Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hildebrand, Jayne

Titel

Middlemarch's Medium: Description, Sympathy, and Realism's Ambient Worlds

Ist Teil von

• ELH, 2018-12, Vol.85 (4), p.999-1023

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• By directly tying novelistic description to the biological medium within which organisms develop, Eliot pries description away from static pictorialism and endows it with a dynamism that makes it difficult to separate from plot and character development.15 It is in Middlemarch, however, that Eliot most fully develops the idea of a medium within which her characters live, making it central not only to the development of her characters, but also to the ethical problem of sympathy with which the novel is so deeply concerned. ii. middlemarch's sympathetic atmospheres The narrator of Middlemarch frequently uses the term medium to convey the agonistic relationship between an aspiring or desiring protagonist and a constraining social environment. [...]in an early chapter, Dorothea suffers from "a passionate desire to know and to think, which in the unfriendly mediums of Tipton and Freshitt had issued in crying and red eyelids" (36). [...]the vitality of environmental conditions as a necessary background to interpersonal recognition in Eliot's novel also results in a narrative economy in which visual description of setting is rarely set apart from narrative prose, or relegated to mere world-making, a Barthesian reality effect. Dividing Dagley and his family from the viewer by interposing an imaginary surface of canvas or text, the sharp focus of the description privileges the visual over other senses, and reduces environmental cues that might otherwise form a medium of connection between viewer and object—as does the rapidly shifting, windy sky in the scene of Featherstone's funeral—to static, representational surface. [...]it is the unification of "all these objects under the quiet light of a sky marbled with high clouds" that, at the end of the passage, definitively freezes Freeman's End into tableau, the sky acting as an ontological frame for cottage and cottagers that cordons them off from the real world of the viewer or reader. [...]the antidote Eliot's narrator offers to the illusory, picturesque description of the cottage is a set of details that replace the description's "quiet light of a sky marbled with high clouds" with a chastening sense of meteorological conditions as an ambient surround that must be continually contended with: the back-kitchen door of Freeman's End is "the only entrance ever used, and one always open except in bad weather" (371); "the awkwardnesses of weather" is one of the few things that Dagley, by existential necessity, "kn[ows] thoroughly" (373).