The
teetering, Tower of Pisa of books on my night table has a new addition. And it’s landed right on top:
Rebecca
Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch. It has launched (with a
terrific review in the New York Times) at the very same time as my
first-ever-Middlemarch-reread-with-the-daughter, and how amazing is that?
Every
decade or so I pull out my old college copy of Middlemarch and hunker
down with Dorothea and Dr. Lydgate and the rest of the crew just to check in
and see what’s changed. Because it
does. Not on the page: in my heart. My head. My
imagination. It’s a fairly miraculous
thing about this book, the way various characters present themselves depending
on one’s age and stage.
What’s
been really fun this month is to take the Middlemarch journey with my
20-year old daughter. She’s in
that stage of life and education where you read with a pencil, annotating
madly, every sentence potential fodder for a paper. It took me years to recover from that stage, and I’m happy
to report that today I not only read without underlining, but if I get bored I skim. Yup. I even skip whole paragraphs.
Not
only do I read for fun, but I rent the movie afterwards. That was the reward we gave ourselves
this month, after wading through all that authorial voice: we watched the BBC Middlemarch
with Juliet Aubrey (a perfect Dorothea!) and Rufus Sewell (who knew Will
Ladislaw was hot?)
Here
were this decade’s surprises:
1. Unlike her mother, who, at
20, wholly identified with the idealistic, yearning Dorothea, my daughter found
Dorothea to be completely naïve and a bit too superior for her own good.
Example: her not-so-subtle put-downs of sister Celia. (We both agreed it really wasn’t all that unreasonable
to want to wear their mother’s jewels.) Instead, the Daughter took the
emotional leap straight to the honest, practical Mary Garth. I did note, however, that as we watched
the BBC miniseries, the Daughter was very pleased that the character of Fred
Vincy was cute. It wouldn’t have
worked at all to marry Mary off to some
pug … or worse, the boring Farebrother.
2. Will Ladislaw and Fred Vincy are
… my son and his friends. Young
men full of energy and ideas and absolutely no clear direction and no
experience. Destined to make
mistakes and learn from them.
Hopefully, these will be mistakes from which they will recover. Thirty years ago, I evaluated them as
potential partners for my heroines:
now I feel like their mother.
3. Rosamund, the Blonde. One could argue that the whole of Middlemarch
is George Eliot’s attempt to overcome some post-traumatic-stress from an
encounter with a blonde. Why else
the hate for poor Rosamund? Why
else make all the admirable female characters brunettes? Seriously: make a chart comparing hair
color to level-of-villainy.
I
have rarely strayed from my initial reading of Rosamund, and always delighted
in despising her … but the Daughter had some fresh insights. She believes Eliot saves her freshest
powder for Lydgate (even Bulstrode gets off lighter) because she marries him to Rosamund. What greater hell? Thanks to Rosamund he has to abandon
his dreams, take a job he despises in Bath, dies young and … get this … she
goes off with their four kids and remarries a wealthy older gent.
Ultimately,
in Middlemarch, being blonde is not half as bad as being self-important
and sanctimonious. Poor Lydgate.
According
to all the reviews, Rebecca Mead does an excellent job in her “bibliomemoir” (a
genre I was completely unaware of until now!) of tracing her own ages and
stages with the characters of Middlemarch. I can’t wait to dig in.
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