"Middlemarch" as a study of Provincial life

Topic : “Middlemarch” as a study of Provincial Life

Name : Chauhan Sejal  Arunbhai

Subject: The Victorian Literature

Paper : 6

Roll no: 28

M.A. Part - I Sem -II

Year: 2013- 15

Submitted to : Heenamem 

M.K..Bhavanagar  University

                                                 

“MIDDLEMARCH” AS A STUDY OF PROVINCIAL LIFE

COMPREHENSIVE  AND VIVID PICTURE :-

The novelist has called the novel Middlemarch, and also given it a subtitle , a Study of Provincial Life. The title is an appropriate one, for the novel gives us  a realistic, vivid and comprehensive picture of provincial life of England as it was in the years immediately preceding the Reform Act, 1832. The picture is so vivid and comprehensive, that it has been said that if there is any hero in the novel it is the society of Middlemarch. The novelist has drawn heavily on her memories of early girlhood and this accounts for the truthfulness and vividness of her portrait of provincial life. In the1830,s provincial life was the same in every part of England for the railways had not yet destroyed rural isolation and seclusion.This makes  George Eliot’s Study of provincial life a microcosm of the provincial life of England. Great public events of the day, like the agitation preceding the Reform Act, “ from merely a very faint background music to the absorbing local interest”.

A BOOK ABOUT PEOPLE, NOT PLACES :-

The action of the novel takes place in Middlemarch or the neighbouring parishes of Tipton, Lowick or Freshitt. The locale of  Middlemarch has been left vague and indistinct, though it is generally identified with the town of Coventry in the Midlands. This is so because it is a novel about people and not about places or ideas. Says ROBERT SPEAIGHT

                       “there are comparatively few passage of natural description, and these are generally relevant to the emotional mood. We remember the long alleys and melancholy trees of Lowick because they were the scenes of Dorothea’s disillusionment. But, in general we walk or drive from one modest red-brick house or one hospitable rectory to another, and only rarely drop in at the ‘local’ for the gossip which GEORGE ELIOT, when she wanted to, could so liberally dispense”. The setting is at once ample and plain. It is a world of family circles and fragile reputations ; and no scene is more skillfully managed than poor Mrs Bulstrode’s round of visit to her friends . The pitiless self-protection of society is here relentlessly exposed.

LANDSCAPE OF OPINION :- 

 The canvass of the novel is a crowded one. A host of characters, belonging to every profession, age-group and walk of life have been brought in, and through their actions and interactions life in a limited region-Middlemarch and its environs- has been faithfully recorded. Not even the minor characters are superfluous, for they serve to illuminate some one aspect or the other of provincial life of the time. As QUENTIN ANDERSON points out,” it is a landscape of opinion”, and not any natural landscape, which is dominated in the novel.

A CONSERVATIVE, TRADITION BOUND SOCIETY :-

This limited, isolated community has certain well-marked characteristics. For one thing, it is deeply conservative. Everything new, every hint of change, is looked upon with suspicion. Railways which are yet distant and far off, are regarded as a threat to the agricultural way of life. Class distinctions are taken for granted, and every class carries with it , its own privileges. Class privileges protect a person, even when he or she behaves in a way inappropriate for the class to which he or she belongs. Thus Mrs. Cadwallader, a lady of high birth, descended from the nobility, haggles and bargains with common traders and cuts jokes with them, but nobody thinks of the worse of her for these reasons. The class to which she belongs shields her effectively.  It never crosses the mind of Mr. Brooke, or anybody else, that his activities in favour of the Reform Bill could work in the direction of reducing his hereditary privileges as a landowner. Nor does Lydgate see the slightest incongruity between his professional  ambitions, his deep interest n science, and his traditional gentlemanly way of life, for which carelessness about small sums of money is essential.

STRESS ON BIRTH AND FAMILY BACKGROUND :-

As A.O.J.Cockshut points out in Middlemarch society, Birth still counts for a good deal, but money is more important; the strength of the position of a man like Mr. Brooke is that he combines both advantages, and has never really been forced into the recognition that the advantages are separable. But others are; Lydgate a man of family, is compelled to beg money from the very middle-class has its gradations, and in reckoning these money is always more important than education or culture. People related by marriage may be separated by economic differences, like the Vincy and the Bulstrodes. And George Eliot is keenly aware of the perennial tendency of the sons and daughters of the merchant class is to hanker after upper class status. Dim, ill-directed efforts of this sort induce Fred Vincy to go in for riding, horse-trading, and dull, sporting dinners. The trouble about setting up to be gentlemanly is that it costs money and very few ways f earning money are regarded as indisputably gentlemanly. Perhaps only one, the Church, is completely above reproach.That is why Fred’s relation all want him to adopt this profession for which, as he eventually comes to feel under Mary Garth’s influence, he is manifestly unfitted.

MONEY,RANK AND STATUS : SOCIAL CLIMBING :-

Money is all important, and different attitudes towards money reveal the moral bent or orientation of different characters. But rank and status are of still greater importance and characters strive to climb to a higher rank. Rosamond Vincy is a great social climber ; ‘the aroma of rank’ fascinates her . She is attracted to Lydgate , not for any of the qualities for which he is really admirable , but for his good family connections in Northumberland . Marriage is for her , more than anything else , a ladder by which to climb as far away as possible from the merchant class. The idea of professional status is not much developed. A doctor or a lawyer is only another sort of tradesman ; so it is part of Rosamond’s acuteness and sensitiveness in matter of rank that she immediately recognizes in Lydgate the man of family that very few doctors would have been .

TRADE AND BUSINESS :-

But there are also those honest workmen who are devoted ‘ to their own trade and business , who do not hanker after social rank , to whom the aristocratic way of life is something they neither like nor understand . Caleb Garth is the best representative of this class .

                  “ His classification of human employments was rather crude……..... He divided them into business , politics preaching , learning and amusement . He had nothing to say against the last four ; but he regarded them as a reverential pagan regarded other gods than his own . In the same way he thought very well of all ranks , but he would not himself have liked to be of any rank in which he had not such close contact with business as to get often honourably decorated with marks of dust and mortar , the damp of the engine , or the sweet soil of  the woods and fields . “ It is a nice irony if the class system that Fred Vincy disgusts his middleclass father by tacking work under this excellent businessman , and thus renouncing upper-class ambitions . The mixture of tolerant superiority and occasional contempt felt even for the substantial middle class by the gentry is well shown at various places. Mr Brooke, for example , does not like that his two nieces should meet the daughter of a mere manufacturer , except only on public occasions .

 DISTURBING INFLUENCES :-

Middlemarch society is tradition-bound , unchanging and conservative . But from time disturbing influences appear and disturb its calm ,  placid , day to day life . Lydgate is one of such factor because his gentlemanly connections and high social origin  are felt to be inconsistent with his role as a professional man . He is a medical man , but medical man are considered on a footing with the servants . Miss.Dorothea Brooke is another disturbing influence . She feels strong sympathy for Lydgate’s aspirations . Belonging by birth to the highest rank of local society , she is totally oblivious of class differences. For her the confining bonds of society are due to her sex , not to her class. For all her idealism and lack of conventional feeling , she hardly wishes to go against thetraditional view of what is fitting for a women. Thus all her high-flown schemes take the form of  persuading or inspiring or helping some man to achieve something notable in the world.

CONVENTIONAL VIEW OF WOMANHOOD :-

Her sister is a good representative of the kind of woman who  is entirely happy with the feminine, nursery world. Their uncle , as usual, unconsciously  expresses the conventional view with perfect exactness when he says to Casaubon , Dorothea’s husband : “ Get Dorothea to read few light things , Smollett : Roderick Random, Humphrey clinker ; they are a little broad , but she may read anything now she’s married , you know”. That is , everything for a woman , even her reading , and much more any public acts, depends on marriage . Such is the view of womanhood in this provincial society. They are expected to obey and fall in line, as Mary Evans herself was expected to do as a girl.

A  FEUDAL SOCIETY IN A STATE OF DECAY :-

However, this provincial society is not static. It is in a stage of transition. It is a feudal society in a stage of decay . The poor tenants are already raising their voice against their landlords, demanding better conditions of living, and passing judgments on their landlords , whom they had so far served and obeyed like slaves . Thus Mr.Hawley regards Mr.Brooke to be a “ damned bad landlord “, and Dingley speaks of the Reform Bill which he hopes will do away with bad landlords .Rumblings are heard of the great national events , like the Luddite movement and machine-breaking ,the advance of the railways , the immanent dissolution of the Parliament and the Reform Bill agitation. All these are as yet far off, distant events , but they are ominous portents of the decay of the old economic and social order. Feelings have undergone a seachange, though the old order still continues.  

CONFLICT OF THE OLD AND THE NEW : RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS :-

In the social fabric , there is a conflict between the old and the new. The old is yet dominated , but it would gradually give way to the new, and by 1870, when Middlemarch was published, it was clear that the future lay with the new . This conflict between the old and the new, this decay and dissolution of the old dispensation and transition to the new , is seen even more clearly in the field of religion . There are two forms of religious traditions. One is the practical , kindly, undogmatic tradition of Anglicanism , the best representative of which is Mr.Farebrother. They believe in doing a good turn a kindly , humane act , and do not bother much about the theoretical questions of right and wrong . Such men were more interested in conduct than in faith ; they had a respected position in the structure of society, which enabled them, to some extent, to mitigate the rigours of class difference. Even when comparatively poor, they were accepted by the gentry as one of themselves, but they knew where the shoe pinches for their uneducated parishioners. Sometimes, like Farebrother, they were men of deep intellectual interests; and were the sort of men who to-day would be university or sixth-form teachers.

THE RISE OF EVANGELICALISM:-

The other religious tradition, much more vehement and fanatical, is loosely called Evangelical. By the year 1830, the Evangelical movement was nothing new, but such is the conservation of the Middlemarchers that they regard it  as something new and are suspicious of it. Bulstrode and Tyke are the representative of this sect. Evangelicals laid stress on the strict adherence to religious dogma. They made a rigid distinction between those who had received divine Grace and those who had not. They believed in the doctrine of the original sin, and that all men were consequently depraved, till they received divine Grace and were controlled and guided by His Will. The Evangelicals thought that they were the chosen of God, and so would never admit that there was any evil in them. Thus they were self-righteous, firmly convinced of the rightness of their conduct, and critical of others who did not belong to their sect.

                  In Middlemarch, the two sects are in conflict, and the older is suspicious of the new. Says A.O.J. Cockshut , ‘’ The relations between the Evangelicals and the old-fashioned, decent, traditional Anglicanism is well given in the exchange between Mr Vincy and Bulstrode at the end of chapter 13. Mr Vincy is asking Bulstrode to give Mr Featherstone a certificate that Vincy’s  son had not been borrowing money on the doubtful security of his expectations from Featherstone’s will. Bulstrode accuses Vincy of ‘’worldliness and inconsistent folly’’, and asks how he can give a certificate in proof of a negative proposition about which he can have no certainty. This combination of high spiritual talk with reluctance to do a kind action to help a friend angers Vincy, striking him as typical of Evangelical cant. He says: ‘I used to be before doctrines came up. I take the world as I find it, in trade and everything else. I’m contented to be no worse than my neighbours.’’

                   This exchange , which should be studied in full, gives the essence of the mutual misunderstanding. For Vincy, and even for the clergyman Ferebrother, religion is a kind of seal or sanction upon decent behavior; it is a social guarantee of the moral values of civilized life. For Bulstrode religion is , in principle , the mainspring of every thought and action. But in the case of a coarse and grasping man, like Bulstrode, this enthusiasm contains within it a terrible trap.

 A SOCIETY ON THE MARCH :-

Plain, old-fashioned Anglicans , like the Vincys and Farebrothers, have a feeling that Evangelicals are gaining all the time. Their fears and doubts are voiced in the novel on a number of occasions. For example we are told,

                   “ The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the belief in life as a merry lot , which made the house exceptional in most country towns at that time , when Evengelicalism had cast a certain suspicion over the few amusements which survived in the provinces. At the Vincys there was always whist……….”

For the profoundly conservative Mrs.Farebrother, the decline of the old eighteenth-century version of Anglicanism and changes in the class system are closely linked :

                 “ When I was young , Mr.Lydgate , there never was question about right and wrong . We knew our catechism, and that was enough; we learned our creed and our duty . Every respectable Church parson had the same opinions. But now , if you speak out of the Prayer-book itself you are liable to be contradicted…..It was not so in my youth ; a Churchman was a Churchman , and a clergyman , you might be pretty sure , was a gentleman , if nothing else “. Some of the Evangelican school, in reality, were gentleman born to high position; but George Eliot does not show us man like these, who were certainly exceptional. She shows us the more characteristic type of self-made business men; who saw, or imagined that they saw , a link between their economic individualism and the intensely personal , at times sophistic , quality on Evangelical religion .

Mrs.Farebrother’s instincts about the way the world was are sound. The old is giving way to the new in every direction. The old in religious, social and economic sphere is decaying and disintegrating, and the new is gradually taking its place . Society is on the march and this sense of movement is skillfully conveyed by the novelist.

A MELANCHOLY PICTURE : ITS SOLIDITY AND COMPLEXITY :-

R.H.Hutton regards George Eliot’s picture of provincial life as a very melancholy one , and this melancholy is rooted in the very design of the book .

                “ It is a world not in sympathy with lofty aspiration for her to give such a solidity and complexity to her picture of the world by which her hero’s heroine’s idealism was to be more or less tested and partly subjugated ,as would justify the impression that she understood fully the character of the struggle . We doubt if any other novelist , who ever wrote , could have succeeded equally well in this melancholy design , could have framed as complete a picture of English country and country-town society , with all its rigidities , jealousies and pettiness , with its thorough good nature , stereotyped habits of thought , and very limited accessibility to higher ideas , and have threaded all these picture together by a story , if not of the deepest interest , still admirably fitted for its peculiar purpose of showing how unplastic  is such an age as ours to the glowing emotion of an ideal purpose”.

CONCLUSION :-

In short, Middlemarch is such a great novel because of the solidity , vividness , truthfulness and comprehensiveness of the picture of provincial life presented in the novel. This makes it a valuable social document which tells us more about the real , day to day , common , provincial life of England in the 1830’s , than any book of history.