Eliot and her politics

Silas Marner, by George Eliot.

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

Doesn't sound like a leftist, does she?

Have you heard of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa?

Her utter lack of sympathy with Molly, Godfrey's abandoned wife, speaks volumes.

Chapter 12, for example.

And why is Silas a miser, come to that?

For saving his money or for his anguish at its theft?

It is all he has to keep him from death from exposure or starvation.

But Eliot cannot see that, she cannot paint it into his character.

She sees him full of concern for his gold, but she, and so he, sees nothing of what it is for.

Or she sees it but gives it no weight, at all.

Finished Middlemarch

A truly fine novel.

Not a moment too soon, but maybe not soon enough

About halfway through Middlemarch, Casaubon dies.

Just in time to not issue personal orders to control the rest of wife Dorothea's life after his own death, as he intended, but not soon enough to predate a codicil to his will disinheriting her utterly if she ever marries Will Ladislaw, his young cousin to whom marriage would very likely make her happy.

Oh, what will she do, this sympathetic and brilliant but nevertheless absurdly self-sacrificing young woman, so unaccountably accepting of political, social, and even sexual male dominance in ways and to a degree that our author, George Eliot, was not?

Eh?

Three Love Problems

About halfway through the book there is an excellent, charming scene in which Will and Dorothea speak alone in the library.

Eliot's insight, beautiful prose, humor, and lightness of touch are nowhere better.

Reading Middlemarch.

Lynne Schwartz reports she has been often called the greatest of 19th Century British novelists.

Maybe she is.

Her work is very fine.

But if she does it how can it be wrong?

She writes "If he would have" instead of "if he had".

She shakes me; oh, she does.

She is that fine a writer.

George Eliot, Middlemarch.

Dodo, Kitty, and Casaubon

George Eliot is wonderful, again.

Wit, intelligence, insight, perception, and lovely prose.

Reading Middlemarch.

A fine novel, in the end

A very perceptive and intelligent novel.

Though she is still, at least, a moral believer of the sort most assured of annoying Nietzsche.

The Mill on the Floss.

Against custom or the settled way

Hobbes is far from the only one to assimilate moral wrong to violations of custom like picking your nose in public, or setting the table with the silver uncommonly arranged - though he departs from this incipient naturalistic relarivism in providing his contract theory to found justice in a universalist manner, but not small morals.

Maggie's mother's spontaneous assimilation of morals to custom is not thus qualified.

The Mill on the Floss, The Final Rescue, Chapter 3.

This is quite different from assimilation of moral wrong with getting a calculation, translation, or fact wrong, to which others subscribe.

The worst choice possible

By her refusal of Stephen, Maggie has spared neither Philip nor Lucy.

But she has made herself and Stephen miserable and ruined herself in the eyes of everyone, though had she married Stephen, gone abroad for a honeymoon, and come back with a trousseau, all would have been forgiven and the new couple accepted.

And her obloquy takes her by surprise.

So writes Ms. Eliot.

The Mill on the Floss, The Final Rescue, Chapter 2.

Just as well, then

That Maggie has steadfastly refused to marry Philip Wakem out of her unwillingness to cross her brother.

Turns out she is far more powerfully draw to cousin Lucy's boyfriend, Stephen Guest.

He beseeches her to marry him, pleading they both must abandon their previous engagements, given their passion for each other.

But, of course, that's not going to happen.

She is utterly certain it would be wrong.

This though neither couple is, as Stephen points out, formally engaged.

Maggie's moral beliefs are even narrower and more self-abnegating - and more oppressive of women - than the conventional.

And she is utterly determined to live up to them.

Contrast, say, Moll Flanders.

Or, for that matter, George Eliot.

The Great Temptation, chapter 11.

The Mill on the Floss,

Nice aphorism after that last semicolon

But if Maggie had been that young lady you would probably have known nothing about her; her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

The clause between the two is an apt comment on the art of the novel, and applies as well to men.

Though there are things like Mrs. Dalloway.

By now, Maggie has renounced renunciation.

She wants to be happy.

She wants "love, beauty, and delight."

The Mill on the Floss, The Great Temptation, chapter 3.

Chapter 4 of this Book shows up the extraordinary subjection of women in its picture of Maggie's relationship with Tom.

So far are the relations between the sexes determined by nothing but upper body strength and relative size.

Eliot is such a wit I would have loved to have lunch with her.

In chapter 6 of this book she writes,

"Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms - "character is destiny."

But not the whole of our destiny.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence.

But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity, and some moody sarcasms towards the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.

Also in chapter 6, this that shows, I think, the fact of it.

"Do take my arm," he said, in a low tone as if it were a secret.

There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of the firm arm: the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help - the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs - meets a continual want of the imagination.

Update.

Somewhere, recently, on the Internet, I read that men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.

A propos.

But it is he who would destroy their father

Tom, having found out Maggie's liaisons with Phillip in the Red Deeps, demands she stop instantly or he will tell their father, whom the news will destroy.

She accepts his angry claim that the destruction would be her fault.

She accepts this without the least glimmer that the responsibility would actually be his.

Wheat and Tares, chapter 5.

The Mill on the Floss.

Self-Renunciation

Maggie discovers and falls in love with Thomas a Kempis' preaching of total rejection of self-love.

As the story continues, we see this is a profound, and profoundly painful and costly, renunciation on her part, of any aspirations to having a life of her own.

The Mill on the Floss.

The Valley of Humiliation, chapter 3.

School time, chapter 3

Eliot is at pains to show that Tom is a stupid thug, and Philip the hunchback is quite smart.

If I have not said so, let me say now she is a very good writer.

Mr and Mrs Glegg

He is an otherwise agreeable miser, harnessed to a snake.

Chapter 12, The Mill on the Floss.

Tom and Maggie are deplorable kids

She at 9 is an evil little psycho and Tom at 13 is just a surly lump.

Eliot paints a distinctly un-PC portrait of gypsies.

Chapter 11.

The Mill on the Floss.

She was 40 or 41 when she wrote this ignorant absurdity

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

Memories of being raped?

Memories of being abused in childhood, for years?

Memories of being beaten and robbed, week in and week out, at school?

Are people soothed by memories of outlived sorrow?

The first paragraph of chapter 9, The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot.

This, on the other hand, is quite right.

A boy's sheepishness is by no means a sign of overmastering reverence; and while you are making encouraging advances to him under the idea that he is overwhelmed by a sense of your age and wisdom, ten to one he is thinking you extremely queer.

The Mill on the Floss

Reading the introductory matter in a 1981 paperback, World Classics edition, from the Oxford University Press, I am put in mind that your true religious believer disbelieves in all Gods, gods, conceptions of God, and conceptions of gods, save his own.

It seems George Eliot, Mary Anne Evans, abandoned any style of orthodox Christianity in her early twenties for some form of Protestant religious liberalism.

She translated Strauss's Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, and the partly biographical introduction says she remained deeply religious all her life, urging people to find consolation and guidance in The Imitation of Christ.

Your true atheist rejects all gods or Gods, disbelieving in them as according to some conceptions and rejecting other conceptions as ballocks.