Bumping into George Eliot

The library is a wonderful place. I haven’t actually been in one as a reader for more than 20 years and as I walked into the musty, low-ceilinged semi-darkness of the Redbridge library (doors propped open because it was a hot day), I realized just how much I had missed it. I’d walked past our neighborhood library several times on my previous visits, but since I moved into 24A last week, I finally decided to enter. My library card is my first piece of real evidence of belonging here and I am very proud of it. (The Costco card just can’t count, ok?) I took home two novels: George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

I decided to save Zadie for next week and start with George: As the saying goes, age before beauty. I am 150 pages into Middlemarch and am smirking raucously, if that’s even possible. I wish I were reading it with my sister, whose unblinking love of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice finally made me read it and fall in love with Austen and the Victorian novelists. (And no! It’s not for the love of Colin Firth, although he isn’t a bad Darcy at all.) When I read my first Eliot novel, The Mill on the Floss, last summer, I realized what I’d been missing by missing the Victorians. I fell in love with the logic of her prose, the way she reveals her heart through reason. She’s not really anything like me. I think.

So far, I find her opinions on the genders, and on marriage in particular, to be full of sharkish wisdom, the Northern point on my own spiritual compass. The more I think and live, the more that I find that experience is undervalued–overshadowed, of course, by the ideals of society (all kinds). Relationships–in particular those falling under the title of marriage–are tied with legal, religious, and financial strings. Like Eliot, I ask: So what of the real strings? The ones that we live for, dance to, pin our dreams on? The things that really tie us to our humanity. What happens to those when we lose our hearts to common sense with the idea that we are supposed to.

Supposed to. As much as I do much of what I am supposed to, I have a real problem with the idea. And this is what I find fascinating about George Eliot. She understands ’supposed to’, but she does not allow it to limit her. If she walked this tightrope successfully in the early 1800s, then what have I got to be afraid of?

As I read last night, I tried to digest this statement by the narrator. I tried to figure out how I would let Eliot get away with it without thinking “doormat”:

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.

Come on, George! Then again, how many times have I done or thought exactly this? So I forgave her. I had to because she’s right. Now, if only we could get everybody to understand the last part.

I love her cheeky portrayals of men. As the Rector says about Dorothea’s betrothed,

‘It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout stream.’

Perhaps the Rector’s view of the relative merits of men as companions to women in marriage are not so different today. We all think, What’s he got to offer? Or, as a friend recently asked her young-ish son who hinted at proposing to his girlfriend, “Yu can buy ‘fridge?” (Jamaican to English translation: Can you support her?) This is certainly the advice I’ve received, implicitly or explicitly, from my elders, mother included. Yesterday’s trout streams are today’s 4/3 with a 2-car garage, but it’s the same thing really.

And the final one for today::

‘Oh, my dear, you must allow for young men. Be thankful if they have good hearts. A woman must learn to put up with little things. You will be married some day.’

Can you hear the book slamming shut? This sounds like something straight out of the How to Be Subservient to Your Man training manual. Luckily, I know the other shoe will drop in a few (hundred) pages because George knew.

George knew well enough that her work wouldn’t be taken seriously if she published as herself, Mary Ann Evans of Warwickshire. But here’s why I like her even more : she named herself George, the very name of the married man whom she loved for most of her life. Scandalous!

In Middlemarch, I am well prepared for disappointment and heartbreak nestled among Eliot’s pearls, perhaps making them even brighter. As one of the two main characters has already married in part one of the novel, and as reading The Mill on the Floss has forewarned me, Mary Ann George Eliot Evans is a realist and there will be no sugary bliss, but perhaps only of the appropriate Victorian (mandatory propitious or religious) kind in the fashion of Jane Eyre. And that will be sure to piss me off.