Middlemarch

Book One: Miss Brooke

My friend Melissa Poulin and I are reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch together and I am sharing some thoughts on Book One: Miss Brooke.

What (I think) I understand:

Dorothea (Miss Brooke) is supposed to be married to a guy named Sir James, who seems nice enough and also is trying his hardest to woo her. He is interested in everything she says. He genuinely seems to adore her. Dorothea is not interested.

One of the more awkward interactions of the two comes when Sir James gives her a puppy and Dorothea tells him it makes her sad to know there are animals bred only to be pets. “I believe all the petting that is given them does not make them happy,” she tells Sir James. “They are too helpless. Their lives are too frail. A weasel or a mouse that gets its own living is more interesting.”

Clearly she has not met Corby, but I think Dorothea - or Mary Ann Evan aka George Eliot - might be expressing how she feels about her situation. I think she wants to “get [her] own living, which is why she falls for an older, more somber gentleman named Mr. Casaubon.

Dorothea’s family is not happy about her choice of affection because Casaubon is old and pretty dull. Plus, he’s headed for a pastoral role which isn’t terrible at all, except I think Casaubon is Presbyterian, and the Brooke’s are maybe Anglican or Evangelical and this is an issue because let’s face it, we all know how pretentious Presbyterians are. We act like we walked down the mountain holding the ten commandments with Moses. Anyway, it seems like this conflict in denomination is the real issue and not that he’s old and dull.

Dorothea’s uncle, who’s taking care of Dorothea and her sister Celia because their mom died, tries his best to steer Dorothea away from Casaubon but she’ll have none of it. So he gives her a letter Casaubon wrote to Dorothea asking for her hand.

Dorothea accepts and I was happy that she followed what she wanted to do when everyone in her family told her not to marry him. Pages later though, Eliot tells us, “though [Casaubon] had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won delight.”

Is delight meant to be won? That sounds like too much work. It also sounds like a lot of pressure for the person one is assuming to win delight from.

So I’m worried for Dorothea because I don’t know if this is going to go well for her, but I also hope for her because I think she’s one of the heroines of this study of provincial life. I’m wondering if her passion to think and do for herself is an act of resistance to the unsophisticated and restricted outlook that’s been placed upon her.

I think Dorothea wants more than what is expected of her. She tells her sister early on in the book that “there may be good reason for choosing not to do what is very agreeable.” Perhaps this is Eliot’s bit of foreshadowing to an exploration of the consequences - good or bad - of moving toward a different or even broader outlook than the one everyone around you has settled on.

My fascination with Dorothea was solidified at the epigraph in Chapter 3. Eliot quotes a book or poem at the beginning of each chapter. They serve as clues to what will be unpacked in the following pages. Chapters 3 is a quote from Paradise Lost. It’s about Eve.

                                                                            "Eve
The story heard attentive, and was filled
with admiration, and deep muse, to hear
of things so high and strange."

What is Eve’s sin? That she ate the apple or that she listened to a story told by a fallen angel and heard a whispered mysterious possibility - some unnamed thing - and chose to see what it was about?

And even if it was the wrong thing to do, is the rest of the Bible about fixing a woman’s mistake? Or is it about a God who created us to live, whose love does not keep us safe but follows us wherever we go and whatever we do?

“Wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions,” Eliot tells us early on in Chapter 3. “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.”

Maybe Mr. Casaubon is another fallen angel, and this is Dorothea’s commencement into the loops and zig-zags that might lead her where she’s meant to be.

“People may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves,” Dorothea says toward the end of the Book One. “They may seem idle and weak because they are still growing.” I worry Eliot was being deliberately trite or sarcastic when she gave Dorothea those lines, but I felt like Eve in Paradise Lost reading them. Whether they are the apple I’ve been told to stay away from, I don’t care. I’m choosing to take and eat.