Marital Realism: Beauty and Pettiness inMiddlemarch

The Lydgates have bought too much furniture and plateware and do not know how to pay for it. All their problems eventuate from this remarkably tame, all too common origin of domestic debt, a version of being house-poor. He broaches the topic over tea with hidden dread. She, sensing the unpleasantness, turns a head to look away. Wedded misery in George Eliot's Middlemarch does not mean spectacular incidents—adultery, abuse, sexual fallenness, or the like. It means subtle, ordinary provocation, underlain by mundane disappointment and mistrust. This is as much true for the Lydgates as for the novel's other main couple, the Casaubons. Middlemarch presents us with nonflorid unhappiness, readable within its own legendary realism.This essay argues, indeed, that a primary grounding of Middlemarch's realism lies in scenes of marriage, especially prosaically troubled marriage. It infers from Eliot's banal erotics a coherent set of aesthetic choices, the guiding principles of what her realism will and will not do. These guiding principles include, among other things, the genres she opposes, most obviously that of the romance. This generic term means, in the first place, a love story, as in the so-called marriage plot, with its form-defining path to the conclusion of blissful wedlock. Secondarily, that love-centric form is linked to the broader generic category: the romance as a general flight of fancy, enabled by emotionally punctuated, temporally or tropologically exotic elements.1 It will come as little surprise that Eliot's realism rejects the romance's imaginative views, including ideal views of love. But that distinction between realism and idealism is not my point here. Nor does “aesthetics” here have the casual semantic value it often does in discussions of realism to mean simply a mode of writing. Rather, I mean to conjure the specialized questions of aesthetics as such: questions about sense apprehension and the formal dynamic of the art experience.2 Eliot is an aesthetic philosopher, one exceptionally attentive to form, along with its perceptual and affective (sensual as well as emotional) impact. Moreover, she is attentive to judgments of beauty. She is interested in how those judgments operate both within the text and in the reader's interaction with her work. Middlemarch's aesthetics is substantially comparative—the novel displays Eliot's belief in realism's sheer superiority as an art form. For her, it lords over other art forms, other genres, other tastes. The novel is self-conscious, sometimes archly so, in making this case.Realism is especially superior, she implies, in privileging interiority, in a quite literal way. It is again self-evident that Eliot prioritized character over plot; she is one of our best-known psychological realists. But what is fascinating about Middlemarch is its handling of interiority as a perceptual, in-the-world phenomenon, as if it had a shape. This is more than psychological realism. Rather, the novel makes psychology a matter of form and sense impression. Characters' very thoughts and emotions are subject to being jostled, measured, obstructed, viewed, and not viewed. They are vital, dynamically positioned figures in an aesthetic landscape.More exactly, Eliot's focus on interiority is combinatory, in that it is best realized in scenes of character interconnection or relationality. This is why marriage, especially troubled marriage, is so prominent in all her fiction. In Middlemarch in particular, with its great social web, the married couple is the most interestingly fraught connection because it is the smallest, most psychologically charged picture of the self's necessarily lived interaction with others. Scholarly discussions of fraught social relationality in Eliot almost always come back to ethics. The word sympathy is common in these discussions.3 The present reading, though, concentrates not on ethics but on interiority as form, in the oddly literalized way Eliot handles it. It notices the innerness, as well as the outerness, of fictional selves and the spatiality of those selves as they see and encounter one another. One of the things I am trying to do is shift our attention to relationality in Eliot from a regime of ethics to a regime of looking and sensing. When we read Middlemarch's men and women in this way, we perceive them as subject to phenomena of access, along with coordinates of both space and time. We become newly aware of how the novel is trying to make us feel and evaluate through its form.If dismissing Eliot's ethics and tracking her as an aesthete seems flawed, that may be because it seems wrong to view her writing as nonpurposive in the Kantian sense. How could she possibly care disinterestedly about beauty, or expect her reader to, when her fiction is famously interested in weighing how to balance egoism with social-mindedness? On a broader level, viewing Eliot aesthetically may also seem flawed because of how high realism, of which she is often taken as a standard bearer, is usually periodized: as morally bent and sometimes outright didactic. In this schema, it will take a historical break, around the start of the twentieth century, to transform art away from earnestness into an experience for its own sake, alive to medium, form, and sense. But Eliot's interest in the phenomenon of the ordinary encounter—in what it looks and feels like, both within the text and to its audience—mashes up such demarcations, hinting at their inadequacy.Realism has a multiplicity and longevity with which we have yet to reckon fully. This is especially true when it comes to statements about its sociality or people interacting in verisimilar worlds. Realism's common association, especially vis-à-vis the Victorians, with tendentious social ideology—as in that emphasis on a marriage plot veering tidily toward a bourgeois familial conclusion—rushes over its formal texture, along with the affective impact of its relational dynamics. This essay is an experiment in stepping outside the normal, ill-fitting boxes of literary history and not reading Eliot's social realism ideologically—not locating a didactic morality within it.4 It reads instead for character feeling inseparably with space and time, in part by tracking Middlemarch's unusually self-aware statements about verisimilar art. As I will unfold, realist relationality in this novel adheres to an aesthetics of the petty, in a specific sense that comprises both human relations and dimensional form. This aesthetics makes person-to-person contact subject to sense perception, and it takes the marital encounter as exemplary. Looking closely at Middlemarch's couples gives us fresh ways of perceiving densely empeopled fictional environments, including their difficulty or discord.Early in Middlemarch, the narrator describes the moment when Lydgate, as a child, happened on the subject of anatomy and developed an immediate passion for it. The intrusive narrator notes that we do not talk much about this kind of passion, the vocational one. And then comes this snarky aside about the passions we do talk about all the time: “We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's ‘makdom and her fairnesse,’ never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings . . . ?” (144). Here, as often in Middlemarch—for example, in the well-known “but why always Dorothea?” passage—Eliot is self-consciously aware of her own fiction making. In this case, specifically, she is adversarially aware of literature's repetitive narrative patterns: the plots we tell over and over, to a wearying degree, featuring the same stock figures of the fair maiden and her lover. This commentary, shoehorned into the exposition about Lydgate's scientific education, is awkwardly placed, and it seems all the more so for its derisive tone—that jab at the love story's excessive poetry and stupidity. As such, it comes off as an urgent, partisan statement of authorial values.Eliot overtly demeans the erotic romance. (That reference to a poetic troubadour tradition is especially significant, I will suggest later.) But more covert instances of Eliot's literarily principled opposition to the romance as such are dispersed throughout her novel. The most evident of these is Rosamond's prefab narrative fantasy of Lydgate. Upon his arrival in town, delighted by his nonnative, non-Middlemarch origins, she creates a “little future”: “Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind. . . . And a stranger was absolutely necessary to Rosamond's social romance, which had always turned on a lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher. . . . And here was Mr Lydgate suddenly corresponding to her ideal” (117–18). The narrator's meshing of Lydgate with the hero washed up on shore, clinging to a raft implies a capacious generic category. Not only has Rosamond internalized the love story romance (Flint 263–64); it is continuous in her mind's lore with the seafaring romance: both stories thrill and carry the reader away through sensational events revolving around a stranger-hero (the stranger factor, or distance, is also important, as we will see). Of course, Eliot's ultimate gambit is that Rosamond's fantasy will be nothing like her eventual relationship with Lydgate. That will be a tedious tale of the daily drip-drip of financial woes and the boredom of small-town life.While Rosamond craves a full, thrillingly punctuated narrative, even in Eliot's own time her readers well knew to expect a narrative oriented around psychology, to the detriment of plot. As Robert Laing, a reviewer of Middlemarch, proclaimed, “[Eliot] does not write . . . for the sake of the story”; instead, she shows a “love for her characters which induces her to follow them through the weariness of their lives.”5 Laing contrasts her with Walter Scott, who aims “to fascinate, to transport his reader,” always including exciting events—some “freak of fortune, . . . some fear of fate.” But Eliot, he says, “has none of Walter Scott's passion for . . . his ‘occupation as a romancer.’” In Middlemarch, “[t]here has been no hero, there has been no romance” (Laing 361–62).Interestingly, Laing (like many critics today) adjudicates the character-versus-plot polarity on the generic ground of the romance: Eliot's favoring of the one over the other goes hand in hand with her rejection of that genre. But even more significant is what Laing says when he gives a description of how Eliot's character-orientedness works. Specifically, he uses a then-significant but now undernoticed term: analysis. This would become common parlance in later nineteenth-century reviews. It was a label for novelists' minute examination of motives, thoughts, and feelings—in short, psychological realism (Graham 102–7). Laing notes that Middlemarch shows a “stringency of analysis,” especially of Lydgate and Dorothea (346). He was not the only one to call Eliot's mode analytic; others also noticed her great attraction to “inner life” (Graham 103, 110). Analysis was a loaded term. The image evoked was, indeed, very strongly of life—a vital, physiological self who seems really alive and who is being probed, even intrusively, by the author. Reviewers reinforced that idea of biological life by oscillating between the term analysis and the terms vivisection and dissection, which describe cutting into live or recently live creatures.6This concept of analysis is useful for appreciating Eliot's idea of character, even apart from a familiar scientific discursive reading of her work. In formal terms, rather, analysis intimates Eliot's understanding of character as, unlikely as it may seem, a physical object. It intimates her understanding of characters as objects with interiority, in a spatial sense. For what do those figures—analysis and vivisection—suggest but a cutting into? To cut into character imaginatively is to experience its exterior and, correlatively, to accentuate its interior—as something to be uncovered. In later Victorian novel reviews, the term analysis would become a byword for authorial obsession with probing or penetrating inner personality so as to expose it utterly, to lay bare what was not obviously externalized through action. It was code, then, for an almost physicalist intrusion. Another reviewer, for example, using a related anatomical metaphor, declared a dullness in the fictional person who is “analysed and ‘introspected,’ till there is nothing new to be done with him or her either as an écorché, or with the skin on, or with clothes on the skin.”7 Character is again penetrable beyond an exterior: an écorché is an anatomical model of the body that strips away the skin, revealing the muscle beneath.Such metaphors—vivisecting, flaying, exposing—emphasize interiority as a thing with dimension: as three-dimensional. In calling Eliot's method analytic, what her reviewers were picking up on was her insistence on interiority as interiority, or as inside—a quite formally provocative concept when you think about it. Further, they were picking up on her depiction of this interiority as a problem for characters within the storyworld itself. That is, Middlemarch is hyperattentive to the outlines or boundaries of interiority, as these boundaries are perceived—and perceived as obstructive—by other characters. The reason that the narrator probes characters so ruthlessly is that so much of their innerness remains hidden, bounded, within the plotted sociality of the Middlemarch world. And nowhere is this hiddenness more apparent than in the novel's scenes of marriage. In its extraordinarily tight sociality, the bond of marriage exaggerates characters' status as objects in relation to (outside) one another. As such, it illuminates the problem of mutual psychological nonaccess. Ironically, moreover, this problem occurs in the very context that stock love stories promise as offering the highest degree of access, an apotheosis of emotional union.Thus arise many moments in the novel of what I think of as frictional relationality. These are scenes in which characters run up against each other's outlined selves, their separate, individually motivated personhood, and then feel frustration.8 We see this happening abundantly with Rosamond and Lydgate in their many scenes of irritated, unspoken bitterness at their disparate life goals—his professional ambition versus her genteel aspirations. This is also the situation of the Casaubons. In their case, Eliot particularly emphasizes the spatiality of character: how encountering someone else's mind can feel like encountering obduracy.9 The impression of another's mind is an affective experience of a kind of shaped-ness. For instance, about Dorothea, the narrator describes her coming to know, drearily—as an “idea” felt, the narrator says, with “the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects”—that Casaubon “had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference” (211). The following passage, too, is remarkable for its depiction both of this couple's spatial distinctness and of Dorothea's vexation because of it. Casaubon, depressed about his failing health but of course silent about this feeling, has just rebuffed one of Dorothea's kind gestures with an “unresponsive hardness” (425). Now Dorothea has returned to her room—filled, the narrator reports, with “anger.” She wonders aloud: “What have I done—what am I—that he should treat me so? He never knows what is in my mind—he never cares.” . . .[S]he saw her own and her husband's solitude—how they walked apart so that she was obliged to survey him. . . . Now she said bitterly, “It is his fault, not mine.” In the jar of her whole being, Pity was overthrown. . . . And what, exactly, was he?—She was able enough to estimate him—she who waited on his glances with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison, it only hidden that she be enough to him. In such a as some women to is such a as some women to Dorothea is really even On that I to the of again in to it. It may be to estimate Dorothea's here as a in her for with it may be to read it as an experience of in the sense that has in his for the relational often looking at marriage in as a that the other's can be and with own Dorothea's to Casaubon for It is a an about the It is much more mundane and not at Dorothea is not in or about innerness, does she even care to what it. She is in the very moment is to look at though, it is only a even by the Dorothea has and Eliot and even us to pay attention to that In an reading, has that Middlemarch's realism is an aesthetics attentive to form and and that it is in its characters feel readers feel it with their minute affective which perceptual that by noticed and that for that very reason the sense of lived in the physical world. I would suggest that the of this experience characters' what they are feeling is not quite but as this sense is most for Eliot in scenes of character especially very as a it is For her that there is a between aesthetics and characters feel the of their and this is a of their of the whole But this necessary to our attention to sense and form, in that it a the novel of affective a of and and like Dorothea's with are so many social moments in Middlemarch that one to that Eliot was more interested in and for their own sake than in the of characters from to feeling of from one experience to another. Eliot was by of which not a will or in concept of the the of including the of the being who between love and Eliot's view of in this way what means in her For Eliot, interiority is but only because is a it is as to as they and in the world. That is, interiority is a self than a of at feel like a How this of have up with Eliot's of art in their common grounding in a was so interested in plots of marriage because she being most and formally and when the social or means a marital The comes from the that gives a of of not just but also all the Eliot's marital is in a of as by in her of and For in is a and a of dynamic moreover, its and on one a to be by the other and, on the other a of much more than in the sense of or rather, it is a of and even and morality are simply the of at a as a we can Eliot her realism on and its and especially in with its daily experience of the ordinary with each other as physical and marriage in Middlemarch makes character most through those moments of The comes from the of the of a thoughts, and in a way that can best be as The novel this is here not just a it is even more in its sense of or life is of such In that about was able enough to estimate him—she who waited on his glances with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison, it only hidden that she be enough to is at an and a Dorothea that her self is to become enough to a the same time, her feeling like is both and in to like the by not or morally as is the feeling in an yet significant because it is a that things Dorothea is at yet the moment has of the narrator's great as he on calling who had the to be a and and so to take his among the our is to in his and as the part of his and especially in those to the of his he seems to his to the and with us in all the of his But lived when the were time, like is by our when were and the in the We must not his and if we so, it is that our would be and as if from a in a emphasis an degree, Eliot's narrator creates a with through judgments in of and time. is an He is a with who the story from and to a like the he Moreover, he is of the in a his own he is to The Middlemarch by the those and is always aware of how the too the to the narrator's about her own mode of on things his nothing but a but do things my with such Middlemarch is in in a way that but also ethics. Eliot's it to the more her and aesthetic This is especially true in the of the dynamic of the couple in love of marriage us to to even the and and even the realism us to a certain of reading and, with to a certain that and we can see the value Eliot character, including its with dimensional character into the it. I called it but it is more like because it space and inseparably from time. and feeling around for its this character the storyworld in a way for the time, a over and (like Dorothea's All of this is not so for the of a plot. It is especially to plots that on and romance the which in the Middlemarch was the novel that in the plot of and which both and are we to do with this of high which to character, it from a self into an of a I would that Middlemarch gestures toward such but to at their and that Eliot the best to her within scenes of These generic operate as an or The in this some for through excessive plot, Eliot then the so to through the of some much emotional This and the reader's of ordinary with all its relational realism, in this way, Eliot's authorial toward the of character as it moment to in space and for that story It is that when Eliot its to a she does so by for the only time in the novel to a story, life with The novel glances at how his will his emotional of her husband's goes and in her She time to to her her . . . new had on her husband's and on his of This moment in figures her almost literal of her and her husband's mutual “It was in the the and his her the to her and see him is the of the of a the couple a for fear of what really lies in each other's The very of their their separate, from the which would have their mutual . . . She could not much is only and and he not am interiority is about more than and It is about the way those ordinary like that of through a the self's in space and The sensational is to the common of at first an must be into the The description of her of this is Middlemarch's most her she knows she will it to to her and his and of his I will and