Rereading Middlemarch in October

Some novels you read; other novels take attendance. Middlemarch is the second kind. I have now been present for it three times — at nineteen, at thirty-one, and this month, in the long October evenings, with the radiators coming on and the book propped against the teapot — and I can report that George Eliot has been marking me absent for two of the three.

At nineteen I read it because it was assigned, and I read it the way you read at nineteen, which is autobiographically. The book was about Dorothea, obviously. Dorothea was about me, obviously. Here was a young woman of embarrassing sincerity, hungry for a great purpose, certain that the great purpose would arrive wearing the costume of seriousness — and I underlined her yearnings with a fervor that must have registered, somewhere, as Eliot laughing gently in her grave. The marriage to Casaubon I read as simple catastrophe, a wrong turn on the road to the right life. The rest of the novel — the Vincys, the Garths, poor Lydgate, the entire town going about its dense provincial business — I processed as scenery. Four hundred pages of scenery. I gave the book its A-minus and moved on.

At thirty-one I read it again because everyone said it was better the second time, and it was, though not in the way promised. What opened up was Lydgate. If you have not read the novel: Tertius Lydgate is a young doctor who arrives in Middlemarch carrying genuine scientific promise and a set of unexamined assumptions about what his life will simply provide him — most fatally, about marriage, which he assumes will be a kind of upholstery, decorative and supporting, requiring no thought. His slow suffocation — talent, debt, a beautiful and implacable wife, the town’s small resistances accumulating like sediment — is the most frightening thing in the book, because unlike Dorothea’s mistake it is not made in a single visible act. It is made continuously, in increments too small to refuse. At thirty-one, watching my own cohort begin to make its Lydgate arrangements, I found this nearly unreadable. I mean that as the highest praise.

Now, at forty-two, the third reading, and the strangest discovery yet: the book is about Mary Garth and always has been. I know how this sounds — Mary Garth, the plain, dry, sensible one, the character least likely to be anyone’s favorite at nineteen because she wants nothing extravagant and therefore appears to want nothing. What I could not see, twice, is that Mary is the only person in the novel whose moral vision is accurate at every moment she appears. She is never once deceived — not about Fred, whom she loves without illusion; not about Featherstone and his repulsive deathbed theater; not about herself. In a novel whose entire machinery runs on people mistaking their own motives, Mary Garth is the fixed point, the calibration standard, the one instrument reading true. Eliot hides her in plain sight, gives her no great scenes, and dares you to notice that she is the answer to the question every other character is failing: how to want rightly, at the correct scale, without lying to yourself about it.

This is what rereading actually is, I think. We talk about it as if the gain were incremental — you catch things you missed, notice foreshadowing, admire the joinery. And you do. But the real event is stranger: the book stays fixed and you move, so the parallax shifts, and characters who stood in front of each other stand apart. The nineteen-year-old could not see Mary Garth because Mary Garth is invisible to anyone still expecting life to be about Dorothea-sized wanting. You have to have watched some wanting fail — your own, other people’s, at close range, over years — before the person who wants correctly becomes the most dramatic figure on the stage.

And Dorothea herself? She survives the parallax, which is Eliot’s miracle. At forty-two I no longer read her as myself; I read her as someone I once was near, a young woman I want to protect and cannot, since she is fictional and also since you never can. Her sincerity, which I identified with at nineteen and winced at (I confess) at thirty-one, now looks like the rarest thing in the book after Mary’s clarity: an unguarded soul. The famous last sentence — the unhistoric acts, the hidden lives, the unvisited tombs — lands differently every decade, and this time it landed as instruction rather than elegy. It is not sad that the world’s growing good depends on unremembered people. It is the only mechanism the world has ever had, and Eliot spent nine hundred pages proving it before she allowed herself one sentence of telling.

I will read it again around fifty, I expect. I have begun to suspect the book contains a reading for each decade, prepared in advance, the way a good host stocks the pantry for guests who haven’t confirmed. Whose book it will turn out to be next time, I can’t guess. Caleb Garth, probably. It is slowly dawning on me that the Garths are the entire novel and everything else is a cautionary frame. But that is the fifty-year-old’s essay, and she’ll write it herself, in October, with the radiators coming on. I’ve left her some margins.