Will Ladislaw’s Contextualization: The Function of Epigraphs in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

Abstract

Will Ladislaw’s Contextualization: The Function of Epigraphs in George Eliot’s Middlemarch Todd Copeland (bio) In Middlemarch’s second chapter, readers are ushered in medias res into the first scene dramatizing the novel’s subtitle, A Study of Provincial Life. The sisters Dorothea and Celia sit at the dinner table while their uncle, Mr. Arthur Brooke, in his role as host directs the conversation among his two guests, Sir James Chettam and the Reverend Edward Casaubon. As Dorothea regretfully senses—and as the passage’s first two paragraphs demonstrate—her uncle’s comments have less to do with entertaining his visitors than with advertising his standing as a man of wide knowledge and lofty connections: “Sir Humphry Davy?” said Mr Brooke, over the soup, in his easy smiling way, taking up Sir James Chettam’s remark that he was studying Davy’s Agricultural Chemistry. “Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy: I dined with him years ago at Cartwright’s, and Wordsworth was there too—the poet Wordsworth, you know. Now there was something singular. I was at Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, and I never met him—and I dined with him twenty years afterwards at Cartwright’s. There’s an oddity in things, now. But Davy was there: he was a poet too. Or, as I may say, Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two. That was true in every sense, you know.” [End Page 129] Dorothea felt a little more uneasy than usual. In the beginning of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from the mass of a magistrate’s mind fell too noticeably. She wondered how a man like Mr Casaubon would support such triviality. (11–12) That the chapter’s first words identify an author is congruent with the concern for texts, and their requisite creators, that forms an integral theme within the social and amorous drama that develops among the dinner party—a concern for what Brooke refers to as “talking of books” (13). As the chapter proceeds toward its conclusion, with the respective pairings of Dorothea with Casaubon and Celia with Chettam, no fewer than seven additional texts or authors are introduced by either the characters or the narrator, including John Locke, Adam Smith, Robert Southey, and Isaac Bickerstaffe’s The Hypocrite. In addition, the reader discovers that, for Dorothea, Casaubon’s reputation has preceded him in the form of his pamphlet on Biblical Cosmology, with this textual knowledge favorably prejudicing her appreciation of the man’s presence. In its use of extraneous texts, Chapter 2 exemplifies the character of Middlemarch as a whole, for in her study of provincial life George Eliot demonstrates the utility of employing, through both the narrator’s voice and in an extra-narrative (or paratextual) manner, the voice of outside experts to clarify, confirm, refine, or expand upon the findings presented to readers. Describing this practice as a common feature of all texts, the philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin has noted, “The author of a literary work (a novel) creates a unified and whole speech work (an utterance). But he creates it from heterogeneous, as it were, alien, utterances. And even direct authorial speech is filled with recognized words of others” (115). In its Victorian comprehensiveness, Middlemarch is a work richly and voluminously saturated by such recognized utterances. Wordsworth’s entrance into the narrative by way of Brooke’s name-dropping reminiscence, for instance, prefigures the poet’s later appearance in the form of epigraphs—or mottoes, as Eliot often termed them—to Chapters 52 and 80. Indeed, the novel’s eighty-six chapters, as well as its “Prelude” and “Finale,” are laden with references to a miscellany of authors, with the most prominent presence of the “recognized words of others” being the epigraphs that precede each chapter’s text and, reflecting the intertextuality [End Page 130] of any individual piece of literature, convey “notions of relationality, interconnectedness, and interdependence” (Allen 5). Such epigraphs form a subset of the components of a book—some determined by the author, others created by the editor, designer, publisher, or printer—that are known as paratext. As defined by the French theorist Gérard...