The Book Club: Middlemarch by George Eliot with Heather Mac Donald | The Book Club

Welcome back to The Book Club, I'm Michael Knowles, and for this month we will be reading this brief little 850-page book, Middlemarch, by George Eliot, with a wonderful guest. But first, before I introduce her, in our fast-paced world, it is tough to make reading a priority. At least, it used to be. But at thinker.org, they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form. You can read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, to recent bestsellers like Jordan Peterson's Twelve Rules for Life. If you want to challenge your preconceptions, if you want to expand your horizons, and most important of all, you know, if you want to sound smart at cocktail parties, you can go to thinker.org, that is T-H-I-N-K-R dot org, no E, no time for that, start a free trial, and put your mind in motion. We will now turn to Middlemarch, and we will turn to our guest, Heather MacDonald, the contributing editor at City Journal, fellow at the Manhattan Institute, author of The Diversity Delusion, author of The War on Cops. You're a very busy woman. Well, absolutely, when we can try and get around with COVID now, but yes, I have to get around the rules. I can't believe, with all that you do, that you would have us read an 850-page book for this episode, but I'm so glad that you did. It is so comprehensive, it is so global in its vision of human life and human struggle and human misunderstanding that it rewards many times through. So could I ask you, Heather, I know this is probably impossible, we always have our guests give a little summary of the plot of the book. The trouble with Middlemarch is, there are probably eight or nine different plots. So shall we do our best? I'm going to focus on the thing that everybody who's read Middlemarch will never forget, which is the most disastrous marriage in all of literature. There is nothing like the marriage between Dorothea Brooks and Edward Cazabon. It is filled with misunderstanding, with crushing of spirit. Dorothea Brooks is a young girl in provincial Britain, in a country town, who burns with idealistic fire. She wants to live her life according to theories that will make sense of the entirety of the universe. She wants to do good in life. She is almost fanatically self-renouncing and wants to be, either to accomplish greatness herself or to be a helpmate to somebody, an intellectual, who will be pursuing the life of the mind. The story opens, actually sort of separately, on St. Teresa of Avila, who Dorothea would be compared to, this very earnest reformer, hard-minded, serious-minded woman. And she is, in that extent, like a martyr, because we see her again and again giving up her own personal interest in order to try to do good for others. So she feels an eros for knowledge, which is something I can identify with. However, the object of her philosophical love is a man of an unbelievably desiccated self-engrossment, a purported scholar, Edward Cazabon, who has been working all of his life on something called the key to all mythologies. And this is going to be this compendium that makes sense of the mythological past. He is in a complete backwater. As Dorothy discovers to her utter horror, after they're married, he is completely oblivious to what's been going on in German scholarship. He's been completely absent from all of the scholarly work that's going on. And also, we should look at the time frames here. She's a young girl. She's 18 years old. He's 45. He's old enough to be her father. And he's described by Dorothy as very down-to-earth sister. We see that he's got a white mole that he snuffles with his soup, and he looks like John Locke. So he's pretty physically repugnant. But he is, above all, emotionally repugnant. He's been engaged in this mind-bogglingly trivial activity that Dorothea believes will be her key to a life of the mind. And she immediately falls in love with him with real, genuine passion. And he writes to her, when he sort of realizes her interest, he writes to her a proposal letter that I would like to read just the first couple sentences, Michael, because it gives so clear a sense of Casaban's desiccated and self-involved personality and his inability to say anything direct and clearly. He gets lost in syntax. And Elliot, again, the thing that needs to be said about her, she has this amazing, ironic laceration of human folly. And something like this, it's a brilliant form. And the syntax here is going to be, if the listeners can't follow it, it's for good reason. You're not supposed to. That is the point. So this is what he writes as his proposal. This is, in one sense, Middlemarch is kind of the anti-Romance, it's the anti-Bronte. You do not have those moments of passionate outbursts. Instead, everything is through convention, class distinction, anyway. So this was Mr. Casaban's letter, Elliot writes. My dear Miss Brooke, I have your guardian's permission to address you on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life has arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need. Dorothea is so naive, she reads this and she breaks down in tears. Because this is what she has been living for all her life. And the marriage goes downhill from there. It starts out on the honeymoon. They go to Italy for their honeymoon. But he's involved in taking all of his notes for this book that he's never going to write. He's just taking all of the notes. And she starts to realize the marriage is not working out quite as she hoped. He does not find any new ardor in his heart or anything. She encounters a younger cousin of her now husband, Mr. Casaban. And there may be a little spark flies. Maybe they're not quite sure of it yet. Later on, this will play a role in the novel because ultimately she's going to end up with him once her husband dies. Again, a spoiler alert. And this tracks the story of Dorothea. There's a parallel story, of course, of a man named Tertius Lydgate, who runs parallel in many ways to her. He's a young doctor. He comes to this kind of backwater, provincial area. Worth pointing out as well, the subtitle for Middlemarch is Provincial maybe meaning a couple of things here. One, outside of the city, but also provincial in the sense that it's a small town. There's gossip. Gossip is playing this whole role. And so he's going to be this young doctor. But then he kind of falls into a not-so-great marriage as well. What we see again and again is people misperceiving the other, pouring their beliefs and their hopes that blinds them to the character of the other. So Dorothea does not see how self-engrossed Casabon is. As indicated in his letter, his proposal letter, he's interested only in how she can help him. Lydgate, who is this reformist doctor, and yes, the texture of this novel is so extraordinary for all that it tells us about this particular moment in time. He comes in as a reformer. He wants to build a fever hospital. He upsets the apple cart of medical practice at the time. One of the things, again, anybody who reads 19th century or even early 20th century literature, you're just terrified at medical ignorance. So the people in Middlemarch believe that the more aggressive that your doctor is in like leeches and things like that, the better he must be. But Lydgate falls in love with a woman who is the exact opposite of Dorothea. And this is just the most fantastic opposition. Rosamund Vinci, who's the daughter of the mayor of Middlemarch, who's a manufacturer and relatively prosperous and respectable within Middlemarch society, but nevertheless a bourgeois. And Rosamund, who's beautiful, Elliot refers to her, I think, you don't know if this is, there's a sort of a cynicism here, but she's described in terms of the violet, her eyes like violet pools. And when she brings little tears, it's like a dew drop on a petal. And she's completely narcissistic. Again, Dorothea lives for the other. She has no sense of self. Rosamund is only about herself and she's always, she's always moving her neck to look at herself in the mirror. She sees in Lydgate, it's very clear from the start, a status increase because he has somewhat aristocratic relatives. So you have Dorothea, who is this would-be saint and martyr. And then you have Rosamund, who is a social climber, the quintessential social climber. And she sees this guy as a way up the ladder. But Dorothea is so self-clueless that she goes through life not realizing when men are interested in her, whether it's Will or a very robust, hearty country yeoman, James Chetham, who wants to marry her. And she's just clueless. She thinks he's in love with her sister. She is so unaware, whereas Rosamund is completely self-engrossed. Lydgate falls in love with her because she's so beautiful. And he thinks of her that she is going to be the sort of helpmate that Dorothea wants to be. Whereas Rosamund, when they fall into debt, it's chilling how she completely discards any marriage loyalty. I don't know what, how your reaction was to the Garth couple. These are, this is a very, a man who lives for work. He's honest. He thinks the best of people. His wife is slightly above him, but is completely dedicated to him. And they have all the children. And there's a little bit of the Victorian sentimentalism of the portrayal of the kids. But there we have perhaps what Eliot thinks may be of the ideal marriage. It's worth pointing out these two themes that seem to keep coming up. Marriage and debt. We've summed up all we can sum up, and we've only summed up about 15% of the novel. But it's a whole portrayal of this life in this moment, the 1830s, in this fictional English town. But with real events that are happening, real social relationships. And these two things keep coming up. Marriage and debt. And the relationship between those two things, which might seem separate, comes out. And particularly because this Garth family, wonderful, good, hardworking family, gets ruined because they signed off on a young fellow's debt. He was playing the ponies. He was betting, basically betting on horses. And it ruined them. And even then, even then, they still had a loyalty to him. But people just, in a certain class, do not expect to pay for things. And they don't work. We have become, in a sense, more bourgeois than they were back in the rise of bourgeois values in 19th century England, where it's mysterious, really, how people keep going. Because imagine this other, now, character we're talking about, Fred Vinci, who is interested in marrying Mary Garth, this daughter of the Garths. He just kind of rides in, he's a sort of idle fellow, and decides he's going to make some money playing the ponies. And he willingly, he encourages this wonderful family to take on all of his debt, and then whoopsie daisy. Yeah. That's a hard marriage to understand, of what Mary Garth, who's portrayed as the, again, she's another opposite to Rosamund Vinci, because she's portrayed as very plain. And Rosamund Vinci is so callous that she sort of acknowledges this and says, well, being pretty isn't important to you, Mary Garth. She's just absolutely without a heart. And actually, on this point, I said we'd finished summarizing, but that isn't true, because there's one crucial moment here, which involves Mary Garth, who is the nurse to Mr. Featherstone, who is this widower, and he's giving money out and credit out to people. And it is expected that he will leave his estate, then, to Fred Vinci. But then what happens? Featherstone is on his deathbed, and he has written a codicil to the will that he wants Mary Garth to destroy, that will allow Fred Vinci to inherit some of his money. And Mary Garth is so moral, and she's worried that if she does follow his will, that she will then come under some kind of suspicion. But even with Featherstone, as this old semi-miser is dying, one feels the pathos of age, where he doesn't have the strength to get up and get the will. And he's ordering, desperately, Mary to go get it and burn it. And she won't do it, and he can't move. And it is, as offensive as he is, it is heartbreaking that she brings that out. There's other scenes where, with Featherstone's funeral, as a matter of fact, that reminded me of the Vat Tosca of Taddeum in Puccini, where you have the gentry, the second floor, observing this funeral. And going on is more roiling emotions with regards to Dorothea and Cazabon, that the funeral is going on underneath, and you hear the townspeople talking about it, and this amazing sort of fugal interplay between all of these different plots that are coming together, that she manages to pull off with utter, utter mastery of her idiom. And there's a payoff, which is that because the will isn't destroyed, this opens up the door for a secret that Mr. Featherstone has had. We've been told he's childless and he's a widower, but he's not quite childless. He's got a bastard brat running around out there who's going to reclaim the money, he's going to show up into town, he and his awful stepfather, and they're going to come in and wreck everyone's social relationships, and gossip is going to fly everywhere. There's a great line that George Eliot has at the beginning of chapter 70, which could be another subtitle to the book. One subtitle is, A Study of Provincial Life. Another one could be, Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are. This sort of unbroken line, even amid this theme of reform constantly going on, you see that these deeds come back to people, these bonds, these relationships, are the tapestry of the novel. Right. I have two questions for you, Michael, as I was reading this. I was thinking, you know what? I'm going to get a sense of how males read novels. Because as you say, Will is this young, he's viewed by the Middlemarch Society as far too footloose and he doesn't come from a good enough family. He's got this horrible Polish background and his grandmother ran off, she was an actress, and so he's condescended upon by the Middlemarch Society, but he too is an enthusiast and he and Dorothea bond immediately. Eliot keeps setting up these encounters between them where neither of them can speak what's on their mind, and Kazaban, in his utter evil, in just the most amazing thing, he had wanted her to pledge, without knowing what she was pledging to, to follow his will, and she couldn't do it, and then of course she blamed herself and she subjugated her own ego and will and said, I'm now going to agree to do whatever he's going to tell me to do, without knowing what it is. Fortunately, he dies before that. However, he has already written a will that says, if you marry Will Kazaban, I'm disinheriting you. If you marry my cousin. He has perceived something that Dorothea is too blind to see, and as soon as she reads this, Dorothea says, hmm, maybe I'm interested in Will after all. This had never occurred to her because she's so blind, but what I want to know, so Eliot sets up numerous encounters between Will, who's passionately in love with her and knows that he is, and Dorothea, who still doesn't understand her feelings, and as a female reader, you are longing for them to fall in each other's arms, for there to be an outbreak of romance, you know, the gone with the wind scene, or something out of, as I say, the Brontes, which we never get here. At most, when they finally do come play, there's one kiss and then typically they move away from each other. Does a male read scenes like that with the same desire or is that a uniquely female anticipation and hope? A man certainly does read it that way. Mr. Cazabon would not read it that way, but I think male readers of novels do, because, I mean, that's only natural, right? The fun is the chase and we're seeing ourselves vicariously here. However, there is a caveat to that, which is, you have this disastrous marriage at the beginning of the novel between Dorothea and old Mr. Ugly Cazabon, and then Will, his cousin, enters the picture and they get married at the end. I'm not sure that's a great marriage. I'm not sure that second marriage is a particularly good one, and actually, Elliot mentions this at the end. She says, you know, these townspeople, I don't know, they thought that this Will fellow, I mean, within a year of her husband's death, she marries his cousin and she shouldn't have married the first guy anyway in the first place, and maybe this isn't the greatest love story ever written. Maybe Dorothea, this wonderful, beautiful, smart, serious woman, maybe she should have aimed a little higher. What do we make of Dorothea? I have to say, Elliot believed that the paramount virtue in life was duty. There's a quote where she says, you know, God, immortality, these are impossible, but peremptory and absolute duty is what we live by. And that does characterize Dorothea. I can't tell, in the middle of the book, I think that she's ironic towards Dorothea herself. At the end, I think the, I have to say, I think the book goes on a little too long. I think she stretches it out. I think there's too many encounters between Will and Dorothea. They almost become ludicrous. Will keeps saying, okay, I'm leaving Middlemarch, I'm going away, I'm saying goodbye. And then he comes, he's already said goodbye, and then he comes back and he's, okay, I'm saying goodbye a third time now. It's ridiculous. But at the end, she again makes Dorothea out to be the source of her virtue. Her virtue makes everybody's life, even though she's your grave, nobody visits your grave, makes everybody better. How do we, to me, as a self-engrossed, egotistical, 21st century, 20th century person who does not have that ethic of self-sacrifice, I think that she's almost too clueless. Or do you find yourself able to believe in her fully and take her side fully? I'd like to quote two great thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Biz Marquis, the rapper. Because with Dorothea's misunderstanding or obliviousness to the designs of Will, I even though Cazabon knows it right away, Cazabon knows it the second they see each other, he says, you're not going to see my cousin anymore, reminds me of that great line from Biz Marquis, you say he's just a friend, oh you say he's just a friend, but baby you, you got what I need. You know that the girl is interested in this guy, even if she says, oh, you know, he's just a friend. Oh, I haven't seen him before. Now, a thinker of equal stature, Nietzsche, hated Middlemarch. He read Middlemarch and he hated Middlemarch because he hated this idea that you would just give your life in sacrifice and suffering and duty and then no one would go visit your grave. But I have to tell you, I love her. I love Dorothea. I aspire to be Dorothea. Really? Yes, I do. And it's probably the Catholic in me, although I'm sure religion plays a big role in Middlemarch too, and I'm sure they wouldn't be so thrilled about my potpourri and papism, but there, you know, that is a, the traditional view of the West and traditional view of Christianity is that suffering, duty is sanctifying, builds you up, you store up treasures in heaven. And at this time, it's worth remembering the historical context. It's all, and actually, Dorothea's uncle, who kind of adopts her, Mr. Brook, runs for Parliament. You know, he's running for political office. It doesn't go very well. But the central political issue of the book is the Reform Bill of 1832, pushed by Earl Gray, after whom we get the tea, the delicious tea. But this is a big social convulsion that's happening, and you're seeing the kind of breaking down of the old aristocracy, you're seeing the expansion of the bourgeoisie, the expansion of the vote. So you're in this moment. I mean, you're in the middle of the country, and it's all these kind of gossipy little romantic relationships, but you're also in the middle of this huge cultural convulsion that is going to transform provincial life, and we'll see what remains eternal and what will change. But I would argue that Dorothea has made so many disastrous mistakes, above all, the marriage to Casabon, that that should give us pause. To trust her judgment. Yes, that that degree of fanatical self-abnegation and this determination to live according to that, that puts her on the wrong path. And when she talked herself into, I'm going to accept Casabon's demand that I agree to do whatever he wants me to do without knowing it, that is a mistake. And she did say if he had lived, she would have been happy to continue, despite that she finally became disillusioned and realized how trivial his work was, that he was never going to write the book, that he'd been writing these... The book would have been horrible had he even written it. Yeah, and he writes, but he writes these little pamphlets that are like getting back at some guy that anonymously attacked him, and that's all he can do. That she would have been willing to give herself to him unconditionally had he lived, but in death she's not willing to subject herself to that bondage and slavery. I have a question as a male reader to a female reader, which is, George Eliot is not a man. George is a man's name, but she's not a man. She writes under this pen name. At the very end of the book, you have a woman writing a book, but then her husband gets all the credit. You have these themes of women, of total self-abnegation like in Dorothea, and yet I don't have the sense that George Eliot is a feminist in the way that we use that term. How are we supposed to understand George Eliot's understanding of sex and womanhood? It's a tough thing because there are moments when she seems to describe ironically the expectation on the part of Lydgate, for example, that Rosamond will just be a totally devoted wife and happy to worship his own medical career and expects a wife to really be a beautiful accompaniment to his life. But he says she should not have too many ideas or ask too many questions because females, they don't know enough about life to be able to answer questions through experience. They always want it to be logical. So it's hard to say whether Eliot is mocking that. She's also not saying that Dorothea should have aspired to her own accomplishment and she is wrong to think of herself as mostly a helpmate to a male, which Dorothea is perfectly happy to do that, and I don't sense from Eliot any kind of critique of that as a valid aspiration because I think she does, for all of the sort of terror of lack of understanding, and she describes with real sort of pain what it's like for a husband and a wife to disagree about something and the silences that sometimes befall Casaban and Dorothea and the few instances where Dorothea actually tries to cross him and asserts herself, and then just that horrible thing that happens in a marriage of not being able to speak. She clearly does believe that marriage is the greatest duty, but she also refers to Dorothea, for her, marriage is a duty, but that's not necessarily bad. You know, we shouldn't read that as something that is... We use that term now as a bad thing. We don't think of ourselves as having duty, absolutely. You know, it is the final line of the entire book is referring to Dorothea. Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent 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 a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs." Sounds like a resounding defense of this sort of life that is not necessarily on the stage all the time, but is more quiet, more provincial, more about supporting other people, and it does raise one last question that I have to ask you before I let you go. You've read this novel more than once. What was the first reading like? What was the second reading like, or the later reading like? Well, it shows that one can change intellectually in life. We're not bound to what we were before. I read this in college, and in college I was a uncritical, blind acolyte of the most insane literary theory known as deconstruction, although that may be unfair because the thing that came out of deconstruction have been like even crazier. At least we could read Middlemarch. What came out of Everwood say, no you can't because it somehow represents white male civilization even though it's written by a female, but you still can't read it. His name is George, even though he is a she. For those who don't know, what is deconstruction? Well deconstruction was a theory that first sort of had its roots in Parisian intellectual life that was centered in the United States at Yale. It's dedicated to certain propositions that sound so ludicrous nobody's going to believe them, but I'm sorry, I believe them to my utter shame and discredit, but the key one for Middlemarch is the idea that literature is not about life because life is not about life. Life is about language. Life is simply a rhetorical trope, and they believe that language always breaks down and that every book is about its own failure of representation. Now again, I'm not expecting anybody to believe this or understand it, but it is true. This is what was being taught. This is what was being taught, that literature is always self-referential. Paul de Man, who is the big ally of somebody, a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida who used to come to Yale, that was his big thing is that books were about failure, but they were also about their own mode of existence. They were always about representation. Now I read books and I say, are you crazy? Authors write because they want to explain human existence. This is the issue, and I think you've hit on it precisely, which is the way that literature is taught now is that you have to hate it, basically. It's what Harold Bloom, another Yalie, called the school of resentment. You find out all these problems, or you find out how it's deconstructing, or you find out how it's self-referential, it's not talking about things outside of itself. The other way to look at it, the traditional way to look at it, the edifying way to look at literature, is to say, what is this saying about reality? What is the life that is being described here? What world am I entering into? The reason that it is not possible to summarize Middlemarch is because it is a whole world that you can zoom out and look at this whole town, and you can zoom even further out and look at the central political issues of this day, and I can tell you the exact year, or you can zoom all the way in on these subtle, precise little moments between two people passing one another or having a conversation, and you are living in that. That is all life, and we can discuss our favorite parts of it and what it did for us and maybe what it says about certain issues, but really the only way to understand the book is to live it, is to experience it, to come in and be part of that world. I got Audible for the first time, and there is a recording of this out there by Juliet Stevenson on Audible that is stunning, and that really brings out the brilliance of the dialogue, and also, for an American, the class differences are not always perceptible. We can hear it in accents. We don't know necessarily exactly what's being portrayed, but it just brings it to life, so I'm going to give a little plug there. It is a great way to do it, and it actually comments on the book, too, which is it's all of these sort of subtle character differences that bring it to life. Other books worth reading, I would say, by the way, The Diversity Delusion, War on Cops. Oh, please, no, not in the same book. Other books. No, no, my God. And Heather is writing under a female name, unlike our friend George Eliot here. If you have not read the book already, I hope that we have convinced you to go on and live in part of that world. Just a brief little over lunch, just a quick 850 pages. In the meantime, Heather, thank you so much for being here. Terrific discussion. So good to see you. Thank you, Michael. We will see you next time on The Book Club. Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Book Club on Prager U. Prager U is a 501c3 non-profit organization, so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming. Thank you very much.