hello friday! (150508) aka middlemarch, part five.

May 9, 2015

(sprinkles cupcakes are terrible.)

in chapter 4 of my life in middlemarch, rebecca mead writes:

"we all grumble at 'middlemarch,'" a reviewer for the spectator said. "but we all read it, and all feel that there is nothing to compare with it appearing at the present moment in the way of english literature, and not a few of us calculate whether we shall get the august number before we go for our autumn holiday, or whether we shall have to wait for it till we return." with book four, we are approaching the very middle of middlemarch -- and even though i know well how the novel concludes, the riddle posed in chapter 30 always beguiles me with its suggestion of alternative fates, of different love matches, of other possible endings.
certain genres of fiction derive their satisfactions from the predictability of their conclusion. the reader knows where things are going to end up: in a romance the lovers are united; in a detective story the murder mystery is solved. there is a pleasure in the familiarity of the journey. but a successful realist novel necessarily takes unpredictable turns in just the way real life predictably must. the resolution of middlemarch, even as seen in prospect halfway through the book, cannot possibly be completely tidy. (an example: mary garth has two possible suitors, fred vincy and mr. farebrother. both have qualities to recommend them, but at least one is bound to be disappointed.) middlemarch permits the reader to imagine other possible directions its characters might take, leading to entirely different futures, and as so often in life, love is the crossroads. (mead, 113-4)

one. imagine a time when novels were serialized and people anticipated the next installment, couldn't wait to read it and discuss it and simmer in anticipation for the next. imagine that.

two. this made me think of hillary kelly's article in the washington post about the serialized novel, which was linked on melville house's fabulous blog with discussion, all of which makes me think of the paris review, which recently serialized rachel cusk's outline (published in book form by FSG in 2015) (excerpts from the paris review: part 01, part 02, part 03, part 04). also i swear the paris review recently said they were going to start serializing another novel in their next issue -- or the fall issue -- but this is the problem with following all things literary on twitter, instagram, tumblr, facebook, and subscribing to publishing newsletters and reading blogs like the melville house blog, the paris review blog, lit hub -- i can't remember where i read this (spent the last 15 minutes trying to find it), but i swear i did, and it makes me happy, the end.

three. that last sentence in the paragraphs quoted above is one reason i feel compelled to keep going with middlemarch. i honestly don't know what's going to happen, not in any constructed narrative way but in the way that it is in life with life's penchant for throwing curveballs as it pleases, and i'm finding it just interesting enough to keep the pages flipping.

four. mr. farebrother > fred vincy.

five. ... because i don't like the number four?

book four of middlemarch is when i decided that i despised causabon. what a selfish man. it wasn't even the stupid clause in his will that did it for me; it was the stupid request he lay before dorothea after waking her in the night because he felt restless so she had to wake up and read to him so he could edit via dictation, when he says:

'before i sleep, i have a request to make, dorothea.'
'what is it?' said dorothea, with a dread in her mind.
'it is that you will let me know, deliberately, whether, in case of my death, you will carry out my wishes: whether you will avoid doing what i should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what i should desire.' (eliot, 477)

oh my god, you selfish man, you'll be dead -- what does it matter to you what she does with her life? she's a human being, not something you can control and order around, and i was glad that dorothea hesitates, doesn't give him an answer right away and asks for more time. it's not fair for her, either, because she ends up getting no sleep and struggles away, aware that he's asking for too much:

still, there was a deep difference between that devotion to the living, and that indefinite promise of devotion to the dead. (eliot, 479)

in the end, it's moot because he dies, and, instead, dorothea's left with a stupid, petty condition in his will that bars her from the property if she marries ladislaw. she can marry anyone else, but she can't marry ladislaw, all because of causabon's small-minded jealousy -- and part of me laughed over all this because i couldn't help but think that, if dorothea so bends herself under her husband's will and causabon is so selfish and petty, they must have had some incredibly unsatisfactory sex. if they had sex at all beyond the consummation of the marriage, that is ...

it's already saturday, which means, drat, i'm going to have to haul this brick of a book to california after all. i was planning on taking atul gawande's being mortal (metropolitan books, 2014), but i'm thinking maybe i'll just take middlemarch and my life in middlemarch instead. that should be enough reading because i don't have a lot of free time in california, anyway, especially when i only have four days to cram as many people in as i can.

i'll still be posting a middlemarch update tomorrow, though, so check back for that! and i promise to talk about characters other than dorothea and causabon. :D

middlemarch, part four.

May 8, 2015

HALFWAY THROUGH.

and honestly wondering about long books and their merits.

here's a sort of confession: i'm not a big fan of long books. i'm not one to commit to long books easily, and i'm actually intensely wary of long books because i opine that very few books should be longer than 400 pages -- the excess of pages encourages indulgent writing and/or meandering story-telling, both of which try my patience.

eliot isn't really guilty of indulgent writing; i'm enjoying how sparse and frankly unremarkable her prose is; and i think her plain style of writing serves the story well. i also can't say she's guilty of meandering story-telling, per se, but there is a sense of inaction, of nothing really happening in middlemarch. i'm not saying the story is completely stagnant, though, because, obviously, things are happening in these pages in the sense that people are living their lives and life moves on -- it's worth noting that the subtitle to middlemarch is "a study of provincial life," which is the perfect summation of the novel and why i wonder if it really requires almost 850 pages.

i won't say that i'm bored because i'm not. at the same time, though, am i really excited or enthused or falling over to recommend this to people? not really? i enjoy middlemarch in that i enjoy these glimpses into what life was like in certain places during certain times (a similar book i think of is tolstoy's anna karenina; that's the book that made me fall in love with nineteenth-century russia), but i wonder if we really need 850 pages of it, if the book wouldn't be better served if it were 100-200 pages lighter.

the cat just made a loud whimpering sound from where she sleeps on my pillow. heh, did i utter an offensive thought? wanting to shave 100-200 pages off this "classic"?

i finished book four today and am moving on to book five tomorrow, and i admit to finding myself a little restless. this might also be my mood tonight, but i find myself growing impatient with dorothea and causabon particularly, the drama that causabon's written in his head about dorothea and will, the nefariousness he's convinced himself is true, never mind that it's built entirely on his assumptions and presumptions. i'm also impatient with dorothea's supposed meekness, the ways she simply swallows her unhappiness or discontentment or irritation at her husband's coldness, and she's clearly got a head of her own, so i want her to say something instead of sitting in her boudoir and letting herself be taken by small gestures. (and i keep coming back to dorothea and causabon because the books keep ending on them, so they're fresh in mind.) i'm also not that taken by the small town politics, all the pages dedicated to the cadwalladers' and chettam's concern over mr. brooke going into politics, and i frankly don't care much about rigg and his issues with his stepfather, raffles, and honestly groaned at the drama being hinted at between them.

however, even so, i'm still reading, which i suppose says enough. i'm still interested enough to look forward to packing this brick of a book in a bag in my tote and pulling it out on the subway or at lunch or with coffee the next day. i'm still intrigued enough to turn the pages and find out how life keeps chugging along for these people. i'm still invested enough to care, to want happiness and contentment for these characters, to wish that they'd get out of their heads and start talking to each other instead of running on their own assumptions or ideas of how things should be. i'm still reading even though there are still over 400 pages to go and part of me groans over that.

and, while i acknowledge that part of that is the charm of middlemarch, another part is simply that i'm greatly enjoying the act of reading middlemarch and blogging about it. in many ways, it's been a huge comfort this week. i obviously haven't been reading as fast as i'd have liked, but i've found much pleasure reading willfully every day and sitting at my macbook and trying to sort out my thoughts to tap out a post. it's not like anything very profound or deep has come of it, but there's something to be said about the comforts of routine, of having something you've committed to and knowing that it's there, waiting to be done at the end of the day before you can go to bed. i don't know. maybe that sounds cheesy, but it's true, and i wonder if i'd have stuck with middlemarch or enjoyed it as much if i weren't doing this either.

anyway, tomorrow's friday, and hopefully i'll have more time to read. will start by reading chapter 4 in rebecca mead's my life in middlemarch, then we'll be off into book five of middlemarch!

middlemarch, part three.

May 7, 2015

unfortunately, i did not have as much time today to dedicate to reading, so i didn't make much headway into book four, "three love problems" -- so let's talk about marriage.

in chapter 34, we see where the foundation of the problems lie in the dorothea/causabon union: they don't communicate. in this situation, the issue at hand is causabon's young cousin, will ladislaw, whom causabon did not want back at lowick (where causabon is) but mr. brooke (dorothea's uncle), daft and dense that he is, invited to stay with him at tipton grange. of course, causabon is unaware that dorothea did not ask her uncle to extend such an invitation to the unwanted cousin, but causabon thinks that dorothea did, so he is displeased with her, but she does not explain or defend herself to him. and where such assumptions grow wild, how can trust grow?

it would all be comical if it weren't so sad.

let us examine their reasons for marriage. or what they seek in a spouse.

in book one, upon learning from her uncle that causabon is intending to propose marriage to her, dorothea says,

'i should not wish to have a husband very near my own age,' said dorothea, with grave decision. 'i should wish to have a husband who was above me in judgment and in all knowledge.'
mr. brooke repeated his subdued, 'ah? -- i thought you had more of your own opinion than most girls. i thought you liked your own opinion -- liked it, you know.'
'i cannot imagine myself living without some opinions, but i should wish to have good reasons for them, and a wise man could help me to see which opinions had the best foundation, and would help me to live according to them.' (eliot, 40-1)

and then there's causabon's reasons for marriage in book three:

he had done nothing exceptional in marrying -- nothing but what society sanctions, and considers an occasion for wreaths and bouquets. it had occurred to him that he must not any longer defer his intention of matrimony, and he had reflected that in taking a wife, a man of good position should expect and carefully choose a blooming young lady -- the younger the better, because more educable and submissive -- of a rank equal to his own, of religious principles, virtuous disposition, and good understanding. on such a young lady he would make handsome settlements, and he would neglect no arrangement for her happiness: in return, he should receive family pleasures and leave behind him that copy of himself which seemed so urgently required of a man -- to the sonneteers of the sixteenth century. times had altered since then, and no sonneteer had insisted on mr. causabon's leaving a copy of himself; moreover, he had not yet succeeded in issuing copies of his mythological key; but he had always intended to acquit himself by marriage, and the sense that he was fast leaving the years behind him, that the world was getting dimmer and that he felt lonely, was a reason to him for losing no more time in overtaking domestic delights before they too were left behind by the years. (eliot, 278)

what, is that the male equivalent of a ticking clock?

maybe the thing is that these aren't totally antiquated reasons for seeking marriage. dorothea's reasons may be more extreme, yes, but there are women who want to be led, who seek guidance and leadership in their spouses, and i'm not criticizing that, granted that it's what the woman wants, because there are many types of women out there who want (and require) different types of spouses. at the same time, though, dorothea's repeated insistence on wanting an older man to guide her and instruct her makes me think shudderingly of ephesians 5:22-24:

(22) wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. (23) for the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is the head of the church; and He is the savior of the body. (24) therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. (NKJV)

i don't know (and don't necessarily think) that this is where dorothea's coming from, but it's what comes to my mind. and i say "shudderingly" because i've always hated the sermons i've heard throughout my adolescence about this damn passage, especially in connection with the married lives and expectations that i've seen practiced -- a man and woman get married; woman stays home; they have multiple children; and woman rears children. i am NOT criticizing this family model, granted that it is the woman's choice; i've seen it work wonderfully in loving, healthy marriages that have produced loving, healthy families; but, as a woman who's always known that she didn't want children or to be a housewife, i've always been personally uncomfortable with this model because there is no room for anything else.

but, anyway, sermons about ephesians 5 never failed to piss me off because pastors tended to focus more heavily on the above-quoted verses 22-24 without giving the following verses more weight:

(25) husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, (26) that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the Word, (27) that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. (28) so husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. (29) for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. (NKJV)

i know; i don't pick the most accessible translation (but i confess to a personal bias for the new king james); but, if you look past the religious-ese, husbands are called to a whole lot of love and sacrifice. (i say look past the religious-ese and offer more religious-ese.) it wasn't until i heard a sermon about verses 25-29, illuminating what this calling of marriage means, what the comparisons to Christ's love for the church and His leadership actually mean for husbands, that i finally stopped hissing internally whenever someone preached on ephesians 5.

dorothea, though, makes me think of the youth group/adolescent takeaway of ephesians 5, where we hear (and are told), "wives, submit to your husbands." hell, when i think of it, i think of causabon, too, this notion that the man should lead absolutely and the woman should follow blindly (and i know i'm talking so heteronormatively, but forgive me for the context of us talking about middlemarch here) -- because the sermon starts, "wives, submit to your husbands," and ends, "wives, submit to your husbands."

and, given this interpretation, which is entirely my own, it's no wonder that dorothea looks for that older, instructive man to guide her and teach her and that causabon looks for that "blooming young lady" (omg, barf) who is "educable and submissive" (double barf).

on that note, i do appreciate that eliot dives right into marriage. i love that she ignores the courtship and the romancing and the wooing, that celia announces her engagement to chettam in one chapter and, bam, a few chapters later, they've been married. at the same time, i do like that eliot's introducing potential foibles in the impending rosemary/lydgate nuptials, though i suspect we'll be diving right into that marriage soon as well. i'm finding the lack of romanticizing and sentimentalizing so refreshing, that eliot has set up these marriages for exploration through different premises, and i wonder where they'll go. i see conflict, yes, lots of conflict, but nothing yet that can be unresolved. in dorothea and causabon's case, a lot can be helped by them simply communicating instead of assuming things and letting things go unsaid while they fester inside, so i don't think eliot has doomed any of these marriages from the start. i don't get that kind of feeling from middlemarch -- it's a book that takes on serious questions but does so with levity and ease, refraining from getting lost in moralizing or instructing, content to sit back and observe these characters and watch their lives unravel and allow us, the readers, to draw our own thoughts. and i love that, too, in the ways that i love and appreciate a book that does not assume its readers to be dim-witted but capable of independent, individual thought.

(i did not finish book four of middlemarch, thus the lack of reference to my life in middlemarch today.)

middlemarch, part two.

May 5, 2015

in chapter 1 of my life in middlemarch (crown, 2014), rebecca mead notes that "one of the odd things about 'miss brooke' is how little of the heroine's personal history is revealed." (mead, 38) i didn't even realize this when i was reading, but i wonder if part of that is also just me. i realized a while ago that i'm not that big on descriptions or factual histories of characters, in that i don't necessarily require them; i tend to form images in my head off more abstract descriptions than detailed, physical renderings; and i'm not very good at taking a written spatial description and creating a corresponding visual image in my head. the realness or authenticity of a character [in a book] lies more in personality and character [of said character], the ways that s/he is fleshed out as a thinking, feeling human being, and, from the beginning of book one of middlemarch, dorothea has been just that. i may not know her history, and i may not be able to offer you a description of how i see her in my head as a reader, but i don't question who she is or, even, and maybe more importantly, that she is.

mead goes on to write:

the only growth that matters is that which occurs within the novel's pages -- the growth that turns her from a prematurely opinionated, occasionally priggish, alarmingly passionate, and inchoately ambitious young woman into something else. (mead, 40)

i love this. i love the principle of this, and i love the execution of it in middlemarch. we know enough about dorothea going into her marriage that we can see the trajectory of her arc in the novel, not in that we know what "something else" she will become but that she will become "something else." it's a narrative way of practicing good faith, i suppose, because, as readers, in general, we like to think of arcs and "journeys," though, whenever i think of arcs and journeys now, i think of meghan daum and how she advocates for it being a triumph, too, to emerge from the other end of a journey the same person. instead, as a culture, we tend to sentimentalize these things, whatever these "things" may be, near-death experiences, a loss of a loved one, an accident, etcetera, all of which are indubitably profound experiences, but we go looking for change, in some alteration of beliefs or behavior, like the experience is wasted if one does not come out from it a "better" person.

while i see daum's point, i also recognize in myself the desire to see dorothea grow, more in the ways that we anticipate teenagers leaving behind their adolescence and becoming young adults. the truth, though, is that much of that also comes hand-in-hand with disillusionment, a sometimes crushing realization that one's ideas and ideals are not held up in reality, and i fear for that with dorothea, the impending disappointments that are already starting to show, the unhappiness that seems so inevitable, at least where i am now moving into book four.

loved this, the end of chapter 1 of my life:

as miss brooke, dorothea remains for me the embodiment of that unnameable, agonizing ache of adolescence, in which burgeoning hopes and ambitions and terrors and longings are all roiled together. when i spent time in her company, i remember what it was like to be eighteen, and at the beginning of things. i remember going for my entrance interview at oxford and meeting with the senior english literature tutor at what was to become my college -- a forbidding-seeming scotsman who, i learned much later, was possessed of a magnificently dry sense of humor and was particularly partial to bright, ambitious, state-school students from the provinces. his study was furnished with low-slung easy chairs upholstered in mustard-colored corduroy; one could either perch on a chair's edge or sink into its depths. during my interview i shifted uncomfortably between one position and the other while talking passionately about middlemarch. afterward i walked across the cobblestones of a narrow lane and stepped onto the wide, lovely sweep of the high street in a state of exhilaration and anxiety. i felt as if my life were an unread book -- the thickest and most daunting of novels -- that i was holding in my hands. i didn't know what the story would be, or where it would lead, and i was almost too overawed to crack its spine and begin. (mead, 43-44)

as far as religion goes: when eliot was twenty-three, she stopped going to church and "left" faith, something that resulted in tension between her and her father until they reached a compromise where eliot would still accompany him to church every sunday, though she could maintain her own opinions about what she heard. i didn't know this, and it surprised me when i learned of it because i've been finding eliot's treatment of religious people to be fair and free of judgment -- it's not that she doesn't criticize intense religiosity (as demonstrated in dorothea) or the hypocrisies that often accompany it, but she does so fairly, allows it the berth of human complexity.

in chapter 2 of my life, mead writes:

one of the things that makes middlemarch a book for grown-ups -- a book for adults, even -- is eliot's insistence upon taking moral questions seriously, and considering them in their complexity. the loss of faith that she underwent in coventry was the beginning of a lifelong intellectual process of separating morality from religion -- of determining how to be a good person in the absence of the christian God. (mead, 72)

and

eliot's novel is intensely moral -- but it is not a moral codebook, and no one would want to read it if it were. rather, through her delineation of human passions -- romantic and intellectual -- eliot reveals her morality. middlemarch demands that we enter into the perspective of other struggling, erring humans -- and recognize that we, too, will sometimes be struggling and may sometimes be erring, even when we are at our most arrogant and confident. (mead, 73)

i think that second quote sums up why middlemarch is so compelling. it's why i'm enjoying the novel as much as i am -- because the people who populate the pages aren't flat, two-dimensional ciphers. they're living people with their mistaken ideals and preconceptions, their notions of the marriages they should have or the partners they should seek or the lives they should lead, and, even though these social relationships seem very utilitarian (you don't want to marry or be too close with people who won't benefit you socially), there's still something about these mentalities that's compelling. i'd say a lot of it is that none of it is somehow obsolete; we can relate to these characters, if not directly then at least relationally; and these "struggling, erring humans" of the nineteenth century still populate our present world. we like to think we're so advanced because of technology, but the truth is that we're still human, still prone to the same sorts of pride and arrogance and ambition and prejudice.

book three, "waiting for death," of middlemarch went faster than books one and two. now that i'm fully familiar with these characters, i feel more invested in their lives and more curious about the outcome of these life decisions they're making, and i'm loving how astute and witty eliot is. she is, in many ways, making judgments of societal expectations and behavior, but she does it with such generosity of spirit and with such ease and absence of preaching or moralizing, with a naturalness that befits the naturalness of her world. i'm loving it so far and looking forward to diving into book four!

and we shall close this post with the last paragraph from chapter 3 of my life:

a book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book. now when i read the novel in the light of eliot's life, and in the light of my own, i see her experience of unexpected family woven deep into the fabric of the novel -- not as part of the book's obvious pattern, but as part of its tensile strength. middlemarch seems charged with the question of being a stepmother: of how one might do well by one's stepchildren, or unwittingly fail them, and of all that might be gained from opening one's heart wider. (mead, 110)

hello monday! (150504) aka middlemarch, part one

May 5, 2015

so i've finally actually embarked upon reading george eliot's middlemarch (penguin classics, clothbound edition, 2011) and rebecca mead's my life in middlemarch (crown, 2014), so today's hello monday post shall be about books one and two of middlemarch, "miss brooke" and "old and young." for this week, there'll be a post everyday, and my stupid ambition is to finish these books by saturday because i'm leaving town at a ridiculous hour on sunday morning, and i am not hauling this brick of a book across the country. i am nothing if not full of stupid ambitions.

maybe i ought to preface this by saying that this isn't a scholarly endeavor, just a personal reading endeavor. this is my first time reading george eliot, and i'm ignorant about a lot of the history or social context of middlemarch, and a lot of these thoughts are first impressions. THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. at the same time, though, if you're looking for summaries/context ... carrying this novel around is also a great shoulder workout?

how did i think i could read my life in middlemarch without having first read middlemarch? i'm not sure what made me try to read my life first because it makes much more sense having read middlemarch (obviously) -- and, even better, as i'd hoped, it adds to the experience of middlemarch. mead is an excellent writer, and she provides wonderful biographical details from eliot's life and weaves it into accounts of her own life and her experience with middlemarch. my life is meant to explore why this specific book resounded so much with mead, and, generally, on a broader scale, it taps into why specific books mean so much to us. for me, personally, it makes me think of ishiguro's never let me go (faber & faber, 2005) or nicole krauss' man walks into a room (doubleday, 2002) because those are two books that have stuck with me over the years, that i constantly go back to -- or, if we're going further back, there's charlotte brontë's jane eyre, the first book i loved, that i've returned to over and over again throughout my life.

and i keep coming back to this quote from my life, in the prelude, which i'm sure i quoted here before:

reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. but a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. there are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. there are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.
this kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and part of our own endurance. it might lead us back to the library in midlife, looking for something that eluded us before. (mead, 16)

maybe one day i'll do a post on the books that have grafted themselves to me and grown with me. that might be a good exercise. what are some books that have grafted onto you?

if you ask me what i think of middlemarch thus far, i'd say that i think it's funny. i'm laughing a lot, writing my fair share of "lol"s (yes, "lol"s) in the margins, while also side-eyeing a lot of the gender crap that tends to come out of the mouths or minds of the [male] characters. i'm amused by the way dorothea's in love with this idea of a man, of a marriage, even though i'm sure it won't end well for her, but also by mr. causabon's ideas of a wife and of a marriage, too -- in some ways, the two are perfect for each other. similarly, i'm also amused by rosemary's ideas of love and lydgate's ideas of ... himself? ... and am curious to see how that pans out (because they seem to be headed towards marriage) -- and also how will is going to shake things up between dorothea and mr. causabon.

(is it telling that i can't remember what mr. causabon's first name is? or lydgate's, for that matter ...)

i find it all amusing because eliot's poking her finger at the marriage plot, airing out the absurdities of gender roles and characterizations while being sort of like, screw the romance; what happens after the "i do"s? she gives us enough of the lead-up to dorothea and causabon's engagement that we know the thoughts and calculations and events that lead to this ill-suited marriage and do the work of foreshadowing future unpleasantness.

also, in general, i think eliot does a great job in introducing her characters. she does so in batches, i want to say, so that we get time to familiarize ourselves with dorothea, celia, mr. causabon, sir james chettam before she introduces rosemary, mary garth, lydgate, fred, etcetera. it's a pretty big cast of characters, but i don't feel totally lost but rather like i have a grasp for who they all are, not only as individual characters but also as characters in relation to each other. not a small feat, that, i dare say.

altogether, middlemarch is turning out to be different from what i expected. it's witty and clever, and i appreciate eliot poking fun at these faulty ideas of marriage. marriage here seems very utilitarian, decided upon usefulness or social gain or whatnot, but i can't say i'm without sympathies either -- i can see where dorothea particularly is coming from, and, while i find myself rolling my eyes at her often, i wish she'd had a stronger hand in her life to advise her, to show her that these ideas of hers are simply ideas, that marriage isn't about finding an older man who can instruct her and to whom she can be of some sort of use, that affection isn't wrong or unnecessary, that she shouldn't be worrying about being "good enough" for mr. causabon. i hope she doesn't get too hurt.

okay i confess that i'm still reading the two chapters in my life corresponding to books one and two (it's already technically tuesday, so this post is overdue, but i will finish once i'm done writing this), but, in chapter 1, mead talks about letters eliot wrote when she was young (in her teens), and "enthusiastically evangelical, and priggishly judgmental" (mead, 26). a professor at yale describes them as lacking in charm, but mead writes:

lacking in charm they may be, but they were not written to charm [...]. they were written out of passion and exuberance and boredom and ostentation, and her desire to discover what she was thinking by putting it on the page -- which is to say they are letters written by a young woman who is trying to work out who she is, and where she is going. (mead, 27)

mead then shares about the similar letters she wrote during her own teenage years, letters filled with the same kind of embarrassing earnestness and obliviousness, which in turn reminds me of the letters i wrote as a teenager about the boyband (h.o.t) i was into, the TV (the x-files) i loved, the gossip circulating in our youth group, my woes about school, my high-handed ambitions, the books i read and proclaimed to have understood. i had a lot of that judgmental, evangelical religion going on in my own life when i was a teenager, and maybe that's another reason i find myself sympathetic to dorothea, wanting to tell her that it's okay, she'll grow into herself, she doesn't need to marry mr. causabon, though, unfortunately, she does.

all in all, i'm glad i finally sat myself down and made myself read this. it hasn't been the easiest reading because i sometimes have to make myself focus, but, at the same time, i am enjoying it. tomorrow, we delve into book three, which is called "waiting for death." doesn't that sound ominous???