Elliot's Reading - Week of 4/18/21: George Eliot

 Elliot's Reading - Week of 4/18/21

The second book (of 8) in George Eliot’s Middlemarch essentially sets up the polarities that will dominate and shape the life of the protagonist, Dorothea Brooke. She has just married the lifeless, sexless, senescent scholar Casaubon - a marriage that every reader will recognize as doomed from the outset - and now in this section Dorothea begins to recognize this as well: Her husband’s scholarship is already way out of date and unlikely ever to result in a serious publication, and besides he resists her offers of assistance; she’s way smarter and more worldly than he, and she is doomed to a life of misery - as she has begun to recognize. But what can save her? Two other potential life interests emerge in this section: We learn a lot about the new doctor in town, Lydgate, a self-assured, ambitious, highly intelligent and au courant man whom we can imagine joining forces w/ DB in a social-justice project to provide medical aid to the poor - though we have to wonder about his character as he caves and sides w/ the powerful financier in town (Bulstrode?) in his selection of priest to minister to one of the hospitals (I may have the details wrong here) rather than pushing for the candidate who seems more worthy and progressive. Similarly, as DB’s life begins to fall apart on her honeymoon in Rome, she by chance meets up w/ Casaubon’s cousin/nephew Will Ladislaw, an aspiring artist/poet: He is immediately smitten w/ DB’s beauty (a characterstic not established in Book 1), but both realize that any relationship between the two is morally and ethically impossible (and he must wonder what kind of woman would fall for C.) - but there’s clearly some kind of attraction there that will surface again as this long novel progresses. Worth noting also that Dorothea’s sister, Celia, gets nothing more than a passing reference and her father has a mere walk-on in the entirety of Book 2.