Middlemarch

I'm rereading one of my favorite novels, George Eliot's Middlemarch, for my graduate seminar. Unlike the Rev. Mr. Casaubon's mind, this novel truly is an "ungauged reservoir," not an "enclosed basin." This time around, I find myself particularly admiring Eliot's masterful use of free indirect discourse: her narrator slips almost imperceptibly in and out of his/her own voice into those of Dorothea, or Lydgate, or Rosamond. These shifts are usually a matter of subtle nuance, and it's particularly fascinating when a thought you've remembered as "the narrator's" turns out to be associated with one of the characters. Eliot's narrators can sometimes cause problems for students, especially when they resort to direct address. Some students regard direct address as something of an insult ("s/he's telling me what to think") rather than as a challenge, or an invitation to reflect on the problems of narrative construction. In Middlemarch, we do have to be reminded that Casaubon isn't an evil man: badly flawed yes, misguided yes, disappointed yes, egocentric yes (although he's hardly the only one in the novel with that problem!), probably impotent yes, but he does have currents of feeling which require our sympathy. (As several critics have noted, Eliot creates only one truly evil character, the sadistic Mr. Grandcourt of Daniel Deronda.) It is, after all, precisely Eliot's point that most of us are in the dark about the nature of those with whom we have daily converse.

The missing narrator was one of the reasons I found the 1994 BBC adaptation ultimately unsatisfying. Not that I thought it was bad or "about as good as you could expect it to be" (as someone aptly said of the more recent Daniel Deronda), but without the narrator, the viewer lost "the web." The novel relies so heavily on the incremental growth of images and allusions (kinds of light, labyrinthine spaces, clearness vs. haze, the famous web) that any attempt to translate it into a visual, dramatic medium loses much of its force. This is, after all, a novel about minutiae, and minutiae tend not to work very well on film. Moreover, there was a certain tone-deafness or, more properly, blindness, in the casting. One certainly "trivial" decision which nonetheless unbalanced the picture was the casting of Julian Wadham as Sir James Chettam. Now, while most people would agree that there's nothing objectionable about looking at Mr. Wadham, there is something objectionable about looking at him as Sir James. In the novel, Sir James is ruddy and "blooming," a big, full-blown, emphatically virile man who stands in direct symbolic opposition to the washed-out and "wintry" Casaubon. There's a lovely little moment when Dorothea finds that "his dimpled hands were quite disagreeable": she consciously registers Casaubon as "mind," but somewhat less consciously reacts against Sir James as "the flesh." In fact, neither man is appropriate for Dorothea. (Will Ladislaw isn't either.) But in the miniseries, we get a Sir James who resembles Dorothea (Juliet Aubrey) and who comes across as rather sensitive and even a bit introspective. So, asks the viewer, why don't they end up together?

(For further information, see Middlemarch at the University of Virginia, which includes a reception history and an annotated bibliography. This guide from a syllabus will help the lost keep all the characters straight. Another course website provides some capsules on St. Theresa and the Reform Bill. Niall McKay posts the great scientist James Clerk Maxwell's interpretation of the novel as "solar myth." The Atlantic has dug up a review dating from 1873.)