Title: Middlemarch
Author: George Eliot

by Michele Filgate

Sometimes it's necessary to treat a novel the same way a candle is used. You light it up for illumination and warmth and let the wax pour down and the candle dwindle away. All of this is a slow, sacred process. Over the entire month of August I decided to balance my contemporary novels expertise with a classic nineteenth century English novel, George Eliot's Middlemarch. Sitting in coffee shops surrounded by chatter, lying under the skylight on my bed in my room, and losing myself in several pages during quiet moments at work, I found myself glued to the 800 pages, the words like liquid wax slowly coating the pages until they all remained eternal but melted around me.

Eliot took paragraphs to describe a single thought, a slow process that could easily be laborious if not for her brilliantly crafted sentences. In Middlemarch she creates a small town and characters that all have implications on each other after the Reform Bill in England in the 1830's. The female author, writing under a pseudonym, centered the provincial tale on the life of Dorothea, a woman who finds herself in chains when she marries Causabon, a scholarly intellectual much older than herself. She submits to him but slowly wanes away as she realizes that marriage isn't the answer to happiness. Enter Will Ladislaw, the dashing cousin of Causabon, one who is enamored of Dorothea at first glance. The love triangle quickly forms.

Middlemarch is a complicated novel that can be analyzed on so many levels, but read for sheer pleasure as well. I found myself re-reading passages many times to wrap myself around Eliot's words and more importantly her ideas. The characters in the book like to think and like to beat everything to the ground to come up with some answers. Destiny and ill-fate come into play as the town banker is exposed to have a shady past that affects other people in the town. Mistaken fortunes and the trials of marriage and love are not components of an original plot, but Eliot's writing is well worth the predictability:

Prejudices about rank and status were easy enough to defy in the form of a tyrannical letter from Mr. Casaubon; but prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle-- solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.

Her reflections and philosophical speculations on being a human and the nature of society lead me to a more satisfying experience than I expected at first from the opening pages. After all, once a candle burns for a while it is able to take shape and settle into the holder easier. Eliot's Middlemarch is a candle that stays melted onto the holder, remnants of it stuck forever. The reading experience is well worth the endurance it takes to truly appreciate it.