the one hoping to keep science wedded to medical practice.*) He uses a stethoscope to enhance his perceptions—which the narrator assures us “had not become a matter of course in practice at that time” (286)—and he does not overprescribe medicines where they are unnecessary. When he is called in to treat Casaubon, he gives the man a great deal of personal attention, bringing to mind the thoughtfulness of Mr. Gibson in
Wives and Daughters. But Lydgate’s perceptions are inconsistently applied; like Mr. Gibson, he often fails to apply them outside the scientific realm, and like Mr. Gibson, this failing is most potently driven home when he enters into an undesirable marriage.
The whole trajectory of Lydgate’s engagement to Rosamond Vincy is one of mutual misunderstanding, which persists into their marriage. When the two are flirting, Rosamond is angling for a husband, but he takes it as nothing of importance: “there was a delightful interchange of influence in their eyes.… [T]hey flirted; and Lydgate was secure in the belief that they did nothing else. If a man could not love and be wise, surely he could flirt and be wise at the same time?” (268). Despite his observations of Rosamond, Lydgate is fooled by the surface perceptions: because he does not want to be in love again (he had a disastrous love affair in Paris when he was younger, and foreswore romance), he does not perceive that Rosamond desires a romantic relationship. The narrator compares the way the two see each other: Rosamond “had a shaping activity and looked through watchful blue eyes, whereas Lydgate’s lay blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which gets melted without knowing it” (271). The only object he perceives here is his pleasure in the flirtation, and like Mr. Gibson, this results in him drifting into a romantic relationship without fully considering it implications.
For example, during his engagement, Lydgate’s interactions with Rosamond “interfere with the diligent use of spare hours which might serve… to make the great, imminent discovery” (349). Lydgate tells his friend Farebrother, the vicar, that he is hopeful that once he’s married, he will have more time to devote to his science, as all the business of being engaged will be over with: once married, the man of science “has everything at home then” (349). This turns out to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of marriage: Lydgate will have
more to do at home if he wants to maintain a marriage successfully, not less.
Lydgate’s problem is that he is unable to apply his scientific sight to the social. Late in the novel, Lydgate reflects on the difference between him and Rosamond:
His superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he had imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside on every practical question. He had regarded Rosamond’s cleverness as precisely that of the receptive kind which became a woman. He was now beginning to find out what that cleverness was…. No one quicker than Rosamond to see causes and effects which lay within the track of her own tastes and interests… (586)
The difference between Lydgate and Rosamond rests in their abilities to see the minute details of complex structures: there is much that is invisible to Lydgate that Rosamond sees clearly. He thinks he is clever because he can see cellular structure, but society is an order of magnitude more complex than anything he observes, and his scientific skills fail him when he attempts to apply them in the human realm. Lydgate partially becomes aware of this fact near the beginning of
Middlemarch; when he is trying to decide who to vote for as hospital chaplain, he realizes that every possible choice has an infinitude of possible reactions that make it impossible to make a perfect one: “For the first time Lydgate was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity” (180). But this understanding does not stick with him throughout the novel; in his arrogance or naïveté, Lydgate assumes he has the full understanding of both his own marriage and the social situation of Middlemarch when he does not. Lydgate’s difficulties with societal observations allow Eliot to test the concept of systematic sight’s application to human beings: if the man of science cannot observe his community or even his marriage with clarity because the myriad factors that make it up are too much for him to account for, how can he hope to make observations of all society
Lydgate’s difficulties with social observation result in the failure of his attempts at reforms. He never makes his big medical breakthrough, never isolates the primitive tissue. And his inability to observe the complexities of social interaction mean that many in Middlemarch view him with suspicion. Lydgate’s more scientific way of seeing makes him unpopular with the other medical men, who find him arrogant: “They implied he was insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless innovation for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the charlatan” (454). Because Lydgate finds it difficult to navigate the complexities of the social system, he is unable to make friends with those who should be his greatest allies, and instead they set themselves against him, opposing his efforts to change the way medicine is done in Middlemarch. Rumors even circulate that he dissects the bodies of the dead for his experiments, because Lydgate is not sufficiently attentive to the feelings of the family of a deceased patient: “For Lydgate having attended Mrs Goby, who died apparently of a heart-disease not very clearly expressed in the symptoms, too daringly asked leave of her relatives to open the body” (455).
Lydgate is not able to turn his scientific vision upon the social realm with accuracy, and it hurts him in the long run, when the town becomes suspicious that Lydgate may have played a role in the death of Raffles in order to help Bulstrode the banker. It is too easy for Middlemarch to believe Lydgate capable of such a thing because Lydgate has “long been sneered at as making himself subservient to the banker for the sake of working himself into predominance, and discrediting the older members of his profession” (720). Obviously Lydgate is not solely at fault here; the townspeople jump to hasty conclusions based on their preexisting biases. But these mistaken conclusions were aided by Lydgate’s inability to master the complexities of the social situation in Middlemarch, and Lydgate is forced out of the town, his hopes of medical reform dashed. Seeing like a scientist has been for naught; he has not located the primitive tissue he devoted his life’s researches to, his marriage has suffered because he does not know how to communicate with his wife, and his visions of medical reform will never be realized.
It’s not just Lydgate, though.
Middlemarch is full of people trying to scientifically observe and/or systematize human experience, and often failing. Part of the problem is egoism, of sifting out the observer’s own thoughts and position from an observation. The narrator renders this problem of perspective with another visual thought-experiment:
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel… will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against a lighted candle as a centre of illuminations, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion…. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent. (264)
The metaphor employed here compares observing human events to an experiment involving light and glass, and the danger of assuming that one’s position in a system of events is the primary one because one is incapable of removing oneself from the scene. This is a recurrent threat throughout
Middlemarch; the accuracy of characters’ observations is often endangered by what they desire to see.
Middlemarch suggests that despite any commitments to objectivity an observer might have, it is easy to run afoul of believing one’s self to be objective when we are not. No one is at the center of the universe, but it is easy to believe it.
I always kind of struggle with liking Will Ladislaw, but Eliot positions him as a positive alternative to the problems that Lydgate and Casaubon struggle with, and this comes down to his artistic inclinations. Ladislaw can see things in Casaubon and Dorothea that they cannot see in each other. He knows that “Casaubon hated him – he knew that very well; on his first entrance he could discern a bitterness in the mouth and a venom in the glance,” and he also sees Dorothea’s sadness: “he painted to himself what were Dorothea’s inward sorrows” (360). The importance of art for creating sympathy is why in her essay “The Natural History of German Life” (
Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, Penguin, 1990),
Eliot declares that “the unreality of their [peasants’] representations is a grave evil” (110). If we depend on art to be sympathetic, then art must do its best to be accurate. What Eliot ends up suggesting
is an alliance between the novel and science. The distance of science can be combined with the closeness of the novel to make truly useful observations, for a true understanding of character will “check our theories, and direct us in their application” (“Natural History” 111). The novelist is the only one who has the knowledge of the particularity of human character necessary for ensuring that the application of systematic theories to human society is accurate and thus moral.
There is hope for the characters
within the novel, too, which Eliot shows through Dorothea’s actions at the climax of the story. Here, she goes back and re-observes an earlier encounter with Rosamond and Ladislaw with her “vivid sympathetic experience,” which “asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance” (788). She quite literally cannot see the way that she used to. She does not know everything, but she can discern that there are “hidden as well as evident troubles” in the Lydgate marriage (788). At this moment, Dorothea looks outside and sees “involuntary, palpitating life”: a woman with a baby, a shepherd with a dog, the field beyond the entrance gate. Dorothea experiences sympathy in the way that “The Natural History of German Life” calls for all would-be sociologists to do so, and armed in this way, she is able to help Rosamond and Ladislaw.
What she tells Rosamond is based on a misinterpretation of events—but it helps Rosamond anyway and, in fact, it is exactly what Rosamond needed to hear. Through this scene, Eliot suggests that when scientists anchor their observations with sympathy, they can do good, and even if they have misunderstood the situation, their actions can be beneficial to others regardless. Dorothea’s actions here are just the beginning of her finally fulfilling her desire to help change the world, now through her marriage to Ladislaw, which makes sense given what we were told earlier of his strong sympathy. James Scott’s “George Eliot, Positivism, and the Social Vision of
Middlemarch” (
Victorian Studies, vol. 16, Sept. 1972) points out that “her marriage to Ladislaw… is a substantial force for change, promising to break down eventually the restrictive class barriers of the Middlemarch gentry” (173-4). Ladislaw even becomes a reform politician. Dorothea is finally beginning to have an impact in the world, even if it’s not quite the one she always wanted. Systematic reform,
Middlemarch argues, is beyond the capacities of our science to realize. Dorothea’s housing scheme might have been thwarted by her marriage to Ladislaw, but it was probably never going to work anyway. She
is, however, able to make a couple other significant architectural interventions, as I discuss in my book, drawing on Heather Miner’s “Reforming Space: The Architectural Imaginary of
Middlemarch” (
Victorian Review, vol. 38, no. 1, Spring 2012) and Barbara Leckie’s
Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain (U of Pennsylvania P, 2018).
The moment where Dorothea helps Rosamond despite her misunderstanding was foreshadowed all the way back at the beginning of
Middlemarch, where the narrator points out the tendency of young women to interpret facts incorrectly, but then claims that the result is not necessarily bad: “They are not always too grossly deceived; for Sinbad himself may have fallen by good luck on a true description, and wrong reasoning sometimes land poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zig-zags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be” (25). Everyone is but a poor mortal trying to do their best in solving the world’s problems, but if they look around keenly and let the novelist guide their sympathies, they might give some moral benefit to the world, even if it’s not the good they intended, whether they have scientific detachment on their side or not.
On my dissertation, one of my committee members wrote after my discussion of
Middlemarch, “Why moral benefit? On the side of science, one could argue that moral benefits are not a primary but rather a secondary goal of scientific inquiry. Is there something wrongheaded, when viewed from a history of science perspective, about novelists’ torquing the goals and justification of scientific observation into an account of its social benefits? In other words, shouldn’t literature have its own domain, and science its own methods?” I think this might possibly be true in general, but
Middlemarch is a novel about sociology and medicine, two sciences that are supposedly entirely focused on benefiting human beings. Knowledge for its own sake is not what these sciences promise, and those promises are (among many many other things) what
Middlemarch puts to the test.
* Probably I'm just stupid, but British medical titles are often a muddle at best. Irvine Loudon’s “Why Are (Male) Surgeons Still Addressed as Mr?” (British Medical Journal, vol. 231, Dec. 2000) indicates that “[p]hysicians were gentlemen with a university education who dealt with internal diseases, arrived at a diagnosis on the basis of the history and external appearance of the patient, and prescribed in Latin. In theory, but seldom in practice, their supposedly superior knowledge gave them a monopoly over the practice of physic and the authority to supervise the work of surgeons” (1589). Lydgate is a “general practitioner,” also known as a “surgeon-apothecary,” but unlike other surgeon-apothecaries, he does not dispense medicine, viewing it as a conflict of interest. Loudon’s article lays out the distinctions, such as they exist, in full.
