Mary Cassatt, “Young Woman Reading”
I visited my good friend Rachel in New York this past weekend—it was her birthday—and amongst our wide rambling conversations about literature, she alerted me to Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch. I haven’t read Mead’s book yet but two reviews about it reminded me of one thing I particularly like about this glorious novel: unlike most fiction, Middlemarch comes right out and says its intent is to make us better people. Better Living through Middlemarch, in other words.
Mead’s book is a “bibliomemoir” about the impact of Eliot’s book on her life. The label is used by Joyce Carol Oates in her review in The New York Times Book Review. In general, Oates is sympathetic to what attracted Mead to the novel:
At the age of 17, when Mead first reads Middlemarch, her identification with Eliot’s 19-year-old heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is immediate and unqualified, and it will last for decades. The book’s theme, “a young woman’s desire for a substantial, rewarding, meaningful life,” was “certainly one with which Eliot had been long preoccupied. . . . And it’s a theme that has made many young women, myself included, feel that Middlemarch is speaking directly to us. How on earth might one contain one’s intolerable, overpowering, private yearnings? Where is a woman to put her energies? How is she to express her longings? What can she do to exercise her potential and affect the lives of others? What, in the end, is a young woman to do with herself?”
Oates finds My Life in Middlemarch to be “a poignant testimony to the abiding power of fiction” and quotes Mead describing its effects:
I have grown up with George Eliot. I think Middlemarch has disciplined my character. I know it has become part of my own experience and my own endurance. Middlemarch inspired me when I was young, and chafing to leave home; and now, in middle life, it suggests to me what else home might mean, beyond a place to grow up and grow out of.
The review disputes Mead’s conclusion, however. Oates writes,
Yet it will strike some readers as debatable that Eliot is, as Mead states, “the great artist of disappointment.” Rather more, Eliot strikes us as the great artist of bourgeois accommodation and compromise.”
Oates sounds critical here, but I don’t necessarily hold it against a novel that it helps us accommodate to lives that are less than satisfactory. Maybe that’s just a sign that, now that I am in my sixties, I’ve become more resigned about what we can accomplish. Accommodation has come to seem more a sign of wisdom than surrender, and I find I’m less interested in characters like, say, Emma Bovary, who crash and burn (thereby playing out what Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man called “the great refusal” of consumer capitalist society). Give me Dorothea or Henry James’ Isabel Archer instead.
I do agree with how Oates questions Mead’s obsession with a single novel, however: “There is something self-limiting if not solipsistic about focusing so narrowly on a single novel through the course of one’s life.” On the other hand, part of Oates’ objection stems from the fact that she likes other authors more:
Does George Eliot, wonderful as she is, and certainly comforting in the unwavering sanity of her narrating voice, stir us to an awareness of the actual world with any of the authority of Franz Kafka? Isn’t there a radiantly gifted Charles Dickens who transcends any of his Victorian contemporaries, including Eliot? Are not the radically experimental novels of Virginia Woolf more exciting, simply as aesthetic experiences? Like her genteel predecessor Jane Austen, George Eliot gives the impression of being utterly oblivious to the physical, physiological, sexual lives of women; far more insightful in the relations of the sexes is Thomas Hardy, not to mention the sexual iconoclast D. H. Lawrence. Eliot is a novelist to place not above but among these, in the extraordinary richness of 19th- and early-20th-century fiction.
The other review, by Kathryn Schultz in New York Magazine, is more sympathetic to Mead’s claims of Eliot’s preeminence. In her essay she raises the question of whether works should be judged by how much good they may do in the world. While noting that she is generally skeptical of such claims, she says she makes an exception in Eliot’s case after reading Mead’s book and then going back and rereading Middlemarch:
I don’t subscribe to the moral argument for fiction—the idea that great books make us better people. (For one thing, I’m reluctant to defend literature by appeals to its putative ends. For another, the data doesn’t look good. Plenty of reprehensible people love books.) Similarly, fiction that is a moral argument makes me wary, not for any prima facie reason but because it tends to be terrible.
And yet, on both fronts, Eliot hushes me. Middlemarch is forever waxing on about how to be good, and it was written with the explicit goal of making us a little better. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings,” Eliot wrote in an 1859 letter, “is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves.”
Harold Bloom, speaking of people who differ from ourselves, was right to note the weirdness of this part of Eliot’s project—or rather, the weirdness of it working. She was, he wrote, the only “major novelist, before or since, whose overt moralizings constitute an aesthetic virtue rather than a disaster.”
Middlemarch, Schultz says, has the same influence over readers that Dorothea has over the people she meets:
Middlemarch is…the most morally serious, and the most broadly humane [novel in the English language]. In its lovely final passage, Eliot writes of Dorothea that the effect of her goodness was “incalculably diffusive”: It exists, it matters, but who can trace it? Applied to books, that becomes a moral argument for fiction I think I can defend. Whatever Middlemarch has been doing to the world all these many years, I like to think it is diffuse, and diffusing, and incalculably good.
It’s interesting that I should come across someone making this case at the same time that I’ve been reading about another author, again in a book recommended by Rachel, who is a fervent believer in extreme aestheticism. The author is Vladimir Nabokov, about whom Williams professor Gene H. Bell-Vollada has this to say:
Nabokov…believed in Lit. for Lit’s Sake, in beauty all pure, in an art that possessed no connection to society, humanity, ideas, politics, or current affairs. (In practice, as we shall see shortly, things were a bit more complicated.) For a random sample, I cite his Playboy interwith with Alvin Toffler: “A work of art has no importance whatever for society…I don’t give a damn for the group, the community the masses.” Nabokov, by the way, saw Eliot as “a plaster idol.”
Aetheticism takes us too far away from Eliot, however, so I’ll revisit tomorrow Bell-Villada’s fascinating book On Nabokov, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Mind, both for what it has to say the author of Lolita and what it has to say about Rand, who has an undoubted connection with society, humanity, ideas, politics and current affairs. For the time being, I’ll note that there was a time was authors were unapologetic about wanting their books to do good in the world. My Life in Middlemarch documents this occurring in at least one life.
