Middlemarch, part 1

I have been spending these past several days of my summer break reading one of my favorite novels, Middlemarch by George Eliot. Every fifty pages or so (I'm in the 700s) I think, I should go write a blog post about this...but then I just keep reading. So now the blog posts I felt were so necessary have built up in my mind into a towering impossibility. Forgive me, then for resorting to bullet points:

• Imagine my wonder last night when I got to a chapter I had completely forgotten about. That's all I can say, because there will be no spoilers in this post. But it got me thinking (as I was reading) about the fickle nature of memory, and the importance of re-reading those creative works that have changed us, do change us, will change us.

• Earlier in the novel, I had this realization: Dorothea Brooke, Mary Garth, and Rosamond Vincy are all about the same age. (In fact, Dorothea is the youngest, just 19 when the novel begins, which makes it all the more interesting that she seems the oldest by far of these three women.) The novel is really about these three women: their personalities, their choices and lack of choices, their actions and the ripple-in-a-lake effects of those actions, and mostly it is about their minds and the shaping of those minds. In a way—hidden just below the surface of a compelling fictional story—George Eliot is illustrating Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Eliot details how each of these young women were educated, and how their intellect is regarded by the men in their lives. The men—all of whom have had access to the best education of their times (the novel is set from 1830-1833) often come up lacking, though a few recognize the tragedy of the educational deficits with which these women have had to contend. The men also recognize among themselves that education does not necessarily make one intelligent. The men do not consciously recognize that they recognize these things. No one in this novel is really "ahead of" his/her time. They are trapped, and some make the best of what life has to offer. Some do not.

• And always, George Eliot is showing us two opposing truths: Even our most trivial actions can have far-reaching consequences, and yet we must not live life fretting over trivialities. Yikes.

More after the next 700 pages. (Just kidding; only a couple hundred to go...)