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Marriage in Middlemarch

Maybe it's a sign of a love for gossip that I've been enjoying the peek into people’s marriages in Middlemarch.  Unfortunately - or fortunately for my curiosity, the two Eliot features most prominently are the ones that are failing.

Even if it turns out that he is a genius of a doctor, Lydgate certainly doesn’t seem to be a very good judge of women. First he falls for a black widow of an actress and then Rosamond, who has her own means for sucking the life out of a man.  I’m wondering if she has any redeeming qualities.  Is the case of the Vincys a warning of sorts to parents? If you spoil your children, they’ll either turn out self-absorbed like Fred (who at least is earnest) or selfish and conniving like Rosamond.

While the marriage of Dorothea and Casaubon seemed gloomy from the beginning, I initially thought love existed between Lydgate and Rosamond.  In both cases the couples don’t seem to know their chosen spouses very well.  Although it was aggravating that Dorothea was so blind to Casaubon’s pinched true nature, you have to admire her devotion to her vows and her persistence in trying to make Casaubon happy.  But I can’t say I can think of anyone I’ve ever met who had this kind of relationship. 

On the other hand, the relationship between Rosamond and Lydgate is immediately recognizable.  He fell for her beauty and from her behavior during courtship imagined her the model of femininity. She imagined him to be a potential savior of sorts who would raise her up from her present circumstances.  But then she turns out to be less flexible and docile than he imagined, and he doesn’t live up to her hopes for a more exciting life. It’s almost painful to read about how they destroy their relationship that seemed so promising: he expects her to be obedient; she’s secretive; he believes he knows best and shouldn’t trouble her with the money issues, but he’s irresponsible for buying what he couldn’t afford.  Meanwhile, she seems to have no care for preserving their state. At least he attempts to protect their relationship by trying to keep alive the image of what he loved about her, while she seems determined to tear him down with her secrets and silent treatment. 

It’s hard to imagine that the Lydgates can repair their relationship, unless Rosamond has some kind of conversion experience and recognizes her selfishness, and Lydgate stops treating her like she’s child, even though she acts like one.

Since Casaubon dies, the possibility of a relationship between Will and Dorothea is out there if both parties were willing to throw riches and public opinion to the wind.  But I still don’t think they seem suited to each other.  Even though she’s idealistic, he seems too romantic for her.  Is public opinion right in this case?

Maybe I have lost my sense of romance because I also think Mary Garth should marry Farebrother and not Fred.  Fred seems destined to disappoint her since he can’t seem to get over his love of a good time. Farebrother is so kind and companionable that you can imagine and healthy relationship between him and Mary. 

At least Mary has a good example of marriage in her parents. The Garths seem to be the most happily married couple in Middlemarch.  She recognizes his faults but still loves him for his goodness, and he recognizes her intelligence and good sense. Theirs is the one marriage that seems built on honesty and respect for each other, in addition to being genuinely affectionate.

Ironically, the little glimpses into the Bulstrode’s marriage seem to suggest that they can weather trials.  If Mrs. Bulstrode can still feel compassion and pity for her husband, even though he has deceived her, perhaps they can pull through their downfall.

I’m embarrassed by how little I remember from this book the first time I read it.  Thus, this quote from Robertson Davies on my new “Reading Woman” calendar from my mother-in-law jumped out at me: “A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”  (I know everyone is supposed to use interactive computer calendar apps, but this calendar has great art and good quotes and lots of space for writing stuff to do; it makes me happy.) 

A short study in contrasts

I don't have a well-formed review to write here because I need to focus my brain on getting through the next few days, but I've been thoroughly enjoying Middlemarch, which I started since I didn't order Mortal Love.  I was reading two long books, Middlemarch, and the latest from Ken Follet for the wives club book club.  Follet’s book is nearly 1000 pages, but I skimmed the last 400 in a few hours. I couldn’t/wouldn’t give the book any more time, even though the historical bits about WWI were interesting. All the characteristics of a bestseller: pedestrian language, love affairs galore, predictable characters.  

Meanwhile, Middlemarch is worth savoring. I rarely get more than one or two chapters read a day, but I usually find a corner to bend down every time I read. I was reminded of reading Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, about diagramming sentences, when the author picked several sentences from James Fenimore Cooper to diagram as an example of long unwieldy writing.  She also quoted Mark Twain making fun of Cooper’s effusiveness.  Some of Eliot’s sentences could surely rival or top Cooper’s for length.  But after reading at the fourth grade level (or lower?) in Follet’s book, I was happy for the challenge of Eliot’s vocabulary and structure. (I do, however, find Dorothea’s goodness a little too good. She really didn’t recognize Casaubon’s pinched ways or Ladislaw’s devotion? And she smiles radiantly a few too many times.)

To illustrate the differences, a couple of selections:

From Fall of Giants:

Ethel, daughter of a coal miner and one-time housekeeper to an earl, listens to her father speak at a memorial service: “Ethel was proud of him. This honor acknowledged his status as one of the principal men of the town, a spiritual and political leader. He looked smart, too: Mam had bought him a new black tie, silk, from the Gwyn Evans department store in Merthyr.

He spoke about resurrection and the afterlife, and Ethel’s attention drifted: she had heard it all before. She assumed there was life after death, but she was not sure, and anyway she would find out soon enough.”

From Middlemarch:

Dorothea, like Ethel, turns her thoughts to a man she thinks she loves and admires, her fiance: “Mr. Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking forward to higher initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and blending her dim conceptions of both. It would be  a great mistake to suppose that Dorothea could have cared about any share in Mr. Casaubon’s learning as mere accomplishment; for though opinion in the neighbourhood of Freshitt and Tipton had pronounced her clever, that epithet would not have described her to circles in whose more precise vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing and doing, apart from character. All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually swept along.. . . something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge?”

You’d think that, with all the improvements in education and opportunity, the contemporary writer would outwrite his predecessor. A sad commentary or just a difference in style?

Mortal Love and Italian Shoes

I know almost everyone is elbow deep in turkey preparations for Thanksgiving. At least, not our foreign correspondents, but all of us here in the US. Except I'm not because my Irish sister-in-law has the honor of hosting our extended family for Thanksgiving and she always goes overboard and makes far too much food so I'm probably going to make some rolls and pecan pie in the morning before we head over but otherwise I've been shirking holiday preparations and instead have been hunkering down with books. At least when the kids let me, which honestly isn't very often. Lately I've been longing for those single days when I could spend an entire day in bed with a book and only have to get up to eat. I tried to do that today but it was raining out and the children, seeing me sitting in one place, kept bringing me picture books to read to them. Still, I managed to finish Mortal Love this afternoon by locking myself in the bathroom during the boys' nap time. And now I'm trying to think what I think about it and what I can possibly say. But I thought I'd just jump in and say something to get the ball rolling and see if anyone else wanted to jump in with something that is a bit more substantial.

First, a greater contrast between this and the book I finished immediately prior to it I don't think I can imagine. Italian Shoes (I wrote more about it on my blog and incidentally I'd highly recommend it as a good, quick read that would be worthwhile discussing as a group. I thought there was some real meat to chew on and some interesting themes) is so stark, bleak --Spartan really-- while Mortal Love is so lush and overwrought, with a kind of hothouse quality. Italian Shoes opens with the narrator, a solitary hermit, on an ice-bound island off or Sweden who has had minimal human contact for the past dozen years. The cast of characters is small and the action minimalist. Mortal Love is bewildering in its operatic cast. I often forgot who was who as it shifted from the Victorian to the contemporary, from the coast of Maine to New York from London to Cornwall and back again. It's an interesting study in contrasts both in subject matter and narrative style.

I didn't dislike Mortal Love; but I'm not sure it was the book I wanted to read just now. I spent the first two thirds of the book feeling rather lost and unsure whether I really wanted to continue. I thought it pulled together by the end but am still not sure I'm satisfied by the ending. I didn't think that anything in the narrative really prepared me for the role that Valentine was going to play at the climax. It felt a bit deus ex machina. But maybe I was just being a sloppy reader and missed some major textual flags. That happens sometimes.

For me the novel does raise one interesting question. It posits that human creativity is mainly the result of the fact that we are mortal and finite. If we lived forever like the fairy-folk, it suggests, our drive to create art, music, poetry would disappear. It's not a new idea for me; but as I read it here suddenly it seemed like a false idea. I'm not sure I agree that mortality is the root of creativity. I think that rather it is because we are made in the image and likeness of God and one aspect of that likeness is that we share in God's creativity. I suppose you could argue that the fairy folk being soulless beings are not made in God's image and thus do not share in the divine gift of creativity. But then you're actually arguing that creativity goes along with having an immortal soul not with a finite being. Anyway, the novel's worldview is pretty pagan so I'm not sure I'm being fair by trying to read it with a Catholic sensibility.

One gripe... it kept knocking me out of the narrative because it was so jarring. The word "refractory" kept appearing where I'm pretty sure the author actually meant "refectory" as a room in the big English manor house. I kept wondering what the heck a "refractory room" was and it wasn't meant to be an important detail at all. It wasn't just once or twice and I can't think why the copy editor didn't catch it. More, I'm not even sure from context that the author realized that a "refectory" is a dining room since in one instance the list of rooms included both "refractory" and "dining room".

Ouch.

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

From the Prelude to Middlemarch. As far as I've read. Couldn't find the Elizabeth Hand book at the library, although I knew a girl by that name, so in the meantime...

An Invitation and a Book Suggestion

As we all know, Otepoti resides in the ass-end of the world, while most of us (with some notable exceptions) appear to reside in the Rust Belt. And, as you all know, Otepoti made a memorable trip to my notch of the Rust Belt last spring. Well, guess what? She's coming back.

As some of you know, we recently got our Letter of Approval from China to adopt Jude, who's now nineteen months old; it came, in fact, exactly a year to the day that we first learned about him. And those of you who know my older son know that it would be something of a disaster, and not a little one, for him if I were to go to China for two weeks and leave him behind (which is why I bring him with me on my out-of-town gigs). So my husband will be making this long journey on his own.

But not entirely on his own. Otepoti has offered, with a generosity beyond any generosity I've ever known, to meet up with him in China and bring Jude back with him. And then she'll be hanging out with us again for a couple of weeks at least.

This will be sometime probably in late January - early February. If any of youse (if I may lapse into the Mutterspräche) are free to make a road trip then, you will have another chance to meet our awesome sister in Christ, and, if I can plan it all, to attend Jude's baptism. All are welcome.

On to the book suggestion. It may be a bomb. Is anyone interested in reading Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand? It's a sort of quasi-fantasy that involves time travel, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Robert Graves's White Goddess, and also sex and drugs. Elizabeth Hand an Irishwoman from Yonkers, my former neck of the woods. It may not be interesting to anyone else but me, and that's completely all right, but I thought I'd toss it in.

A Review of Amy Welborn's new Memoir: Wish You Were Here

by Melanie Bettinelli
(I went ahead and turned this comment into a post, because why not?--BD)

I'm trying not to be all gushy and fangirl about Wish You Were Here. Amy's was one of the first ever blogs I read and I've always felt she was sort of a kindred spirit. And I remember reading what she wrote at the time of Michael's death and her blog posts about Sicily so I sort of feel like I'm approaching the book with a very strong predisposition to love it. And maybe there are funny echoes in it for me in that I've never really wanted to go to Sicily very much until I married a man who is half Sicilian and then we discussed it as our dream honeymoon but couldn't actually afford to go. So there is that layer of the emotions from my own marriage weaving throughout.

All that said, I do think its a magical (I've not read Didion's book; but I can already tell you this is completely different) sort of mash up of travel memoir and a very Catholic exploration of grief. She does both genres so well but the way she slips seamlessly from one to the other is sort of breathtaking. (See, I'm gushing.) Just to do a reality check I read a chapter to my sister this evening while we were making dinner. Oh even better than I thought. The prose is lyrical but down to earth. The imagery doesn't beat you over the head but somehow the details of every tourist stop are marshaled so that you are constantly staring death in the face. Most of all what strikes me is how faith informs everything. It doesn't make death and grief easy, doesn't make it go away. Just that it is the medium in which they happen.