good Middlemarch society...

Week 4 | analyzing week three and getting into our next chapters

Welcome to the Closely Reading book club, where we closely read classic literature together and discuss assigned chapters each week. Right now, we’re reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch—and you’re welcome to join us any time.

a quick update

After some very sweet and encouraging DMs from a handful of readers here, the weekly guides from here on out are going to be a bit shorter. While I looooove getting into all the details with everyone, our comment threads have become *where it’s at* when it comes to conversation, and I want to push our attention more there than on my own observations.

To be honest, creating a robust guide each week starts to take its toll over time—and cuts into time for other passions of mine (like ceramics and rewatching Stranger Things and playing with my cats), so I really feel so much gratitude and love for my readers who’ve encouraged me to take back some of my time and avoid burnout.

(The last thing I want is burnout! For me and for you!)

on that note

As we continue our amazing, in-depth, and brilliant conversations about George Eliot’s Middlemarch each week, I am introducing a few “conversation guidelines” to make sure our comment thread keeps the vibe we’ve all been enjoying for over a year now in this book club.

1. Add to the convo! The comments are the most productive (and funnest!) when we’re all open (and feeling safe enough) to add our thoughts, and share different interpretations or readings of key scenes and characters. You’re obviously allowed to disagree with one another and provide insights into your departures in thinking. Do so in a respectful, conversation-building way.

   1. If you’re not sure what that looks like, take some time to review past comment threads. Our readership here is brilliant.

2. Avoid spoilers! Many of the readers here are enjoying our read-a-long books for the very first time. So, as you comment, please be mindful of how far along we are in the novel and don’t spoil anything we haven’t read yet. That said: any chapters we have read up to that point are on the table, so have at ‘em!

3. Don’t be an asshole! This should go without saying but, for goodness’ sake, be nice. I reserve the right to delete mean comments and to block repeat offenders.

   1. “Mean” in this context includes, but is not limited to: demeaning others’ interpretations, calling other readers uninformed or stupid, suggesting a fellow reader who happens to be a young literature student should stop reading and thinking entirely because they don’t already know everything in the whole universe about George Eliot (a real comment that led to an immediate delete last week), or — in general — leaving comments that are aimed to hurt rather than foster good conversation.

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let’s talk chapters 11-16

Ya’ll.

I hit a wall this week.

Somewhere around chapter 12, I was like “how long are these paragraphs?” and put my book down for a few days to frolic in the summer sun — nary a thought of Fred’s apparent gambling problem or the self-centered-seeming Rosamond in my mind.

I got a sunburn while swimming in a mountain reservoir and when I brought myself back to reading, I was confronted with a sun-induced warm sleep setting over my whole body that Eliot’s meandering paragraphs did little to combat.

AND YET!

Thanks to you all, and our dedication to the project at hand, I pressed on.

It was rough for a few chapters…

But then I made it to what felt like a reward in chapters 15 and 16.

I absolutely loved the discussions of Middlemarch the place in these chapters. Middlemarch almost starts to become a character itself!

Lydgate, as our resident “stranger” has come into this town like us: he knows little of the particulars, but he knows well the social laws and political traditions that uphold this society. He knows human behavior — or, at least, the basics and patterns of it.

And he’s getting to see something we haven’t seen from the outside yet. Lydgate can see the biases and prejudices that roil under Middlemarch’s surface, and that perpetuate a status quo that keeps the same five or six families in charge of all the major decisions that govern the town.

He sees it — and he’s already starting to rub up against it. Who will be his allies? Who will he (perhaps unwittingly) alienate with his choices? Will he be able to bring the power of REFORM to this place?

I also noticed we met many men this week — and I found that particularly curious. A few readers have mentioned needing to go back to map all the various characters we’ve met, and one reader pointed out that our cast has grown to over 30 individuals thus far.

(That’s a lot of people to track!)

I’m not keeping track of everyone in any tidy or organized way; I don’t believe you must do so in order to continue closely reading. But! If you want to, here are some tips for doing so:

• Use a large index card to write down names + basic details. Use this index card as a bookmark or tuck it into the back of your book for easy reference.

• Create a similar index, but use the blank pages at the end of your book to do so. No need for external notes.

• Color-code characters with different highlighters. (This can get extremely time consuming, but if you really want to see where different characters appear in the story, color-coding can be very effective!)

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something I loved

My favorite part of this weeks’ chapters was, far and away, the chapter on Lydgate — and especially the story of his bizarrely traumatic first love.

When we learned that the first woman he ever loved and considered marrying was a beautiful actress who totally killed her husband on stage and got away with it, I felt I really understood why Lydgate — at twenty-and-seven years of age — is in no hurry to get married.

He was like, “No thanks, I’ll stick to reading anatomy books instead.”

And I love that for him.

After all: who hasn’t buried themselves in an academic or otherwise intellectually demanding project after a terrible romantic upset?

(Just me?)

I’m thinking through why Eliot chooses this history for Lydate, and why she went to such pains to give us a detailed character outline of him.

The old adage that great writers “Show, don’t tell” seemed disregarded here. Eliot was telling us about Lydate, and even went so far as to warn us from making up our minds about him without really “showing us” all that much about his character. It left me wondering about the narrator’s relationship to these characters. Is the narrator a quiet observer within Middlemarch? Do they know things they are choosing not to show us? Why all this telling?

This is at least the second intrusion of this kind our narrator has made (and I think we could argue it’s been many more than that…) and so I’m just becoming increasingly baffled about this narrator’s desire to control or shape our reading experience in this way. Does the narrator trust us?

What do you think?

I also found it curious that Lydgate was only one of many men we met this week who have put love in the backseat as they focus on other things, like:

• Gambling and games

• Career advancement

• Intellectual pursuits

• Passion projects

• Voting and holding Middlemarch committee meetings

• Shaping the future of the town

• Politicking around

Marriage is, from what I could tell in these chapters, among the least interesting things a man in Middlemarch believes he can do. There is so much else to worry about: inheritances, whether you’ve got the right votes for seats of community power, whether you’ll discover new medical wonders or keys to mythologies.

I wonder, then, about how these chapters provide for us a deeper backdrop upon which to consider Dorothea’s eager partnership with Casaubon — a character who reminds me so much of Lydgate. Two men who are consumed with their intellectual pursuits and who long to find that one true thing at the core of a system—of either mythologies or of human anatomy—that will unlock the mysteries that beguile humankind.

Two interesting questions here:

• Do these men really believe there is a single answer to life’s most beguiling questions?

  • Where does that thinking come from? Or, rather, what informs that kind of belief in a “single” truth?

• Where does marriage rank for men, in terms of social viability?

  • Where does it rank for women in terms of social viability?

On the second question(s), I found this quote particularly apt. It comes from chapter 12:

“The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.”

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favorite quote

Each week, I share my favorite quote from our assigned pages. If you had one this week, please share it in the comments!

Here is my favorite from this week:

“Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.”

Oh, wow. There is an Eliot sentence that has me swooning.

I love the imagery this sentence conjures for me. (This is showing, not telling, in my estimation.)

I hadn’t ever really paused to think about this experience, though I’ve certainly had it. The image of the landscape here—a part of yourself carried on cliffy heights of feeling, while the “persistent self” waits patiently in the “wide plain” of the rest of our reality—is so effective, for me. It suggests a deep understanding of selfhood, and of what it means to be torn asunder by passion. It highlights, for me, the bifurcation of logic and reason from matters of the heart; it compassionately envisages that patient, perhaps more stable self, who rests on standby during “heights” of fantasy, faith, or feeling.

And it suggests there is always that somewhere beyond the heights of feeling; a ground where, from the heights, we can land again.

I love that.

I also loved when Fred said: “Oh, fudge!”

I do not say “Oh, fudge!” nearly enough.

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what we are reading this week (week 4!)

Here we go into week 4! Here’s your assignment

Week 4: Monday, June 16
Read chapters 17-23 this week

You can view the full reading schedule here.

You can pose your questions here (or in the comments of today’s post!)

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let’s press on

Head into the comments to share our thoughts on what we read last week—and remember to keep our new guidelines in mind.

If you enjoyed today’s essay and want to make a one-time contribution, you can buy me a coffee.

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