GEORGE ELIOT (LADY EVANS):
“MIDDLEMARCH. A study of provincial life”
Any writer who begins the first chapter with such a simple and charming phrase must
be able to write, at least, one
marvelous novel:
“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty
which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”
And after eight-hundred and
thirty-eight pages (yes, 838…), one has to conclude that, indeed, the authoress
did accomplish the task. Middlemarch. A
study of provincial life, published between 1871-72 by the pen-name of
George Eliot, belonging to May Ann (Marian) Evans (*1819-†1880), whom, after reading her novels, I took
the decision to call henceforth only “Lady Evans”.
Already as a young woman, Lady
Evans fascinated the intellectuals of London, in the main thanks to her
translations, and her initial work as an editor and critic. By her early 20s
she had a solid grounding in Greek and Latin, as well as German, having
translated David Friedrich Strauss, The
Life of Jesus (1846), “Das Leben Jesus, kritisch bearbeitet” (first edition
1835), later Ludwig Feuerbach The
Essence of Christianity (1854, “Das Wesen des Christentums” (first edition
1841). In 1851 she met George Henry Lewes (1817-1878), with whom she started
living together, although Lewes was a married man, and could not divorce. A
long trip to Germany in 1854 allows them to live almost like a legal married
couple, but the trip also introduces her to la crème de la crème of
German cultural life. It is usually assumed that Lewes convinced her, she
should do “some literature of her own”.
Cover: detail from a salted paper print from a calotype negative of the
statuette of La Venus d’Arles by William Henry Fox Talbot, c. 1840s.
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The guidance for my voyage through
the opus of Lady Evans, which
began in 2017, rested chiefly on a good Londoner friend of mine,
ANGLORVM LINGVA LITTERARVM PERITVS, mostly active at and around the British
Library, whom I know since the end of the 1980s. The Londoner peritvs suggested, to begin
with:
“I
had already connected you in one respect with George Eliot because her time in
Berlin was so important to her writing at the crucial early stage. I expect you
know about her elopement with George Lewes which took them first to Berlin and
to Weimar where they were received by List and his Polish wife Caroline.
Lewes
himself was her guide to German literature (as he also to her reading of
Shakespeare), and he supplied her with a number of recent publications by German
or Swiss German writers who were experimenting in the genre of the Dorfgeschichte-
the village story.
I
won't name specific writers or works here but simply advise you that when you
read The Mill on the
Floss (1860) and Silas
Marner (1861) (my recommendations here) you must be aware that to a
significant degree the characters, the descriptions, and even the complexities
of the plots have all being borrowed from her reading- some French some Polish but
mostly German writers.
To
ensure that her early novels had authenticity for the English reader (and John
Blackwood was the key figure here), G H and Mary Ann Evans (her real name) made
extended travels into specific parts of England in the summer months to
discover locations, and breathe the true English air.”
About a week after the email of the
Londoner peritvs, I answered
as follows:
“Dear...
I
have just finished a first reading of The
Mill on the Floss. Graciously written, a delightful and intelligent humour,
especially with regard to Latin, a mastery of dialect again, like Thomas Hardy
later – and yet, getting to about one third of the novel I was asking myself:
“Where on earth is this Lady taking us?” Up to there, it all looked to me like
a perhaps more spiritually elevated female version of Mark Twain (*1835-†1910),
ex ante. I had been enjoying to the utmost his Huckleberry Finn
(1884), last year, in the original American text. Then comes the “family ruin”,
and the whole world is turned upside down. The book as well. A rule, perhaps,
for coming young writers: Nothing better than a full-blown tragedy, including
the cacophony of casseroles and silvery being taken away by the bailiffs, to
“tense” the narrative, to wake us up and await anxiously the coming events.
A
female Bildungsroman, a genre she was fully aware of, begins to take
shape, taking the upper hand on the marktwainian Dorfgeschichte
she was advancing before. Her portrayal of the inner changes in Maggie is
extremely well done. No young man of some taste and moral elevation will fail
to fall in love with her (including myself…). “
Shortly afterwards, the Londoner peritvs answered:
“I
too fell in love with Maggie when I first read it- very young and well before I
had learned that literature is an art, and that its effects can be contrived-
our emotions manipulated.”
After more than 150 years, the writing of Lady Evans
is still capable of stirring up deep emotions in grown-up male. And many
others.
We then went to read Silas Marner, to which we hope to come back much later on in this
blog.
It would be absurd to attempt to present herewith even
half-a-résumé of what not few people consider to be one of the finest English
novels of all times. Middlemarch is
a fictitious universe created to portrait, and to de-construct in detail
“provincial life”, as it might have been sometime between the late 1820s and
early 1830s, somewhere in the English Midland (with a brief interlude in Rome,
Italy). There are many political and social events boiling up in the
background, including the arrival of the early railways, improvements in the
medical science, and key political reforms, like the 1832 Reform Act, which
introduced major changes in the electoral system in England and Wales.
Yet it is the portrayal of the inner turbulences and
aspirations of the key characters, and the way they interrelate in that
provincial milieu which conforms the backbone of the novel, a realistic one,
perhaps also a historical novel, above all a tratactus on the psychology of male and females, from the point of
view of a woman, Lady Evans, who
combines classy humour, biting irony (not always scenting of malice), and acute
debunking of the hidden motives of human beings, either well-off, or struggling
somewhere in the social ladder.
Let us concentrate on the figure of Dorothea Brooke:
“Her hand and wrist were so
finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style those in which
the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her
statute and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments,
which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine
quotation from the Bible...”
Dorothea does not want the follow the expected traditional
role of a woman at that time, marry a rich gentleman, breed children, and learn
to be satisfied with that. She aspires to a high status of knowledge, wisdom
and artistic realization. She desperately wants to find someone who would help
her to improve her Latin and grant her the basics of Ancient Greek.
Against the advice of her sister Celia‒perhaps not as
clever as Dorothea, yet more perceptive, and mistrustful of logorrhea‒she falls
into a feverish infatuation with the clergyman Casaubon, much older than her:
“Dorothea was altogether
captivated (…) Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies’ school
literature: here was a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile complete
knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who united the
glories of doctor and saint.”
Thus ensued marriage, “a disastrous
one”, as it would start to become evident during the voyage des noces in
Italy,
Yet it could well have been the case
that Mr. Casaubon was not only incapable of satisfying Dorothea’s durst for a
higher intellect rooted on the Ancient Classics. Perhaps there was another
level, at which this “disillusion” took a concrete shape.
It is the beginning of Chapter 28,
which begins with the arrival of the newly-wed, from their honeymoon, Mr. and
Mrs. Casaubon, back to England, “in the
middle of January. A light snow was falling...” In the first twenty-six lines
the words “white, brightness, snow”, and related, are repeated about fifteen times.
In the middle of line 18:
“...there was a red life in her lips, her throat had a breathing whiteness
above the different white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about
her neck and cling down her blue-grey pelisse with a tenderness gathered from
her own, a sentient commingled innocence which kept its loveliness
against the crystalline purity of the out-door snow.”
Censorship was then very binding, in
particular with regard to explicit, and also implicit, references to intimate
intercourse, or just simple caresses.
Much more so, if it referred to a clergyman. It would take decades for
those restrictions to be lifted, gradually and hesitantly. Even in 1940, in the
black-and-white film version of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, “the
clergyman Mr. Collins” disappeared, to give place to an anodyne and
professionally undefined character, as censors would not have accepted such an
ironic portrayal of a God’s servant.
Is then the authoress using the
recurrence of “whiteness” in a liaison with “purity” and “innocence” to
indicate, that the marriage as such was not properly consummated, neither in Italy, nor in England, as required by religion,
law and social norms?”
The London peritvs was, at first, sceptical regarding my interpretation,
attributing it perhaps to this humble scribbler having put on his
“French-Spanish” spectacles, while reading those particular pages:
“But
this is England and it (or rather she), is George Eliot. This accumulation
of colour adjectives and nouns is a favoured technique. The design is to
intensify everything: we understand Dorothea's intensity through this
re-iteration of remarks re her dress, her skin and the elements in the world
through her window.
That's how I would explain it (inexpertly). I can however refer you to a whole
chapter devoted to this chapter in a “Companion to George Eliot”, 2013. The
author is a prof of English at John Hopkins. - Andrew H. Miller.
This will give you a better idea of how the higher criticism treats Eliot's
prose and the technical terms it uses- intimation, attention, etc., metonymic.
Your reading is, however, perhaps the more interesting‒it
suggests how a French or Spanish reader might understand what was being said, or
implied.
Miller suggests that it is this very compounding of images, this intensifying,
which elevates Eliot to the highest plane of achievement in English novel
writing of her era.”
Well may that be the case. Yet we
cannot but remain curious about “too much of a coincidence” in the words chosen
in those lines.
An example of the richness of the
text, of the many layers behind the surface of letters of words, which, at
times goes by, acquires new dimensions, unleashes hidden codes, demands a new
reading.
Lady Evans was no doubt one of the most
remarkable British femmes de lettres of the 19th century. She
constructed dialogues capable of enticing any reader, and possessed a breath-taking
ability to portray, in few lines, the facade and the inner core of the characters:
“The remark was taken up by Mr. Chichley, a middle-aged bachelor and
coursing celebrity, who had a complexion something like an Easter egg, a few
hairs carefully arranged, and a carriage implying the consciousness of a
distinguished appearance. “
Or the mother of the Rev. Camden
Farebrother, a no-nonsense, down-to-earth Protestant lady, who knew her
catechism, convinced that beyond the Prayer-book there was nothing to be
learnt, and no need to change opinion (“If you change once, why not twenty
times?”):
“My mother is like old George the Third”, said the vicar, “she objects
to metaphysics.”
George Eliot. A replica by François d’Albert Durade, oil on canvas, 1850-1886, based
on a work of 1850.
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Let us just celebrate Lady Evans,
her unique parcours, as an independent woman in a society which did not
tolerate such a deviance, as a talented writer, as an acute gazer and
crystalliser through words of the world surrounding her. Quintessentially
English, yes, perhaps, but also very much opened to what Germany and Italy had
to offer then.
Above all, true to herself, to her
dreams and feelings. As stated in the poem which epigraphs Chapter 56:
“How happy is she born and taught,
That serveth not another’s
will?
Whose armour is her honest thought,
And simple truth her only skill?
This woman is freed from servile
hands
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall:
Lady of herself, though not of
lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all.”
