Elliot's Reading Week of 8-1-21: Eliot (George) and Hawthorne

 Elliot’s Reading - Week of 8-1-21: (George) Eliot and Hawthorne 

Have reached the half-way point in my slow (re)reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and what’s left to be said? The section I just finished, Three Love Problems, moves the plot along on its several divergent - later to converge - tacks, with the typical GE insights that any reader will highlight while reading along. There are some passages too complex for me to discern and several on 1820s English politics are best skimmed, but most are insightful and original; no writer thought as much about her or his work as did GE. In essence, in the section we see the various relationships heading toward calamity: the young, ambitious Dr. Lydgate, clearly a central character in all plot lines, has married the beautiful Rose Darcy and we can see that he’s spending way too much money in setting up household and that his marriage may be a disappointment to him - he’s far more professionally and intellectually driven for her and he shows little attention to her: She’s his ornament, perhaps. Meanwhile, her spendthrift brother was bound for Oxford and, if I remember, an ill-suited career in the church and too unsettled to marry his beloved Mary Garth when her family fortunes change somewhat as her father unexpectedly gets hired to manager a couple of estates - so perhaps they can get together and marry (I am confused on some of these plot points, sorry). We readers also know that Mary may be due for a huge inheritance as the final portion of a will has yet to be read. Most important, Dorothea Brooke recognizes that her marriage to Casaubon was a terrible mistake, that he’s unable to love her in any way (including sexual - though this is hinted at only) and he likewise realizes that he will not live to complete his great scholarly enterprise - at the end of the chapter/section they both seem to recognize how their life together has been a failure and an illusion, and they sadly totter off together, he old and frail and lost and she providing him with at least some support. The question is: Will she be drawn into the world of politics (her uncle’s) and social change (her husband’s cousin Will)? 

The short stories of Nathanael Hawthorne aren’t read much today outside of intro American Lit courses (if those still exist), so, yes, his stories from the early 19th century feel at times a few centuries older than that - thanks (or no thanks) to his heavy use of allegory and Christian morality and fatalism. Two of the NH’s stories in the Casill Norton anthology are examples of his quaintness and of his still-enduring power as a fiction writer and innovator. The two - Young Goodman Brown and The Birthmark - are weird and mysterious and for that alone they might find some contemporary readers drawn to their otherworldliness: He’s not that far from Lovecraft Country, after all. YGB tells of a man who embarks on some unexplained overnight mission which entails his leaving behind his young bride, Faith (get it?), to traverse the forest en route to a neighboring town; across the span of his night journey he encounters the luminaries of his town engaged in some secret, Cabalistic, totally unChristian ceremony - and he returns a damaged and withdrawn man, and lives that way his entire life. It’s no coincidence that this story, like many of NH’s, is set in his town of Salem, with its dark, not-so-secret history. The Birthmark tells of a beautiful woman whose beauty is marred only by a birthmark shaped like a tiny hand on her cheek; her scientist husband has concocted a potion that, once imbibed, will erase the birthmark, making her beauty perfect. But there is not such thing as “perfect” in our earthly, made-of-mud existence; the potion works but takes not only the birthmark but also (spoiler, kinda) her life: Perfection is neither replicable nor human.