Middlemarch: empiricist fables

Abstract

The sudden switch in chapter ten of Middlemarch, from Dorothea's career to Lydgate's, is the most unprepared and unsettling transition in George Eliot's oeuvre. At that point, Middlemarch becomes a multiplot novel, different in kind from the other fictions, and as a result it foregrounds the question of interpretation in quite new ways. Each of the divided structures of her other novels, most strikingly Silas Marner, Felix Holt, and Daniel Deronda, implies and acts out a dialectic which comes to focus on a crucial conflict of interpretation, climax, and closure. However disparate the two halves of these novels, each half is read against the stable background of the other with which it is being brought into closer and closer relationship. The pressure in such double narratives focuses finally on the central interpretative crux, which is resolved either by an apocalyptic breakthrough into a new kind of reality or by a vision of consequences which makes choice meaningful. For instance, both Rufus Lyon, with his ‘wider vision of past and present realities’, and Mordecai, his Jewish counterpart in Daniel Deronda with his gift of second-sight, hint at some kind of transcendence at the borders of the real in the novels on either side of Middlemarch . The persistent decentering of the narrative of Middlemarch denies such possibilities: ‘the time was gone by’, Dorothea Brooke acknowledges, ‘for guiding visions and spiritual directors’. In their absence, the reader experiences at first hand the life of the novel as a hypothesis continually collapsing under the weight of the new evidence which the different segments of the narrative bring to light.