By George Eliot

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

It’s always stressful when you fail to love a Great Book. One always embarks upon a classic with high hopes, expecting to be enriched. You hold in your hands a work that has been vouched for by Culture as possessing extraordinary merit. You hoped, when you began, to one day participate in unanimity: “Oh, yes”, you imagined saying at cocktail parties in the future, “of course I have read ‘Ulysses’ – haven’t you? Oh, but you must! It’s a masterpiece!’ But you have failed to arrive at this imagined destination; the book has not taken you where you hoped. It’s disappointing, of course, but, more, it’s disconcerting: you know something is askew, and the consensus critical opinion suggests that it is you.

Most of us probably handle this personal failure to perform by staying silent when the works in question are discussed. Better to have no opinion than a opinion which is manifestly wrong, which might single you out as a philistine. It is therefore impossible to know how many Great Works are leaving people cold on a regular basis – maybe no one actually likes ‘Ulysses’. As long as the threat of intellectual opprobrium hangs over dissent, there is the risk that people will pretend to like things they don’t in order to avoid looking stupid.

All of which is my way of bracing myself to admit something that I have kept hidden for a long time: I don’t like ‘Middlemarch‘.

I know that I’m supposed to love ‘Middlemarch’ – everyone loves ‘Middlemarch’, especially literature-minded women. Bookish women seem to love ‘Middlemarch’ to an almost improbable degree – the ubiquity of ‘Middlemarch’ appreciation is rivaled, in my opinion, only by love of ‘Pride and Prejudice’.

But I’m a bookish woman, and I have never loved ‘Middlemarch’.

This fact makes me feel so insecure that I have, in fact, read ‘Middlemarch’ four separate times in the past twenty years. I’ve never once liked it, but I keep reading it because everyone else loves it and I’m trying to figure out what I’m missing. Compounding my difficulty is the fact that I find it singularly unmemorable; I forget what happened in ‘Middlemarch’ about fifteen minutes after finishing the book, which means that, not only can I not understand why other people like it, I can’t remember why I didn’t.

But I have just finished my fourth attempt on ‘Middlemarch’, and, in the last few moments before the plot leaves me again, let me try to parse my disappointment.

All criticism should begin with a compliment. Let me state the obvious: ‘Middlemarch’ is beautifully written. My copy positively bristles with sticky notes from all the passages that I’ve marked.

“To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.” (p. 266)

“Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best.” (p. 229)

“Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.” (p. 349).

Not only is this language lovely, the insights are well-observed, almost profound. That I am in the presence of a great mind as I wade yet again through this book is obvious to me – Eliot is a magnificent writer. I have absolutely no quarrel with her prose – this is not where my relationship with ‘Middlemarch’ is foundering.

The difficulty is this: I loathe every single one of her characters, and I don’t care at all about what happens to any of them. For what it’s worth, I am aware that this is the shallowest possible level of analysis. Characters in novels aren’t your friends – it is not their responsibility to be likable to you. Many great novels are written about terrible people. The idea that the merit of a book is how much you root for the characters, or how much you see yourself in them, how much you connect with their situation, is, in my opinion, sophomoric garbage, weak thinking for weak minds.

That approach to novels offends me because it doesn’t even apply to life. The virtues of mankind are various: people may be brilliant, or funny, or brave, or kind. They may be all of these things, and without being at all likable. We often root for people we wouldn’t like. Plenty of people have accomplished great things, lived interesting lives, without being the sort of person you personally relate to. It often happens that fascinating lives are lived by weak, repellent, or wicked people. Novels, which are essentially just stories about people, shouldn’t be held to a narrower standard than people themselves.

But, in my defense, I don’t loathe the characters in ‘Middlemarch‘ because they are weak, repellent, or wicked – they aren’t, especially. They are merely unremarkable. In all likelihood, I wouldn’t loathe them in real life at all. I only loathe them because I feel I am being forced to admire them. I resent them because I feel I am being forced by consensus opinion to read an 800-page book about them. Again.

The plain truth is that I don’t understand why people love this book, but I have a sneaking suspicion that loving ”Middlemarch”, rather like hating ‘Middlemarch’, is all about Dorothea. I don’t think anyone loves ‘Middlemarch’ for Fred Vincy, or for Will Ladislaw. Dorothea is fulcrum upon which the novel turns – it is Dorothea upon whom readers pin their attachment, in whom readers endeavor to see themselves.

Certainly, Dorothea is the obstacle which I myself cannot get past. Much of my irritation with her, I think, stems from my sense that I am supposed to like her, my sense that George Eliot liked her. She’s not drawn as a perfect character, but her flaws, stated clearly in Eliot’s beautiful, precise prose, are unconvincingly virtuous. They have the aspect of Trojan flaws: putatively added to give realism and depth, but actually draped across a character to flatter them. They feel disingenuous, the novelistic equivalent of being asked your weaknesses in a job interview and saying, “I care too much about my work.”

George Eliot tells us that Dorothea is idealistic, lofty in aspiration and naive in execution, and earnest to a fault, as befits a person pure of heart. But that is not who I see. The character I see is an unperspicacious and pretentious woman who cultivates virtue in order to satisfy her own vanity. And while I think it is entirely possible to love a vain and unintelligent character, I think it is very difficult to love a vain and unintelligent character whose author doesn’t see her that way.

As I write that out, it suddenly occurs to me that it is the problem: my objection to ‘Middlemarch’ isn’t that I don’t like the characters (very few books are peopled by characters I actually like). The problem is that I don’t like them, but George Eliot does.

Perhaps it’s impossible to really love a book when you substantively disagree with the author about her own characters – I don’t know. But it is certainly the problem here: George Eliot is charmed by her ‘Middlemarch’ characters, and I am not.

A story needs to justify itself to readers. All stories are acts of persuasion: the readers are offering their time; the story must therefore provide a continued justification for that time. Different kinds of stories provide different justifications. Action heroes aren’t well-developed characters because they don’t need to be: no one is there to watch them grow and mature. Hero’s journeys have opposite requirements: if the hero doesn’t justify the story, nothing will. Likewise, when a character is meant to be disliked, the story is built to accommodate that repulsion, either by making the repellent character compelling in some way, or by punishing them in a way that the reader will find satisfying.

‘Middlemarch’ is a hero’s journey: good and lovable, though imperfect, people experience tribulation, learn and grow, and then are recompensed with happiness. The virtuous are rewarded; sinners are punished. But I don’t find Eliot’s heroes heroic – I find them stultifying, and that doesn’t work. When the hero fails to capture your interest, all the apparatus of their journey becomes burdensome, and you, as a reader, resent it.

Or at least I do. And I know that it’s my problem. Everyone else seems to find Dorothea enchanting, worth journeying with – I’m clearly the exception. And I wish it weren’t so. I’m not one of those people who feel superior when they dislike something popular. On the contrary, I feel anxious and unsettled, as though I were missing something obvious.

I wish I loved ”Middlemarch‘; I have certainly tried to. I don’t resent the effort I’ve put in: I believe it is our obligation to better ourselves for the sake of great literature, to try to become the readers we want to be. I’ve failed with ‘Middlemarch’, but that’s OK. Perhaps we are defined as much by our failures as readers as we are by our successes. The books that we don’t love can teach us just as much about ourselves as the books we do. And, often, greatness in a work of literature is less about how much you enjoy reading it than it is about how intensely you feel to need grapple with it.

Measured that way, ‘Middlemarch’ is certainly a great work of literature to me. Though I have never loved it, I have also never been able to make my peace with not loving it. On the contrary, I come back to it again and again looking for resolution. And maybe, one day, I will love ‘Middlemarch’. Somehow, I doubt that I have read it for the last time.