Serious Reading: Middlemarch

I am going to start another series called "Serious Reading." These will include thoughts on reading, especially in the online world. I know that the Internet has diminished my reading because I do so much of it on screens rather than on the much-preferred (for understanding and memory) paper medium. I need to get back to more "book" reading v. iPad or Kindle or computer reading. I know better. 

The real point of Serious Reading will be to read serious and difficult books, and I really want to read Middlemarch. It is a daunting book for the modern reader, but it offers treasures. I have only really read the Prelude so far, which I have posted below. 

Middlemarch is basically about a young woman, Dorothea Brooks, who has high ideals and is willing to, at least early in life, forgo the love of a younger man for a husband to marry a man who strikes readers today as pretentious, sluggish, boring, and not very passionate for a young woman, to put it mildly. He turns out to be a deep disappointment in many ways, and ultimately cruel. Overall, the book is about being a woman, I think, or being a woman in that period of time (not entirely different from today), so Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) starts the book with this prelude about a woman of historical distinction, Teresa of Avila, a Spanish saint (St. Teresa). 

_________

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious 

mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt,

at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with
some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one
morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek
martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged
Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human
hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met
them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great
resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s
passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed
romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to
her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within,
soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would
never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the
rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the
reform of a religious order.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not
the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for
themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of
far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of
a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of
opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and
sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance
they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but
after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and
formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent
social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge
for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague
ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was
disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient
indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures
of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as
the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might
be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness
remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one
would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite
love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared
uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the
living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and
there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving
heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are
dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some
long-recognizable deed."

_____

Not exactly a breeze to get through, but to paraphrase it is to take away is meaning, like poetry. In short, there have been many Teresas born, but most "tremble off" or "never find the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind." Teresa happened to live in the right time for her special gifts and therefore founded a religious order and is remembered in history and beatified. Most women are not, despite their characters. This tells us that the novel is about such a woman. Eliot ends the book with these words: 

_________

"Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were
not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus
broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on
the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was
incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you
and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived
faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

__________

We depend on these women (and men, but Eliot is concerned with women here) who faithfully lived a hidden life and spread influence outside of the history books. 

One might say, well, you've got the basic idea, so why spend hours and days slogging through a book from the Victorian age, when also you could watch a BBC version? Because serious reading is not about the plot, or the Cliff's Notes, or the Wikipedia summary. It is about much more, but what?  

Let's explore. But I promise, I'm reading in a paper book so I can keep lots of tactile notes.