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I don’t know what it was that drew me towards Middlemarch
NOW, in the middle of writing a difficult book. Maybe because I wanted
to read a difficult book to keep my brain limber, does that ever happen
to you? Do you sometimes want to consume something challenging so it
feels like your brain is doing jumping jacks, flexing in the far corners
of your mind? If you think of your brain in a body, then what is that
body doing, what is that body eating (Netflix? romances? murder
mysteries?) does that body still recall how to read something one way
and interpret it for you so it means something else? (This happens when
you are reading poetry, for example.)
As a novelist, reading is the way I come up with new ideas. Something will set something else off: oh, this scene reminds me of that person I met five years ago. I wonder what would have happened if… Or, interesting,
this book mentions five different perspectives, but this is what is
still missing, I wonder what a book like that would look like. People
ask me a lot, young people I mean, back when I did book tours across
the country (those were fun) “how can I be a writer?” and I say, “Read
more.” And they look slightly disappointed, I don’t know what they are
expecting, maybe a rattled off set of tips: “1. Wake up at 6 am every
morning. 2. Sit in front of [COMPUTER BRAND] and open an empty Word
document. Use the Garamond font (my favourite) and type out the first
sentence.” Actually, knowing our Indian education system, they are
probably expecting that. My first and only art class in primary school
was us copying one picture on to our blank sheets, the person who copied
it best, got the best marks. Of course, this is the tenet of a lot of
art schools: learn to draw realistically before you can break the rules,
but I say pooh to all that. Draw the way you used to draw as a child,
write the way you used to write as a child. Not thinking of who would
see the picture or the poem, just doing it for the delight of it.
But what has all this got to do with Middlemarch?
Plenty. For one thing, as you’re immersed in the book, and I bought a
paperback copy, hefty and hard on the wrists and my stomach on which it
rested, you realise that if George Eliot aka Mary Anne Evans aka Marian,
darling had not written for the sheer joy of it, had not created the kind of novel that she wanted to read, we wouldn’t have this book at all. Middlemarch is, as I put in the thumbnail description of my bookish Instagram: “Pride and Prejudice but with marriages, not weddings and not just rich people, it is Anna Karenina but English pastoral, it is A Suitable Boy but with more ethical lessons tossed in.”
I
did find myself thinking of Jane Austen a lot, it was inevitable, here
was English provincial life, but as I said, Marian took the village of
Middlemarch and explored it from all angles. We are never allowed to
linger on a marriage proposal too long, or follow a happy couple during a
honeymoon.
There are three marriages that occur during the
course of the book (I’m not counting the two that happen in the finale)
and of those, one was between a pompous old man and a very young woman
who wants to do good in the world and feels the only way to do this is
by marrying someone great and helping them, between two extremely
attractive people who have been flirting steadily for a while, and a
side-character marriage of the previously mentioned starry-eyed young
woman’s sister to her rejected suitor.
Of these marriages, our
main characters are all unhappy. Dorothea (who marries the old man)
realises that her husband isn’t as smart as he says he is, nor as wise,
her husband, in turn (and this is Marian’s gift, that she gives us all
these points of view, not condemning or mocking, just holding a mirror
up) realises that marriage really isn’t for him. So the two of them
labour on, and it gets more and more claustrophobic to read about them, I
remember one bit that stood out to me, I’ll paraphrase here: “whenever
he said ‘my love’ he used his coldest tones.”
And while you start
out by rolling your eyes at Dorothea, you are the reader after all, you
are older and wiser and you know how marriages are, by the time you are
in the middle of her unhappy marriage with her, you long to save her as
well. George Eliot keeps describing her as “good,” everyone who comes
in contact with her, seems to feel the same way, and yet you’re not
annoyed by her as you are by other saintly characters in literature.
(One day I will do a whole thing on What Katy Did and how poor
Katy was forced to tamp down her rebellious hoyden nature because of
that prig of a Cousin Helen who taught her to be the soul of the house
and never complain about her backache or whatever. Bah.) Why does
Dorothea not annoy me? I think because Marian/George gets so deeply into
her psyche, you’re not just looking at a paper cut-out of a person,
like saintly people in books so often are, you looking at a real young
woman with ambition and drive. She really wants to change the world for
the better, and she keeps tilting at it, attempting to fix things and
keeps being thwarted by her well-meaning male relatives. In the
beginning, sure, she’s all poses, she’s like, “Oh I like riding too
much, I must give it up” but the genius of Marian is that you are
invited to roll your eyes at her, as much as her younger sister does,
just sitting there, wanting a necklace from their dead mother’s
jewellery box and being snubbed a little in her pleasure.
Mary Anne Evans was born to loving parents, she had loving siblings
also, but she was considered too unattractive to get married, and since
she was pretty smart, her father decided to educate her. Which makes me
think that it was probably better to be born ugly and smart than pretty
and smart, even though I know vanity is strong in all of us, but imagine
being pretty and smart, and you’re dying to be educated, and
read and learn and your fam’s like, “Nah, we’ll just wait for a good man
to take you off our hands.” INFURIATING. Luckily, for Marian, which is
what her family and loved ones called her and which is what I will as
well, she was a homely child, and she made the most of her intelligence
by continuing to read and teaching herself the classics when she was
forced to leave school and look after her father.
After that, she
took the German she had taught herself to read and translated a
controversial text for that time: The Life of Jesus, which brought her
to the attention of the London crowd, and pretty soon, she was the
assistant editor of a magazine, and quickly moved up to the editor’s
role, UNHEARD of for women at that time, especially since it was a
political journal not just household tips or whatever. In fact, if
Marian could be said to have a Fatal Flaw, I think she didn’t like women
very much. I’m basing this on her essay, largely quoted on the internet
in articles about Middlemarch. It was called Silly Novels by Lady Novelists and I’m putting some excerpts here:
[On
their heroines] Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and
her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a
superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well
dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the
Bible in the original tongues.
We
had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned
governesses, because they had no other “ladylike” means of getting their
bread. […] Under these impressions we shrank from criticising a
lady’s novel: her English might be faulty, but we said to ourselves her
motives are irreproachable; her imagination may be uninventive, but
her patience is untiring. Empty writing was excused by an empty
stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by tears.
To
judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an
amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible
qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and
speculative questions.
Okay,
but then we’re sort of side-eyeing Marian, like, come on Marian, why let
the sisterhood down and so on, and then she says:
The
foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being
counterbalanced by any consciousness of the intellectual or moral
derogation implied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the
extremely false impression that to write at all is a proof of
superiority in a woman. On this ground we believe that the average
intellect of women is unfairly represented by the mass of feminine
literature, and that while the few women who write well are very far
above the ordinary intellectual level of their sex, the many women who
write ill are very far below it.
No
sooner does a woman show that she has genius or effective talent, than
she receives the tribute of being moderately praised and severely
criticised. By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman’s talent
is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she
attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if
ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing
point. Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell have been
treated as cavalierly as if they had been men.
So,
you see, she really was on our side after all. And the arguments she
makes her about “silly novels” can be applied to us right now in the
twenty first century, and also to all sexes. Silly novels are a
phenomenon that never actually dies. Today, looking at Indian romance
novels (written primarily by men, how the world has changed) we can see
that the hero is always well-meaning, dashing but emotionally foolish,
the woman is always a peculiar mixture of weak and fragile and yet
preternaturally wise, and the romance is always ill-advised but one
we’re supposed to root for anyway. Meanwhile, I can’t remember the last
Big Debut Fiction Darling that was written by a man. I think it was
Amitabh Bagchi? But that wasn’t debut, no? And women soar ahead.
The other bad marriage in Middlemarch is that of Rosamund,
the mayoral candidate’s daughter with the new doctor in town, Lydgate.
Rosamund is extremely attractive, we’re told about her flaxen hair and
her blue eyes, and we’re also told that she longs to better herself, get
good company round her own table, her father’s friends are too low brow
for her. She’s aware of her beauty and fixates on Lydgate, the new guy,
to rescue her from a lifetime of being a provincial wife. And Lydgate,
by the same measure, although he doesn’t actually want to get married,
falls prey to her blue eyes and helpless face. And then, of course, they
realise that they didn’t really know each other at all before the
wedding. Rosamund is obstinate and sly, Lydgate is in debt and harsh and
easily manipulated. I hated Rosamund as I read her and yet, I loved the
fact that I hated her, if that makes sense. She breathed, she moved,
she thought, this little china doll! I was in her head! To make a
character like that alive like that, what skill.
Of course, as I
write my own book side-by-side, I begin to think of the lessons I’ve
learned from Marian. How to examine a character from a distance, for
example. How to work in thoughts and beliefs, but not in a preachy way,
but as a way to both keep the story going and provide some context.
After all, we do not exist in black holes, so neither should our books.
How to, also, make sure that all your characters have ambition and heart
and complex psychologies of their own, even the supporting ones, so
that they all feel like real people, not just painted extras on a
background. I don’t want to write like Marian, because well, I
worked very hard to develop my own voice, my own style, so I write like
MYSELF and no one else, but I want to take away some lessons from her,
the same way I do with other great writers.
George was always
very popular, by the way, no artistic struggle there to hold up as
inspiration. Her first book was an instant bestseller, and she found
love with a man named George something, whose first name she adopted as
her pseudonym because she loved it so much. (‘Eliot’ because it was a
nice round mouthful of a name.) He was married, so they lived together
for about twenty years before he died, and for a while, everyone was
scandalised, but Queen Victoria was a great fan of Marian’s work so
after a royal visit with the Princess, everyone was like, “Well, ok, if royalty is fine with it then why not?”
After
her George’s death, she married a man twenty years younger than herself
(go Marian!) and went off to Venice on a honeymoon, where this young
fellow jumped out of a window and into a canal (he survived), some
speculate because he didn’t want to have sex with her, but you know, who
knows why he did? Marian was no beauty, sure, but she was a great
woman, and any man would be lucky to have her, and men should stop being
such delicate darlings about these kind of things, and remember that
very young women have been having sex with very old men for centuries
and no one jumps out of windows dramatically.
Anyway, one last
story about Marian: at the height of her fame, she had to have her
living room in London extended, because of the crowds of people who came
to visit her every Sunday evening, when she hosted an apparently
open-to-all party.
I wish you all great success in your writing
careers (or okay, other careers also), and hope at some time in the
future we must all have our living rooms extended to accommodate all our
loving fans.
PS: More Middlemarch? This is a great essay by Rebecca Mead, who turned it into a book.
