Three Grown-up Problems in Middlemarch: Provincial Conversations as Metonymies for National Ones
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Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. In this paper, I contest the narrow individualistic understanding of this remark: it does not refer merely to the fact that Middlemarch is a novel of midlife crises or that the focal interpersonal relationship culminates in a second marriage. I argue that all of its subplots need to be construed metonymically, as parts of a much larger whole. For example, Dorothea’s cottage plans need to be construed as part and parcel of the national debate instigated by the housing crisis of the poor. Similarly, Casaubon’s midlife crisis is metonymically related to the still incomplete disestablishment of the Church of England and Lydgate’s to the transition of modern medicine from an empirical practice to an explanatory science. However, I also argue that adding this social dimension does not in itself qualify Middlemarch as a “Condition of England” novel as Felicia Bonaparte has suggested; the structure of feeling is quite different from the tension between sympathy for the poor and fear of their rage noted by Raymond Williams in the novels of the Hungry Forties. Moreover, to read the novel as a “Condition of England” novel is to read it as a metaphor, rather than the metonym that was intended: Middlemarch is intended to show us an organic part of a heterogeneous nation, and not a simple symbol for that nation as a whole.
Abstract
Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. In this paper, I contest the narrow individualistic understanding of this remark: it does not refer merely to the fact that Middlemarch is a novel of midlife crises or that the focal interpersonal relationship culminates in a second marriage. I argue that all of its subplots need to be construed metonymically, as parts of a much larger whole. For example, Dorothea’s cottage plans need to be construed as part and parcel of the national debate instigated by the housing crisis of the poor. Similarly, Casaubon’s midlife crisis is metonymically related to the still incomplete disestablishment of the Church of England and Lydgate’s to the transition of modern medicine from an empirical practice to an explanatory science. However, I also argue that adding this social dimension does not in itself qualify Middlemarch as a “Condition of England” novel as Felicia Bonaparte has suggested; the structure of feeling is quite different from the tension between sympathy for the poor and fear of their rage noted by Raymond Williams in the novels of the Hungry Forties. Moreover, to read the novel as a “Condition of England” novel is to read it as a metaphor, rather than the metonym that was intended: Middlemarch is intended to show us an organic part of a heterogeneous nation, and not a simple symbol for that nation as a whole.
참고문헌 (20)
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