That's an interesting take on Dorothea and Dr. Lydgate. I agree that founding a hospital is a useful, productive and loving way to realize both of their desires to create something good in the world. But I always thought that their relationship was the great example of a great love missed, in Middlemarch. Because it's perfectly clear that Dorothea and Dr. Lydgate are soul mates. If they had married, they would both have been able to achieve so much in their lives, helped so many people and been a great influence for good in the world.
Instead, he married the pretty, shallow, fashionable social climber Rosamond, who saw him as her ticket to social status, and who throttled his every impulse to do good, and eventually forced him into a socially prominent practice taking care of rich old people. They had "four fashionable daughters", and he died at the age of 60, having accomplished none of the good he hoped to do.
Meanwhile Dorothea, who escaped a truly miserable marriage on the death of her older spouse Mr. Casaubon, falls into a marriage with a fashionably rebellious political activist Will Ladislaw, whom she at least seems to be attracted to. (I never understood that marriage in the book. In the BBC series they cast Rufus Sewell in the part, which explained a lot.) But her energy will be frittered away in supporting him, and nothing good will happen there either.
There is no romantic energy between Dorothea and Dr. Lydgate, I agree, and I never understood why until someone pointed out to me that the thought of marriage would never have occurred to either of them because of the class divide between them. Dr. Lydgate is middle class; Dorothea is upper class. I had completely missed that.
So I think that Eliot, intentionally or otherwise, gave us a brutal critique of the damage the British class system did to those who lived under it, in blighting the life not only of Dr. Lydgate, but of Dorothea. Though at least she gets Rufus Sewell.
I think Elliot can’t she could have made him more complex and less repulsive, more the ladislow has no sexual intent towards D raises the septics brow yet I know many people who have sex that I am happy not to contemplate. They said in plays , operas , movies there were tropes for sex. Elliot’s is marriage with sex off stage and never in her character hearts. This was serialized I believe so likely she had boundaries to stay within. She is a fine writer but I would say she is not making sex sublime but ignoring it , I don’t need her to go into depth on sex or expect her to.
As I get farther into MM I find that Elliot may have a touch of the gossip/unreliable narrator tinge when it comes to sex in the novels. It makes her a bit interesting, only a bit and I think the narrator is honest just intentionally imperfect. I have a quarter left. I actually haven't got to the part Henry and Zena discussed in Zena article so I will comment in a week when I am finished.
I do think since the pandemic other young woman immediately are pregnant and one only bed scene is sexless tourture reading that C being impotent may be one of Elliot’s few sexual signals in the novel.
I’d say that as I am reading Middlemarch it is better to say the narrator just doesn’t talk about sex and it is a trope of the era. Elliot goes as far as to say that ladislow has no desire to marry Dorothea if chance would allow it (but his character acts pretty much like that’s all that’s on his mind. ) I think love implying if you get married and a chaste courtship in every way is a trope. Only child so far is roses pregnancy (I am half done). Being halfway through I doubt in anyway metaphorical or otherwise will there be any sex or hint of it. Personally this Eros free town is less exciting and it makes suspension of
Yes! The idea of libidinal cathexis. Desire seems to find only one of its forms in sexuality, yet it always seems to function as a movement from self to other.
The reversal stays with me, that eros might be the love of wisdom hiding under sexual desire rather than the other way around. Doña Casilda runs like a maniac through the countryside and we call it devotion, Lydgate and Dorothea dream a hospital and we call it charity, yet both burn with the same flame. Perhaps our categories were always too small for the fire they were meant to contain.
Middlemarch is a mighty, magnificent novel—arguably the best ever written in English. Mary Ann Evans, highly educated genius who she was, crafts the Dorothea-Lydgate relationship as a worked example of Diotima’s discourse on the Ladder of the Soul in Plato’s Symposium.
But before we all start trooping up the Ladder the whole concept is worth unpacking.
When George Eliot could not get the different kind of collaboration from Herbert Spencer in real life, she went and built it vividly and perfectly between Dorothea and Lydgate on the page, i wildly guess.
"You will find that I can be satisfied with very little, if I am delivered from the dread of losing it."
George Eliot to Herbert Spencer July 1854
Selections from George Eliot’s letters edited by Gordon S Haight
When writing itself becomes an exposed nerve system, it ceases to be a tool for healing, escape or sublimation like Franz Kafka.
What a perfect example. It's not sublimated lust, it's something else. And also productive!
thank you for posting, Henry!
That's an interesting take on Dorothea and Dr. Lydgate. I agree that founding a hospital is a useful, productive and loving way to realize both of their desires to create something good in the world. But I always thought that their relationship was the great example of a great love missed, in Middlemarch. Because it's perfectly clear that Dorothea and Dr. Lydgate are soul mates. If they had married, they would both have been able to achieve so much in their lives, helped so many people and been a great influence for good in the world.
Instead, he married the pretty, shallow, fashionable social climber Rosamond, who saw him as her ticket to social status, and who throttled his every impulse to do good, and eventually forced him into a socially prominent practice taking care of rich old people. They had "four fashionable daughters", and he died at the age of 60, having accomplished none of the good he hoped to do.
Meanwhile Dorothea, who escaped a truly miserable marriage on the death of her older spouse Mr. Casaubon, falls into a marriage with a fashionably rebellious political activist Will Ladislaw, whom she at least seems to be attracted to. (I never understood that marriage in the book. In the BBC series they cast Rufus Sewell in the part, which explained a lot.) But her energy will be frittered away in supporting him, and nothing good will happen there either.
There is no romantic energy between Dorothea and Dr. Lydgate, I agree, and I never understood why until someone pointed out to me that the thought of marriage would never have occurred to either of them because of the class divide between them. Dr. Lydgate is middle class; Dorothea is upper class. I had completely missed that.
So I think that Eliot, intentionally or otherwise, gave us a brutal critique of the damage the British class system did to those who lived under it, in blighting the life not only of Dr. Lydgate, but of Dorothea. Though at least she gets Rufus Sewell.
Disbelief a bit harder , but like opera singing replaces sex I can just except the sex is held back but probably is just happening.
Can you imagine sex between Dorothea and Casaubon?? Or are we supposed to infer that he is impotent?
I think Elliot can’t she could have made him more complex and less repulsive, more the ladislow has no sexual intent towards D raises the septics brow yet I know many people who have sex that I am happy not to contemplate. They said in plays , operas , movies there were tropes for sex. Elliot’s is marriage with sex off stage and never in her character hearts. This was serialized I believe so likely she had boundaries to stay within. She is a fine writer but I would say she is not making sex sublime but ignoring it , I don’t need her to go into depth on sex or expect her to.
As I get farther into MM I find that Elliot may have a touch of the gossip/unreliable narrator tinge when it comes to sex in the novels. It makes her a bit interesting, only a bit and I think the narrator is honest just intentionally imperfect. I have a quarter left. I actually haven't got to the part Henry and Zena discussed in Zena article so I will comment in a week when I am finished.
I do think since the pandemic other young woman immediately are pregnant and one only bed scene is sexless tourture reading that C being impotent may be one of Elliot’s few sexual signals in the novel.
That said I’d be in very gray territory to say this was anything more than a conjecture
I’d say that as I am reading Middlemarch it is better to say the narrator just doesn’t talk about sex and it is a trope of the era. Elliot goes as far as to say that ladislow has no desire to marry Dorothea if chance would allow it (but his character acts pretty much like that’s all that’s on his mind. ) I think love implying if you get married and a chaste courtship in every way is a trope. Only child so far is roses pregnancy (I am half done). Being halfway through I doubt in anyway metaphorical or otherwise will there be any sex or hint of it. Personally this Eros free town is less exciting and it makes suspension of
Yes! The idea of libidinal cathexis. Desire seems to find only one of its forms in sexuality, yet it always seems to function as a movement from self to other.
The reversal stays with me, that eros might be the love of wisdom hiding under sexual desire rather than the other way around. Doña Casilda runs like a maniac through the countryside and we call it devotion, Lydgate and Dorothea dream a hospital and we call it charity, yet both burn with the same flame. Perhaps our categories were always too small for the fire they were meant to contain.
Middlemarch is a mighty, magnificent novel—arguably the best ever written in English. Mary Ann Evans, highly educated genius who she was, crafts the Dorothea-Lydgate relationship as a worked example of Diotima’s discourse on the Ladder of the Soul in Plato’s Symposium.
But before we all start trooping up the Ladder the whole concept is worth unpacking.
Thoughtful, intriguing, and - on the face of it- rather far-fetched!
When George Eliot could not get the different kind of collaboration from Herbert Spencer in real life, she went and built it vividly and perfectly between Dorothea and Lydgate on the page, i wildly guess.
"You will find that I can be satisfied with very little, if I am delivered from the dread of losing it."
George Eliot to Herbert Spencer July 1854
Selections from George Eliot’s letters edited by Gordon S Haight
When writing itself becomes an exposed nerve system, it ceases to be a tool for healing, escape or sublimation like Franz Kafka.