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Marital Realism: Beauty and Pettiness in Middlemarch
Ist Teil von
Novel : a forum on fiction, 2021-08, Vol.54 (2), p.189-209
Ort / Verlag
Providence: Duke University Press, NC & IL
Erscheinungsjahr
2021
Link zum Volltext
Beschreibungen/Notizen
The Lydgates have bought too much furniture and plateware and do not know how to pay for it. All their problems eventuate from this remarkably tame, all too common origin of domestic debt, a version of being house-poor. He broaches the topic over tea with hidden dread. She, sensing the unpleasantness, turns a head to look away. Wedded misery in George Eliot's Middlemarch does not mean spectacular incidents—adultery, abuse, sexual fallenness, or the like. It means subtle, ordinary provocation, underlain by mundane disappointment and mistrust. This is as much true for the Lydgates as for the novel's other main couple, the Casaubons. Middlemarch presents us with nonflorid unhappiness, readable within its own legendary realism. This essay argues, indeed, that a primary grounding of Middlemarch's realism lies in scenes of marriage, especially prosaically troubled marriage. It infers from Eliot's banal erotics a coherent...