Sublimation in Middlemarch

Eros need not be expressed sexually. In Freud’s account of the chaste and enormously fruitful life of Leonardo da Vinci, sexuality is “sublimated” onto different objects. Freud’s forebear, Plato, imagines rather that the body is a temporary and ultimately unnatural home for our deepest desires. Eros was not sexuality hiding under love of wisdom, but the love of wisdom hiding under sexual desire. We need not make a judgement as to its original form to see that it can be directed into one form or another.

Teresa of Avila tells the story of a young woman named Doña Casilda. She is wealthy, beautiful, passionately in love with her fiancé. But when she attends the clothing of a Carmelite nun, she decides, against the wishes of her family, to renounce everything—lover, wealth, status—for a life of poverty and prayer. Her determination resembles that of a star-crossed lover. She tries three times to join, the second time jumping out of the carriage as her household brings firewood to the convent and clinging for life to the statue of the Blessed Virgin. After her family wrests her back, she runs away a third and last time. She finds herself left alone in a church for a single minute. She tucks her shoes under her skirt to run like a maniac a long way through the countryside until she reaches the monastery, where she spends the rest of her life.

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, as the story draws to a close, the brilliant doctor Lydgate is founding a new hospital for the study of fever and is in need of a new source of funding. Dorothea, widowed and restless with her great fortune, longs for some concrete good within her reach. This pair, each ardent for forms of greatness and devoted to their communities, have no hint of romantic interest between them. Eliot lets us see the prospect of a different kind of collaboration between the two, where each will have an opportunity to use the furthest reach of their talents and ambitions. Circumstances make the collaboration impossible just as it comes into view. Yet the jointly conceived hospital is itself a beautiful manifestation of erotic desire.

That is Zena Hitz writing about lust for The Lamp, in an issue dedicated to the Seven Deadly Sins. You can also read Victoria on the topic of John Donne, sexually explicit epithalamia, and the importance of Latin for Early Modern English.