Missing the glory
Adatto, Kiku
'MIDDLEMARCH' SHRUNK FOR THE TUBE Missing the glory KIKU ADATTO rhat do I think of Middlemarch?" Emily Dickinson wrote. "What do I think of glory?" Now that the BBC production of...
...With Dorothea Brooke at its moral center, Eliot's Middlemarch offers a parable for our times...
...Witnessing the scene with Will and Rosamond wounds Dorothea deeply...
...All are young and new to Middlemarch...
...Her narration is an essential counterpoint to the decorous speech of her characters...
...One of the glories of Middlemarch is that it gives us two of the strongest women's voices in all of fiction, that of the author, George Eliot, and of her heroine, Dorothea Brooke...
...The lament is that Dorothea never receives public recognition for her work...
...But their fates are different because of the various ways they negotiate the pulls of public and private life...
...perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity...
...To act without regard for public opinion for a greater good is reason enough to celebrate Dorothea's moral courage...
...In the war between the public and private in our time, it is women who are typically the casualties...
...spent itself in channels that had no great name on earth...
...Startled and shocked, Dorothea retreats from the scene...
...In two extraordinary acts Dorothea rises to redeem others wrongly brought down by scandal...
...At its moral center are three reformers: Dorothea Brooke, Dr...
...Yet despite society's judgment, Eliot celebrates Dorothea's greatness...
...And Rosamond, moved by Dorothea's goodness, overcomes the vanity of a flirtatious woman, and confesses that she threw herself at Will, that Will loves only Dorothea...
...Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible...
...Unfortunately, the BBC production provided few clues...
...Will Ladislaw comes to Middlemarch to visit his elderly cousin, Rev...
...Only glancing references are made to Dorothea's projects and passions...
...She has no career...
...You will say it is Persian or something else geographic...
...I have a belief of my own," Dorothea affirms, to widen "the skirts of light" and make "the struggle with darkness narrower...
...I have found it and I cannot part with it...
...Yet she uses her position as a woman to act boldly to bridge the gap between private and public life in a way no man can...
...Lydgate the star of the show...
...It is my life...
...Acting on these higher claims, Dorothea returns to Rosamond to reassure her of the efforts on her husband's behalf...
...Edward Casaubon, a clergyman and religious scholar of independent means...
...It affirms the heroism of Dorothea's "unhistoric" life...
...In the novel, Lydgate enters the scene, not with a flourish, but at a dinner party...
...Middlemarch promises the opportunity for innovation away from the entrenched and unyielding institutions of London...
...The television series focuses on Dorothea's protestation that she is satisfied with retreating from the world to help her husband with his ponderous scholarship, but ¦ omits the passionate, assertive parts of her dialogue...
...So much of our greatest fiction is about the unraveling of women's lives—Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, the tortured heroines of Dostoyevsky, the quiet desperation of Wharton' s Lily Bart, to say nothing of the women stuck in the spiritual flatlands of postmodern fiction...
...The fact that the BBC production slights the development of Dorothea's character is not the fault of Juliet Aubrey, the actress who plays Dorothea...
...Not surprisingly, the pharmacists who dispense medicine that people don't need and the doctors who offer cures that don't work resent Lydgate and wait for an opportunity to discredit him...
...She holds no office...
...Instead, Will stays to work for political reform as a journalist and political adviser...
...Then we would all stand by him and bring him out of his trouble...
...She tells the tale of Saint Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century religious reformer, whose "passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life...
...Saint Teresa found her calling in the reform of a religious order...
...Now that the BBC production of George Eliot's Middlemarch has concluded on public television and we turn to the book, what glory will we find there...
...She was 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...
...But she does more than this...
...Middlemarch is a tale of how the pettiness and scandal of private life threaten to undo great efforts for public reform...
...Most people think she should stick to being a lady, and give up her projects...
...She considers Lydgate's life and work and Rosamond's bond to him...
...Eliot's novel, with its redemptive view of the inner life, is a balm to our battered psyches...
...KIKU ADATTO is the author of Picture Perfect: The Art and Artifice of Public Image-Making (Basic Books...
...Many Teresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action...
...She refuses to retreat to the safety of a sheltered life...
...Dorothea faces down scandal...
...But unlike most of us, who would turn away with outrage and wounded pride, she rises to the higher call of justice...
...To write Eliot out of the script is like staging Shakespeare without the soliloquies and asides...
...In a society suffocated by convention and resistant to reform, her moral courage provides a more potent form of agency than more public lives achieve...
...It provides the piercing insights into their souls, Eliot reveals that Dorothea's moral courage goes beyond her vigorous efforts for reform...
...Even the men who admire Lydgate are too cautious to act on his behalf...
...She holds no public position, but is selftaught...
...Like the other members of the cast she is superb, and when given the chance, reveals Dorothea's willfulness and passion...
...It doesn't help that Lydgate has recently asked Bulstrode for a large loan to pay a personal debt...
...While the men she respects stand at the sidelines, advising Dorothea to let Lydgate clear his name if he can, she refuses their caution...
...A stranger comes to Middlemarch and tells of the unsavory past of Bulstrode, the pious town banker who financed Lydgate's fever hospital...
...Dorothea forgoes Casaubon's fortune and marries Will, a man without property or position, who is later elected to Parliament on a platform of political reform...
...Into the breach steps Dorothea Brooke...
...How is Dorothea first addressed...
...we read lurid accounts of the private vices of politicians and celebrities in tabloids and, increasingly, the mainstream press, accounts that make the vicious gossip of Middlemarch society seem elevated by comparison...
...At the same time, the invasion of public life by talk of scandals, vices, and confessionals, seems a kind of revenge against a public realm that tyrannizes over the private, depreciates domestic lives, prizes careers and professions over children and families...
...Her full nature...
...As a consequence it missed the relevance of this great story for our times...
...In Dorothea Brooke, Eliot offers us a different vision, a portrait of a woman who does not come undone...
...they were chosen for her...
...It is Anthony Page (director) and Andrew Davis (screenwriter) who get Dorothea wrong, and with astonishing regularity strip her of speech, agency, and action...
...In the voice of narrator, Eliot is at once ironist and social critic...
...First, Dorothea refuses to bow to public opinion and acts independently to defend Dr...
...Let us find out the truth and clear him," she argues...
...The television series, by contrast, casts Dorothea as "girl interrupted," diverted by the claims of domesticity...
...Just as Dorothea wrestled with the moral dilemma of what loyalty required in her marriage to Casaubon, she now wrestles with what loyalty to her friends requires...
...In Middlemarch lore, Eliot notes with irony, Dorothea was viewed as not a "nice woman," faulted for marrying first a sickly old scholar, then his young cousin...
...But Eliot reminds us that the fate of the modern-day Teresa is different...
...She gives vent to the anger of spurned love...
...Lydgate has come to Middlemarch to reform health care...
...She is reduced to exactly what she is a rebel against—a Victorian lady of demure voice and at times (as one critic noted) of "preposterous saintliness...
...Dorothea and Will finally free themselves from the constraints of propriety and affirm their mutual love...
...She also rises above scandal that touches closer to home...
...It is this space that is occupied by Dorothea Brooke...
...Lydgate's carriage sweeps into Middlemarch...
...Our confusion about the public and the private swirls about us—we degrade our inner lives by baring our souls on television talk shows...
...After Casaubon marries Dorothea, he grows jealous of Will, and insists Will leave town...
...Eliot concludes the novel with both a lament and a celebration of Dorothea's life...
...The stranger dies under Lydgate's care and the townspeople (many resentful of his medical reforms) imply Lydgate assisted in his murder...
...Those close to her appreciate her gifts, but she devotes the rest of her life to her husband and family...
...Her soul could not be contained by the small pursuits of private life but "soared after some illimitable satisfaction...
...The "objects of her rescue," Dorothea realizes, "were not to be sought out by her fancy...
...Not with the deference the BBC production accords Lydgate, but as "Dodo," the pet name given by her practical, but less substantial sister, Celia...
...All three reformers are drawn together by shared ideals and mutual respect...
...Eliot reveals that some of the greatest good is done quietly and without historical acknowledgment, in the space between public and private life...
...23...
...Instead of painting Dorothea in the vivid colors of Eliot's narrative, they render her in pastels, passive when she is active, docile when she is defiant...
...After Casaubon's death, Dorothea had felt a growing love for Will, but as a widow, was restrained by propriety from seeing him...
...After speaking to Lydgate, she offers to talk with his wife Rosamond to reassure 22 her that Lydgate's name will be cleared...
...Though she lives on a grand estate, her talent and passion is land reform...
...The series opens by effacing Eliot's independent heroine and making Dr...
...Eliot describes Dorothea as a modernday Saint Teresa, brimming with moral passion, poised to change the world...
...Eliot begins Middlemarch with a "prelude," a parable by which we are to understand Dorothea's life, and through her life, the lives of many gifted women...
...When Will interrupts, "That sounds like beautiful mysticism," Dorothea asserts, "Please do not call it by any name...
...People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbor...
...perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion...
...Eliot's commanding contrapuntal voice as narrator is eliminated from the TV series, except for a brief coda...
...We too live in a time when reform is in the air, but so is scandal that threatens to undo it...
...Women of distinctive promise arise in every epoch, but they are fettered 21 by society, forced to leave the path of public action, or unacknowledged, never given a chance to exercise their agency in the world: That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago was certainly not the last of her kind...
...Eliot is the poet of Dorothea's life, a life that to outward appearances has no epic meaning...
...In one scene, for example, Will indignantly tells Dorothea that her life with Casaubon is a "dreadful imprisonment...
...Lydgate when he is unfairly discredited...
...Without Eliot' s constant reminder that Middlemarch society has got Dorothea wrong, the television series unwittingly adopts Middlemarch's view of her, taking on the smug, condescending tone of the society Eliot disdains...
...We too struggle to weigh public virtues against private vices, to sort out the conflicting, overlapping claims of the public and the private spheres of life...
...But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs...
...Dorothea is a twenty-yearold heiress who has come to Middlemarch after the death of her parents to live with her uncle...
...Lydgate talks of his visions for medical reform...
...Despite its rich evocation of Middlemarch society, it muted the two voices that matter most in Eliot's novel...
...In a sordid concatenation of events, Lydgate is drawn into a scandal not of his making...
...But when she goes to Lydgate's home she comes upon Rosamond and Will Ladislaw intimately clasping hands...
...She is a woman...
...Hers is an inner moral courage that makes a difference in the world...
...Her uncommon talent for land reform, her refusal to be fettered by gossip, her willfulness and occasional haughtiness, and her remarkable virtue are lost in a one-dimensional portrait of naive good will...
...Tertius Lydgate, and Will Ladislaw...
...Lydgate organizes a new fever hospital...
Vol. 121 • July 1994 • No. 13
