Recent Criticism of Middlemarch

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.