Middlemarch

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1871

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 1

Book 2

Book 3

Book 4

Book 5

Book 6

Book 7

Book 8-Finale

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Themes

The Cost of Making a Bad Marriage

Middlemarch is built on a foundation of bad marriages. There are those which happened in the past, which drove Julia and Bulstrode into hiding. There are those in the present, such as Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon and Lydgate’s to Rosamond, in which the marriage is not built on a thorough understanding of each other, but on an idealized version of the respective characters.

Premarital idealization is often associated with social mobility, as in the cases of Casaubon and Rosamond. Casaubon marries Dorothea because marriage is expected of a man in his position, while Rosamond marries Lydgate because she wants to attach herself to a man who is moving up in the world. Meanwhile, Dorothea and Lydgate fall in love due to more idealistic and romantic reasons. They love the idea of love, rather than their actual partner. Dorothea convinces herself that Casaubon is a great intellectual whom she can help achieve greatness. She wants to achieve her ambitions vicariously through her husband, which (in a patriarchal society) necessitates marrying a great man. Thus, she idealizes Casaubon and turns him into something he is not. Lydgate similarly misunderstands Rosamond. He sees only her beauty, rather than her cynical ploy for social mobility. He deludes himself into ignoring her true character and allows himself to be manipulated. These two marriages are entirely miserable. For a long time, no one gets anything they want and they spend years in each other's depressed company, waiting for their partners to die or depart.

At the end of the novel, the mistakes of the early marriages are undone. With Casaubon long dead, Dorothea realizes that Will is her true love. Her experience with Casaubon has dealt a traumatizing blow to her judgement, however. Not only does she have legal and financial provisions which prevent her from marrying Will, she is also afraid of making another bad marriage. As a result, she and Will spend months dancing around their true feelings. The fear of a bad marriage almost prevents a good marriage. They eventually marry but, in doing so, Dorothea is forced to sacrifice the inheritance left to her by Casaubon. To Dorothea, this is a willing sacrifice. The money symbolizes her bad marriage and she would rather be rid of it in the name of a good marriage than deny herself the opportunity to love Will.

In the final chapter of the book, the narrator reveals that Lydgate and Rosamond spent many miserable years together. After Lydgate's death, Rosamond remarried. She found an elderly, wealthy physician who was able to provide her with the prosperity and social mobility that she sought her entire life. Ironically, Rosamond is the most cynical maker of marriages and perhaps the most successful. She is forced to sacrifice nothing that she values, yet is able to attain everything she wants. In a novel about bad marriages, Rosamond is the only person to regard marriage as a vehicle for her own cynical desires. Her cynicism is an echo of Dorothea's earlier belief, that the only way to achieve great things would be to do so vicariously through a husband. Dorothea and Rosamond, to varying degrees, accept that marriage in a patriarchal society is a bureaucratic instrument which is one of the few ways in which women can improve their social standing and achieve their ambitions. While unromantic, there is an honesty to Rosamond's approach which is directly rewarded with everything she ever wanted.

Social Status and Religious Hypocrisy

Middlemarch is filled with religion but only on a surface level. Many of the characters are priests, otherwise they are married to priests, friends with priests, or related to priests. In the small community, priests and their churches play an important role. The churches are social institutions, while the priests are pillars of the community who are present in everyday life, from hospitals to political debates.

However, while the church and priests are everywhere in the town of Middlemarch, religion itself is seemingly entirely absent. Characters rarely talk about God and almost never pray. Even though churches are in abundance and priests are so numerous, the novel rarely portrays a scene set inside a church. Characters attend church services on only two occasions: one is a funeral, which is mainly watched through a window from inside a house, and the other involves Will attempting to glimpse Dorothea, only to leave before hearing the sermon. Even during Will's visit, the church's main priest Casaubon does not speak. In Middlemarch, the church is nothing more than muscle memory, a tradition perpetuated simply because it is a tradition, not due to some burning belief in any actual religion.

Belief may be absent from Middlemarch but the church still plays an important role. Instead of a religious institution, the church provides a social function. Religion is interchangeable with social class. The church and the priests do not serve God, but they perpetuate social etiquette and perform necessary community functions which perpetuate the enduring class system of British society. They perform marriages, hold public meetings, and provide advice and compassion for people in need. They perform these functions absent of God; in reality, Christianity is a loose set of moral expectations which are more reliant on social mores and legal restrictions than biblical provisions. Casaubon, for example, uses his will to dictate who his wife can marry after his death. He manipulates the legal institutions of the country to fuel his bitterness and jealousy toward his younger cousin, acting in a manner which is not in accordance with Christian moral teaching but which is made possible by the institutional knowledge he possesses. Christianity is irrelevant to a priest, even after his death. Though Casaubon might reasonably expect that he will enter into the kingdom of heaven, he is more concerned with manipulating the people he leaves behind on earth.

Added to this, certain branches of the church and certain denominations correspond with social expectations. Farebrother and Casaubon are both priests, for example, but the former is poor and the latter is rich. Farebrother attends to a poorer congregation, distinguishing him as a priest for the working class. Meanwhile, the more well-bred, haughty Casaubon attends to a middle-class congregation. These distinctions illustrate the hollowness religion of Middlemarch and the way in which it functions as a marker of social class, rather than genuine belief.

Perhaps the only character in the novel who truly believes is Bulstrode. At the very least, he is the only character who engages in specifically Christian rituals of prayer. However, Bulstrode is distrusted because he is an Evangelical. He is an outsider with a dark past: His evangelism and his sincerity are prompted by his guilt. Bulstrode's religion is a post-hoc attempt to redress the mistakes of his past, latching on to the only sincere expression of religion as a way to distract himself and others from his disreputable history. Despite his immorality, he is the only true believer—even the most devout man in Middlemarch uses religion for self-serving reasons.

The Performative Nature of Reputation

In the strict Victorian society of Middlemarch, characters are beholden to certain social expectations. The system of manners, etiquette, and protocol dictates the lives of many characters and compels them to act in ways that may not be natural to them. A key example of this is Casaubon. He marries Dorothea but he does not love her. Instead, he accepts that his status as a wealthy, middle-class, respected bachelor and priest means that he is expected to take a wife. When the opportunity presents itself, he takes full advantage without pausing to consider whether he actually loves Dorothea or whether she even knows or understands him.

The burden of these expectations is that a division is created between the public and private lives of the characters. In public, the characters must adhere to specific social expectations which govern their actions. In private, they are free to be themselves. Lydgate notices this division when he visits Farebrother's house. He notices that the priest is relaxed and friendly, far from the public persona of a poor, humble village priest. The social expectations of society compel the characters to create fictional personas which they project onto the world through a continuous performance. This performance is the metric by which they measure their social conformity and their integration into society itself.

However, the division between public and private personas creates conflict. The constant need to perform and to adhere to social expectations places a great deal of pressure on the characters. The conflict between the private and public life leads to characters being unable to speak honestly to one another. Dorothea and Will are victims of this conflict. In public, they are particularly careful to maintain their reputations as upstanding citizens. They do not want to be mired in scandal, particularly following the provision in Casaubon's will which suggested that they might be secret lovers. In public, Will and Dorothea strive to never be seen as too close. To contravene the public perception of their character would be to ruin their reputation, even though they are both individually aware that they love one another very much.

A key example of the destructive interaction between the public and the private is the downfall of Bulstrode. The power of gossip undoes the banker, where the merest hint at impropriety from an untrustworthy drunk is enough to dismantle Bulstrode's public persona in Middlemarch. Bulstrode presents himself as a pillar of the community and a devout Evangelical Christian. The gossip, originating from Raffles, undermines this persona. Bulstrode cannot maintain the performance and he is forced to leave Middlemarch with his reputation in tatters. Similarly, however, Lydgate is also ruined by the same rumors. He is guilty through association, even though his conscience is clear. The truth is irrelevant in a world where reputation is so dependent on performance. Since Lydgate cannot maintain the performance of honorability and morality, his public persona as a trustworthy doctor has been undermined and he suffers from the same fate. Morality is a public performance in Middlemarch and those who are unable or unwilling to perpetuate such a performance suffer from the downfall of their reputation.