The Incredible Shrinking Sentence

SOME FORM of the word “shrink” appears in George Eliot’s Middlemarch sixty times. Whether used to describe a physical action, a psychological state, or a spiritual condition, the word establishes the book’s moral tenor. Much of this novel contemplates how characters’ decisions either amplify or diminish their moral constitutions: Eliot’s narrator astutely observes that “character too is a process and an unfolding.” Tertius Lydgate, for example, is a character “still in the making...and there were both virtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding.” Lydgate’s shrinking has to do with courage, as he tries to do the right thing, but often “shrinks from”— or turns away from—hard conversations.

Nicholas Bulstrode, a character who can’t seem to do the right thing, demonstrates a shocking “process and an unfolding” of moral character—his faults far outweigh his virtues; his shrinking is the spiritual kind. As Bulstrode’s shady past emerges, he begins to contemplate his wrongdoing: “He remembered his first moments