We have already seen some of this portraiture in the Middlemarch scene relaying Lydgate’s frustration at the threadlike pressures shaping his decision to replace the town vicar. But the decision at the center of Middlemarch belongs to its heroine, Dorothea Brooke. It is worth mapping out the full spectrum of Dorothea’s choice to demonstrate just how subtle and far-reaching Eliot’s account of the decision truly is. But you could substitute any number of other literary decisions, some of them heroic, some tragic, for this one: Lucien Chardon’s fateful decision to forge his brother-in-law’s signature on three promissory notes near the end of Balzac’s Lost Illusions; the Lambert family agonizing over what to do with their increasingly senile patriarch in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Other narrative forms can also shine light on full-spectrum decision-making: think of Michael Corleone’s choice to murder his brother in The Godfather: Part II, or Walter White’s ultimate endgame in the final season of Breaking Bad. All these narratives have compelling plot twists and vividly rendered characters, but what makes them so striking for our purposes is how accurately they map the multidimensional forces that come to bear on the choice itself. To immerse oneself in these stories is, in a sense, to practice the kind of mapping exercises we require in our own lives.
In the first chapters of Middlemarch, Dorothea makes a staggering mistake, marrying a dour and aging classical scholar named Edward Casaubon, inspired not by any romantic passion for Casaubon himself, but rather by the idea of a grand intellectual collaboration, assisting with his epic quest to discover the “key to all mythologies.” (Dorothea’s youthful earnestness appears to have been based on Eliot’s own temperament as a young adult.) Casaubon turns out to be one of literature’s great duds: as aloof and austere as his marital relations are, his professional work as a scholar proves even more disappointing to Dorothea. She quickly comes to see his grand project as a kind of endless maze, a labyrinth of classical allusions with no underlying pattern to make sense of it all. On their honeymoon in Rome, as her newlywed buoyancy begins to deflate, she meets a young political reformer named Will Ladislaw, a cousin of Casaubon’s with no financial prospects thanks to his mother’s scandalous marriage to a Polish musician. Ladislaw and Dorothea develop a platonic but intense friendship, as Ladislaw’s energy and political ambitions offer a welcome contrast to the intellectual mausoleum of her married life, which only grows more dismal on returning to Casaubon’s large estate in Middlemarch, Lowick Manor. Detecting—correctly, as it happens—the seedlings of a great passion, Casaubon spitefully adds a secret codicil to his will specifically dictating that Dorothea should forfeit his entire estate if she ever marries Will Ladislaw after Casaubon’s death.
By Book Five of Middlemarch—memorably titled “The Dead Hand”—Casaubon has succumbed to a heart condition, and Dorothea learns for the first time of the provision that her late husband has inserted in his will. Eliot takes us inside Dorothea’s shifting consciousness as the news sinks in:
She might have compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs. Everything was changing its aspect: her husband’s conduct, her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them—and yet more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw. Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew. One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did. Then again she was conscious of another change which also made her tremulous; it was a sudden strange yearning of heart towards Will Ladislaw.
In these lines we feel the vertigo of a mind grappling with a radical revision of recent history, a revision that in turn suggests new possibilities for the future. This transformation—“a metamorphosis in which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs”—sets the stage for the decision that will hover over the rest of the novel: whether to obey the dictates of the dead hand or sacrifice her estate—and confirm her late husband’s worst suspicions—by marrying Will Ladislaw.
In the hands of a novelist like Jane Austen, those variables would have been sufficient to drive the narrative forward: Will she follow her heart and run off with Ladislaw, or make the financially smart decision and retain control of Lowick Manor? Framed in those terms, Dorothea’s choice would have effectively been a dual-band decision, a choice between emotion and economics. Instead, Eliot turns Dorothea’s choice into a full-spectrum affair, shaped by threadlike pressures from all the different scales of social experience.
Unlike Austen’s heroines—many of whom have great independence of spirit and intelligence, but no professional ambition—Dorothea has a legitimate career in her sights: overseeing the development of Lowick Manor with a progressive agenda, building what we would now call low-income housing on the property. “I have delightful plans,” she tells her sister. “I should like to take a great deal of land, and drain it, and make a little colony, where everybody should work, and all the work should be done well. I should know every one of the people and be their friend.” Dorothea’s ambitions for Lowick flow out of new intellectual currents that had widened the banks of political opinion in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, specifically the cooperative movement pioneered by the Welsh socialist Robert Owen. When Austen’s characters speak about “improvements” to their estates, at the turn of the century, the changes proposed are almost entirely in the service of making the property more economically efficient by adopting modern agricultural techniques. A generation later, Dorothea has her mind set on improving the lives of her tenants.
Dorothea hires a local estate manager named Caleb Garth to assist her in executing her plan for Lowick. Perhaps the saintliest figure in the book, Garth is rebounding from a failed attempt to become what we would now call a real estate developer, building and leasing out his own properties. When we first meet him, he is scraping by as a land surveyor, snubbed by some of the wealthier families in town who had once been his peers. The prospect of managing the Lowick estate offers a significant opportunity for Garth to get back on sound financial footing. But Dorothea’s need for Garth has other historical roots beyond the ideologies of cooperative movement. The two are also bound together by the most dramatic technological development of the decade:
With this good understanding between them, it was natural that Dorothea asked Mr. Garth to undertake any business connected with the three farms and the numerous tenements attached to Lowick Manor; indeed, his expectation of getting work for two was being fast fulfilled. As he said, “Business breeds.” And one form of business which was beginning to breed just then was the construction of railways. A projected line was to run through Lowick parish where the cattle had hitherto grazed in a peace unbroken by astonishment; and thus it happened that the infant struggles of the railway system entered into the affairs of Caleb Garth, and determined the course of this history with regard to two persons who were dear to him.
The reform era enters into Dorothea’s decision through her attraction to Will Ladislaw as well, who ends up editing a local paper purchased by Dorothea’s uncle, Mr. Brooke, as a vehicle for Brooke’s somewhat muddled reformist ideals. As Dorothea begins to recognize her own talents and passion for progressive politics, Ladislaw becomes an intellectual ally as well as a paramour, and thus adds a further layer to her potential betrayal were she to marry him, given Casaubon’s conservative politics. This slice of the spectrum illustrates yet another reason why hard choices are so challenging: even if Dorothea were to prioritize her political values over all the other conflicting scales, the decision would be perplexing. If she runs off with Ladislaw, she can support his political ambitions, but would lose direct control of her own ambitions to reform and improve Lowick. Which pat
h will in the end lead to more of the social change she wishes to see in the world? The balance sheet between the two scenarios is not easily calculated.
Always in Middlemarch, beneath all the high-minded reforms, economic struggles, and moments of passion and camaraderie, an unrelenting murmur of town gossip can be heard in the background, subtly framing the decisions that confront the main characters, as we saw in Lydgate’s anxiety about appearing to have sold out to Bulstrode in the vote for the new vicar. Despite their platonic history, for Dorothea to marry Ladislaw would be effectively to admit to the Middlemarch community that Casaubon’s suspicions had been correct all along.
At its core, Dorothea’s choice is a simple binary: Should she marry Ladislaw or not? But Eliot allows us to see the rich web of influence and consequence that surrounds that decision. A full-spectrum map of the novel would look something like this:
MIND
(emotional and sexual attraction to Ladislaw; intellectual autonomy)
↓
FAMILY
(potential children; impact on father and sister)
↓
CAREER
(“improving” Lowick)
↓
COMMUNITY
(gossip; impact on the poor of Lowick)
↓
ECONOMY
(relinquishing Casaubon’s fortune)
↓
TECHNOLOGY
(railroad; new agricultural techniques)
↓
HISTORY
(the reform movement; Ladislaw’s political career)
In Middlemarch, each of these different levels plays a defining role in the story. There are great love affairs woven throughout the novel (Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, Dorothea and Will Ladislaw), but those romantic affiliations are only part of the story. Those emotional connections share the stage with the scientific revolutions that propel Lydgate’s research, the coming of the railroad, and the epic political reforms of 1832. Compare Middlemarch to earlier classics from writers like Jane Austen or the Brontës, and the difference is almost immediately apparent. The emotional and familial sphere in, say, Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre is fully developed; we are granted access to the rich psychological inner life of the central characters, though without some of the extravagance of Eliot’s prose. (We see characters making choices, but don’t get ten pages on their internal rumination the way we do at points in Middlemarch.) But the forces at play in those decisions are limited to the upper realm of the scale diagram: the emotional connection between two lovers, and the approval or disapproval of their immediate family and a handful of neighbors. From a modern critical perspective, we can detect larger, historical forces that frame the events of the narrative (the “improvements” of industrialized agriculture in Austen’s time, the off-screen trauma of British colonialism in Jane Eyre), but those agents do not play a conscious role in either the deliberations of the characters or the editorial observations of the author herself. As brilliant and entertaining as Jane Austen’s narratives are, their natural home is the drawing room, or the cotillion. That is the scale at which those stories operate. Middlemarch never lets its reader (or its characters) settle too comfortably into those drawing-room conversations. There is always a larger, bustling world banging on the windows.
MARY ANN’S CHOICE
The weight of public shame and scandal that plays into Dorothea’s decision had direct biographical roots in Eliot’s own experience, in a decision she had wrestled with personally more than two decades before she began writing Middlemarch. In October 1851, Eliot—known then by her real name, Mary Ann Evans—met the writer G. H. Lewes in a bookstore off Piccadilly Circus, a meeting that would set in motion one of the great—if unorthodox—emotional and creative collaborations of the nineteenth century. The relationship faced some formidable hurdles at the outset. Lewes was himself already in a complicated open marriage, and his initial chemistry with Eliot was unpromising. Shortly after the meeting, Eliot mocked Lewes’s appearance in a letter. (According to one of Eliot’s biographers, Lewes was “famously ugly, with wispy light-brown hair, a straggly moustache, pitted skin, a red, wet mouth and a head that looked too large for his small body.”) But over time, a profound bond developed between the two intellectuals. Two years after their first meeting, Eliot wrote to a friend that Lewes “has quite won my liking, in spite of myself.” Lewes would later look back on their courtship and remark in a journal entry from 1859, “To know her was to love her, and since then my life has been a new birth.” By the summer of 1853, Lewes was visiting Eliot during her six-week holiday at St. Leonard’s on the southern coast of England. Sometime during that sojourn, the two appear to have begun contemplating a momentous decision, one that would ultimately scandalize London society—and lay the groundwork for what many consider to be the finest novel ever written in the English language. They began to discuss living together as man and wife, without ever, officially, becoming man and wife.
It was, on the face of it, an impossible choice, thanks to the peculiarities of Victorian mores, in which the lines between what was permissible and what was forbidden were gerrymandered into contortions that largely allowed men exceptional sexual and romantic freedom and severely limited the options of women. Divorce was not legal except in the most extreme of circumstances. If Eliot wanted to become Lewes’s life partner, she would have to surrender all the other aspects of her rich and promising life: the web of relationships she had established among the London intelligentsia, her promising career as a writer and translator. She had spent nearly a decade cementing a reputation as the most brilliant woman in England; now, to make a home with the man she loved, she would have to surrender all of that and become that most misogynistic of Victorian tropes: the fallen woman.
As Eliot contemplated her choice by the seaside in the summer of 1853, it must have seemed as though she faced a crossroads where both paths led, inevitably, to bleak destinations. Either she gave up the love of her life, or she gave up everything else she loved in her life. She could abandon the idea of living with Lewes, or she could renounce her position as a London intellectual, sever ties with her family and friends, and disappear into the hidden shame of the fallen woman.
But in the end, Eliot’s choice, like most decisions of this magnitude, turned out to be a false binary. It was not a forking path after all. It took almost a year to discern it, but eventually Eliot and Lewes managed to find another route out of their impasse. After a six-month trip to the continent, where they gave cohabitation a trial run under the less moralizing eyes of the German and French intellectual elite, they returned to London and concocted an entirely novel solution to the problem of how to live together. Lewes negotiated an arrangement with his wife where she sanctioned Lewes sharing a home with Evans. Evans herself adopted Lewes’s last name, and instructed her friends to address her using the Lewes surname in all their correspondence. (The shared surname helped them get past the suspicious eyes of their landladies.) Evans, over time, developed a rich and genuinely maternal relationship with Lewes’s children. And as her literary ambition shifted toward the novel, she began publishing under the nom de plume “George Eliot,” which kept her public work far from the scandal of her illicit alliance with Lewes.
In the end, they lived together virtually as man and wife for almost twenty-five years, ending with Lewes’s death in 1878. Their actions were met with controversy and disapprobation, to be sure. The partnership with Lewes introduced strains into Eliot’s relationship with her extended family that never fully healed. “I am sure you retain enough friendship and sisterly affection for me to be glad that I should have a kind husband to love me and take care of me,” she wrote to her sister, who responded by cutting off all communication with Eliot. Many of their allies in London’s progressive circles feared that their open immorality would do damage to their shared political causes. But over
time, an unlikely aura of domestic normalcy settled over the couple. Sustained by the relationship, Eliot embarked on one of the great stretches of artistic productivity in modern history. “My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year,” she wrote in 1857, just as that creative stretch was beginning. “I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than any I remember at any former period of my life.”
THE FULL-SPECTRUM NOVEL
Both Mary Ann Evans and her fictional creation Dorothea Brooke confronted decisions that ranged across multiple scales. Mary Ann’s choice originated with emotional and sexual feelings for Lewes, of course, but the ultimate ramifications of the choice involved many other parts of the spectrum: Evans’s professional ambition as a writer and thinker; the politics of her embryonic feminism, carving out a career as an intellectual in a world dominated almost exclusively by men; the potential shame of becoming the subject of tittering gossip in drawing rooms and coffee houses throughout London; the familial ties that would no doubt be sundered by such a scandalous choice. Even mundane economics played into the decision. Evans and Lewes supported themselves with their writing. If they chose to spend the rest of their lives in sin, their livelihoods were in peril, too—Evans’s most of all.
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