Middlemarch May, Volume 1

Books 1 and 2 discussion post

Welcome back¹ to Middlemarch May over at Fran Magazine! If you’ve been keeping up with the proposed Middlemarch-in-one-month reading schedule, you’ll have finished or be close to finishing or (in the instance of my dad) be well of the way into Book 3. There’s no right or wrong speed to be reading Middlemarch; I hope that’s clear at this point. Mostly it means that these discussion posts will discuss events of the books suggested and that you might stumble into “Middlemarch spoilers,” but it’s also a 150 year old book, so, like, deal with it. I suspect with people finishing different sections in different amounts of time means that a post like this will be active for a minute — that’s okay by me! I’ll do what I can to hop in and out.

I’ve given a lot of thought to how these discussion posts will work, in part because I have flunked out of almost every book club I’ve ever been in. Some of that is glamorous snobbery: I don’t like when book clubs become gossip hubs and would much rather talk about the book. But I am also picky about what I read, and group-mandated texts are annoying to me, which is really grand coming from someone dictating a thing like this, but what can you do. Possibly what annoys me most about the conventional book club form is that you don’t often get the experience you get of reading of big tome — of going on a journey with not only these characters, but your friends. One 250-page book lends a real “one and done” experience. This is good in the short-term, but my response to a book changes so dramatically over time. We were discussing this in the comments a bit last week — consider something like Catch-22, a book I read when I was 19 and thought was the funniest thing to ever exist, that I then found unbearable a decade later. Committing thoughts on a book in writing is equally painful, but we do what it takes get through Middlemarch May.

When it comes to discussion posts, I leave much of the flow of conversation to all of you. One of my best teachers, Alice Elliott Dark, had a tendency to start our reading classes by everyone being responsible for bringing a passage of the text they’re eager to talk about with them. That way, there was always something new to delve into, and in a group of twelve of us, few were bringing the same passage. So if you’re struggling to have something to say about book, or not sure what to talk about, consider what you’ve made a mental note of, or what you’ve highlighted. I’m a relentless annotator at this point in my literary career, having abandoned much preciousness about maintaining the quality of a new book and also preferring to buy used when possible. Buy a highlighter! It’s fun.

Here’s what you missed on Middlemarch

Books 1 and 2 introduce four-ish narrative threads and tentative marriage plots, including:

• Dorothea Brooke’s marriage to the haughty Mr. Casaubon

  • And possible late Book 2 rivalry of Casaubon’s sexy, moody artist-adjacent (if not generally wayward, or, as we say in this part of the country, “Bushwick-esque”) second cousin Will Ladislaw

  • Dorothea also began the text in a tentative non-romance with James Chettam

    • Who was funding/developing some housing projects for her

• There’s also the matter of Dorothea’s sister Celia, who may or may not harbor feelings for her sister’s rejected suitor Chettam, TBD where this goes, they both seem like amiable normies

• There is the matter of Tertius Lydgate, Middlemarch’s new doctor, who coming out of a disastrous romance in Paris is looking to woo local hottie Rosamond Vincy

  • Lydgate is also caught up in a number of Middlemarch’s administrative and business decisions as he oversees the development of a new hospital. We watched as he may or may not have bungled the placement of a hospital chaplain based on the politics of men older and richer than him.

• There is also the tentative romance between Rosamond’s brother Fred and Rosamond’s friend Mary

  • MORE ON FRED VINCY BELOW

It is interesting returning to Middlemarch, having gotten just beyond this part of the novel three years ago, and see what I do and do not remember about the text. Mostly I remember everything with Dorothea and Casaubon, because who among us has not watched our dumbest smart friend settle for someone who is not good for them. I’m particularly drawn to the ways in which Eliot writes Dorothea, a character for whom I’m sure she admires in a begrudging, if not slightly, like, pitiable way. She wants Dorothea to figure it all out, but until that point, she’s content to make fun of her as best she can. I admire the implication that Dorothea is perhaps too Protestant to enjoy Rome, lol.

I was struck by this particular passage about Dorothea towards the end of Book 2:

We are all of us born into moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom than to conceive with that distinctiveness which is no longer reflection but feeling — an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects — that he had an equivalent centre of self whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

In part, I love this because it is funny: I suspect a lot of Middlemarch is about awakening from moral stupidity. But like many funny passages from the book, it dovetails into something more philosophically tangible and true, the intellectual growth of a person shifting from reflection to feeling. Of course, while this paragraph reflects Dorothea’s relationship with her husband (BOO WE HATE HIM²), it feels more like what is immediately so apparent in her casual flirtation with Will — that she is pushed to not only articulate her views, but expand and develop them in argument with him. This is the key to intimacy, I suspect, rather than the parroting she does of Casaubon.

What’s going on with Celia?

I have great fondness for Celia, Dorothea’s sister who tells it like it is. She sort of falls out of the grand narrative come Book 2. Let’s get Celia back in the mix! I love the end of Chapter 9.

Celia had become less afraid of “saying things” to Dorothea ever since this engagement: cleverness seemed to her more pitiable than ever.

The Fran Magazine Middlemarch May Fred Vincy Wars

Last week in the comments, there was support both for and against Fred Vincy, who is either an irresponsible cad or a funny wayward hottie or some combo of the two. Please have it out about Fred in the comments section, or at the very least vote in the poll. For the record, I am PRO.

A few more excerpts highlighted…

“Superior” was the “natural” of the 1830s.

“Oh, there are so many superior teas and sugars now. Superior is getting to be the shopkeepers’ slang.” — Fred Vincy (smash)

And consider the wry amiability of his crush, Mary Garth, presenting a real “who can relate”:

Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards those who instead of telling her that she ought to be contented did something to make her so.

Last things

I’m curious to know what copy you’re reading, if you’re doing an audiobook, how you’re finding the process of reading Middlemarch, if it’s fun, if it’s a struggle, whatever. I think it’s good to articulate these things, even if negative, because perhaps banishing an indifference will awaken you to enjoyment, who knows. I have to hope I am making myself more human by admitting Swann’s Way did little for me. But hopefully you are enjoying Middlemarch. I am. I am laughing, even!

Anyway! Let’s chat. More to discuss below.

1. If you’re not doing Middlemarch May I beg you to ignore these emails and otherwise please do not unsubscribe 🙏🏻

2. Casaubon is a drip but like any great empath I feel sad for him <3