Fran Magazine: Issue #64 - The end of Middlemarch May!

Middlemarch May discussion post for Books 7 and 8

Thank you for reading Fran Magazine, a twice-weekly-ish blog that for the past month has focused almost exclusively on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Next month we’ll talk about, like, Taylor Swift (no, really, we will). But for now let’s dig into the end of Eliot’s humanist tome. If you’ve had fun with the discussion posts as a casual reader, consider becoming a subscriber today.

Here’s what you missed on Middlemarch

Vibe check

• Dorothea and Will

  • Married

• Celia and James

  • Married

• Mary and Fred

  • Married

• Rosamond and Lydgate

  • Married — but miserably

• Bulstrode

  • It’s so over for him

• Mr. Raffles

  • Actually dead

So basically everyone figured it out!

At the start of the month, Jake Bittle sent me this meme, which was useful to keep in my back pocket as I read Middlemarch, but by no means, necessary. Did my experience mirror the meme because I’d seen it before I got to the end of the work, or is Eliot’s work so expansive that these feelings become somewhat universal? Yes, is probably the answer to all of it.

But of course “sympathizing with characters” and “liking a work” are two aspects of reading and writing I’ve gone in and out of phases of unlearning over the years. I have a complicated relationship to the nature of “taste.” Does it matter? What is the point? When I think back on my own reading (and other cultural) diets, I often find taste limiting: who knows what I am avoiding based on my own preconcieved notions? In high school English, we spent two months doing an independent reading project from which we got to select our focus from a series of seven books. I can’t remember all of them, but I know I ignored Jane Eyre, Pride & Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights due to some latent internal misogyny. I did not want to be seen reading these books, and I hated considering what they would say about me if I enjoyed them. Instead, I picked up Crime & Punishment, a book I mostly loathed despite its quality. What did I think I was doing or proving in this exercise? I wound up reading all three of those other books in college and enjoying two out of three of them much more (I will never reveal which I can’t stand!!!¹).

I spent 2020 watching the films of Terrence Malick, a filmmaker whose work I was convinced I would not ever enjoy. Again: why I thought this, I am not sure. To be on Tumblr in the early 2010s was to bare witness to an onslaught of Tree of Life GIFs, though despite what Netflix may want you to think, giftsets do not represent quality. I came to Malick first on a date, then again on an edit, years after professing he was not for me, until I watched all of them over the course of a wonderful, strange year. I loved most, if not all, in their own way. I worked chronologically as best I could, but I just couldn’t wait that long to get to A Hidden Life, a film I’d seen the trailer for no less than six times at the Angelika during my first semester of grad school.² I’m not sure what it was about A Hidden Life that compelled me so much: it finally felt like, for all of my Malick hesitance, that this was the one that was really going to be for me.

As mentioned early on in Middlemarch May — and to my own surprise — A Hidden Life takes its title from Middlemarch, the final line, in fact:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts, and that things are not so ill with you or me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.

As if this — Malick, Eliot, all of it — doesn’t make me cry enough already!

For years I thought Malick was defined by a swirling ethereal faith thing. If not God, then God-adjacent, or whatever, only to realize he has been making romances the whole time. So, too, is Eliot, in this sweeping, electrifying way. These are not marriage plots as we’ve come to see them in more overt comedies (not that this is without its humor). The marriages here hinge not only on a series of predictable circumstances but on growth, reflection, development, death, birth. Dorothea could not marry Will without Rosamond; Fred and Marry owe everything to Mr. Farebrother. “Our lives are not our own” — Susan Saranton in the extended Cloud Atlas trailer. I never thought I wouldn’t like Middlemarch; I was just not yet ready to grant it the time.

Okay. More from me in a bit. Lending a few paragraphs to Claire, who has been one the great Middlemarch May commenters and one of the best people to talk books with…

Claire Magazine x Middlemarch May

Yes, it’s me, Claire — writer, Middlemarch Mayor, and diligent FranMag reply-guy. If you know me outside the comments, you may have read my earlier piece on The Eternal Daughter. At the risk of this becoming “my thing,” I’d like to have another conversation with the dead today. First, a personal story.

Serendipity

My Grandpa Sydney died last summer. He was a writer of sorts and literature was his lifelong passion. We frequently read together; he sometimes loaned books to me, but often he just asked what I was reading and picked up a copy, then called me to discuss. It was a lovely, meaningful ritual that I’m proud to say continued to the very end of his life.

Fittingly, when he passed, I inherited his library. Actually, his will only says that I inherited his Shakespeare collection, but ^^sweet little story withstanding^^ I think we can all agree he would have wanted me to take as many books as I could possibly justify in my Brooklyn apartment. This brings us to one day this April when I was helping my dad clean up his place, and I found on his bookshelf… Middlemarch!

Fran had been pitching me hard on Middlemarch May, and finding a heavily annotated copy of Middlemarch felt like a sign. Many of my grandpa’s books also came with fun bonuses wedged inside (usually printed Wikipedia pages on topics such as “Spain”) and Middlemarch had not one but two: a six page stapled character glossary from Sparknotes (dated 2009), and an unfinished essay titled “Inheritance.” Now, I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to use that as a jumping off point for some writing of my own?

Inheritance Games

I could hardly have chosen a better topic for a Middlemarch essay, let alone one about how I inherited not only my grandpa’s books, but his love of literature and his legacy as a writer. And unfinished writing projects, let us be clear, are absolutely on the table for inheritance in Middlemarch. One of the book’s darkest and most fascinating last-will-and-testament-gotchas (and there are so, so many) is the threat of Casaubon making Dorothea continue his thesis after it literally kills him. Dorothea only narrowly avoids this when, on her way to sign up for “grad school,” she finds him dead.

“... she was going to say ‘Yes’ to her doom: she was too weak… Neither law nor the world’s opinion compelled her to this –– only her husband’s nature and her own compassion, only the ideal and not the real yoke of marriage…. If that were weakness, Dorothea was weak.” (481)³

Eliot doesn’t t quite condemn Dorothea for her decision, but reiterates that she is somewhat too good for the world; too self-abasing, too idealistic, and way too serious. In declaring she will finish Casaubon’s project, she is recreating the same mistake that got her married to him in the first place: a contrivance to sacrifice herself for a worldly good that, really, nobody asked for. We’re left with the sense that forcibly inheriting grad school is nonsense only Dorothea would buy.

art by: Nick Konrad

Yet, this is not the last word on legacy. Will Ladislaw (“Will” as in “will” ??) is screwed out of not one but two inheritances. When Bulstrode tries to give the money back, he finds it untouchable due to its sketchy origin (FB Marketplace scams). Will’s situation differs from Dorothea’s in that blood money, while icky, doesn’t come with an ask, doesn’t require that he proverbially extend the life of his icky ancestor. However, the issue still goes much deeper than the unethicality of the money itself:

“It is important to me to have no stain on my birth and connections… You shall keep your ill-gotten money. If I had any fortune of my own, I would willingly pay it to any one who could disprove what you have told me.” (624)

Will is so upset by just the knowledge of the money that he would undergo a third disinheritance to unlearn about it, illustrating that inheritance in Middlemarch, more so than fortune, is about the behaviors and intentions that transcend lifetimes. Perhaps even more so than that, though, inheritance in Middlemarch is about fucking with your relatives, and that’s something we can all get behind. 

I normally hate reading a book with annotations, but this time was special since my grandpa was not here in person to discuss Middlemarch with me, as he surely would’ve loved to. I wish he’d included more personal thoughts in the margins, but his annotations were mostly vocab notes like this one:

He was clearly tickled that “subscribe” here literally meant “written underneath,” unlike today where it just means “subscribe to Fran Magazine.” If you read Middlemarch this month, hell, if you read this entire post, and you’re not subscribed… what more can I say?

Last thoughts from Fran

I regret everything I say about finding the Lydgate/Rosamond meltdown funny: after the week I’ve just had — you may notice that Middlemarch May is arriving on Wednesday, not Monday; some of that is because May ends on a Wednesday, but beyond that… no comment — I found the “Two Temptations” section of Middlemarch almost unreadably stressful.

“It was more bearable to do without tenderness for himself than to see that his own tenderness could make no amends for the lack of other things to her.”

Brutal! As if to pour salt in the wound, consider Rosamond speaking to Dorothea:

“Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. […] I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like am urder, and everything else is gone.”

For crying out loud!!! I found myself wonder if Rosamond’s warning is prophetic, if none of these characters, no matter how in love they are, will be blessed with a happy life. Mercifully, Eliot provides a little epilogue. Where do we stand on little epilogues?

Beyond that I find myself at a relative loss for what else to say about Middlemarch. It has undoubtedly moved and surprised me in ways I could not anticipate, only imagine. It is going to be really crazy to read a 200 page book about this in which a French lady gets attacked by a bear.

Does anyone want to “meet up” (lol) and read Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch at the end of the summer? Sound off below. And thank you to all of the great Middlemarch Mayors for indulging and commenting and chatting and reading. This is a labor to not only read, but to consider with the full breadth of sympathy and love you’ve shown for the work. It has bolstered and amused me to no end. I have a lot of comments to catch up on, and I am so grateful for all of them! What will we all read next May?

1. It’s Wuthering Heights.

2. I was, at that point in time, deep in my “going to the Angelika” era.

3. I am citing from the 2003 Penguin edition.