Respect and Respectability in Middlemarch

Here is your spoilers warning.

Also for the purposes of footnotes, I have the Barnes and Noble Classics Edition of the novel.

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I read Middlemarch for the first time during my senior year of high school. At the time, I pegged it as a novel about individuals. And it is in many ways – the novel centers on the idea that ordinary people living ordinary lives make the most abiding change in the world. Upon a second read, as a college graduate, wife, and mother, I realized that Middlemarch is about a different kind of individual – the married couple. The two become one. One character remarks of marriage that it is a bond so strong any breach of trust within it renders marriage like a murder¹. Considering all this, it is extraordinarily fascinating that the woman who wrote the novel kept house with a married man, living as his wife, never becoming one with him because he was already one with another. Despite Eliot’s personal living arrangements, she had an extremely keen sense of what makes a good marriage. In the following, I would like to propose that Middlemarch treats a good marriage as one where both spouses equally respect each other. In doing so, it contrasts marriages made for the appearance of respectability and marriages of genuine esteem.

The nuances of respectability and respect are not quite as simple as they would appear. Eliot does not treat respectability merely as a societal constraint but also as an individual’s misguided esteem. The latter definition is the most interesting to me. When the reader first meets Dorothea Brooke, she is idealistic to a fault but nevertheless sympathetic. In one of the funniest and most character revealing lines of the novel we read, “[Horse] Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it”². In other words, Dorothea has not learned the intersection between enjoying a hobby and faith. She has not developed a Theology of Horse Riding™️. She longs to be a great intellectual and philanthropist. She spends a great deal of her time designing cottages for the poor farmers who live on their family land. She daydreams about being a sort of servant to a great man of letters. She finds frivolous anything that distracts from these purposes. And thus, she makes an extremely odd marriage to a Mr. Casaubon³.

Mr. Casaubon is the most insipid, saltless person one could imagine. He is about 45, which, while not old, is not young. One is given the impression that Mr. Casaubon might as well be a 60-year-old man based on his habits and demeanor. Marianne Dashwood’s comment, “thirty-five has nothing to do with matrimony” much better suits Mr. Casaubon at 45 than it did Colonel Brandon at 35 (who, might I add, is one of the most underrated Austen heroes)⁴. Dorothea’s match to Casaubon is an odd one. What would possess a girl of 19 to marry a man over 20 years her senior? Dorothea is not motivated by money, though her husband does have a large estate. No, Dorothea is an idealist. Through Casaubon she perceives that she might be important. She wants to help a Great Man with his Great Work. Mr. Casaubon woos Dorthea not with roses but with his understanding of Greek and his dedication to his never-ending WIP, “The Key to All Mythologies”, which he has been laboring over for years, making minute progress. The marriage is subject to much scrutiny and anticipated with dread and concern by Dorothea’s neighbors. It is not perceived as an entirely respectable match. Dorothea cares not. Her marriage to Mr. Casaubon will give her a place in history alongside a great man. She is confident that his work will be of lasting importance.

As their marriage unfolds, the reader’s pity for Dorothea grows. What was clear to the reader from the beginning grows clearer to Dorothea on their honeymoon in Italy. It is a loveless marriage, where Dorothea is appreciated but not cherished (and we question even the former). Mr. Casaubon very quickly becomes callous to Dorothea, downplaying her emotional needs and often isolating her. Very pitiably but predictably we see that no one respects Mr. Casaubon (or his “Key to All Mythologies” for that matter) and few appreciate him. Dorothea begins to realize this when Casaubon’s cousin, Will Ladislaw, reveals that his belief that the Key will be lost in a sea of irrelevance. Matters become complicated when the reader begins to see that Will has real sympathy and affection for Dorothea and her situation. Here is a man who respects her, but a man she can never have because of her over hasty marriage.

Dorothea has the opposite problem of Elizabeth Bennet. While Elizabeth overestimates Darcy’s pride, Dorothea overestimates Casaubon’s good nature. While Elizabeth’s respect for Darcy grows, Dorothea’s belief in Casaubon’s good nature lessens. Because her marriage lacks respect from one party, the whole unit suffers.

Another marriage central to Middlemarch begins very respectably. Tertius Lydgate is a promising young doctor when he arrives in Middlemarch. He is motivated by the wonders of modern medicine and hopes to do good, as Dorothea does. His whole life is devoted to his practice, his free hours consumed by further research and experimentation. He plans to remain a bachelor for life to better serve his ideals (and because he was emotionally burned in France as a young man by a murderous opera singer… but you know, the medicine is the real motivation). Enter Rosamond Vincy. Rosamond, in her own estimation, is the only worthy socialite of marriageable age in Middlemarch, and she is determined to marry an outsider. After a few flirtatious encounters with this shallow creature, Lydgate finds himself engaged to marry her.

Very quickly after their marriage begins, the infatuation between the two dies, and with it whatever respect the other might have had for each other. Here is a message every crushing teenage girl (looking at my high school self here) should take to heart – infatuation is not genuine respect. Lydgate, like Dorothea, attributes more goodwill to Rosamond than she has. Rosamond sees in Lydgate only a respectable match and a man she can mold to fit her standards. Rosamond comes to despise Lydgate’s devotion to medicine, seeing it only as a hindrance to their financial betterment and their lack of nice things. In a telling moment Rosamond says to Lydgate:

There was a moment’s pause before Rosamond said, ‘Do you know, Tertius, I often wished you had not been a medical man.’

‘Nay, Rosy, don’t say that,’ said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him. ‘That is like saying you wish you had married another man.’⁵

Rosamond Vincy frightens me. As the wife of a man who plans on going into ministry, I see her petty obsession with luxury and worldly respect undermine her love for who her husband genuinely is, and I am afraid that, without the grace of God, so could I be too. Rosamond ultimately puts the couple in such a state of financial ruin that Lydgate must give up the work he loves. His wife’s personality and behavior cripple his noble spirit. After the payments of his debts (which I won’t reveal how that comes about!) he resigns himself to Rosamond’s lifestyle and becomes something of a doormat. In the last pages of the book, we read:

He gained an excellent practice …. Having written a treatise on Gout, a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side. His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do.⁶

But none of this would have happened to Lydgate, or Dorothea, had they analyzed their future partners carefully. Had the other seen their potential spouse’s littleness of soul, their esteem would not have been so falsely conferred.

Middlemarch ends with two new marriages. Two marriages founded on respect. The first is Dorothea’s second marriage to Will Ladislaw – Casaubon’s cousin who he used to threaten Dorothea with disinheritance should she marry him upon his death. And the second is Rosamond’s brother, Fred Vincy’s marriage to his childhood friend, Mary Garth. The nature of Ladislaw’s reputation as a bit of a bohemian, and the clause in Casaubon’s, make Dorothea and Ladislaw’s marriage to one another a subject of much talk. It is not perceived as a wise or respectable match. Nevertheless, while strange to the world, their marriage is a thing of beauty to the two of them. It is a marriage in which both, but especially Dorothea with her alienation in her first marriage, sigh and can say most truly, “This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” Or, as Eliot writes, “They were bound to each other by a love stronger than any impulse which could have marred it.”⁷ This marriage makes each blossom into better people, which in turn, blesses those around them.

This is how marriage ought to be. A marriage in which both spouses are full of mutual admiration is a blessing to their children and a blessing to the world. And it is a joy to the couple! Dorothea is miserable in her first marriage; Lydgate’s marriage nearly destroys him. But Dorothea and Ladislaw, who began first as intimate friends, are extremely happy. In Middlemarch, it is the patient couple, the couple who watches the character of the other and assess whether they are worthy of their love, who is happiest. This is evidenced in Dorothea and Ladislaw but also in Fred Vincy and Mary Garth. Though Fred deeply loves Mary, Mary holds him at arm’s length until he reforms his childish, ruffian ways. Only when he matures and shows a genuine desire to lay aside the world and take up the mantle of good character, does she truly open her affections to him and consider him marriageable. It is only when he lays aside worldly respect that he becomes respectable in her eyes. This makes all the difference.

A respectable marriage in the eyes of the world might not necessarily be a marriage of respect between the couple. A marriage of deep respect might not be the most respectable to onlookers, but it is the better of the two and worth the patience that one might suffer to acquire it.

1. p. 757

2. p. 6

3. p. 37

4. p. 32 in Sense and Sensibility (Barnes and Noble Classics Edition)

5. p. 435

6. p. 790-791

7. p. 791