Sympathy and Middlemarch

"The meanness is the point."  That's been said about Trump and about MAGA more generally. It can certainly be said of ICE. "My viewpoint is the only one that counts" might well describe quite a number of world leaders' assumptions.  Or "I will have what I want, and humanity or history be damned" might describe others'.  Those ideas about how our relationship with other human beings is constituted drove me into the pages of George Eliot's Middlemarch.  One does not undertake this commitment lightly. In my charming hardcover Penguin edition, the novel clocks in at 850 pages, which challenges the abilities of Penguin's binders:  I quickly had errant pages falling out of my book. 

There's a special group of books that we read for the narrator.  Most of these involve a first-person narrator with a charming voice or perspective.  Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, flawed as his perspective is, nevertheless embodies the nostalgia that infuses the novel. I wanted George Eliot ringing in my ear--I know, that's a lazy conflation.  But who else is responsible for this remarkable passage about Dorothea Brooke's unhappiness with her marriage, an unhappiness felt by many newly-married people who find themselves in painful situations they didn't anticipate: 

"Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.  That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of its frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.  If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

How to unwind the perspective here, the gentle ironies?  On the one hand, we're being forgiven for being insensible sometimes.  Yet do we want only to feel "the coarse emotion of mankind"? Somehow, painful as it is, Eliot gives us the sense that we should strive to have a "keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life." 

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  What is this magical tome, this exemplary novel called Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf called the first novel written for grownups?  The first thing to note is that it's called Middlemarch.  Wafting through its pages is discussion of the 1832 Reform Act, which sought to end the kind of gerrymandering that let some small communities return their favourite MP while huge areas were underrepresented. On the other hand, we are witness to many acts of kindness.  In many ways, it's about our collective lives, how we influence and judge and support one another. It's also about growing up:  many of its primary and secondary characters are in their early twenties when they meet challenges beyond their ken and we learn whether or not they have the integrity and spirit to use their frustrations to grow. 

That broad, serious concern is levened by the three romances at the novel's centre. First, the fervent and serenely beautiful Dorothea Brooke marries an old scholar, Edward Casaubon who is working on his magnum opus, "The Key to All Mythologies."  That he even assumes he can undertake such a task tells you something about the size and single-mindedness of his ego.  He and Dorothea go to Rome for their honeymoon, largely because he wants to do some research there, but what really happens is that he begins to see that his project is fatally flawed.  So Dorothea's eagerness to help him is interpreted as criticism of his abilities. Thus he is often cold to her during her most sympathetic moments, which led to the tears that provoked the narrator's commentary above.  Also in Rome, Dorothea meets Casaubon's nephew, Will Ladislaw.  If I tell you that he was played by a young Rufus Sewell in the BBC version, you will detect in the casting the likelihood that Dorothea finds Will more attuned to her feelings--and a lot sexier.  I shan't spoil the ins and outs of this second relationship for you.

The third romance is between Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy. Lydgate is a French-trained doctor who is alive to all the latest science and whose practice implicitly challenges the ways of the other Middlemarch doctors.  In spite of the fact that his practice is in its early stages, he marries Rosamund, largely because she is beautiful and accomplished.  (He has met Dorothea early in the novel and finds her earnestness exhausting. He will later change his mind.) It is Rosamund who will entertain him when he gets home from a difficult day. Eliot frequently notes how Lydgate combines the coldness of science with very human warmth and sympathy in his practice , and it is this sympathy which binds him to Rosamund when he finds her crying because she loves him and he stopped coming to the house until her brother Fred became ill. 

Rosamund and her family have pursued all the exterior markers of success.  Her beauty, her taste in clothes, her skill at the piano, her perfect manners, learned at Miss Lemon's finishing school, will guarantee her goal:  to marry up.  Her father is in trade, so she seeks someone with connections to the landed gentry, preferably titled, and a profession.  I find her a sad character, one whose happiness is doomed by the fact that her sense of self is constructed out of whalebone and money.  She has no inner life that is not shaped by how others see and admire her. That life collapses when Lydgate's practice is in difficulties and he must live more cheaply--a smaller house, fewer dresses and parties.

There's a third tier of characters we come to know well and then there is Middlemarch more generally, with all of its smallness and gossipiness and its delighted criticism when "their betters" are brought low.  There are machinations about inheritances and the ruining of reputations--which ripple throughout the community. There's gossip and people going out of their way to be kind. There is also poetic justice about unkindness, meanness, or cruelty.  It is like a boomerang and will come back to you, possibly ruining your life.  One of the subtler examples of this occurs in Rome.  Just as Dorothea is pulling herself together after the disappointed tears we witnessed above, Casaubon's nephew, Will Ladislaw, is announced and since Casaubon is away, Dorothy meets him alone.  

"She was alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy, and at this moment it seemed as if the visit had come to shake her out of her self-absorbed discontent--to remind her of her husband's goodness, and make her feel that she had now the right to be his helpmate in all kind deeds." While she and Will do not flirt, Casaubon senses that their lives are carried out on a different plane, one he can't reach by dint of his focus on thought over feeling.  Dorothea and Will have a common language of sympathy, a common generosity and curiosity about the well-being of others that immediately binds them.  In his will, Casaubon anticipates the romantic blooming of their relationship after he dies, so he disinherits Dorothea if she marries Will. The community regards this as an ugly gesture, one that implies Dorothea's faithlessness. Obviously it says more about Casaubon's envy than about Dorothea's relief in speaking openly to someone who understands her desire to give and receive sympathy. Why should Casaubon wish to control her happiness after he dies, except for the ill-tempered envy that follows him to the grave?  It blows up in his face. Yet this is what Eliot's narrator says of him:

"For my part I am very sorry for him.  It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy:  to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted."

What critics call the ideology of the plot--the pattern of who gets rewarded and who gets punished for their actions and attitudes, and what that pattern says about the values of the narrative, whether it's a novel or a film--certainly punished Casaubon.  This passage is the culmination of three pages that begins with a consideration of Dorothea and cuts off by asking "But why Dorothea?  Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble." In these pages, Eliot is certainly undercutting our expectations.  But to what end? We hope we live in a world where fate is scrupulously ethical--though at the present moment, we doubt that fact, adding to our anxiety, making it existential as well as political.

But what if sympathy were, so to speak, a universal human right?  What if, when you saw or learned of someone behaving oddly or badly, you shifted from ready judgment to the harder task of being curious? Frank Bruni has written a wonderful book on what he calls the "grievance industrial project"--peoples' general tendency to feel aggrieved when they don't get their way or feel disrespected--describing a general trend right now. The evidence he has is irrefutable.  MAGA and Trump, you might have noticed, eat grievance for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  But perhaps sympathy is the force that might hold the rest of us humanly together during this difficult time.