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Middlemarch - CaB Book Club 1

Started by Smeraldina Rima, October 08, 2017, 09:42:59 PM

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Quote from: Large Noise on October 11, 2017, 02:47:50 PM
I was wondering about Dorothea's preoccupation with building cottages for the tenants. As I understand it, one of the effects of the industrial revolution was that, for the first time, land became more valuable for what you could build on it rather than what you could grow on it. So is Dorothea being purely kind-hearted here, or is there an element long-term economic self-interest in her charity?

Dorothea's plans for the cottages aren't rooted in material self-interest, but nor is she being simply kind.
Through her reading she's become aware of socially progressive ideas, and I think there might be an element of enthusiastically keeping up with current intellectual trends, albeit trends that have positive consequences-  In her conversation with James about the cottages in chapter III, she raves about a book by an architect/planner Loudon, and thinks about a German priest and social reformer, Oberlin. 

And in her masochistic outburst to James "I think we deserve to be beaten out of our beautiful houses with a scourge of small cords-all of us who let tenants live in such sties as we see around us", I think you can see different sides of her character struggling with each other. On the one hand, you can hear the self-flagellating religious fanatic, on the other hand you can also hear someone who is actually quite perceptive, who has noticed social problems that her peers are unaware of.

Quote from: pancreas on October 12, 2017, 12:16:03 PM
I'm very concerned that the moral of this story is going to be that women should all be like Celia, emotionally intelligent, artistic if they like, but leave all the scholarship and abstract intelligence to the men.

I think it's fair to say that almost every opportunity to contrast Celia and Dorothea in Book I does seem to excessively favour Celia's anti-intellectual common-sense approach. But I think the stuff about the cottages runs counter to that- Dorothea seems, potentially, better than all of them, male and female,  in these scenes. She knows useful and socially important things the other characters don't.
And, as Talualah has clarified above (thank you),  we also have a presumably female narrator who is really much more in the intellectual than the anti-intellectual camp. And omniscient.

pancreas

I assume a 'grilled bone' for breakfast is grilled bone marrow. Whatever it is, I now want grilled bone for my breakfast as well. But then I could eat bone marrow all fucking day long. Best to take the Fergus Henderson approach and smear it on toast with parsley capers and salt. Glorious. Oh yes, and potted beef. I'll have that too.

Interesting to find a Smiths lyric at the end of the first book. I know that some of us are catching up this week but now would be a good time for most people to add further or final comments on the first part. You can also make readalong style comments on Book II. Old and Young this week.

Quote from: Howj Begg on October 12, 2017, 01:01:24 PM
I read Midlemarch last year. It's a shame as I would've like to do this readalong.

Feel free to join in from memory.

chocolate teapot

I need to hurry up and finish Book I, I'm on chapter 7 at the minute.

My feeling at the end of the first part was that the opening line (which has several echoes modifying the theme of virtues thrown into relief) was a key to those twelve chapters. I found the characters' weaknesses relatable right across the board. But they only seem to have one big one each, which is dispiriting.

pancreas - you might want to look into 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists'. I read that the essay was written around the start of Eliot's career as a novelist and Charlotte Bronte (Currer Bell) was among the writers excepted from the essay's criticisms of certain unhelpful novels by women:

QuoteNo 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.

There's a short summary of the essay here: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/silly-novels-by-lady-novelists-essay-by-george-eliot
And the whole essay is here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28289/28289-h/28289-h.htm#page178

I'm not sure I found the women had much more of the kind of freedom you described than the men, or that I minded the clockwork impression. The characters with most about them from the first book seemed to me to be Fred and Mary.

pancreas

Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on October 17, 2017, 12:52:44 AM
My feeling at the end of the first part was that the opening line (which has several echoes modifying the theme of virtues thrown into relief) was a key to those twelve chapters. I found the characters' weaknesses relatable right across the board. But they only seem to have one big one each, which is dispiriting.

pancreas - you might want to look into 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists'. I read that the essay was written around the start of Eliot's career as a novelist and Charlotte Bronte (Currer Bell) was among the writers excepted from the essay's criticisms of certain unhelpful novels by women:

There's a short summary of the essay here: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/silly-novels-by-lady-novelists-essay-by-george-eliot
And the whole essay is here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28289/28289-h/28289-h.htm#page178

I'm not sure I found the women had much more of the kind of freedom you described than the men, or that I minded the clockwork impression. The characters with most about them from the first book seemed to me to be Fred and Mary.

I might read that. It's certainly grown on me over the first part. I agree Fred and Mary do have something to them, and Fred is certainly involved in the plot rather than being scenery. One thing that seems true about Eliot's characters thus far---as opposed say to Dickens'---is that they have counterbalances to their weaknesses. No-one seems to be wholly evil---again, thus far. She actually works all this through when she describes Mary, who is plain and boring and unrefined etc., but takes pains to explain how she's faultlessly honest. Eliot seems actively engaged in rehabilitating the characters at the same time as exposing them. It does show a certain generosity, which I like.

Anyway, I'm sticking with it.

Janie Jones

I have a question, please.
Does Dorothea actually kiss Casaubon's shoes? The sentence in Chapter 5 reads, '...as, for example, in the present case of throwing herself, metaphorically speaking, at Mr Casaubon's feet and kissing his unfashionable shoe ties...' So this didn't actually happen, did it? But he had just kissed her 'candid brow.' I know what 'metaphorically' means but does it apply to the action of her getting down there to his horrible old shoes or is the whole thing a metaphor and she didn't actually go near his feet? Please can someone explain?

I will be unable to ever watch 'the skin of [a learned older man's] bald head moving about,' without smiling at Celia's revulsion.

Quote from: Janie Jones on October 17, 2017, 08:14:42 PM
I have a question, please.
Does Dorothea actually kiss Casaubon's shoes? The sentence in Chapter 5 reads, '...as, for example, in the present case of throwing herself, metaphorically speaking, at Mr Casaubon's feet and kissing his unfashionable shoe ties...' So this didn't actually happen, did it? But he had just kissed her 'candid brow.' I know what 'metaphorically' means but does it apply to the action of her getting down there to his horrible old shoes or is the whole thing a metaphor and she didn't actually go near his feet? Please can someone explain?


Given the context of Dorothea's behaviour immediately before,  I'm sure it's all just a metaphor and she didn't kiss his shoes.  But I agree that the sentence is strange-  it reads like she metaphorically got down to the floor but then literally kissed his shoes. Which would only be possible if her lips were over a metre in length.

I assumed they were over a metre in length.

Still staying with Book 1 topics a bit, I've been wondering about the original readership. Middlemarch was published in 1870 but is set about forty years earlier, so it's analogous to someone writing a book now about the Winter of Discontent, punk, rise of Thatcher etc. In Book 1 there are a few very specific references to politics that date it precisely to 1829/1830 for those that want to look it up, e.g. "Mr. Peel's conduct on the late Catholic Question"in chapter I, but I wonder if there is other less political stuff, in there that would have obviously signified to the first reader that it was set in the past.

Quote from: pancreas on October 17, 2017, 01:49:00 AM
Eliot seems actively engaged in rehabilitating the characters at the same time as exposing them. It does show a certain generosity, which I like.

The dialogue "quoted" at the beginning of Chapter XIII echoes that generosity you are talking about. That bit would seem saccharine were it not for that one word "unread" in the last line.

Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on October 17, 2017, 12:52:44 AM

I'm not sure I found the women had much more of the kind of freedom you described than the men, or that I minded the clockwork impression.

The "clockwork" aspect that Smeraldina Rima and Pancreas both mentioned is what gives the novel its philosophical aspect, the feeling that it's a novel about conflicting ideas, that the choice between James and Casaubon for example in Book 1 is a choice between different ways of life.
Bunyan gets quoted later on, and his Christian allegories like "Pilgrim's Progress" are full of chacters called stuff like "Hopeful" and "Ignorance" who obviously don't shake of the attributes they are introduced with.

In the annotations to my copy, there's an interesting point about the choice Lydgate makes in Chapter X: he's interested in Doro-thea, "the gift of the gods" and he's attracted to Rosa-mund, "the flower of the earth".

DukeDeMondo

Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on October 16, 2017, 03:13:58 AM
Interesting to find a Smiths lyric at the end of the first book.

Indeed. In fact the young fella it was referring to - assuming we're thinking of the same thing - has struck me as a bit of a proto-Moz throughout.

Jesus Christ, Chapter 20 left me absolutely fucking reeling. That is something, that. I've been awed plenty by the thing - and also, it must be said, perplexed of occasion - but I wasn't expecting to come across anything that visceral. I was reading from behind a pillow. Scared to run my hand across the page in case I cut the fucking finger off myself. Fuck sake. Like watching someone with a soldering iron at someone's eye. 

Also, poor old Farebrother. Robbed.

Quote from: Astronaut Omens on October 19, 2017, 05:47:58 PM
Still staying with Book 1 topics a bit, I've been wondering about the original readership. Middlemarch was published in 1870 but is set about forty years earlier, so it's analogous to someone writing a book now about the Winter of Discontent, punk, rise of Thatcher etc. In Book 1 there are a few very specific references to politics that date it precisely to 1829/1830 for those that want to look it up, e.g. "Mr. Peel's conduct on the late Catholic Question"in chapter I, but I wonder if there is other less political stuff, in there that would have obviously signified to the first reader that it was set in the past.

I found this John Mullan article useful as an overview of some of the relevant history: https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/middlemarch-reform-and-change

One thing that article doesn't mention is the emergence of railways in the 1840s, something which A.O.J Cockshut (fnar) draws attention to when he's looking at 'the general characteristics of this distant and compact society of the provincial town'. Cockshut points out that class differences were taken for granted - prior to the reform act - licensing people to behave inappropriately to their class, as in Mrs Cadwallader's interactions with the farmers and labourers in chapter 6. He similarly says that 'carelessness about small sums of money is essential [to Lydgate's] traditional gentlemanly way of life'. That carelessness reminds me of one of the examples of free indirect speech in the first chapter, when the Catholic Question comes up: 'if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would inherit Mr Brooke's estate, presumably worth about three thousand a year...' When I first read that presumption I was trying to get a handle on the narrator, 'drenched in irony' as Talulah wrote. One interesting thing about the narrator is that the free indirect speech often - not so much there - seems to caricature the characters more than any of the other descriptions of them, assuming we read the opinions as theirs and not the narrators when it seems roughly signposted that we should. But some of the opinions distanced from the narrator might be better taken as those not of the specific characters 'in thought' but of a free indirect speech which lends itself to the general conventions of the recent past. There might be something similar with the conveyed ambition that Dorothea should certainly marry. The exclamation marks add to the impression of ironically holding up standards that the reader is expected to scrutinise feeling a few decades wiser and these could bundle in some more radical ideas with the norms that have more clearly altered.

Thanks for pointing out the mund/thea dichotomy. To comment on the subjects of the novel's philosophical clockwork and the competition of the different types - and to explain an earlier comment about the opening line of throwing into relief seeming so important - I found that there was intriguing space for emotional encounters to change the course of lives in accidental reverse mechanisms. Most of the virtues that come to light are defined and exaggerated against relieving backgrounds, often of personal displeasure or irritation:

Dorothea seems to like Casaubon not only because she is set up to by nature but especially because Sir James upsets her at the right time. She then overrates the value of his precision because it opposes Mr Brooke's annoyingly vague mind. But later, at the melancholy side of the house, Casaubon 'has no bloom that could be thrown into relief by that background' and there Celia overrates Sir James's common sense thanks to her own irritation at Casaubon: he 'talked so agreeably, always about things which had common-sense in them, and not about learning!' Dorothea thinks she dislikes 'exactly' men and enjoys Casaubon disagreeing with her, until it concerns something she is already passionate about at which point Casaubon and Sir James both come into new lights. In the twelfth chapter, Lydgate's expectation of a 'disagreeable routine' and his 'disbelief in Middlemarch charms made a doubly effective background to this vision of Rosamond' which echoes the pattern at the beginning. The narrator also remarks that even the hypothetical greatest man who probably does not exist is vulnerable 'to unfavourable reflections... in various small mirrors'. Here the interesting thing to me was not that subjective characters reorient ethical values in a field of relativism, but that the characters establish these precarious virtues through reactive displeasure, always reaching their ethics via aesthetic rebounds. The confusion of the two and the theme of beauty thrown into relief by poor dress also bear on Dorothea's problems with her painful catching sight of the really flattering advantages of her modesty and her later enthusiasm for making the 'life of poverty beautiful' in the style of Oberlin.

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on October 19, 2017, 08:06:43 PM
Indeed. In fact the young fella it was referring to - assuming we're thinking of the same thing - has struck me as a bit of a proto-Moz throughout.

I think we are: 'To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular.'

I need to get on with a lot of "Old and Young" over the weekend.

selectivememory

Finished the second part ("Old and Young") earlier today. These are just rough notes that I made at different points. They're not very refined, but I thought I'd just get them down for the sake of contributing. I'm very much enjoying the book and the conversation in this thread and I think this was an excellent choice for the inaugural CaB Book Club.


I liked the bits about Lydgate and Rosamond's impressions/expectations of each other. Particularly about how she might have given more weight of meaning to certain parts of his behaviour than she would other men, because she's specifically looking for it/desiring it from him. At the same time, while she has already decided she wants to marry him (mostly down to her perception of him being of a higher birth than any other of her suitors), and he is somewhat charmed by her, I liked the narrator pointing out that both are much less concerned with who the other person is, than with what they represent to one another, and what impressions they have. There doesn't seem to be any indication, from either of them, that they want to know anything deeper about the other, and I like that here - as I've noticed coming up quite a bit so far in this book, including in the later chapters concerning Dorothea, Casaubon and Ladislaw - Eliot draws attention to how these characters are so wrapped up in their own ideas of what these other people are like that they almost aren't able to conceive of the object of their thoughts as an independent centre of consciousness as realised and complex as their own.

I identified something I like about the prose style, which is the way Eliot can often give a long-winded explanation of something, which is at the same time incredibly precise in the use of language, so that it feels like she says exactly what it is that she wants to say. I read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre earlier this year, and I felt something similar about how both of those books were written. I guess part of it might be just the general mode of expression in English authors in the 19th Century. I've not read a great deal of English Lit from that period though, so this is probably a quite superficial observation; and of course, these were all exceptionally talented writers, so it might not have been that common.

Felt a bit disappointed in Lydgate that he went against his mate Farebrother in the vote, and I was annoyed that he was called out about his allegiance to Bulstrode before he'd even had a chance to place it, because I think that strengthened his resolve to vote for Tate. That said, I thought that chapter in particular was great in how it showed all the pressures and weird social complexities he's inviting into his life (which are a by-product of his general pursuit of greatness, but nevertheless are things he's invited), and his frustration at being forced into making choices that he resents having to take a side on. Simply put, he cannot be as neutral as he'd like in the life that he's chosen.

In the later chapters I enjoyed the focus again on Dorothea, and her general encroaching despair at her situation (nicely summed up by Ladislaw in their final conversation in Rome before they left), as she starts to see Casaubon for who he really is outside of her impressions of him. I also really liked seeing Ladislaw's character open up a bit. It was nice to see Dorothea's naivety from his point of view, and how it endeared her to him, as though she's been presented as being quite studious and thoughtful, she is very sheltered really in a lot of ways.

I also liked their discussion of the worth of art, and Dorothea's concern that art does no material good to the lots of most people in the world is revealing, but I do wonder if she was just using that as a defence because of her own difficulty in understanding and appreciating art. I feel Ladislaw is one of the most perceptive characters we've spent any significant amount of time with so far.

This is all by-the-by, but I loved the following quote, from Ladislaw during that discussion, and I wish I'd read it a couple of days earlier because it sums up a point I was very clumsily trying to make to friend of mine (about something else entirely, but the point stands) and I just think it captures the idea incredibly succinctly.

"Of course there is always a great deal of poor work: the rarer things want that soil to grow in."

Janie Jones

Quote from: selectivememory on October 20, 2017, 07:56:06 PM


I identified something I like about the prose style, which is the way Eliot can often give a long-winded explanation of something, which is at the same time incredibly precise in the use of language, so that it feels like she says exactly what it is that she wants to say. I read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre earlier this year, and I felt something similar about how both of those books were written. I guess part of it might be just the general mode of expression in English authors in the 19th Century. I've not read a great deal of English Lit from that period though, so this is probably a quite superficial observation; and of course, these were all exceptionally talented writers, so it might not have been that common.


I was interested to read this. Everyone will remember from GCSE English, the instruction to 'show, not tell' in writing. CaB shibboleth H P Lovecraft, writing in the 20th century, gets a lot of stick for telling us things are 'eldritch' 'terrifying' 'sinister' etc instead of letting us feel that for ourselves by showing us the characteristics of the crawling chaos or whatever that make is so evil and unsettling.

But GE tells us stuff all the time. In Chapter 21, she writes, 'I do not understand you,' said Dorothea, startled and anxious. And it's a good job she does tell us how D is feeling because she's done fuck all to show us that she's startled and anxious at this point. It's lazy writing.

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on October 19, 2017, 08:06:43 PM

Jesus Christ, Chapter 20 left me absolutely fucking reeling. That is something, that. I've been awed plenty by the thing - and also, it must be said, perplexed of occasion - but I wasn't expecting to come across anything that visceral. I was reading from behind a pillow. Scared to run my hand across the page in case I cut the fucking finger off myself. Fuck sake. Like watching someone with a soldering iron at someone's eye. 


I envy you that reaction. I dislike the God's Eye narrator, it adds nothing IMO to have these first person witterings stinking the story up. Starting the chapter, '... I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly,' like someone announcing a regrettable delay to the 08.15 to Fenchurch Street, well it just made me snigger and I couldn't feel anything for the suffering of D thereafter.

selectivememory

Quote from: Janie Jones on October 21, 2017, 11:24:17 AM
Everyone will remember from GCSE English, the instruction to 'show, not tell' in writing. CaB shibboleth H P Lovecraft, writing in the 20th century, gets a lot of stick for telling us things are 'eldritch' 'terrifying' 'sinister' etc instead of letting us feel that for ourselves by showing us the characteristics of the crawling chaos or whatever that make is so evil and unsettling.

But GE tells us stuff all the time. In Chapter 21, she writes, 'I do not understand you,' said Dorothea, startled and anxious. And it's a good job she does tell us how D is feeling because she's done fuck all to show us that she's startled and anxious at this point. It's lazy writing.

Yeah, I wouldn't disagree that there's been a lot of "telling", although I don't think that's always a bad thing. I should probably look for an example of what I was talking about (maybe I'll post a quote the next time I see something that seems to fit), but I think that when she manages to cover an idea with such breadth, and in such a penetrating way, I'm quite susceptible to it. It's basically the difference between something like "she felt sad" (and no doubt, that bit you highlight is pretty lazy) and an in-depth explanation of a complex psychological state, even if both could be strictly called "telling" rather than "showing".

This week we're reading Book III: Waiting for Death.

I enjoyed chapter 17 of the second Book set in the Farebrother parsonage, with Mrs Farebrother's distrust of metaphysical and ethical hinterlands, her cookery book analogy, the tea, the tobacco and Mr Farebrother's drawers full of blue-bottles and moths. It had a more colourful sense of place than the rest of the book, like a Dickensian chapter among the others: not only the atmosphere from small things but an invitation to sympathise with Farebrother not Bulstrode and Tyke as minor sentimental heroes and villains in a novel without them in principle. Mrs Farebrother seems to signpost that sort of interruption in opposition to the narrator's objective by rejecting the pursuit of deeper understanding.

I hope we haven't seen the last of Adolf Naumann 'the good-natured painter'.

Thinking of the period of time between the writing and setting of the novel, it's strange that going the other way there's only half a century between Middlemarch and expressionism, The Wasteland and Ulysses; about the same time between us and Gravity's Rainbow or punk rock.

selectivememory

This from the end of Chapter 28 made me laugh, as it sums up Celia so well:

"Only I was afraid you would be getting so learned," said Celia, regarding Mr. Casaubon's learning as a kind of damp which might in due time saturate a neighboring body.

pancreas

Just coming to the end of Old and Young---I'm a bit behind. She is certainly laying it on thick with Dorothea's divinity. 'Angel', 'ordinary phrases... not applicable to her' for two examples of a whole chapterful of them. And of course she gets to model for the Santa Maria. It's not actually as endearing as I think she thinks it is.

I think in those cases the narrator is inhabiting Will Ladislaw's perspective and thoughts with free indirect speech.

QuoteThere was a new light, but still a mysterious light, for Will in Dorothea's last words. The question how she had come to accept Mr. Casaubon—which he had dismissed when he first saw her by saying that she must be disagreeable in spite of appearances—was not now to be answered on any such short and easy method. Whatever else she might be, she was not disagreeable. She was not coldly clever and indirectly satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling. She was an angel beguiled. It would be a unique delight to wait and watch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly and ingenuously. The Aeolian harp again came into his mind.

...

I will not dwell on Naumann's jokes at the expense of Mr. Casaubon that evening, or on his dithyrambs about Dorothea's charm, in all which Will joined, but with a difference. No sooner did Naumann mention any detail of Dorothea's beauty, than Will got exasperated at his presumption: there was grossness in his choice of the most ordinary words, and what business had he to talk of her lips? She was not a woman to be spoken of as other women were. Will could not say just what he thought, but he became irritable. And yet, when after some resistance he had consented to take the Casaubons to his friend's studio, he had been allured by the gratification of his pride in being the person who could grant Naumann such an opportunity of studying her loveliness—or rather her divineness, for the ordinary phrases which might apply to mere bodily prettiness were not applicable to her. (Certainly all Tipton and its neighborhood, as well as Dorothea herself, would have been surprised at her beauty being made so much of. In that part of the world Miss Brooke had been only a "fine young woman.")

I think we're supposed to see Will Ladislaw rather than the narrator or George Eliot getting caught up in those divine impressions of Dorothea.

Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on October 23, 2017, 11:34:05 PM

I think we're supposed to see Will Ladislaw rather than the narrator or George Eliot getting caught up in those divine impressions of Dorothea.
I agree, but in that case, maybe Eliot is guilty of laying it on a bit thick about Ladislaw?

Anyway, I really like that scene in chapter 22 where Naumann and Ladislaw are joking quoted above for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Ladislaw's ethereal view of Dorothea contrasts very neatly with Lydgate's empirical, physical attitude towards Rosamund.

Secondly, after the tension of the other Rome chapters,  there's a bit of a release in the idea that Naumann's poems/ songs are presumably obscene. All the way through 20-22 anything explicit about sexuality has been dodged, but that has given the text a very weird and unique intensity. The passages at the start of chapter 20 about Dorothea's overwhelming encounter with the art in Rome would be fraught (and great) enough if they were only about a Puritan girl's startled response to Catholic painters, but they are also a stand-in for something else- the horrible thing a girl who has lead a sheltered life discovered on her honeymoon to a much older man.

And what did she discover? Casaubon's lack of enthusiasm about his engagement to Dorothea in chapter 10 could be read, in part, as a sign of a lack of interest in sex. Is he impotent? Is his failure to actually complete an academic work a mirror of that? Or is going to bed with him just a repulsive experience?

In his essay "Eros and Idiom", George Steiner singles out the same line from the end of Chapter 28 that Selectivememory  picked up on above, while talking about sexual failure and revulsion throughout the book: considered that way, the idea of Casaubon's learning as having "a kind of damp which might in due time saturate a neighbouring body" really is horrible!

selectivememory

I've finished Book Three, so here's a few notes just off the top of my head before I move on:

Other than Mary, it was hard to have much sympathy for anyone in the last few chapters of "Waiting for Death". All the vultures circling Featherstone were pretty loathsome, and his playing idiotic games with the two wills made him seem like a malicious old prick (which backfired hilariously in his last moments when he relied on the one person around him with any sort of integrity to help him carry out his final plan). Do have some sympathy with Fred in general, but even he was only hanging around because of Featherstone's money and to be near Mary.

Enjoyed the introduction of the incredibly pompous Mr. Borthrop Trumbull (who I believe is taking part in VERSUS this year). I think maybe Eliot's contempt for this character was a bit more apparent than in other cases earlier on. Maybe contempt is too strong a word, because he doesn't seem to be an unpleasant man, but she seemed to take a lot of pleasure in describing all his physical affectations and his conceitedness. I liked this line, my reading of which is that he's the kind of person who will often interpret a subtle insult as a compliment:

If anybody had observed that Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, being an auctioneer, was bound to know the nature of everything, he would have smiled and trimmed himself silently with the sense that he came pretty near that.


Had to laugh at Lydgate stumbling into an engagement to Rosamond, although at this point, I'm not sure if it'll be as disastrous as Dorothea's marriage. I laughed even more when Mr. Brooke ended up inviting Ladislaw to stay with him when he was supposed to be keeping him at a distance. I'm sure that's going to go down well with everyone. "This is the one thing we didn't want to happen"

And yeah, in general the Dorothea-Casaubon marriage is a bleak state of affairs. Dorothea's still a teenager, isn't she? I do enjoy it though whenever Celia pops up to casually express her revulsion towards Casaubon.

Quote from: Astronaut Omens on October 25, 2017, 12:26:49 PM
I agree, but in that case, maybe Eliot is guilty of laying it on a bit thick about Ladislaw?

I think a similar thing happens when the technique applies to Dorothea's thoughts as in the last part of this adoration: 'Dorothea coloured with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the speaker. Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life, and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could illuminate principle with the widest knowledge a man whose learning almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!'* The narrator seems most liable to caricature the characters at those moments, which is why I try to read some of the statements as thoughts thrown not directly to the characters but to some surrounding feeling of local society, as in the 'And how should Dorothea not marry?' paragraph of the first chapter for example. It reminds me of the narrator's observation of Will Ladislaw 'taking the usual course from detraction to insincere eulogy' in that the kind explanations and defences of the characters are often more sympathetic than the voicings of their thoughts, which sometimes seem to take the piss.

*On that occasion the effect of Dorothea's eventually contrasting views of Casaubon is at stake so it might require exaggeration for that purpose.

Thanks for writing about the wider implications of the erotic art in Rome. A lot of that had gone over my head, despite having come to the book prepared with an idea that Casaubon's possible impotence was an important theme. I'll pay more attention to it in "Waiting for Death".

I'm ignoring selectivememory's post for now as you're much further along. I usually get round to the different books at the end of the week when it starts to seem like a bleep test.

Quote from: selectivememory on October 25, 2017, 10:59:58 PM
I've finished Book Three, so here's a few notes just off the top of my head before I move on:

Other than Mary, it was hard to have much sympathy for anyone in the last few chapters of "Waiting for Death". All the vultures circling Featherstone were pretty loathsome, and his playing idiotic games with the two wills made him seem like a malicious old prick (which backfired hilariously in his last moments when he relied on the one person around him with any sort of integrity to help him carry out his final plan).

I didn't understand his plan or the advantage for him with the two wills. Did he intend to decide between two wills at the last minute for fun? Or was he waiting to see how people would influence him at the end? Should we be able to guess what's in the two wills and which one he wanted to destroy?

I really like the way Book III dances between seeing Fred as a selfish, spoilt idiot and a loveable rascal and never quite settles on either view. In chapter 25 Mary is shown to be clear sighted enough about Fred to see that his apologies are worthless,(her line "What does it matter whether I forgive you?" also has resonances with the ideas vs actions theme running throughout the book).
When she then forgives him, it's not that she's a dupe, her pleasure in laughing at his foibles is really   made understandable.
But I found that other things in this section put doubts about her attitude to Fred in my mind. Above all, there is his sister Rosamund's behaviour. Rosamund is painted much less sympathetically than Fred, quite scheming and sinister, but when the narrator says of Rosamund, presumably ironically "she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide", I was struck that Fred and Rosamund are both guilty of leeching, or planning to leech off other people.
There is also the placing of the William Blake at the top of  chapter 25, about two different kinds of  love, one selfless and  the other abusive. This seems like it would have been a better fit for one of the chapters about Rosamund and Lydgate, but I thought putting it here casts Fred's behaviour in a bad light. I liked that this thread was returned to in the last chapter of Book III with Mary thinking about Fred that "he could not enjoy his follies when he was absent".

Mary's enjoying watching the fire and marvelling at it's independent life contrasts with Dorothea's not really noticing the sunbeams at the end of chapter 20. I thought light imagery was also doing something else in this section of the book: Earlier, Naumann imagined Dorothea as "a sort of Christian Antigone".  The scene in where Lydgate and Dorothea go into the"sombre light" in the library with the shutters closed reminded me of the punishment that Antigone is given in Sophocles' play: she is buried alive.

(Incidentally, Naumann's referencing Antigone is in keeping with a large German intellectual interest in that classical myth. Holderlinwrote his own translation of the Greek play, and Hegel references it a lot. As for the German books that Casaubon has failed to read, I'm pretty sure Eliot is basically advertising her own translations of Strauss' Life of Jesus, which depicts Christ as an ordinary, non-supernatural being, and Feuerbach's "The Essence of Christianity", a strident, at times ecstatic atheist book which deals with Christianity in anthropological terms, "explaining" religious symbolism in natural terms- In the closing section, baptism is revealed to be reverence for water, the mystery of the Last Supper is really nothing more than humanity's need for food and drink. By contrast, the British scene which Casaubon is a part of was apparently more given to biblical literalism- apparently in 1848 a Theology exam in Cambridge  contained the question "Give the date of the Deluge", the correct answer being 2348 BC!)

Two other things I liked a lot about part III- the long portrait of Caleb Garth, the industrialist who's no good with money, another great section of the book which is definitely showing not telling but which would not really be possible without acres of showing. (I really don't think it would be possible to write a book about introverted-intellectual people like Dorothea and follow the show-don't-tell rule too closely). And the way the narrators seemingly ironic tone at times allows her to say things which would otherwise seem too blunt-I'm thinking of her saying, re Lydgate: "In half an hour he left the house an engaged man, whose soul was not his own, but the woman's to whom he had bound himself".

Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on October 29, 2017, 11:39:49 PM
I didn't understand his plan or the advantage for him with the two wills. Did he intend to decide between two wills at the last minute for fun? Or was he waiting to see how people would influence him at the end? Should we be able to guess what's in the two wills and which one he wanted to destroy?
Re the last question: Not all of what's in them, just the important bit.

selectivememory

I have been cracking on with this in the last week or so, but I'll save my comments for each book for the end of each week like everyone else.


Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on October 29, 2017, 11:39:49 PM
I didn't understand his plan or the advantage for him with the two wills. Did he intend to decide between two wills at the last minute for fun? Or was he waiting to see how people would influence him at the end? Should we be able to guess what's in the two wills and which one he wanted to destroy?

I thought it was a little bit of waiting to see how people would behave, and a little bit of him just being a vindictive old tosser who enjoys his power games.

Quote from: Astronaut Omens on October 30, 2017, 12:34:29 AM
Above all, there is his sister Rosamund's behaviour. Rosamund is painted much less sympathetically than Fred, quite scheming and sinister, but when the narrator says of Rosamund, presumably ironically "she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide", I was struck that Fred and Rosamund are both guilty of leeching, or planning to leech off other people.

I do quite like Fred still, as he does seem well-meaning even if he is a bit hopeless, and at least up to where I am, he seems to have grown up a bit.

I was surprised when I read your comments above about Rosamond though, as I didn't really pick up on that at all prior to her marriage (there was a certain amount of shallowness I thought was apparent, but I didn't really see her as scheming). But where I'm up to now (about midway through Book Six), she has begun to exhibit exactly that kind of behaviour pretty unambiguously, and has become a lot less sympathetic to me.

Janie Jones

Who's still in then? I think I'm one of the behindmost? I'm nearly at Chapter 38 in book 4.

Something that interests me, not specifically this book but generally in the culture and literature of the period, is what a massive elephant in the room sex must have been when these girls returned from their honeymoons, having been chaperoned to within an inch of their lives beforehand and unlikely to have experienced more than a kiss, if that. Then they're back in Middlemarch, fully deflowered married women. Does GE touch on it at all? I know I couldn't get out of my mind the thought of Dorothea and that fusty old man getting jiggy. The speculation raised by some of you that he's impotent was quite a relief.

Jerzy Bondov

I'm quite behind right now, only just getting to the end of Book 3. I'm enjoying checking in here though. Will try and post something soon.