middlemarch

Question 1

lygate

Answer 1

there must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry”, and that “a man’s mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.”

o Lydgate and the science of anatomy. He had early been ‘bitten with an interest in structure’.

Lydgate was feeling the hampering, threadlike pressures of small social conditions and their frustrating complexity

Question 2

contemporary critics web

Answer 2

• Alexander Bain in Mind and Body: “The webs of bodily order – veins, nerves, tissues – allow the metaphor of the web to move into the intimate ordering of life”

juliette atkinson o this web-like structure place a coalesce effect on the narrative structure.

Question 3

Darwin

Answer 3

• We shall never, probably, disentangle the inextricable web of affinities

• ‘To me the Development Theory and all other explanations of processes by which things come to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the process’

Question 4

narrator web unravelling

Answer 4

‘I atleast have so much to do in unravelling human lots and seeing how they are woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevances called the universe. ‘

Question 5

miss morgan

Answer 5

she’s interesting to herself

‘resigned’ look about her

Question 6

Dorothea

Answer 6

‘perfect young Madonna’ in the Vatican Museum, an expression of ‘antique form animated by Christian sentiment – a sort of Christian Antigone – sensuous force controlled by spiritual passion’.

she was looking forward to higher initiation in ideas

Question 7

J.H Miller on the form

Answer 7

“a form governed by no absolute centre, origin, or end”

Question 8

Will on sympathy

Answer 8

fanaticism of sympathy”.

“turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery”. (this passage can be read alongside the ‘Notes on Form in Art’

Question 9

Notes on Form in Art

Answer 9

Form, then, as distinguished from merely massive impressions, must first depend on the discrimination of wholes and then on the discrimination of parts.

Question 10

prelude theresa

Answer 10

with dim lights and tangled circumstances, they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes, their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresa were helped by no coherent social faith

• The ‘martyrdom’ she sought as a child was denied her by ‘domestic reality… in the shape of uncles’. So she had to satisfy her epic ambitions ‘in the reform of a religious order’.

Question 11

depiction of Casaboun

Answer 11

‘suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity’.

David Carrol: there is ‘a medical quality in this kind of shift:

Question 12

eliot on beginning a book

Answer 12

‘when a subject has begun to grow in me’, she writes on the completion of Middlemarch, ‘I suffer terribly until it has wrought itself out – become a complete organism,’ suffering is inseparable from the act of writing.

“But my writing is simply a set of experiments in life — an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of… what gains from past revelations and discipline we must strive to keep hold of as something more than shifting theory.”

Question 13

David Carroll

Answer 13

its different segments can best be understood as the fictionalisation of different hermeneutic modes

• But on its provincial borders the reader is allowed glimpses of the Pascalian abysses which lie in wait if the desire for meaning is pursued to excess…

Question 14

rome

Answer 14

The ‘city of visible history’ [Rome] turns into ‘the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes’.

• This is the definitive representation in the fiction of the ‘miserable agglomeration of atoms’, that deconstruction of the self and the world which George Eliot’s master-plot demands.

Question 15

sally organism

Answer 15

Middlemarch as a community “exhibit[ing] all the characteristics of a vital organism’. (Sally Shuttleworth

Question 16

Beer

Answer 16

Gillian Beer and the novels ‘inclusiveness’

Question 17

eliot and readers

Answer 17

George Eliot letter that man and woman are ‘imaginative beings. We cannot, at least those who ever read to any purpose at all… help being modified by the ideas that pass through our minds’.

many who knew her, thought it was a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in certain circles as a wife and a mother’

Question 18

kate flint readers

Answer 18

eliots own novels were structured to refuse her readers the kind of satisfaction promised by the works she attacked [in lady novelists.’

Question 19

mr brooks

Answer 19

he gave up science saying: ‘it wouldnt do. it leads to everything’ (idea that there must be limits. conflict between realism and science

Question 20

Matthew Beaumont

Answer 20

[realism grants] unequivocal sense of the moral irreducibility of individual lives’ (the difference between individual lives and society

Question 21

Eliot on art and life

Answer 21

‘the natural history of German life’
Art is the nearest thing to life: it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.’

Question 22

udder feeding quote

Answer 22

we are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves

Question 23

henry james

Answer 23

Henry James review of the novel in 1873 ‘Middlemarch is a treasure-house of detail, but it is an indifferent whole’

Question 24

narrator has a personality

Answer 24

“but why always Dorothea? I protest!’.

The narrator feels characterised, and sometimes even semi-homodiegetic.

Question 25

Carrol abyss

Answer 25

David Carroll, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations 1992

But on its provincial borders, the reader is allowed glimpses of the Pascalian abysses which lie in wait if the desire for meaning is pursued to excess…

Question 26

Brook physiology

Answer 26

At one and the same moment there had risen above the shoulders of the crowd, nearly opposite Brooke, and within ten yards of him, the effigy of himself: buff-coloured waistcoat, eye-glass, neutral physiognomy

The caricature threatens because it offers no legible meaning, instead forcing the interpretive agency onto the reader.

Question 27

Casaubon looks like Locke

Answer 27

his deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke’. His similarity to Locke on the bassis of his ‘deep eye-sockets’ anticipates his resemblance to Milton on the basis of his blindness. Exhausted eyes. In the complex interaction of C’s quickly fading eyes and the various eyes on Casaubon, eliot questions the very interpretive faculty of vision on which physiognomy and portraiture rely.

We are constantly asked to change our point of view as readers, to gain a more comprehensive view of Eliot’s study. What always looks whole to us, whether it’s the human ego or the whole of the novel itself, whatever looks unified is just a subjective perception of order

Question 28

J Hillis Miller Casaubon and interpretation

Answer 28

Casaubon becomes ‘a text, a collection of signs which Dorothea misreads, according to that universal propensity for misinterpretation which infects all the characters in Middlemarch’.

the problem is with misreading; with the illusion of fixity that is physiognomic portraiture in general.

‘neutral physiognomy’ throughout Middlemarch to reveal the epistemological force of a reader’s drawing of analogies based on his or her own psychological compulsions. These analogies are both productive and untenable.

Question 29

Adam Bede

Answer 29

Let me take you into that dining room and show you the Rev, Adolphus Irwine… we will enter and stand still in the open doorway’

Eliot’s narrator is voiced form the limen – the liminal space – the latin etymology of which is ‘threshold’. the narrative voice, as in Eliot’s first novel Adam Bede, seeks to guide and position the reader into a shared stasis and point of view

These breaks or ruptures in the linear sequence of the narrative – what J Buzard terms ‘self-interruptions’

These intersections afford Eliot an instance in which to inculcate the ethical import of her realist doctrine

by placing her narrator in this liminal space, in the space ‘between prospect and retrospect” (henry james) implants the ‘clew’

Question 30

what is the clew

Answer 30

Positing her narrator in the liminal space implants the “clew” (a term Eliot evokes with dual significance: a key to understanding but also a ball of thread or yarn presented in mythological or legendary narratives to lead out of a labyrinth), the thread that guides the hermeneutics of the novel

Question 31

Foucault and Carrol threshold

Answer 31

David Carrol writes on the aforementioned analysis from Foucault that ‘the threshold indicates the fragility of any perspective on the visible, including Foucault’s own’. The painter is said to “[rule] on the threshold”, but, in fact, the threshold is precisely the fine line where no one and no one thing rules, where all sovereignty is undermined, where incompatible spaces, epistemes, and modes of discourse struggle for dominance’ (1987 62-3). If we apply this threshold threat to the sovereignty of omniscient narration, then perhaps this suggests Eliot’s awareness or rather anxiety at a position which proffers to see and know all – an anxiety which fits into a moral world without a God

Question 32

Notes on form and thresholds

Answer 32

The threshold, whilst seemingly a liminal site, retains the need for structure in narrative as Eliot’s architectural emphasis on doorways and framing evinces. Her 1868 essay, ‘Notes on form in Art’, does much to illuminate her use of threshold narrating

To frame something and position spectatorship and comprehension on the boundary of that frame is to cultivate an insular space, to give the matter of discourse ‘Form’: the isolation of various differences and ‘unlikenesses’ further aids the working out of the heteroglossia (to borrow from Bakhtin) that accompanies the discourse that is framed and, thus, ‘knowledge’ and by extension sympathy ‘continues to grow’.

This alienated viewpoint, one which straddles both omniscience and immersion in the scene narrated, decentres protagonist point- of – view and is essential to the ethical architecture of Eliot’s narrative discourse. ‘Notes on form in Art’ qualifies the realist doctrine and gives a formal explanation for the ‘multi-perspectival sympathy-spreading realism’ that her fiction demands (2005 280).

Question 33

Casabon framed narrator I protest

Answer 33

Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him… Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes;

Question 34

James B critic on realism and sympathy

Answer 34

‘multi-perspectival sympathy-spreading realism’

Question 35

squirrel

Answer 35

that element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind;

and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it… 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.

(idea that a super-sympathetic state would ultimately kill us)

• The lifted Veil: the character can hear the thoughts of everyone around him. A utopian state of absolute sympathy.
• This habit of expansiveness has a risk of becoming uncontrollable. This is a comment on realism, and on the limitations of sympathy. (the idea of web again)
  The novel reject a potentially totalising system

Question 36

critic on how real life is chaotic but art sorts it out

Answer 36

Peter Burra ‘real life is chaotic and formless, and the artist is faced with the problem of configuring his impression of that life into a space which is infinitely smaller than itself…. to arrange the chaos into some sort of order.”