mitchell rosamond plots-libre

The Rosamond Plots:Alterity and the Unknownin Jane Eyre andMiddlemarch

R E B ECCA N . M I T CHE L L

∞ N earnest man, devoted to a singularcause, falls in lovewithawomannamed

Rosamond. She is exceptionally lovely—an “angel”1—but she isinvested in the superficial perquisites of that loveliness, and isunwilling or unable to share in his ambitions. Should he marryher? Two major novels of the nineteenth century feature a man inthis very predicament: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre () andGeorge Eliot’s Middlemarch (–). In Brontë’s novel, St. JohnRivers gives up Rosamond Oliver; in Eliot’s novel, Tertius Lydgatemarries Rosamond Vincy. The divergent responses to similar situa-tions are tellingof the foundational differences that critics have con-ventionally identified in the novels: Brontë privileges knowledge of

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1 See Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Jane Jack and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Claren-don Press, ), p. : “What did St. John Rivers think of this earthly angel?” And seeGeorge Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. :“In fact, most men in Middlemarch, except her brothers, held that Miss Vincy was thebest girl in the world, and some called her an angel.” Further references are to theseeditions and appear in the text.

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the self, and Eliot privileges knowledge of the other. Know yourselffully, as St. John Rivers does, and avoid an unhappy marriage whilesparing an innocent woman from a wholly preventable fate. Fail toknow the other, as Tertius Lydgate does, and condemn yourself to amiserable future in which both you and your partner are unfulfilledand resentful.

Such easy conclusions suggest that there is little in theRosamond plots that cannot be accounted for by the most basicreadings of Brontë’s and Eliot’s oeuvres, a conclusion substanti-ated by the dearth of critical attention paid to them. So overlookedare the Rosamond plots that the very names of the characters havebeen misspelled in the critical literature.2 Rosamond Oliver’s rolein Jane Eyre is, of course, considerably smaller than RosamondVincy’s inMiddlemarch. Even so, Oliver’s near-total absence in anal-yses of the novel is striking, and, when she is mentioned, sheis often reduced to a superficial foil to Jane’s unconventionalbeauty. That is not to discount the role of beauty in both works.In Middlemarch as well, Rosamond Vincy’s preternatural lovelinesscontrasts with heroine Dorothea Brooke’s austere beauty, andBrontë’s and Eliot’s treatments of feminine attractiveness is oneintersection commonly addressed by critics. Wendy Steiner arguesthat “the unlinking of beauty from virtue was an important goal inthe creation of aesthetic and human sympathy” for both Brontëand Eliot.3 Elizabeth Hardwick concurs that “both CharlotteBrontë and George Eliot are hard on the whims of beautifulwomen,” and she opines further that “it seems such a pity onlypretty girls are able to win that fine, complicated hero the heroinesand the authors would like for themselves.”4 More broadly speak-ing, critics have done much work comparing the writings of Eliot

2 For example, Zadie Smith, in a commentary on Middlemarch, uses “Rosamund”throughout (see Smith, “Book of Revelations,” The Guardian [ May ]). In Disorient-

ing Fiction: The Authoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton: Prince-ton Univ. Press, ), James Buzard refers to Miss Oliver as “Rosamund,” even thoughthe Penguin edition he cites uses “Rosamond.” Perhaps not a major gaffe in any instance,but it is one that evinces the ease of overlooking the characters’ particularity.

3 Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (New York: FreePress, ), p. .

4 Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (New York: Random House,), p. .

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and Brontë,5 and a great deal of that work has offered compellinginsights regarding the historical, social, political, and aesthetic dif-ferences that underscore their novels. Yet no critic has consideredthe Rosamond plots of Jane Eyre and Middlemarch together.

In this essay I suggest that the Rosamond plots do far morethan provide embodiments of beauty to serve as counterpointsto the novels’ plainer heroines, and that they also do more thandemonstrate a shift from Brontë’s self-awareness to Eliot’s other-awareness. I argue that Middlemarch stages a radical revision ofthe version of subjectivity vaunted in Jane Eyre. Via its invocationof Jane Eyre’s Rosamond plot, Middlemarch challenges the verynature of self-knowledge, questions the status of identification inintersubjective relationships, and insists upon the unknowabilityof the other. In Eliot’s retelling, the self-awareness promoted inJane Eyre is not only insufficient, but also verges on self-absorptionand even solipsism. One way in which Eliot enacts this revision isby shifting the focus of positive affective relationships away frommodels of identification. Rather than basing empathic extensionon the recognition of similarities, Eliot’s novels describe charac-ters who must first apperceive the difference between themselvesand others. Having realized the self, onemust go further to realizethe complexity, difficulty, even the potential impossibility of know-ing the other in order to open up a space for a richer engagementwith those whose desires and drives are different from one’s own.In light of Eliot’s construction, it becomes increasingly clear thatin Jane Eyre the cultivation of self-definition is predicated on one’snotions of self in relation to others. St. John’s behavior towardRosamondOliver serves as an example for Jane; from his exampleof self-certainty even in the light of social pressure and conflictingdesire, she learns to identify her own desire and to resist pressure.We see that St. John’s rejection of Miss Oliver is a model for Jane’srejection of St. John. Jane’s time in Morton becomes not a meredistraction from her life with Rochester, but rather a necessary

5 See for example Wilbur L. Cross, The Development of the English Novel (New York:Macmillan and Co., ); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the

Attic: The Woman and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ.Press, ); and Christopher Lane, Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian

England (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, ).

J A N E E Y R E A N D M I D D L E M A R C H 309

step toward that life. By functioning as obstacles on the ostensiblepath to knowledge, the two Rosamonds perform essential roles inboth works: in Jane Eyre the obstacle posed by Miss Oliver’s pres-ence is overcome with relative ease, while in Middlemarch MissVincy’s alterity proves to be more formidable.

While none of Eliot’s notes forMiddlemarch indicate that shewas actively considering Jane Eyre, her familiarity with and interestin the novel and Charlotte Brontë’s life and works is well docu-mented. Jane Eyre became a sort of touchstone for Eliot’s own writ-ing; upon the publication of Adam Bede in , Eliot turned toBrontë’s novel to compare its sales figures to those of her ownwork.6 If Eliot chafed against anything in Jane Eyre, it seemed tobe the rigidity of Jane’s version of duty, especially to the extent thatJane’s boundedness to social or religious propriety oppressed herown personality. Writing shortly after Eliot’s death, Abba GooldWoolson describes Eliot’s aversion to Brontë’s vision of “self-respect,” which “scorns a relationship, however excusable in herown eyes, which would make her personal honor seem other thanstainless in the eyes of the world.”7 Described in this way, Eliotseems to object to Jane’s concern about others’ regard for her.As she noted in a letter to Charles Bray, Eliot further objectsthat Jane’s sort of “self-sacrifice” is directed toward “a diabolicallaw which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcass.”8

Woolson links Eliot’s response to Jane Eyre to Eliot’s own romanticsituation. Eliot, unlike Jane Eyre, chose life with theman she lovedover supplication to the marital laws that kept G. H. Lewes, herlover, bound to his legal wife. This reading confines Eliot to sup-porting, even forwarding, Brontë’s emphasis on self-knowledgeby suggesting that Eliot believed that Jane’s problem was herhyper-concern about the views of others or of the abstract soci-ety-at-large. This preoccupation with externally approved righ-teousness, such readings argue, could be corrected with greaterpersonal fortitude or a stronger sense of self.

6 See J. W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, vols. (NewYork: Harper and Brothers, ), I, .

7 Woolson, George Eliot and Her Heroines: A Study (New York: Harper and Brothers,), pp. –.

8 George Eliot, letter to Charles Bray, June , quoted in Cross, George Eliot’s Life,I, .


Other critics have cast the comparison in light of Eliot’s oeu-vre rather than her biography. Swinburne’s Note on Charlotte

Brontë flatly prefers Brontë’s fiction, which he labels the work ofgenius, to Eliot’s, which he labels merely the work of intellect;Eliot, in his view, is but a pale and inferior example of a womanwriter.9 Martin Spence, in a very brief piece comparing the pro-posal scenes in Jane Eyre andMiddlemarch, opens by claiming: “Lit-erary indebtedness is always interesting, and when it concerns twoof our greatest novelists, it cannot fail to be instructive.”10 Spen-ce’s essay nevertheless ends with an indictment of Eliot’s effortby noting the signs of “admiration and envy” in Eliot’s imitationof Brontë’s text: “The signs are always the same: dilution, senti-mentalisation or vulgarisation of the original, lack of unity anddrive so that the force of the original is wasted and dispersed,and . . . an obvious lack of rooting” (“C. Brontë’s Jane Eyre andG. Eliot’s Middlemarch,” pp. –).11

As I argue, there is another way of understanding the twonovels’ distinctions: Eliot’s focus in Middlemarch on the limits ofknowledge reveals the insufficiency of the self-knowledge andself-fulfillment advocated in Jane Eyre. In addition, by insisting thather characters remain in society after their marriages, Eliot fur-ther exposes the problem with the isolationist model of marriageoffered in Jane Eyre, a model necessary to sustain static definitionsof self. In comparison to Eliot’s in Middlemarch, Brontë’s visionitself seems adolescent, egocentric: the world conceived in Jane

Eyre is a world without society, where self-fulfillment is achievedbymoving away from, rather than into, a sphere shared with otherpeople. Jane, after all, chooses Rochester’s “retired and hidden”

9 Swinburne writes: “George Eliot, a woman of the first order of intellect, has onceand again shown how much further and more steadily and more hopelessly and moreirretrievably and more intolerably wrong it is possible for mere intellect to go than itever can be possible for mere genius. Having no taste for the dissection of dolls, I shallleave Daniel Deronda in his natural place above the ragshop door” (Algernon CharlesSwinburne, A Note on Charlotte Brontë [London: Chatto and Windus, ], pp. –).

10 Spence, “C. Brontë’s Jane Eyre and G. Eliot’s Middlemarch,” The Explicator, , no. (), .

11 Eliot was kinder toward those who invoked Brontë’s work. Writing about CharlesKingsley’sWestward Ho! (), she notes that the novel “reminds us a little of Jane Eyre,but we prefer a partially borrowed beauty to an original bathos” ([George Eliot], “BellesLettres,” Westminster Review, [], ).


( Jane Eyre, p. ) Ferndean, in “quite a desolate spot” (p. )with two elderly servants as their only company; St. John leavesEnglish society altogether in favor of India. In Middlemarch Doro-thea moves into society through steps that are not always easy(e.g., Sir James’s reluctance to accept her husband Ladislaw)and sometimes contentious (e.g., Middlemarch’s persistent com-munity view that Dorothea is not “a nice woman” [Middlemarch,p. ]). The novels’ very forms mirror this transition: from thefirst-person narration of Jane Eyre to the omniscience of Middle-

march’s narrative voice, and from Brontë’s quasi-autobiographicaltitle to Eliot’s title, named after the community in which her nov-el’s central characters live. These movements, from the subtle tothe pronounced, are all present in the Rosamond plots, which,so long ignored in the critical literature, show Eliot’s work not tobe a pale derivative of Brontë’s, or a meager extension of its pri-mary tenets, but instead an exploration of encounters with con-sciousness of the other in a way foreign to Jane Eyre’s characters.More specifically, Eliot’s revisions situate empathic response asbeing dependent upon the recognition of the radical alterity ofthe other.

Given the importance of self-knowledge inBrontë’s world, the fact that Rosamond Oliver functions as anobstacle both for St. John and for Jane’s self-realization makesher role far more important than her presence on the page mightsuggest. On the surface, Brontë’s depiction of St. John Rivers andRosamond Oliver’s relationship, mediated by Jane Eyre’s incisivereporting, details the collision of two egos. Rosamond is fully awareof her “perfect beauty” and “knew her power” over St. John ( JaneEyre, pp. , ), flirting to excite his desire even when heradvances are rebuffed. St. John easily exceeds Miss Oliver’s levelof self-awareness, as his self-assessment acknowledges both hisdesires and the rationale for his refusal to act upon those desires.Sopowerful is his devotion to his self-construction that it influencesthe way in which he views others in addition to himself. That is,St. John’s dedication to his missionary ideals might have led himto deem any beautiful (and thus distracting) woman an unsuitable


companion. But his consideration of Rosamond is remarkable forits frank acknowledgment of the potential pleasure of the match.In his exhortation to Jane on this point, St. John articulates a visionof a future that entertains not only the limitations of his andRosamond’s clashing sensibilities, but also his genuine delight inMiss Oliver’s charms. Though he loves her “so wildly—with allthe intensity . . . of a first passion,” he imagines her a partner“[un]suited” to him; though “acutely sensible to her charms,” he“is as deeply impressed with her defects” (pp. –). The state-ments refute those critics who characterize St. John as denying“his erotic attachment to Rosamond Oliver.”12 He does not com-pletely repress his desire for her, but rather subjects that desire toa brutal test against the other qualities that define his character—duty and piety foremost among them.

Rosamond presents temptations that serve as a temperingagent for St. John’s self-vision, which he calls upon repeatedly toguard against her charms and the fantasy life they inspire.13

St. John admits that she is a beauty, “well named the Rose of theWorld, indeed!” ( Jane Eyre, p. ),14 and her “perfect beauty”in fact ossifies his resolve, so much so that even Jane is skepticalabout his ability to know his real desires. Challenged by Jane,St. John insists that his attraction to Rosamond is “a mere feverof the flesh” and not “a convulsion of the soul,” and, as such, hescorns the feeling as a weakness, affirming that he is “as fixed asa rock, firm set in the depths of a restless sea” (p. ). To Janethis assertion seems only mock-heroic, and when St. John instructsher, “Know me to be what I am—a cold hard man,” her responseis to smile “incredulously” (p. ).

12 Melodie Monahan, “Heading Out Is Not Going Home: Jane Eyre,” Studies in English

Literature, –, (), –.13 See Barbara Hardy, Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination (London:

Athlone Press, ), pp. –. Hardy includes a discussion of St. John’s stance inlight of those fantasies.

14 The erudite Rivers is wrong—“Rosamond” is derived from the Teutonic name“Hrosmond,” meaning “horse protection” (see A. Smythe Palmer, Folk-Etymology: A Dic-

tionary of Verbal Corruptions or Words Perverted in Form or Meaning, by False Derivation or Mis-

taken Analogy [London: George Bell and Sons, ], p. ). St. John’s “Rose of theWorld” is a translation based on the French rose (rose) and monde (world), which seemsbetter suited to Rosamond’s portrayal in the novel.


The significance of Jane’s incredulity cannot be overstated: itis an indication of her own inchoate self-awareness. Jane doubtsand mocks St. John’s self-vision early in their acquaintance, butthe novel shows that Jane eventually comes to use his stubbornself-definition as a model for her own development. AlthoughJane ultimately rejects St. John’s marriage proposal, she adoptshis willingness to buck conventional expectations in favor of fol-lowing the ideals that define his existence. For St. John that meantabandoning a rich, beautiful woman who loves him in favor of amissionary life; for Jane it means abandoning most of her inheri-tance and a life of altruistic religious devotion in favor of lovinga now-obscure cripple. Before Jane realizes her internal resolve,the pressure to join St. John seems at times to overwhelm her abil-ity to articulate her own self in relation to him; when attempting todescribe St. John’s power in the pulpit, the usually pithy Jane can-not: “I wish I could describe that sermon,” she confesses, “but it ispast my power. I cannot even render faithfully the effect it pro-duced on me” ( Jane Eyre, p. ). Such imprecision in Jane’s nar-ration is a sign in Brontë’s universe of problems on the horizon.(For Eliot this anxiety is inverted, as too much self-assuredness moreoften signifies a problem.) In response to this sense of ineffability,Jane is forced to find language for herself; St. John’s pressuresteels Jane’s resolve, just as Rosamond’s presence strengthenedSt. John’s resolve.

The shift when Jane realizes “all at once” that St. John was nota suitable husband for Rosamond—or for Jane herself, or perhapsfor anyone—is the apogee of Jane Eyre’s Rosamond plot:

I began to feel he had spoken truth of himself when he said he washard and cold. The humanities and amenities of life had no attrac-tion for him—its peaceful enjoyments no charm. Literally, he livedonly to aspire—after what was good and great, certainly; but stillhe would never rest; nor approve of others resting round him. . . .I comprehended all at once that he would hardly make a good hus-band: that it would be a trying thing to be his wife. ( Jane Eyre, p. )

This is a moment of breakthrough, not only because Jane seesSt. John clearly, but also because that revelation arises from herrecognition that he knew himself clearly. Along with his sisters


Diana andMary, Jane had believed that St. John’s missionary aspi-rations could be overcome with affection, with persuasion, or withmoney. They were wrong. As long as Jane is skeptical of St. John’sself-vision, she cannot articulate herself in relation to him. Onceshe recognizes the accuracy of his self-vision, Jane can then applythat lesson to her own relationship with St. John: if she had beenwrong in her understanding of him, then surely he could bewrong in his understanding of her. His insistence that she “[turn]to profit the talents which God” had given her (p. )—that sheembrace duty to the exclusion of all other drives—solidifies hersense of self and casts into relief Jane’s real desires, desires thatconflict with St. John’s vision of a future with her. Rosamondwas essential for establishing St. John’s internal fortitude, forti-tude that Jane must then herself muster in order to rebuff hisadvances.

In this model, Jane moves into genuine comprehension onlywhen she confirms St. John’s self-assessment and acts as an affirm-ing, rather than a skeptical, audience. Feminist criticism has longframed Jane’s development in similar terms, as a quest for anappropriate or appreciative audience. Rosemarie Bodenheimerwrites that “Jane’s progress in the novel . . . has to do with findinga fit audience for whom she can give a proper shape to her ownstory,” where Jane’s role is “to take charge of so many kinds of sto-ries in a narrative that seems both to credit and to quarrel withthem all.”15 So Jane is a character who wants to write her ownstory, in her own way, and to have it believed by those she tells.So too does St. John, and in his relation to Rosamond we see anearly example of the very difficulty that Jane faced: St. Johnrepeatedly asserts not only his position in relation to Miss Oliver,but also his very character, only to have it disbelieved by his family.When Jane “comprehend[s] all at once,” stating in clear, declara-tive sentences her revised understanding of St. John, she also over-comes at least some of the challenges posed by Rosamond’spresence, challenges that propel Jane’s own narrative.

15 Bodenheimer, “Jane Eyre in Search of Her Story,” Papers on Language and Litera-

ture, (), , . Carla Kaplan pushes this point further, suggesting that under-lying Eyre’s plot is a reliance on dialogue or dialectic for self-construction (see Kaplan,“Girl Talk: Jane Eyre and the Romance of Women’s Narration” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, [], –).


Just as she did for St. John’s self-articulation, RosamondOliverfunctions as a counterpoint to Jane’s. Jane doubted St. John’sdeclarations about his desire, at least in part because of her identi-fication with Rosamond: as a woman unable to be with the manshe desires, Jane identified with Rosamond’s equally thwarteddesire. From that perspective, St. John’s behavior was the causeof Rosamond’s pain, and Jane worked to counter his behavior orattitudes. After St. John’s proposal, Jane ceases to be a thwartedlover—a role she sharedwithRosamond. Instead, she is inapositionto reject a partnership that might seem appealing to outsiders—arole that St. John himself had occupied in relation to Rosamond.Jane is then able to apprehend St. Johnwithout an overdeterminedsympathy for a woman longing to be loved. St. John becomes amodel of self-recognition for Jane; as she comes to realize the accu-racy of his self-description, she is able to feel more certain in herself-analysis. In other words, Jane emerges from the encounterwith Rivers with a stronger belief in the necessity to know oneselfrather than to bemore careful when reading others—a conclusionthat Eliot will complicate in Middlemarch. When Jane acts on herdesire for Rochester and returns to Thornfield Hall, she refusesto embrace a vision of herself that excludes passion, a choiceendorsed by the novel’s happy ending. Joyce Carol Oates describesJane’s choice between two men urging her in different directions:“if Rochester is all romantic passion, urging [Jane] to succumb toemotional excess, St. John Rivers is all Christian ambition, urgingher to attempt a spiritual asceticism of which she knows herselfincapable.”16 I would say that Jane comes to know herself as incapa-ble of St. John’s brand of asceticism, but I agree with Oates’sbroader point: Jane’s dilemma focuses less onwhichman shewantsand more on which version of herself is more accurate. Jane’sclarity on that point leads her to Rochester.

This ending seems to confirm the accuracy of Jane’s self-definition. It also confirms St. John’s: he would have made a mis-erable husband for Rosamond. St. John ends the novel a “resolute,indefatigable pioneer”; an unmarried missionary “firm, faithful,and devoted; full of energy, and zeal, and truth” ( Jane Eyre, p. ).

16 Oates, “Introduction,” in Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Bantam Books,, ), pp. xiii–xiv.


Though St. John’s reading of Rosamond as an unsuitable partnerwas accurate, his reading is based not on his deep understandingof her needs but rather on the strength of his ambition. MissOliver’s alterity was immaterial to his decision, and because thenovel does not grant the reader access to Rosamond’s thoughts,it remains silent on how she felt about the outcome of the relation-ship. Rosamond’s end, according to the novel, has nothing to dowith her own expectations or premonitions but instead confirmsSt. John’s hunch about her future. Despite all of Rosamond’schildlike petulance, she does, as he predicts, marry someone else.This final point elucidates Rosamond’s function in the novel. Sheexists as a necessary step along the road of St. John’s and Jane’sgrowth into self-awareness; each constructs an identity in responseto or as a reaction against Miss Oliver and what she stands for. As aconduit to the self-actualization of St. John and Jane, Rosamond’salterity has no place in the lives of those characters, just as it has noplace within the novel.

If the Rosamond/St. John relationship inJane Eyre demonstrates the value of self-knowledge in preventingincompatible relationships, then the tale of Rosamond Vincy’smarriage to Tertius Lydgate inMiddlemarch shows that an uncom-promising sense of self is not sufficient to navigate a world ruledby relationships with other individuals. Their marriage forms thelink between the novel’s epistemological claims and the inter-personal relationships it depicts, showing that the limitations ofknowledge that apply to literary or scientific pursuits apply equallyto engagements with individuals.

Lydgate, like St. John, begins his approach to RosamondVincy with the conviction that his ambition—he is a Doctor intenton reformingmedical practices in England—will overrule any fan-cies of the heart. Whereas St. John’s self-awareness allowed him toavoid a potentially disastrous marriage, Lydgate’s convictions can-not save him, and the stumbling logic that leads him to propose toRosamond arises precisely from the strength of his resolve. In El-iot’s depiction, self-certainty functions more as self-delusion, andthe stronger that certainty, the more impenetrable the delusion.


What is more, both men are unable to appreciate the full alterityof their Rosamonds, but St. John’s deficiencies in this area have lit-tle permanent effect on those around him, and Rosamond Oliverescapes relatively intact. InMiddlemarch the consequences of theiregotism extend beyond the lives of Rosamond and Lydgate, a dis-tinction crucial in understanding the differences between theworlds depicted in Eliot’s and Brontë’s novels. The tidiness of JaneEyre’s resolution—all parties happy, each in an isolated contented-ness that depends on no other person than her husband17—iscountered by Eliot’s web of connection that links each person toevery other. That web ensures that repercussions of interpersonalfailure reverberate beyond the individual. Knowing yourself doesnot ensure your own happiness, and not apprehending othersensures difficulties for all those connected to each other. Yet thesegreater demands also create room for greater growth, and thepromise of the Rosamond plot in Middlemarch is the potential—even in the least likely person—for a movement into an acknowl-edgment of alterity, and thus the possibility for expansion andchange. Even among Eliot’s oeuvre, which tends to frame self-awareness through encounters with others, the relationships inMiddlemarch emphasize more strongly the necessity of encounter-ing the other not in opposition to the self, and not even, as KayYoung argues, as “an application of the other onto and even intothe self, . . . as feeling the presence of the other residing within.”18

Before that application can occur, an individual must apprehendthe unknowability of the other. Eliot accomplishes the emphasis inbroad, formal strokes (as when her narrator famously interruptsto query of the reader, “why always Dorothea?” [Middlemarch,p. ]), as well as in characterization (as when Mary Garth, com-plaining to Rosamond about Fred Vincy’s approach to courtship,bemoans, “I am not magnanimous enough to like people whospeak to me without seeming to see me” [p. ]).

17 The narratives of Miss Temple, Jane, Diana, Mary, and Miss Oliver functionallyend with their marriages, as the unions function to fulfill the promise as well as thedesire of each woman.

18 Kay Young, “Middlemarch and the Problem of Other Minds Heard,” LIT: LiteratureInterpretation Theory, (), . See also Young, Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics

of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, ).


Curiously, because critics often focus on the empathy thatEliot’s novels provoke in readers, and because they so often figureempathy as a “feeling like,” they have for many years overlookedthe role that such alterity plays in Eliot’s novels.19 In fact, Eliot’sconstruction of the ethical imperative of empathy largely an-ticipates the twentieth-century phenomenology of EmmanuelLevinas, whose work on radical alterity gave a vocabulary to con-siderations of empathy independent of identification. More re-cently, scholars such as J. Hillis Miller and Thomas Albrechthave begun to consider Eliot’s work in light of her repeated insis-tence that before one can feel like another, one must recognizethat one is other.20 It is this tenet of Eliot’s writing that is apparentin Middlemarch: knowledge derives from the recognition of whatone does not know.

Rosamond and Tertius’s relationship and its miserable endshow the natural outcome of the failure to appreciate the other’sradical alterity; it also resonates because both characters (as seemsso often to be the case) assume with smug certainty that they dounderstand the other perfectly. That understanding is shown tobe limited by the shallowness of Lydgate’s interest—it is not Rosa-mond’s particularity that he finds attractive, but precisely her lackof particularity. Lydgate apprehends her not as a person, but asone of a type featuring “that distinctive womanhood which mustbe classed with flowers and music, that sort of beauty which byits very nature was virtuous, being moulded only for pure and del-icate joys” (Middlemarch, p. ). Such phrases echo Jane Eyre’scomments about Rosamond Oliver’s beauty—“Nature had surelyformed her in a martial mood; and, forgetting her usual stinted

19 There has been a resurgence of interest in empathy of late. Suzanne Keen, in herinsightful Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, ), thoroughly con-siders the reader’s affective response to fiction. Other useful examples include RachelAblow, The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford:Stanford Univ. Press, ); and Ellen Argyros, “Without Any Check of Proud Reserve”: Sym-

pathy and Its Limits in George Eliot’s Novels (New York: Peter Lang, ). My concernhere, however, is Eliot’s representation of relationships between characters, notbetween readers and the texts.

20 See especially J. Hillis Miller, Others (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, ); andThomas Albrecht, “Sympathy and Telepathy: The Problem of Ethics in George Eliot’sThe Lifted Veil,” ELH, (), –.


step-mother dole of gifts, had endowed this, her darling, with agrand-dame’s bounty” ( Jane Eyre, pp. –)—while transform-ing their focus from the specific incarnation to the abstract. Eliot’sdiction emphasizes critically Lydgate’s consideration of Rosa-mond in terms of generalities, and not exactitude—a “creaturelike” Rosamond would make a good wife; her intelligence was“just the kind” that Lydgate found desirable, and hers was a “sortof beauty” that ensured virtue (Middlemarch, p. ). Rosamondherself was not innocent of such characterizing. Arriving in Mid-dlemarch as a stranger, Lydgate appeared particularly interestingto her because she had already decided that she “shall not marryany Middlemarch young man” (p. ). InMiddlemarch these men-tal conceptions of the other foreshadow the couple’s future fail-ures at shared life. In Jane Eyre Rochester’s similar reductionsof Jane to placeholder do not prove to be equally problematic(e.g., Rochester, when comparing Jane to Bertha Mason, explainshis desire by saying, “I wanted her just as a change after that fierceragout” [Jane Eyre, p. ]), as they are indicative only of hisdesire, a desire that Jane shares.

Unlike the world of Jane Eyre, where self-certainty can buttressa person against the judgments of others (for example, St. Johnand Jane herself), in the town of Middlemarch no amount of per-sonal fortitude can completely prevent the outside world fromaffecting one’s actions or thoughts. A case in point: even thoughLydgate believes that he is in control of his life and marriage, theconflicting beliefs of his beloved continually impede his actions.The omniscient narration contrasts Lydgate’s and Rosamond’sthoughts in order to demonstrate the disconnect. He believedthat “the preposterousness of the notion that he could at onceset up a satisfactory establishment as amarriedmanwas a sufficientguarantee against [the] danger” of proposing to Rosamond (Mid-

dlemarch, p. )—that is, sufficient enough for Lydgate. Rosa-mond, only a few lines later, is occupied with thoughts of “ahandsome house in Lowick Gate which she hoped would by-and-by be vacant,” and by the paragraph’s end she is “imagin[ing]the drawing-room in her favourite house with various styles offurniture” (p. ).

The regular collisions of these twominds reach their apotheo-sis in the scene of Lydgate’s proposal. Still insisting that Rosamond


“took everything as lightly as he intended it” (Middlemarch, p.),21

Lydgate visits the Vincy household ostensibly to test his resolveto avoid the temptations there, “to have a few playful words withRosamond about his resistance to dissipation, and his firm resolveto take long fasts even from sweet sounds” (p. ). Despite hisresolve, his dedication to his plans is lost when Rosamond becomesteary-eyed in his presence. It is not exactly her pain or desire thatignites Lydgate, but rather his “sudden belief that this sweet youngcreaturedependedonhimforher joy” (p.).Sopassionovertookthe “warm-hearted and rash” Lydgate (p. ), a passion that con-structs Rosamond’s desire in terms of himself. Given the myopicvision that permeated both sides of the Lydgate/Vincy courtship, itis not surprising that theirmarriage exacerbates, rather than breaksdown, these barriers to shared intimacy.

Eliot insists upon demonstrating that the very proximity ofmarriage exposes the fissures in Rosamond and Lydgate’s rela-tionship: “Between him and her indeed there was that total miss-ing of each other’s mental track, which is too evidently possibleeven between persons who are continually thinking of each other”(Middlemarch, p. ). In the end, Lydgate’s approach to his life’swork and his marriage undermines his efforts at both. Once Rosa-mond is defined in his mind as the instrument of the ruin of hispotential (one of the final details that the novel offers about theirmarriage is that Lydgate, in a moment of frustration near the endof his life, calls Rosamond his “basil plant” [p. ]), Rosamond’sactions or feelings have no effect on that characterization. WhileLydgate acknowledges his own failures, he regards himself as a vic-tim of the unwelcome influence of others: “He had meant every-thing to turn out differently; and others had thrust themselvesinto his life and thwarted his purposes” (p. ). To a degree,the novel concurs with Lydgate’s self-assessment. Lydgate’s failuremight have been influenced by others, but only to the extent ofhis devotion to ignorance about them. Rosamond is Lydgate’smatch in this regard. She is unhappy in her marriage (it “had ful-filled none of her hopes, and had been quite spoiled for herimagination” [p. ]), and that misery is defined in terms of

21 Another example from Eliot’s oeuvre is Arthur Donnithorne’s insistence in Adam

Bede that his intentions have always been understood by Hetty Sorrel.


her disappointment in Lydgate. She receives his occasional at-tempts at “tenderness as a poor substitute for the happiness hehad failed to give her” (p. ). She, like Rosamond Oliver, goeson to marry a rich man, whose wealth she regards as her “reward”(p. ), and Mrs. Lydgate’s backward slide into the fate sharedby Miss Oliver is one of Eliot’s most damning characterizations.Rosamond blames Lydgate for her unhappiness as well as hisown; her only redeeming feature, as is told in the “Finale,” is thatshe does respect Dorothea. This flawed external focus, seeing theother as fungible or as a medium to deliver happiness or misery,is a core problem in Middlemarch, but it is also one that may beovercome.

In Jane Eyre self-knowledge was the means to escape bad deci-sions or bad marriages. But in Middlemarch it is clear that everyindividual impinges upon another and is similarly impingedupon, and so any self-knowledge that refuses to allow the influ-ence of the other is not sufficient. Bad marriages thus occurdespite perceived self-knowledge. Lydgate believes that he knowshis own desires very well, but he is deluded by his expectationsof life in relation to Rosamond, imagining that he would serveas her hero or that she would serve as his trophy. He does notaccount for the influence of her subjectivity on his own, and hecannot accurately anticipate his reactions under that influence.Dorothea, Lydgate’s complement in this regard, thoroughly con-siders her chosen role as helpmate to her future husband, butshe woefully miscalculates her husband’s desires and the effectof his will on her own. Overcoming those delusions requires anear-violent encounter with the truth embodied by the present,human other, not with the abstract Providence on which charac-ters in Jane Eyre depend to confirm internal hunches.22 For

22 In Jane Eyre agents or voice of change are often curiously disembodied or external—Jane’s uncle’s letter and Rochester’s voice calling for her are two examples. Jane’s decisionto leave Thornfield was the result of a soul-searching answered from without: in a dream, aspirit instructs her to “flee temptation” ( Jane Eyre, p. ), and on the road away fromRochester, she begs Providence to “sustain” her (p. ). As for St. John, he tells Jane:“my powers heard a call from heaven to rise, gather their full strength, spread their wingsand mount beyond ken. God had an errand for me” (p. ). These are moments of crisis(Jane on the verge of giving up her life while wandering the moors, and St. John decidingon the future course of his then-adrift life), and the crises are emphasized expresslybecause the characters need to seek an answer from outside of the self. Lacking the


Dorothea this truth arises in the present, human other embodiedby Rosamond Vincy. Dorothea’s realization reinforces Eliot’smetaphor of the pierglass—that each person is the center of herown universe, and that to imagine the other simply as a constella-tion of the self is to condemn oneself to solipsism.23Dorothea andRosamond’s meeting at the novel’s end, an encounter in whichRosamondmakes possible a rapprochement of Dorothea andWillLadislaw, is a harsh, almost violent reckoning with another, forc-ing both women into a mutual awareness of alterity.

Both Jane Eyre and Middlemarch describe anencounter between the heroine and her foil (a Rosamond) inwhich one is called into consciousness of the other—scenes thatare illustrative of the progression from Brontë’s to Eliot’s vision.In Jane Eyre Jane watches as Rosamond Oliver and St. John walkaway from each other after a clipped conversation. Rosamondtwice looks back at St. John, who never turns to look at her. Janerecognizes Rosamond’s pain: “This spectacle of another’s suffer-ing and sacrifice, rapt my thoughts from exclusive meditation onmy own” ( Jane Eyre, p. ). As I noted earlier, Jane’s sympathyfor Rosamond is contingent on her identification with Rosamondas a woman in love with a man she cannot have. And though Janedescribes the encounter as a shifting of her thoughts away fromherself, the shift is painfully slight, as it is based in that identifica-tion. The encounter fails to help Jane understand Rosamond bet-ter (it is perhaps as much projection as it is identification), andRosamond emerges from this realization not a fuller person inJane’s mind, but rather one more like Jane herself. In Middle-

march that encounter with another’s pain also forces the charac-ters to cease “exclusive meditation” of their own situations. Yet inEliot’s novel these encounters require interaction beyond merelyseeing another’s pain; it is precisely one’s inability to anticipate oraccess the other that imbues such interactions with potential.

fortitude to assert desire definitively, they call upon Providence. For both St. John and Jane,such moments are only steps on the road to a clearer self-awareness that can shirk outsidepressure.

23 For the full “parable,” see the opening of chapter of Middlemarch (pp. –).


In Dorothea and Rosamond’s meeting near the end of Mid-

dlemarch, Dorothea must confront her assumption that Will isromantically involved with Rosamond, while Rosamondmust con-front the truth that Will is devoted to Dorothea. Though later shewould claim otherwise, Eliot revised the scene repeatedly, intenton capturing the significance of the interaction.24 What is oncean encounter of rivals becomes something else, as each womanis in turn pulled out of a deep self-awareness into an awarenessof the otherness of the other. At first Dorothea misreads Rosa-mond’s intentions, “too much preoccupied with her own anxiety,to be aware that Rosamond was trembling too” (Middlemarch,p. ). For her part, Rosamond is “taken hold of by an emotionstronger than her own—hurried along in a new movement whichgave all things some new, awful, undefined aspect” (p. ), yetshe does find the words to release Dorothea from her suspense:Ladislaw is in love with Dorothea, not with Rosamond. The revela-tion surprises Dorothea, who expected Rosy to vindicate herself,not Ladislaw. Eliot locates much of the affective power of thescene in their mutual surprise—each woman is overcome by herown emotion, but even more by the encounter with someone elseentirely, whose experience was unknown, even unimagined. Onemight expect the self-centered Rosamond Vincy to be shaken bythe experience, but even the generous and contemplative Doro-thea could not have imagined it:

It was a newer crisis in Rosamond’s experience than even Dorotheacould imagine: she was under the first great shock that had shat-tered her dream-world in which she had been easily confident ofherself and critical of others; and this strange unexpected manifes-tation of feeling in a woman whom she had approached with ashrinking aversion and dread, as one who must necessarily have ajealous hatred towards her, made her soul totter all the more witha sense that she had been walking in an unknown world whichhad just broken in upon her. (p. )

Here, an encounter with the other woman leads to an encounterwith the world, “an unknown world”—it leads Rosamond not back

24 See Jerome Beaty, “The Writing of Chapter ,” in his “Middlemarch” from Notebook to

Novel: A Study of George Eliot’s Creative Method (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, ), p. .


to herself but instead expressly outside of herself. Moreover, theresult of the encounter is generosity, even at the expense of one’sown (imagined) happiness. This breakthrough into the foreignmind-space of the other opens up the possibility for better rela-tionships, for actions based on a genuine empathic extension thatfirst recognize difference before recognizing similarity.

And thus Eliot depicts two flawed women—Rosamond andDorothea—cognizant of their own limitations but willing toextend themselves by recognizing the unknown experience ofanother woman. That imagination carries the individual outsideof herself into a fuller, more generous understanding of the worldand its inhabitants. For Rosamond Vincy that understanding arisesin an instant, andmight indeed be confined entirely to the conver-sation she shared with Dorothea about Ladislaw. Dorothea provesthe fuller realization of the seed of empathic extension that endsMiddlemarch’s Rosamond plot. Nevertheless, always entangled withthe other, Dorothea Brooke cannot be a new St. Teresa, as herworld and those in it no longer support the work of an “ardentlywilling soul” in the way they once did (Middlemarch, p. ). In thenovel’s finale Eliot writes: “there is no creaturewhose inward beingis so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outsideit” (pp. –). This is a critique of social strictures that bindpeo-ple to inequitable institutions and ideals, but also a comment onthe inescapability of the obligation to the other. Early in her mar-riage to Casaubon, Dorothea is described as being “as blind to hisinward troubles as he to hers: she had not yet learned those hid-den conflicts in her husband which claim our pity” (p. ). The“yet” is important, and is repeated: “She had not yet listenedpatiently to his heart-beats, but only felt that her own was beatingviolently” (p. ). Substitute Casaubon, or Lydgate, orRosamondVincy in Dorothea’s place, and the sentiments still hold; being lim-ited to knowledge of oneself is not enough, as one must work tolearn to move beyond the self and recognize the limitations ofself-knowledge.

Eliot’smodeling of the dynamics of interpersonal relationshipsdepends on the role that the recognition of alterity plays in herdescription of the ethical drive, a recognition that does not inhibitempathic extension but rather makes it possible. In this way, Eliot’sfiction anticipates Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological model,


a model that provides a useful touchstone for understandingEliot’s construction, wherein only through the individual’s recog-nition of the radical, interminable alterity of the other does thepossibility for empathy exist. Writing in themid twentieth century,Levinas maintains that “the other is alterity,”25 yet he does notplace the self and other in a dialectic, suggesting instead that theother remains always unknowable. In Levinas’s account, theencounter with that radical alterity of the other human opens upthe space for ethical behavior. And in his account, only anotherhuman is radically other and cannot be folded into one’s self-conception or made into an object of the self. This distinctionhelps to explain the connection inMiddlemarch between Lydgate’sand Casaubon’s difficulties with their scholastic endeavors andtheir difficulties with human relationships. Not recognizing thefutility of their chosen projects, eachman works toward a compre-hensive and exhaustive knowledge, believing all the while in thepossibility of success. While those limitations may be evident ineven themost superficial reading of the novel, what becomes clearvia the Rosamond plot is that the same certainty of knowledge andignorance of limitation applies to the way in which thesemen (andothers) approach relationships with other people. Levinas cau-tions against the common desire for or expectation of alterity innon-human objects—a book, for example, cannot function as another. But the characters in Eliot’s fiction routinely collapse thatdistinction.26 If Lydgate believes that he can (and will!) unlockthe secrets of the tissue that unifies all living things, then whyshould he doubt his capacity to understand his relatively simple-minded wife? (Lydgate is, of course, gravely mistaken in thisbelief.) Whereas St. John’s and Jane’s certainty ensured theirrespective desires, Lydgate’s seems to ensure the frustration of his.

The difference between the Rosamond plots of Jane Eyre

and Middlemarch rests with this revolution of emphasis of theunknown—whereas for the characters in Jane Eyre the self must

25 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Proximity of the Other” (), trans. Bettina Bergo,in his Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford:Stanford Univ. Press, ), p. .

26 See the chapters “Alterity and the Limits of Realism” and “Sawing Hard Stones:Reading Others in George Eliot’s Fiction,” in Rebecca Mitchell, Victorian Lessons in

Empathy and Difference (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, ).


be sorted, defined, and refined, and progression must be markedby a movement into certainty, for the characters in Middlemarch

the unknown world is the world of the other, and progressionoccurs through an acceptance of uncertainty. A community, anenvironment peopled with others, precludes a pervading sense ofcertainty of self or other; the kind of self-certitude exhibited bySt. John and ultimately achieved by Jane Eyre is neither possiblenor desirable in the world ofMiddlemarch.

University of Texas-Pan American

ABSTRACT

Rebecca N. Mitchell, “The Rosamond Plots: Alterity and the Unknownin Jane Eyre and Middlemarch” (pp. –)

In both Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre () and George Eliot’sMiddlemarch (–) anearnest and ambitious man falls in love with a superficial and beautiful woman namedRosamond. This essay explores the “Rosamond plots” to argue that Middlemarch stages aradical revision of the version of subjectivity vaunted in Jane Eyre. Via its invocation of JaneEyre’s Rosamond plot,Middlemarch challenges the very nature of self-knowledge, questionsthe status of identification in intersubjective relationships, and insists upon the unknow-ability of the other. In Eliot’s retelling, the self-awareness promoted in Jane Eyre is not onlyinsufficient, but also verges on self-absorption and even solipsism. One way in which Eliotenacts this revision is by shifting the focus of positive affective relationships away frommod-els of identification. The change marks an evolution in our understanding of the way inwhich character and communal life is conceived by each author. More specifically, Eliot’srevisions situate empathic response as being dependent upon the recognition of the radi-cal alterity of the other.

Keywords: Charlotte Brontë; George Eliot; Jane Eyre ; Middlemarch;alterity


mitchell rosamond plots-libre

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