Middlemarch fights: things of beauty, tools of advocacy

George Eliot has many strengths, but a surprising one is her facility with confrontations.  People facing down one another verbally is difficult to depict for many reasons: confrontations are tough to observe (or participate in) because so many people tend to avoid them; and then when confrontations do occur, they're often emotional, nonsensical and frustrating.  Verbal confrontations are so troublesome that authors may even feel uncomfortable writing them: Jonathan Franzen, for example, disperses his characters in The Corrections just before they can all meet (and fight) at Christmas.  (Physical confrontations are much easier to portray on paper: they're less ambiguous, require less - or no - dialogue, and tend to end with a winner.)

But George Eliot is a master of the verbal showdown.  Time and again, her characters face off and, with devastating directness, collide verbally with profound consequences and stunning language:

•  Mary Garth stands up to Peter Featherstone, when the old bully - even as he lays dying - wants to use her for his manipulative ends ("I will not let the close of your life soil the beginning of mine" p. 316);
• Tertius and Rosamond Lydgate attack each other over his debt and her deceptiveness;
• Camden Farebrother demands that Mary Garth reveal her affection for Fred Vincy;
• Nicholas Bulstrode coldly denies Tertius Lydgate a loan with the words: "My advice to you, Mr. Lydgate, would be, that instead of involving yourself in further obligations, and continuing a doubtful struggle, you should simply become a bankrupt." p. 684;
• Middlemarch's municipal politicians publicly humiliate Nicholas Bulstrode by insisting that he make an accounting of his past deeds or resign from his leadership roles;
• Dorothea Brooke's and Rosamond Lydgate's startling heart-to-heart opens the way for Dorothea's reconciliation with Will Ladislaw.

The list could go on and on and on.  The engine of Eliot's plot are these gorgeously-crafted confrontations, in which her characters speak, not like people, but in that much-harder lingua literatura: dialogue that reads believably on the page because - without realizing that we're flattering ourselves - we think we speak like that.

Eliot's astonishing skill with confrontations is all the more unexpected because the British are stereotypically not confrontational: the general image is that they avoid ruffling the surface in order better to maintain the stiff upper lip. 

But Eliot plainly thinks well of confrontations.  Dorothea's first mistake with Edward Casaubon, for example, is not confronting his claims of intellectual superiority.  Celia's blunt exposure of her sister's flaws is a sign of love ("by opening a little window for the daylight of [Celia's] understanding to enter among the strange colored lamps by which [Dorothea] habitually saw" p. 820).  Fred Vincy is likable because he squarely faces his failures with the Garths.

In this respect, Eliot is modern.  Transparency, honesty, forthrightness and directness - whatever the consequences in terms of discomfort, loss of face, humiliation, or instability - are modern values.  That Middlemarch - not a modern place - is nonetheless a hotbed of confrontation is an instance of literary argument: Eliot endeavors to persuade her readers to accept modern values by illustrating their basis in established (even timeless) behaviors; rather than a descriptive "study of provincial life," Middlemarch is a normative vision of the transition from pre-modern to modern. 

In so doing, Eliot fulfills an obligation identified by Caleb Garth, Eliot's salt-of-the-earth pro-modernity atavist: "The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them forward."  (p. 563.)  By providing so many elegant and vital examples of human confrontation, Eliot shows us latter generations how to live with the courage of the convictions she urged us to adopt.

(Photo courtesy of BBC)