Summary
I read two very
different critical essays on Middlemarch,
Matthew Rich’s thoughts with the longwinded title, “’Not a Church, but an Individual
Who is His or Her Own Church’: Religion in George Eliot’s Middlemarch”, and Robert B. Heilman’s “’Stealthy Convergence’ in Middlemarch”. Rich explores the role of individualized
religion amongst the characters of Middlemarch,
noting that organized religion, while an assumed component, plays almost no overt
role in the plot. There are plenty of religious figures, clergy and the like,
but we never see them officiating or preaching or attending church, (except
when Ladislaw snuck into Causabon’s church to see Dorothea, where the service
itself played no part). Rich tells us that whatever the formal religion of the
characters (Anglican, primarily), each character operates on prominent personal
religious principle upon which the narrator and the reader are to judge. Caleb
Garth’s “noble form of religion” is “To do a good day’s work and do it well” (Rich
650), and know one has worked honorably. Dorothea has a different
personal religion, the “religion of radiant sympathy” (652). “What do we live
for, “she asks, “if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
(652). Rich also convinces us, amazingly, that Mr. Bulstrode, also has a
personal religion: the facade of religious commitment, one “concerned only with
the empty belief in…ritual or ceremony, not the understanding and practice of
moral teachings” (654). In Bulstrode’s mind, if he looks religious, then he is so,
thus avoiding true accountability.
Heilman’s “Stealthy
Convergence” takes on the artistry Eliot shows in switching from one plot
thread to the next. Instead of clumsy, abrupt transitions, Eliot uses the
novelistic equivalent of panning used in modern film, where the reader’s
attention is slowly transitioned from one set of characters to another by
carefully overlapping conversation, as found in the party scene where we first
meet Lydgate, or matching themes, as when the seemingly abrupt return from the
Lydgate thread to Dorothea’s honeymoon in Rome. Heilman says we are here taken
through parallel themes with “two eager idealists feeling educative blows by
unanticipated crude reality, one in professional, the other in domestic, life”
(Heilman 621), the professional blow being Lydgate pressured to compromise his
morals by voting for Tyke, and the domestic blow being Dorothea’s first inkling
into Causabon’s true nature as an insecure and aloof scholar.
Analysis
I found in Heilman
the only defense of Dorothea’s marriage to Will Ladislaw. All Middlemarch marriages are of opposites,
and theirs is the most interesting of all as a “convergence of the moral and
the aesthetic” (622). Dorothea has a “strong Victorian cast” that emphasizes
duty and selfless service. Ladislaw is a “pure Romantic” (capital R), an “outsider”
without ties, but a strong “sense of honour” (622). To Heilman, then, Ladislaw
and Dorothea complement each other, in the same way that Fred and Mary do, and
even (in a negative way) Lydgate and Rosamond. I see his point, although I can’t
say that, even from this perspective, that Eliot made her case for the marriage.
The other marriages work very well, in a plotting, storytelling sense, for the
marriages either fix character defects or deliciously expose them. With
Ladislaw, this did not happen, and I still come back to the sense of “why him?”
Works
Cited
Eliot, George. Middlemarch: An Authoritative Text,
Backgrounds, Criticism. Ed. Bert G. Hornback 2nd ed. New York: Norton,
2000. Print.
