5.5 MIDDLEMARCH is an epic for losers and failed marriages

If you're the type to dissect your friend's long-term relationship or listen to Ester Perel, you'd love this book (+ lines I loved, a list of similar stories on screens & pages, & a writing prompt)

If Austen is the optimistic banter of Love Island, where couples end the story with a happy engagement and promise of a good life together, Eliot is Couples Therapy, massaging the scar tissue of a fifteen-year marriage.

“There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that–to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail” (Chapter 76).

Set in 1829, Eliot wrote Middlemarch as a historical fiction, a glance back thirty years in the past to the anticipation of England’s First Reform Bill. Centuries later, this novel feels timeless and acutely prescient for the twenty-first century.

In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 1800s, the authors of this century grapple with the idea of an individual’s promise in an industrializing and expanding world. Jane Austen’s Persuasion showed how Waterloo admirals disrupted the long-standing class structure based on land ownership. Napoleon came to represent the power of the individual in the furthest, global extreme. Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities warns against mob mentality and advocates for individual morality to defy a blind compliance to dangerous systems. In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky names Napoleon as the example of the individual granted utilitarian impunity for murder and questions who and how we measure this moral license to kill. Across these novels graduating from 1817 to the 1860s, international authors wonder what the role each person has in a changing society undergoing change to step away from a single leader to a more democratic world.

George Eliot uses the fictional town of Middlemarch to represent the ordinary. Following three young couples’ marriages and ambitions, she uses a loving third-person narrator to sneak into the darkest moments of these marriages and their failed attempts to stand apart from their neighbors. As if in response to Rodion Raskolnikov in St. Petersburg, Middlemarch’s narrator brings history’s victors, the “Shining Ones,” back to earth by reminding us of how people who knew the Napoleons in their time would describe them:

Each of these Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among neighbours who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame: each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his course toward final companionship with the immortals (Chapter 15).

This is a book about failed potential. It’s delicious. It’s empathetic. It’s timeless. Each husband and wife begin their marriage with individual ideas for how their life will achieve domestic ease and professional acclaim, only to project their shortcomings on their partner.

Couple #1: Dr. Tertius Lydgate and Rosamund Vincy

These two copyrighted “messy” in a marriage. Skip this season of Love Is Blind and buckle in for the Lydgate marriage instead, and I promise you won’t be disappointed in the drama.

Tertius Lydgate is an outside doctor hired to take over a retired doctor’s practice. He dreams of making a medical discovery in provincial England that will earn him a spot in the textbooks. Though mostly a stoic man, he is also a love bomber. In France, he quasi-stalked an actress who accidentally stabbed her costar/lover on stage. Convinced of her innocence, he followed her social exile to rural France and proposed. He only leaves when she says, insistent, “I did not plan: it came to me in the play—I meant to do it” (Chapter 15).

He’s more intellectually than emotionally intelligent. He often puts his foot in his mouth. To a table of Middlemarch establishment doctors and players, whose lives revolve around knowing everyone’s business and reputation to make decisions, he says, “Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way would be to pension off the good fellows whom everybody is fond of, and put them out of the question” (Chapter 16). The men, including Mr. Vincy, go back to their card game like, good luck, bud.

Now, the Regina George of Middlemarch, Rosamund Vincy, wants his attention. She’s the girl who resents her hometown and the people in it but will never leave because she likes the superiority complex. Rosamund has turned down every suitor in Middlemarch because they’re too boring. Lydgate is new blood, and he has a distant connection to a count, though this noble connection offers no financial assistance for Lydgate’s impoverished lifestyle. (Lydgate has little money and survives on anatomy textbooks alone.) She hits Lydgate with the charm offensive. He’s smitten, which, as we remember from his time in France, is dangerous to his limited sense of judgment.

Rosamund thought that no one could be more in love than she was; and Lydgate thought that after all his wild mistakes and absurd credulity, he had found perfect womanhood…It was plainer now than ever that his notion of remaining much longer a bachelor had been a mistake: marriage would not be an obstruction but a furtherance. (Chapter 36)

Though they love each other at the start of the relationship, their joined life spirals quickly. Rosamund, who imagined a life of lavish nobility, spends more money than God. Lydgate signs off on embroidered handkerchiefs and horses and silver platters, though he can’t afford it, because he’s obsessed with making her happy.

Rosamund also has a queen complex and does irrational things with the attitude of, I want to so I will. Like, riding a horse with Lydgate’s cousin while pregnant when Lydgate says, please don’t you’ll get hurt, I am a doctor by the way. Or, reaching out to Lydgate’s rich uncle asking for more money to cover the debts she incurred so they can stay in their house that is twice as expensive as Lydgate’s salary. When Lydgate tries to have a conversation with her, saying…hey, please stop doing that…she weeps, he consoles her, and the cycle repeats.

Lydgate isn’t a martyr. He’s upset that his wife has any desires that conflict or complicate his. He wanted submission, a woman to support his professional gains, but he’s chosen one of the most stubborn-willed people in Middlemarch:

Between him and her indeed there was that total missing of each other’s mental track, which is too evidently possible even between persons who are continually thinking of each other. To Lydgate it seemed that he had been spending month after month in sacrificing more than half of his best intent and best power to his tenderness for Rosamund…But his endurance was mingled with a self-discontent, which, if we know how to be candid, we shall confess to make more than half our bitterness under grievances, wife or husband included (Chapter 58).

His resentment at her stubbornness and lack of interest in his scientific pursuits builds. Lydgate calls Rosamund a basil plant, because “basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains” (Epilogue). A great line, but brutal to use on anyone. Particularly, you know, your spouse.

Lydgate’s marriage siphons his medical discovery, while Lydgate’s despair and poor judge of character—platonically as well as romantically—entangle him in town drama, estranging him from the booming practice he wanted. Their relationship is at the furthest extreme of people doomed, desperate to maintain their individual desires within a partnership.

Couple #2: Mr. Casaubon and Dorothea Brooke Casaubon

I talked about Dorothea Brooke and her obsession with the old reverend Mr. Casaubon in my post about the first half of Middlemarch, so we covered how Dorothea’s vision of marriage is a paternal kinship of shared knowledge. To recap: she’s orphaned and raised by her daft and flimsy-opined uncle Mr. Brooke, and she’s passionate about renovating the homes on Mr. Brooke’s estate to improve their tenants’ living conditions. She has a martyr complex and wants to change the world for the better, often through the religious example of subverting her wants for the greater good.

She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was (Chapter 48).

When they travel to Rome for their honeymoon, all the warnings about Mr. Casaubon as an old, stubborn, boring scholar prove true. The scales are wiped from Dorothea’s eyes. When she talks, her husband doesn’t engage with her. She realizes this man whose life goal is a library of an uncompleted manuscript will never listen to her opinions. Dorothea, as Mrs. Casaubon, dictates and reads aloud, her life purpose defined by her husband’s goals. Mr. Casaubon and Lydgate overlap in these professional ambitions minimizing their wives as tools to their ends.

Dorothea bites her tongue and tries to be the Good Wife, and this makes them also “miss each other’s mental track,” like the Lydgates. Mr. Casaubon, a reclusive and rich man, silently despairs at her discontent:

There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young lady as he could have obtained for a wife; but a young lady turned out to be something more troublesome than he had conceived. She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him…His discontent passed vapourlike through all her gentle loving manifestations… (Chapter 42).

But this unsettled discontent also makes him jealous of his younger cousin, Will Ladislaw. Will is Dorothea’s peer and a nomadic artist of lost purpose. When Will visits, Mr. Casaubon projects his insecurities onto Dorothea, making her pay for an infidelity she doesn’t commit and battling their marriage’s issues in silent isolation.

Without spoiling how Dorothea’s marriage plays out, I want to highlight how young Dorothea ages out of her idealism of a new life beginning in marriage and grieves her poor decision to ignore others’ warnings and choose a bad husband. She confesses,

“Sorrow comes in so many ways. Two years ago I had no notion of that–I mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak. I used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things. I was very fond of doing as I liked, but I have almost given it up,” she ended, smiling playfully (517).

Dorothea fell for the fallacy of the exceptionalism. As an idealistic youth, she pictured she could form her life into whatever shape she wanted. After she marries, she sees the realistic, nuanced version of marriage each couple faces and accepts her headstrong determination also placed her in this unhappy marriage.

Couple #3: Fred Vincy and Mary Garth

Fred Vincy comes from the same spoiled family tree as Rosamund. His father paid for his education to become a gentleman and enter the clergy, a lucrative position, but he gambles his money on horses. He has one of the most iconic entrances in the novel:

He wakes up late and demands a grilled bone for breakfast (I’m imagining a fat porterhouse steak). Then harasses his sister while his mom giggles.

Mary Garth, his oldest friend and quiet crush, is the moral answer. Unlike the blonde angels of Dickens and Dostoevsky, Mary is plain-faced and poor. She works as a house servant for Mr. Featherstone, a cruel curmudgeon who uses Mary as his punching bag. Most people, particularly Fred’s mom Mrs. Vincy, dismiss her.

But Mary doesn’t rely on their reassurance:

Yet she liked her thoughts: a vigorous young mind not overbalanced by passion, finds a good in making acquaintance with life, and watches its own powers with interest. Mary had plenty of merriment within (Chapter 33).

A large reason for her secure identity is her parents’ values. As the lowest-earning family in our Middlemarch ensemble, they offer an oasis of harmony. Unlike the Vincys, the Garths stand by each other. Mr. and Mrs. Garth are the only equal partners. They tease each other’s stubborn beliefs, talk together about their family and decisions, and stand by each other when one makes a decision the other doesn’t like. About marriage, Mr. Garth warns Mary,

“...what it must be for a wife when she’s never sure of her husband, when he hasn’t got a principle in him to make him more afraid of doing the wrong thing by others than of getting his own toes pinched. That’s the long and the short of it, Mary. Young folks may get fond of each other before they know what life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns into working day, my dear…” (Chapter 25).

All this to say: Fred is a spoiled boy who doesn’t have a sense of consequences, and he wants to marry Mary. Who wouldn’t in a town where the men expect the woman to frontload the emotional work of reforming them? But the more interesting thing is Mary, when she has the chance to be with someone who matches her values, still finds interest in Fred. She sees the danger of his gambling and unmoored sense of purpose and still finds, in her long-standing love for him, she wants to see how his story ends.

In the end? Everyone is ordinary.

None of these characters, whether their marriages work or not, move onto idealized greatness. Some of them forsake it. Some spend their lives chasing it. Few are remembered.

But that doesn’t mean their lives are inconsequential.

This final line of the novel acts as the antithesis of the Napoleon complex—not the one about being short, but the one about forging a global impact in a lifetime.

…for the growing good of the world is partly depending on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully in a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs (Epilogue).

All of our lives are inherently valuable. If no one remembers our names in a century from now, our participation in today forges an unintentional legacy. Instead of carving out a path for a future we can’t see, Middlemarch offers a timeless reminder that our greatest impact can exist in the smallest interactions with the people we love and the neighborhood where we live.

---

My favorite Middlemarch lines

• We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts–not to hurt others (57).

• If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial (116).

• Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of nations, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite (157).

• I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding benign given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect (265).

• To ask her to be less simple and direct would be like breathing on the crystal that you want to see the light through (352).

• …prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle–solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness (413).

• “To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!” (644)

A playlist of additional reads and watches

• If you like the optimistic side of couples working out their issues, watch Couples Therapy (Paramount+) or Ester Perel’s podcast

• If you’re a relationship sadist, check out the Oscar Isaac/Jessica Chastain’s Scenes of a Marriage (Max) or Noah Bambauch’s Marriage Story (Netflix)

• If you like huge British ensembles on equally huge estates, watch Downton Abbey (BritBox)

• Or if you like realistic and flawed lovers who are their own biggest obstacle, read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo

A Middlemarch writing prompt (for paid subscribers)