Self And Society

Just passed the halfway mark of Middlemarch and glorying in what an absolutely wonderful novel it is. It's so familiar to this reader that it's easy to forget the sheer ambition of Eliot here: a novel to diagnose the condition of England at a time of crucial historical change - yet, at the same time, to inhabit the most intimate corners of its major characters. I read the bit yesterday where Casaubon has found out just how ill he is and upsets Dorothea with his cold response to her concerns, then meets her late at night displaying a heart-breaking gentleness. Completely unexpected, yet true. As good as Tolstoy at his best. (And isn't it odd how this moment occupies the exact centre of the work?)

There is an advantage to having a degree of familiarity with the novel, I find. Instead of getting lost in the abundant detail of provincial life I'm more aware than in previous readings of what binds the enterprise together. In many ways what we are given is a series of studies in various forms of selfishness, and I'm including even the selfless Dorothea and Caleb Garth in that claim. But Eliot goes beyond merely laying bare the sad reality of what it is to be human. How that selfishness connects with our role as social animals is what's under often painful examination.

There's something disconcertingly bracing about this kind of moral seriousness.