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Madelyn Hoagland-Hanson

ENG299 Stadler

3 October 2010

“You are lonely; I love you”: Middlemarch, Metaphor, and the Scientific Mind

In his 1873 review of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Henry James writes, despite and amid

a great deal of praise for what he considers “at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest

of English novels,” that, in the end, “the author wishes to say too many things, and to say them

too well; to recommend herself to a scientific audience.” Such a judgment verging on

condescension might reasonably strike us as unfairly glib in light of the staggering complexity of

Eliot’s narrative project, which, although it represents one of the first English novels meant for

broad public consumption to employ unabashedly scientific—specifically medical—language

and ideas, certainly does not give the overall impression of simply being a four-volume kowtow

to “a scientific audience” and its modish interests. By ignoring the various points at which the

novel explicitly undermines and implicitly complicates the assumed values of the scientific

audience before which it supposedly genuflects, James’ review demonstrates a misreading of

Eliot’s representation of science and the philosophic aims underlying her use of scientific

discourse in Middlemarch, focusing as it does instead on what seems to be James’ annoyance at

what he sees as the faddish infiltration of contemporary scientific theories (specifically those of

“Messrs. Darwin and Huxley”) into the humanistic, novelistic sphere. Such an unexamined

oversight as this on the part of a male critic of Middlemarch may derive some irony from the fact

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that Eliot’s intricate, even “labyrinthine”1 (Miller 4) representation of the role of science in the

novel is inextricably knotted up in her representations of the masculine (assumption of the

existence of the knowable and subsequent desire to know) and the feminine (refusal to be

known), so that to misunderstand the latter is inevitably to misread the former.

The most obvious character through whom to explore the representation of science in

Middlemarch is Tertius Lydgate, the idealistic young doctor (or “medical man”—a telling phrase

that occurs only one time less than “doctor” in the text) whose unwise marriage to Rosamond

Vincy and, by extension, to her expensive caprices towards the middle of the novel would seem

to be the driving force behind his eventual ruin. In Chapter 15, Eliot’s narrator gives us a long

account of Lydgate’s personal “history” in an attempt to “make the new settler Lydgate better

known to any one interested in him” so that he is not “known merely as a cluster of signs for his

neighbours’ false suppositions” (142). Such motions by Eliot’s narrator towards his own

objectivity, as though he is meticulously presenting a full set of facts from which a scientifically-

minded reader can “draw his or her own conclusions,” can productively be read as rhetorical

feints, since it is in this chapter that Lydgate’s character (unlike any other in the novel—no other

character receives such meticulous narratorial attention to their biographical formation from

childhood) is actually retroactively constructed before the reader’s eyes. To clarify, the illusion

is that, by reciting the events of Lydgate’s past, the narrator is providing an explanation for his

present character; a causal relationship is assumed between Lydgate’s past and present, so that

one might see his current manifestation of personhood as the confirmation of a previously-

posited hypothesis: for instance, “This ambitious young man will be a doctor.” Already, then,

the primary fallacy of the scientific approach to the question of “why?” is being enacted for us in

1 This paper draws heavily for its terminology from J. Hillis Miller’s vocabulary in the first chapter of his book

Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines. Generally speaking, I have tried to use these terms in a way that is faithful to

Miller’s usage, and I’ve tried to note them explicitly where they appear, but I nowhere quote Miller directly.

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narrative form: an observed result (Lydgate’s present character) necessarily colors our view of

the endless range of variables (Lydgate’s personal history) whose influence we selectively

discern in retrospect. Any conclusion (predictive or otherwise) drawn from such a process is

incurably contaminated by, in a sense, the blindnesses conferred by seeing what was once

hidden—one can no longer imagine what it was like not to see what is now obvious; one

therefore assumes the inevitability of this revelation and, often, names it “progress.” Our

inclination is towards a kind of sated assumption of complete understanding and linear cause-

effect relationships between given events, which is encouraged by a similarly false assumption of

full access to the facts offered to us by Eliot’s seemingly all-knowing, analytically-minded, and

almost certainly male narrator.

If we descend to the level of the literal text itself, we may note a kind of generative

disparity in “knowledge” between Eliot’s narrator and what we must assume is the author

herself. Because Eliot’s narrator is himself Eliot’s narrative creation, he represents, in that sense,

a character who, while he may not be an active party in the community of Middlemarch, is

nonetheless an active party in the community of Middlemarch. We may not ascribe him

autonomous control over the text; his “decisions” to reveal certain things to us and hide others

are in some sense not his own; he can have no agenda that Eliot herself does not give him. All

this may seem like pointless, self-evident tautology, but it is important to the extent that we need

to recognize Eliot’s male narrator as a device rather than as a true origin in order to parse out his

role in Eliot’s meta-commentary on the scientific approach to narrative that Middlemarch

arguably employs. When we examine symbolism or metaphor in the text, we do not examine

these things as though the narrator is employing them; rather, we unthinkingly bypass his status

as medium and ascribe (correctly) such purely literary devices to the literal pen—which is a

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physical, albeit mechanical, extension of the mind, though it is not the mind itself—that

produced them. When we talk about an unreliable narrator, we do not suspect him of

manipulating something so endemic and essential to the meaning of the novel as symbolism,

metaphor, or words themselves; his power is only to tell or not to tell, and not to choose how he

will tell. When, in Chapter 15, the narrator tells us that, in his youth, Lydgate discovered a book

on anatomy and “the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart” (144), we

feel as though we are receiving a textual wink directly from George Eliot. We feel comfortable

reading this passage as symbolic; we say, “Of course Eliot here means to subtly point to

Lydgate’s perpetual seduction by the mysterious intricacies of the human heart, which always

seem to come to him deceptively diagrammed and garbed in the plain-clothes of science.” When

we make such inferences, when we deliberately (though perhaps unconsciously) leap over the

figurative presence of Eliot’s contrived narrator, we simultaneously do two important things:

first, we cease to view the novel as a linear presentation of recorded facts and events from which

we are drawing scientific “conclusions” (such a view requires that we assume the narrator and

the author speak in unison); and second, we indulge the unscientific (one might say “poetic”)

capabilities of the human mind in order to connect with the mutable (because incontrovertibly

human), feminine origins of the text itself. In so doing, we admit the text its ambiguity without

even realizing we are doing so: metaphor is the female pocket within the masculine plot; it is the

crinkled rose (Miller 24) that disrupts the artificial organizing principle of the male line, which

necessarily points towards something or end, though it can neither name nor see it—because it

does not exist.

A metaphor is defined by the OED as “A figure of speech in which a name or descriptive

word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which

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it is literally applicable.” Contained within the word itself are its implications: “meta,” meaning

“over,” indicates the transcendent properties of the device—it lifts us above the narrative line to

commune with the author’s “meaning”—but “meta” can also mean “across” (what is a more

direct challenge to a straight line than perpendicular divergence from its constraints?). If we

provisionally agree to view metaphor as poetic challenge to scientific plot, we may see this

literary philosophy play itself out, through the confluence of narrative and metaphor, within the

dramatic unfolding of Tertius Lydgate’s past, present, and future within the context of

Middlemarch. Most helpful for such an analysis is an examination of Lydgate’s romantic pursuit

in his early life of the French actress Madame Laure, followed by a comparative examination of

his later miserable marriage to Rosamond Vincy. Returning to the OED’s definition of a

metaphor, we may see, if we choose, a way in which that definition may apply to a marriage.

Marriage is, broadly speaking, the joining of two unlike but analogous people, resulting, often, in

the transfer of a name to from one person to another to whom it did not originally apply.

Marriage is theoretically and ideally based on the purity of love between those who sustain its

connection; ideal marriage partners have no agendas or goals outside of the immaculacy of

connection. In its purest form, marriage is an initiatory step, a wide and sudden opening out

from a momentary clinch, that invites a lifetime of interchange between two people. It is not a

closed goal of itself.

In Lydgate’s early pursuit of the French actress and (possible) murderess Madame Laure,

we can see the connection between marriage and metaphor play itself out in a particularly

provocative way. Lydgate, believing as he does that Laure’s stabbing of her husband was a fatal

accident rather than intentional, follows his love to Lyon, where he confronts her, insisting that,

“You are lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to be my wife: I will wait, but I want you to

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promise that you will marry me—no one else” (153). In response, Laure tells him that she meant

to murder her husband (though “it came to her in the play”) and that, “You are a good young

man…But I do not like husbands. I will never have another” (153). After this heartbreak,

Lydgate resolves that “henceforth he would take a strictly scientific view of woman, entertaining

no expectations, but such as were justified beforehand” (153). This is a fascinating series of

events when read as meta-commentary on the crisis among plot, metaphor, science, and the

literary. Lydgate’s demand that Laure consent to “marry [him]—no one else” is representative

of the naïve masculine view of marriage as a way of trapping or holding onto the mysterious,

mutable feminine; it is a distortion of the ideal marriage because it is essentially teleological,

obsessed with its own institution rather than its implications. (Lydgate, after all, is “jealous lest

any other man than himself should win [Laure’s affection] and ask her to marry him” (152).)

Lydgate is possessed by love, or what he thinks is love, but his love is more the one-sided zeal

for possession than the two-sided desire for connection that actual love requires—it is thus only

the scientific instinct in another, less sanctioned guise. Madame Laure, meanwhile, appears to us

as a woman jaded, who seems to have forgone even the possibility of true connection with men

so corrupted by their instincts towards knowing and possessing all—she does not deny love, but

husbands. Unable to gain Madame Laure’s corresponding affection, Lydgate sublimates his

passion into the societally-appropriate realm of science, which concerns itself with the obsessive

mapping of female nature’s secrets under the cloak of progress—in other words, he espouses

single-minded devotion to the plotline.

Lydgate’s marriage to Rosamond Vincy might be read simply as a failure in the “strictly

scientific view of woman” to which Lydgate pledges himself after Laure’s refusal—the true

scientist, we might say, will never fall in love. However, I prefer to read the marriage, more

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specifically, as a failed or inept metaphor, or as a particularly poisonous corruption, forced and

ill-motivated, of the true aims of metaphor itself. To indulge a slightly reductionist take on

Lydgate’s and Rosamond’s respective motivations in marrying one another, Rosamond is

fascinated by Lydgate because he is novel, and Lydgate is fascinated with Rosamond because

she is beautiful (in a strictly physical sense). Without entering into a discussion of what beauty

truly is, we may assume for the sake of simplicity that beauty is some aspect of reality that the

human mind finds particularly attractive. “Objective beauty” is therefore an impossible phrase;

beauty as it is traditionally conceived is the epitome of the anti-scientific. However, both beauty

and novelty are qualities that will act intractably to seduce the human mind; we seem unable to

resist their lure (their Laure?) although they cannot offer us anything beyond themselves. They

are false precisely because their entire existence is predicated on the possibility of their being

concretely obtained, obtainment being, as I have said, an end and not a beginning. If, as I have

previously posited, we see the ideal marriage as the perfect metaphor, based wholly on the

generative continuity of connection without goal or end and thereby exempt from the linear

insistences of plot, event, and closure, we may see the joining together of Lydgate and

Rosamond, not as the coiling coincident spirals that form the infinite folds of the female flower,

but as the uncomfortable jousting of male linearities that can find no purchase for their

incongruous “points”: Lydgate and Rosamond are not content “merely” to connect; they desire

certain things from one another that neither one of them can provide.

At this point, it is appropriate to dispute the idea of the “perfect metaphor,” since it would

most likely be dangerous to say that George Eliot would have subscribed to such a fiction any

more than she would have been likely to subscribe to the idea of the “perfect marriage.” All

connections between human beings, the novel seems to want to tell us, are imperfect because

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they are necessarily mediated. A metaphor is not the thing itself just as an individual word is not

the thing itself. A novel is not all that it wishes to say to its readers. Two people can never be

one person. There is always, perpetually, some modicum of finite, shifting difference that keeps

connection from being absolute and unending, that keeps the world from melting into a blinding

unity of sameness (Miller 23). It is not sameness that Eliot seems to desire, however, but

interchange; the gesture of her art form is against the pre-emptive shutting down of avenues of

connection in pursuit of some overarching goal, fulfillment of desire, or bit of superficially

existent knowledge. One is reminded of E.M. Forster’s famous plea, almost half a century after

Middlemarch’s publication, to “Only connect,” the implication being that there is nothing

beyond the urgency of the link itself, initiated and sustained by love. Lydgate’s instinct towards

sympathy, towards unmitigated compassion for his fellow man, is perhaps the strongest of any of

Eliot’s Middlemarch characters, even Dorothea: his recognition of what he should do to achieve

a desired goal is constantly upset by his impulse towards human connection, as when, towards

the end of the novel, he is irresistibly moved to offer the humiliated Bulstrode his arm because

“he could not see a man sink close to him for want of help” (729) though he knows that the

townspeople will see this as a sign of his complicity in Bulstrode’s schemes. Eliot shows us,

through Lydgate, the way in which the artificial boundaries erected by the scientific mind, the

masculine desire for complete manufactured control over the world and what occurs there, are

struggled mightily against by the capacious, infinite urges towards connection naturally fostered

by the human heart. Similarly, we as readers strain towards the heartfelt voice of a “real” person

we hear on the other side of the novel’s metaphors; we naturally diverge from its narrative

directives in favor of a higher connection. Neither scientist nor husband nor smug male narrator

can roughly isolate or cause us to descend from such urges, since the connective tissue of

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metaphor, whose entire “purpose” is located in its very action of linking thing to thing without

end or beginning, is the poetic basis of human existence.

Works cited:

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. London: Penguin, 1994.

Miller, J. Hillis. Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

"metaphor, n.1" The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University

Press. 1 Oct. 2010.