"jollitude"

11 March 2024:I think I could sit and think about this letter from Harriet Beecher Stowe to George Eliot for the rest of spring break. Stowe is teasing Eliot abotu Middlemarch's seriousness: "My love, what I miss in this story is just what we would have if youcwould come to our tumble-down, jolly, improper, but joyous country,--namely, 'jollitude.' You write and live on so high a plane! It is all self-abnegation. We want to get you over here, and into this house, where, with closed doors, we sometimes make the rafters ring with fun, and say anything and everything, no matter what, and won't be any properer than we's a mind to be" (qtd. in Silvey 61). Silvey adds that the "house" that Stowe want Eliot to visit is Annie Fields' home in Boston. Just an amazing quotation that makes clear how small the writing world was in the nineteenth century. Moreover, Stowe pretty accurately describes what Eliot does in Middlemarch and it is just very funny to think that she believes some good old American "jollitude" can help a bit. 

Work Cited

Silvey, Jane. “It All Began with Jane Eyre: The Complex Transatlantic Web of Women Writers.” Gaskell Journal, vol. 19, 2005, pp. 52–68.

150 Years of Middlemarch, 150 Years of Shepherd

12 October 2021: Delivered my presentation on Middlemarch, George Eliot, and Shepherd tonight. I think it went pretty well. The q&a portion was so much fun and the reception after was just lovely. 

Whew! Glad to have it done, too. 

The Road to Middlemarch

9 August 2021: "A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book." --Rebecca Mead, The Road to Middlemarch

Still really digging this book, a wonderful mix of genres--biography, literary criticism, memoir, and just lovely insights on how a great book shapes us. 

Sunday reading...

8 August 2021: "Middlemarch demands that we enter into the perspective of the other struggling, erring humans--and recognize that we, too, will sometimes be struggling, and may sometimes be erring, even when we are at our most arrogant and confident. And this is why every time I go back to the novel I feel that--while I might live in a century without knowing as much as just a handful of its pages suggest--I may hope to be enlarged by each revisiting. Only a child believes a grown-up has stopped growing." --Rebecca Mead, The Road to Middlemarch

Lots of time for eclectic reading today: three issues of Entertainment Weekly, today's Washington Post, a big chunk of Her Body and Other Parties, and another big chunk of The Road to Middlemarch. I think Mead's book is the text that has soothed me most on a kind of anxious day. And what she says above sums up what makes me love the novel, too.  

"until about 15 minutes ago, they were us..."

16 March 2021: A little over two years ago I made a decision not to pursue an opportunity to switch (potentially) to a more administrative role. And it felt--and still feels--great. I know it was the right decision for my happiness and the kind of work I want to do. That makes me more grateful for those who do take on this work, especially if it isn't something they do out of a sense of obligation or responsibility. (The only thing that comes close: taking on the Senate presidency, which was more about taking one for the team, but is still--by definition--a faculty position.) 

This lovely piece by Rachel Toor is a good reminder of just who an "administration" often is and how careless our rhetoric towards these folks can be. Definitely worth reading.

I suppose it's also the Middlemarch in me at this moment, but any reminder to gesture and push outside ourselves and really see the people we interact with is welcome these days. 

"It exists, it matters, but who can trace it?"

15 March 2021: "In its lovely final passage, Eliot writes of Dorothea that the effect of her goodness was 'incalculably diffusive': It exists, it matters, but who can trace it? Applied to books, that becomes a moral argument for fiction I think I can defend. Whatever Middlemarch has been doing to the world all these many years, I like to think it is diffuse, and diffusing, and incalculably good." --Kathryn Schulz, "What Is It About Middlemarch?"

Been thinking about Schulz's piece on and off all day. She says so eloquently what I have been trying to explain to my students about this novel. 

It also touches on an eternal but also extra-pandemic-y question: what difference can any one person make? Especially ordinary people? If you do good, the book suggests, it matters.

"little triggers"

4 March 2021: "Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear." --George Eliot, speaking something that is as true today as it was when she wrote it 150 years ago.

I have spent lots of time today working on various (not fun) parts of my job, a lot of them involving wordsmithing and really thinking ahead, so coming across these words made me laugh and nod my head knowingly. 

Back to Middlemarch

26 February 2021: "One can begin so many things with a new person!—even begin to be a better man." --George Eliot, Middlemarch

Such a pleasure to return to this book again and (re)discover gems like this one, where the narrator hints at Lydgate's appeal for Bulstrode. The book is packed with these very specific insights about its characters that nevertheless still ring true today. 

Finishing up Middlemarch

15 October 2018: "It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light piercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining." --George Eliot, Middlemarch

Finding myself so moved (again) by this amazing book.

More Middlemarch truth-bombs...

7 October 2018: "Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self. And who, if Mr. Casaubon had chosen to expound his discontents--his suspicions that he was not any longer adored without criticism--could have denied that they were founded on good reasons? On the contrary, there was a strong reason to be added, which he had not himself taken explicitly into account--namely, that he was not unmixedly adorable. He suspected this, however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it, and like the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have a companion who would never find it out." --George Eliot, Middlemarch

Not sure why 41-year-old, umarried, too-invested-in-work me is so drawn to Casaubon on this read-through of Middlemarch, but it's undeniable.

"...never stop doing right..."

5 October 2018: What a day. Spent part of it talking about Middlemarch and how one person's deciding vote (Lydgate voting on the hospital chaplaincy) can have ripple effects he couldn't anticipate right as Susan Collins was about to declare her Kavanaugh vote. Taught The Hate U Give on the very day a Chicago police officer was convicted of shooting a black man who was running away from him. Left campus a bit earlier than usual to make it to an early screening of A Star is Born, which was amazing, if not exactly uplifting.

So it's been a lot.

Here's what I want to post for today: just a little bit from The Hate U Give. Lisa, Starr's mother, is trying to tell Starr to let go of guilt over her friend's death. She tells her about the day Starr was born--how Starr wasn't breathing and her mother wondered what she had done wrong, how it might be her fault. She explains, "One of the nurses took my hand...looked me in the eye and said, 'Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. The key is to never stop doing right.'"

Back to Middlemarch

2 October 2018: "Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them." --Eliot, Middlemarch

I first read Middlemarch in college in my junior year, I think. Now, 20 years later, I find myself seeing Casaubon in a different light, the compassionate light Eliot wants us to see him in, I think. Having gotten caught up in more than a few similar metaphors of my own, I feel a particular pang of recognition in the passage above.

(And "old Casuabon" is about 45. Yikes.)

Even more Middlemarch

24 July 2018: "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?" --Dorothea, in Middlemarch

Thanks to some essays I have been reading, I've been thinking a lot about what Eliot is saying about what matters in life. The quotation above, simple as it seems, works quite well and isn't bad advice for how to live your life.

"the experience which we call emotional"

23 July 2018: "What seems eminently wanted is a closer comparison between the knowledge which we call rational & the experience which we call emotional." --George Eliot, in a notebook entry.

A moody, broody day here, no doubt in part because of the rain, a rapidly disappearing summer, and (as usual on these moody, broody days) big thoughts. I spent some more time reading about George Eliot and found myself struck by these words, which shed some light on Middlemarch, but also hit close to home on moody, broody days.

Austen and Eliot

18 July 2018: "When Jane Austen died, her last words were 'Pray for me, oh pray for me'; when George Eliot died, she is reported to have said 'Tell them the pain is on the left side'. The shift which took place between the two novelists is movingly registered in those two utterances: to have gained all the scientific ability to measure and locate human pain without the redeeming belief in any ultimate remedy for that pain — that is the predicament George Eliot 'gave out in intensified form' in Middlemarch, and it is one of which we too, living in a later century, have an intimate knowledge" (Wilhelm 56-7).

Preparing for my seminar on the nineteenth-century novel, I read the lines above earlier today and found them quite persuasive and moving.

Work Cited

Wilhelm, Cherry. "Conservative Reform in Middlemarch." Theoria, vol. 53, October 1979, pp. 47-47.

Howards End

29 April 2018: "Can't it strike you even for a moment that your life has been heroic?" --Helen to Margaret, at the close of Howards End.

I will confess to not having read Forster's novel (and now I really want to), but I finished watching the new mini-series this morning and loved it. The line quoted above brought tears to my eyes, reminding me a bit of Eliot's thoughts about quiet heroism in Middlemarch.