Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

(George Eliot, Middlemarch)

In the history of the novel in English, Middlemarch still looms large. Written in the same generation as Charles Darwin’s theories—and by a one-time intimate of evolutionary thinker Herbert Spencer—George Eliot’s 1871–72 novel seems to mark the crown of creation, the fittest, most perfected example and telic endpoint of the species the development of which Ian Watt traced in The Rise of the Novel (1957)—what Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and (later) Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott were striving toward. As a dense, multilayered reading experience—an absorbing, backward-glancing immersion in “Provincial Life”—its pleasures are what many of us look for in novels in general. As Hilda M. Hulme put it in passing, “[E]very novel would be Middlemarch if it could” (36). Middlemarch, I like to think, was the sort of thing D. H. Lawrence had in mind when he called the novel, as a genre, “the one bright book of life.” It is a grandly capacious novel, its four volumes ranging across psychological introspection, historical sweep, an anthropologist’s absorption in the minutiae and economies of rural life, and a philosopher’s airy speculations about human nature—and all in narrative form. Indeed, Middlemarch’s all-encompassing ambitiousness may mark it as a successful essay at Casaubon’s failed project: “The Key to All Mythologies.” (In 1832, the epoch in which Middlemarch is set, the Edinburgh Review declares, “We have learnt … how greatly the sphere of the Novel may be extended, and how capable it is of becoming the vehicle almost of every species of popular knowledge”: a declaration that anticipates George Eliot’s masterwork [qtd. in Chittick 22].)

More to the point, Middlemarch remains an outlier within Victorian fiction: it is the Victorian novel for people who don’t much like Victorian novels. In his seminal The Great Tradition (1948), F. R. Leavis saw in George Eliot’s novel “the living representative of the great tradition” (13), an ushering-in of the modern fictional tradition of Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Leavis’s study pushed back against the then-“present vogue of the Victorian age” among literary critics as it dismissed, en masse, “Trollope, Charlotte Yonge, Mrs. Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Charles and Henry Kingsley, [and] Marryat” (1); dispensed with Charles Dickens’s “genius” as “that of a great entertainer” (19)—with the exception of Hard Times (1854), smuggled into the great tradition through the backdoor of an analytical postscript claiming it as the “only one of [Dickens’s] books in which his distinctive creative genius is controlled throughout to a unifying and organizing significance” (19); and dealt with the Brontë sisters in a footnote, while maintaining the family produced only one unqualified genius, Emily, author of a single book. Indicatively, Leavis elevates George Eliot’s novel “above the ruck of Gaskells and Trollopes and Merediths” (15). Some of such judgements are no doubt attributable to George Eliot herself: the agnostic free-thinker with the unorthodox private life seems more our peer than most of the other eminent Victorians, and as a learned, polylingual translator, editor, and critic, she was at a remove from the era’s figures she famously appraised in “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856). A cursory glance at George Eliot’s biographies yields such titles as Kathryn Hughes’s George Eliot: The Last Victorian (1998). Indeed, Leavis traces “the proposition that ‘George Eliot is the first modern novelist’” (a commonplace, for Leavis, in student essays and “examination papers”) back to Lord David Cecil’s Early Victorian Novelists (1934) (5). For Cecil, George Eliot’s modernity meant she was “concerned, not to offer ‘primarily an entertainment,’ but to explore a significant theme—a theme significant in its bearing on the ‘serious problems and preoccupations of modern life’” and did so by “break[ing] with ‘those fundamental conventions both of form and matter within which the English novel up till then had been constructed’” (Leavis 5).

Within Middlemarch’s reception history, this verdict was most famously secured by Virginia Woolf’s oft-quoted declaration that Middlemarch “is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” (“George Eliot,” 201). In Middlemarch, Woolf saw an important “first” in English fiction as well as an important precedent for the sort of work Woolf would champion in “Modern Fiction” (1919), with its conviction that “the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it” (106).

In this essay, I want to bring Woolf’s assessment of Middlemarch into dialogue with the assessment of another formidable architect of “modern fiction.” I am thinking here of Henry James’s measured assertion that Middlemarch “sets a limit, we think, to the development of the old-fashioned English novel.” If this is praise, it is curiously qualified praise—indeed, James elsewhere calls Middlemarch “a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole” (qtd. in Atkinson 69). The implication may be that, far from Woolf’s important “first” in English fiction, Middlemarch is, instead, a bygone “last.” I am reminded of an anecdote in which filmmaker and comic Mel Brooks was on a talk show and shown a clip of an upcoming film, to which Brooks replied, “Well, it’s the sort of thing that has to be tried over and over again—until it’s abandoned” (qtd. in Kael 465). George Eliot’s novel stands as a tradition that must be abandoned. Her legion, fervent admirers can at least take solace in the thought that with Middlemarch, that “sort of thing” may have been, perhaps, perfected; authors following in George Eliot’s stead would have to do something else, since she, as it were, got it right. After all, how does one follow up a “Key to All Mythologies”?

Indeed, to survey the status of British fiction in the 1870s, is to experience a sense of traditions perfected and things abandoned. I want to suggest that the 1870s mark a crisis point for what James called “the old-fashioned English novel.” The first year of the decade saw the death of Charles Dickens (June 9, 1870), and indeed by the 1870s, a generation of canonical Victorian novelists had died, the Brontës by 1855, William Makepeace Thackeray in 1863, Elizabeth Gaskell in 1865. A sense persists, too, that the 1870s represented a last gasp for such sprawling multiplot novels as Middlemarch or Anthony Trollope’s capaciously titled The Way We Live Now of 1875, the sorts of works James affectionately dubbed “loose, baggy monsters”: by the 1870s, a sense persists that we had reached the limit for the grand, Tolstoyan ambition of fitting the whole, wide world (and the way we live in it) between the covers of a book. I often tell my students that with War and Peace appearing right before 1870, Anna Karenina coming in 1878, and George Eliot’s own Daniel Deronda published in 1876 (in addition to Middlemarch and Trollope’s The Way We Live Now), it is tempting to think that by the 1870s, the novel had swollen, balloon-like, to the point of bursting. As Kelly J. Mays recounts, meanwhile, the 1870s in Britain began with the Education Act, which “vastly increased the size of the novel-reading public” and would undermine the hope that any one “Great Victorian Novel” could speak to everyone: “[T]he perceived increase in the size of the reading public was seen to entail an increase in diversity that rendered it impossible any longer to envision that public either as a culturally homogeneous group or as one that shared the same background and values as those seeking to reach it through the written word” (22).

More to the point, I want to place the liminal status of the novel in the 1870s in the context of a larger crisis in representation emerging in the same decade. The harbinger for this new mode was in April 1874, when the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs—a coalition of artists “frustrated with the continual exclusion of their works from the official Salons” (Dempsey 14)—held an exhibition of their art in the home of photographer Félix Nadar (14). Perhaps the most auspicious of their artworks exhibited at the so-called Salon des Indépendants (Watt 170) was Claude Monet’s 1872 oil painting Impression, Sunrise, the name of which would become synonymous with a new artistic movement: impressionism. In Monet’s depiction of a sunrise over a harbor, the foggy atmosphere of the maritime setting renders the scene’s details as a fleeting, hazy impression of colors, shapes, and shadows. (John G. Peters notes that some would “identify sharp juxtapositions of colors, innovative use of light, and the use of ‘empathetic and evocative brushwork’ as [other] common techniques in impressionist painting”) (15).

Impressionism proved controversial from the start—indeed, the very terms “impressionist” and “impressionists” as labels stem from critic Louis Leroy’s dismissive review of the 1874 exhibition. As Ian Watt recounts,

He goes on to note, “[T]he conditions under which the viewing is done are an essential part of what the … artist sees and therefore tries to convey” (Watt 170). More than a mere haze or distortion, impressionism sought to depict a limited and circumscribed viewpoint. As Watt notes, “In one way or another all the main Impressionists made it their aim to give a pictorial equivalent of the visual sensations of a particular individual at a particular time and place” (170). Similarly, E. H. Gombrich calls “the Impressionist movement a decisive role in the process of art’s long transition from trying to portray what all men know to trying to portray what the individual actually sees” (qtd. in Watt 171).

Such ideas were given wider currency in literary and critical circles with the 1873 publication of Walter Pater’s popular, scandalous The Renaissance. In a celebrated passage from that work’s “Conclusion” (one worth quoting at length), Pater writes,

Through Pater, the notion of a tightly circumscribed point of view “became an important part of the cultural atmosphere” (Watt 172) of the 1870s.

“Literary” impressionists shared with their artistic forebears a conviction that the “epistemological process was an individual and not a universal phenomenon” (Peters 13). Peters is quick to note that literary impressionists “were a loosely knit group of artists who never produced a unifying artistic manifesto nor even a consistently similar product” (13). Nevertheless, they are united by the effort “to represent phenomena as they filter through a single human consciousness at a certain point in space and time” (Peters 34). We see such an objective in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. There is a distinctly impressionist quality to even the incidental imagery:

Once in Africa, the character Marlow describes the scenery as a veritable impressionist painting:

Later, he observes, “Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularized impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me” (Conrad, Heart 14)—a sentiment he extends to the African workers pressed into slavery at the Belgian station: “They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the green gloom” (17).

Conrad shared with Pater the sense that impressionism ultimately revealed the utter isolation—the limitations—of the thinking, viewing subject. Conrad’s storytelling Marlow berates his listeners as follows:

As part of the 1870s’ Zeitgeist, impressionism’s mode of representation may very well have been bad news for Middlemarch. Pater’s lonely, modern image of us all “ringed round by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us” is a direct riposte to George Eliot’s earnest conviction that “the greatest benefit we owe the artist”—literary or otherwise—“is the extension of our sympathies” (qtd. in Childers 411). Middlemarch’s formal qualities—its capacious length, its leisurely pace, its all-knowing omniscient narrator—can be seen as the corollary of its author’s ethical-emotional commitment to ever-enlarging our sympathies. After impressionism, with its scrupulously maintained and delimited point of view, something like Middlemarch, with its “universal observer, divorced from space, time, and all other limiting factors” (Peters 21–22), could appear merely formless, justifying Henry James’s good-natured description of traditional English novels as “great fluid puddings” (qtd. in Booth 28) or his judgment, above, of Middlemarch as “a treasure-house of details, but … an indifferent whole.” Conrad famously said of fiction that “aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art” that it “should carry its justification in every line”: “And in truth it must be, like painting, like music.… It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music” (“Preface” xi–xiii). Such comments are tailor-made for the painstakingly formalist works that emerged out of the crisis in representation that, I suggest, arose in the 1870s. Moreover, such statements are at a far-remove from the sort of realistic, ethical mimesis George Eliot championed in her seminal essay “The Natural History of German Life” (1856), where a true and honest “picture of human life such as a great artist can give” is “a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot” (110). Was Middlemarch, then, moving toward quaintness and obsolescence even as it appeared, rather like one of Casaubon’s heroic but doomed projects?

We may very well ask if such assessments are entirely fair, judging Middlemarch anachronistically, by the standards of later eras in fiction. I began this essay with a sense of Middlemarch’s perceived place in a developmental history of the novel, but Merritt Moseley, in her essay on Middlemarch entitled “A Fuller Sort of Companionship: Defending Old-Fashioned Qualities,” rightly attacks what she calls “a false teleology, according to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction is little more than well-intentioned floundering that stands in the same relation to William Faulkner, say, as the belief in the homunculus stands to modern embryology” (75–76). Adherents of this view, she notes, “are sometimes encouraged in this mistake by teachers who believe that the old-fashioned qualities of Eliot’s fiction have been not just superseded but somehow proved wrong” (76). Middlemarch, for one, can be read as being as subversive of existing modes of literary representation as the fiction that succeeded visual impressionism. Even by the 1870s, the three-volume novel or “triple decker” was the paradigmatic format for new fiction.¹ With its neat, tripartite structure, the format privileged “well made” plots and overdetermined “happy endings”: marriage, inheritance, the restoration of order. (Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre [1847], with Volume 3’s triumphant “Reader, I married him” is perhaps the definitive example) (382). Released in eight half-volumes to comprise a four-volume whole, Middlemarch pushes against the boundaries of the triple decker in a manner recalling a famous declaration from The Newcomes (1853–55) by William Makepeace Thackeray, whose work George Eliot admired: “You gentlemen who write books … and stop at the third volume, know very well that the real story often begins afterwards” (Thackeray 286). Indeed, Middlemarch, it might be alleged begins, rather than ends, in marriage (i.e., Dorothea to Casaubon) and quickly moves on to the full disappointment that follows: the real story. As George Eliot writes in her “Finale,” “Marriage which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning” (607–608).

Moreover, one can detect in Middlemarch intimations of an impressionist epistemology, as in chapter 27’s celebrated “pier-glass” image:

Here, the limited, centralized perspective of the viewer’s candle produces the fleeting, “flattering illusion of concentric arrangement,” where all else is hazy chaos. The image is of a piece with Woolf’s famous, impressionist dictum: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged. Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (“Modern Fiction” 106).

To return to James’s verdict on Middlemarch, it is hard to shake off the sense that he was suggesting we abandon writing a certain kind of novel just as a woman writer had perfected it. Thus, Elaine Showalter has traced among male writers and critics in the years after impressionism an at-times “violent” dissent from “the matriarchal legacy of George Eliot” (76). Similarly, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have discussed how the literary modernism anticipated by James and Conrad was one “constructed” “as an integral part of a complex response to female precursors and contemporaries” (156). As many have pointed out, sexist language and binaries structure the postimpressionist and modernist disdain for the “loose and baggy” in fiction.²

Perhaps the final word on Middlemarch and limits should go to George Eliot herself, who had written (in the lines I provided as the epigraph to this essay), “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending” (607). After all, its very title announces that Middlemarch’s focus will be neither beginning nor ending but middle: a site that can be either a fertile field of action or a marshy slough of despond. Middlemarch may ultimately be about making peace with being in the middle, even as Dorothea, of the “finely-touched spirit” (612), comes to see “[h]er full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spen[d] itself in channels which had no great name on the earth,” content, perhaps, in knowing that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts” (613). Jeanie Thomas has called George Eliot’s novel “a guide to life in the ‘middle distance,’” interpreting Woolf’s praise of it as a novel for “grown-up people” as an acknowledgement of its capacity to teach acceptance of disappointment and mediocrity (162). Indeed, the middle—and its attendant senses of mediocrity; compromise; and, even, the middlebrow—is the province of the novel as a genre, particularly the “old-fashioned English novel”—its lofty artistic or aesthetic aims threatened by a turn to middle-class realism, even as Saint Teresa (as we learn in Middlemarch’s “Preface”) saw her epic aspirations turned back by “domestic reality” (3). For Woolf, the “old-fashioned” novel was the middle-of-the-road compromise for the nineteenth-century woman writers “excluded by their sex from certain kinds of experience” that could produce history, epic, philosophy, etc.: “Fiction was, as fiction still is, the easiest thing for a woman to write. Nor is it difficult to find the reason. A novel is the least concentrated form of art. A novel can be taken up or put down more easily than a play or a poem” (“Women and Fiction,” 143). In its liminal status, somewhere between Woolf’s “first” and James’s “last,” Middlemarch is a dream of better, more creative possibilities for women and fiction.

Notes

Works Cited