George Eliot’s Subversive Vision of Marriage
“Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” George Eliot wrote those sentences in her 1872 masterpiece, Middlemarch, an examination of marriage unmatched by any other. She scrutinized the relationship—its intimate secrets and its public contours—with rare imaginative and moral intensity in her other fiction too. But that fearsome declaration, uttered by her protagonist Dorothea Brooke, stands out. It was meant to disorient a reader, and still does.
It definitely sounds un-Victorian, framing marriage as the antithesis of a demurely conventional arrangement. Does it sound contemporary? The shudder at suffocation might seem familiar—I need some space. That “awful,” though, isn’t just a way of saying dreadful ; it surely also means awe-inspiring, which delivers a jolt. Americans may marvel at the romantic spectacle of lavish weddings and wonder at the endurance of an institution that has weathered so many rounds of criticism, calls for redefinition, and diagnoses of crisis. But we appear to be more wary than awed. A quarter of 40-year-olds in the United States (where the surgeon general recently issued an advisory on “our epidemic of loneliness and isolation”) have never been married—a new milestone. Who knows whether they’ll change their mind. To those holdouts—as well as the rest of us—Eliot’s sentences say: Don’t take marriage at face value or assume you understand it.
Eliot’s own marital trajectory was anomalous, and not just by . Marian Evans, as she was known when she arrived in London from the Midlands in 1851 to help edit the liberal, had long despaired that “the bliss of reciprocated affection” was out of reach for the homely, brooding misfit she felt she was. In 1854, soon to turn 35, she eloped to live with a married man, and became a social pariah. Evans called him her “beloved husband,” and George Henry Lewes—editor, biographer, philosopher, critic, scientific writer—called her the “best of Wives,” though he never divorced the legal wife with whom he had three children. Evans credited their “blessed union,” and “the happiness which his love has conferred on my life,” with allowing her to discover “my true vocation, after which my nature had always been feeling and striving uneasily without finding it.” George Eliot was born.
