This book is so all-encompassing and deep that it's almost impossible to summarize. It gives you an in-depth look into a variety of characters' lives, all of whom are interconnected, living in the rural English county of Middlemarch. I've heard this book described as a depiction of marriage and its difficulties and rewards. I really liked what Eliot herself said in the beginning of the finale: "Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic--the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common. Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm, and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each other and the world" (793). And that is kind of the gist of the book, told through the stories of a number of different relationships and marriages.
The main character is Dorothea Brooke, who we meet at the beginning as a young woman with huge ideals and great ideas about life--that whatever we do in life should be heroic and aimed at making life better for others around us. Another main character is Tertius Lydgate, a newly minted doctor who has just moved to Middlemarch and has super high ideals for what he wants to accomplish in his professional life--he doesn't want to be motivated by money, but he wants to make scientific discoveries and make a difference in his field. Both of these characters enter into marriages (not with each other) that change them and their ideals, for better and for worse. Dorothea marries an old man who she believes will be able to teach her everything she doesn't know--because she feels so powerless to make a difference in the world with her limited knowledge and understanding--but she ends up being trapped by his jealousies and small expectations for her. Tertius quickly marries the prettiest girl in town and slowly and surely gets into debt and begins losing his focus on his goals and priorities. Meanwhile, there is a whole score of other important characters, with their own struggles and relationships that we are also privy to, who give us other views on the town of Middlemarch and the effects of love and marriage for people who enter into it. One of these couples is Fred Vincy and Mary Garth--they are in love with each other, but Mary refuses to allow Fred to court her because he is a lazy guy who places all his hopes on a distant relative giving him all his property instead of working to get a good place in something. Mary pushes Fred to become better and work harder, and his love for her made him shape up and become a truly better person. They eventually are able to get married and have a good, happy, solid foundation based on their mutual respect and shared goals. Theirs is the happiest love story in the whole book.
Dorothea is a different character than one I feel like I've encountered in literature before. She's beautiful and almost perfect, but not in a stereotypical feminine way. She's perfect because she's so pure in how earnestly she strives to put everyone else above her, and how she only wants to make a difference in the world more than she wants anything else. But the way the narrator describes her is almost winking at her unworldliness, understanding that she is naive in her goals and the way she looks at the world, but admiring how earnest she is all the same and feeling proud of her for sticking to her guns. I really loved that. I love how she didn't turn bitter and angry after making a bad marriage choice, and how she didn't hate her husband even though she easily could have.
I don't know how realistic Dorothea is, truly (marrying an old, grumpy man just because he seems to know everything seems very unlikely even for the most saintly of young women), but I loved her just the same. Dorothea in the end remarries and is happy and loving but does not make universal change through her life. But Eliot seems to be making a point by this--she says: "Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it." And the last sentences of the book are about her: "Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels with had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs" (799). I just absolutely loved those thoughts and the truth behind them.
The storyline between Lydgate and his wife, Rosamund, is probably the most depressing of the story--because it seems so real. This is a relationship that probably plays out EVERYWHERE even today. They see each other and like each other, and Rosamund especially tries really hard to impress him and to act like a perfect young potential wife for him until he falls in love hard enough that they get married. But they don't actually know each other at all--they just know each other from conversation at parties in her parents' drawing room. So when they get married she starts complaining about him working long hours, starts spending lots of his money, starts ignoring him and wanting to get other men to discreetly fall in love with her, and stops wanting to share her thoughts and feelings with him. She slowly closes herself off from him until she has no love left for him, and despite his efforts to heal their relationship, she stays bitter and cold. And they stay married like that for another 25 years--without any real love in their relationship. I wish I could go into more detail about their relationship and how selfish and horrible Rosamund seemed to me, but this post is already getting ridiculous and I don't really know what more to say other than Eliot really knew how relationships can go sour. She really seemed to nail it here. It's nothing more than small instances that never get forgiven and slowly harden over time.
I loved how Fred and Mary worked together and how Mary refused to cave to her emotions without thinking about the future. Mary was so practical and smart--not only waiting until Fred had a steady income that could provide for them before getting married, but also making sure that Fred was someone that she could respect and love before she ever married him. Fred could and probably would have been a good-for-nothing layabout if he hadn't been influenced by Mary, and that was such an interesting and positive message from the story.
All in all--such a true and revealing and meaningful book. I am so glad I read it. It's 800 pages long exactly--longer than probably all of the YA novels I read while on our trip combined--and infinitely more worth it because of what I got from it. If people read this book and would try to internalize the lessons from the relationships portrayed in here, I think they would make less mistakes in marrying the wrong people and ruining their relationships once they were in them. This book is a great example of why literature is important.
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