The Lydgates have bought too much furniture and plateware and do not know how to pay for it. All their problems eventuate from this remarkably tame, all too common origin of domestic debt, a version of being house-poor. He broaches the topic over tea with hidden dread. She, sensing the unpleasantness, turns a head to look away. Wedded misery in George Eliot's Middlemarch does not mean spectacular incidents—adultery, abuse, sexual fallenness, or the like. It means subtle, ordinary provocation, underlain by mundane disappointment and mistrust. This is as much true for the Lydgates as for the novel's other main couple, the Casaubons. Middlemarch presents us with nonflorid unhappiness, readable within its own legendary realism.This essay argues, indeed, that a primary grounding of Middlemarch's realism lies in scenes of marriage, especially prosaically troubled marriage. It infers from Eliot's banal erotics a coherent set of aesthetic choices, the guiding principles of what her realism will and will not do. These guiding principles include, among other things, the genres she opposes, most obviously that of the romance. This generic term means, in the first place, a love story, as in the so-called marriage plot, with its form-defining path to the conclusion of blissful wedlock. Secondarily, that love-centric form is linked to the broader generic category: the romance as a general flight of fancy, enabled by emotionally punctuated, temporally or tropologically exotic elements.1 It will come as little surprise that Eliot's realism rejects the romance's imaginative views, including ideal views of love. But that distinction between realism and idealism is not my point here. Nor does “aesthetics” here have the casual semantic value it often does in discussions of realism to mean simply a mode of writing. Rather, I mean to conjure the specialized questions of aesthetics as such: questions about sense apprehension and the formal dynamic of the art experience.2 Eliot is an aesthetic philosopher, one exceptionally attentive to form, along with its perceptual and affective (sensual as well as emotional) impact. Moreover, she is attentive to judgments of beauty. She is interested in how those judgments operate both within the text and in the reader's interaction with her work. Middlemarch's aesthetics is substantially comparative—the novel displays Eliot's belief in realism's sheer superiority as an art form. For her, it lords over other art forms, other genres, other tastes. The novel is self-conscious, sometimes archly so, in making this case.Realism is especially superior, she implies, in privileging interiority, in a quite literal way. It is again self-evident that Eliot prioritized character over plot; she is one of our best-known psychological realists. But what is fascinating about Middlemarch is its handling of interiority as a perceptual, in-the-world phenomenon, as if it had a shape. This is more than psychological realism. Rather, the novel makes psychology a matter of form and sense impression. Characters' very thoughts and emotions are subject to being jostled, measured, obstructed, viewed, and not viewed. They are vital, dynamically positioned figures in an aesthetic landscape.More exactly, Eliot's focus on interiority is combinatory, in that it is best realized in scenes of character interconnection or relationality. This is why marriage, especially troubled marriage, is so prominent in all her fiction. In Middlemarch in particular, with its great social web, the married couple is the most interestingly fraught connection because it is the smallest, most psychologically charged picture of the self's necessarily lived interaction with others. Scholarly discussions of fraught social relationality in Eliot almost always come back to ethics. The word sympathy is common in these discussions.3 The present reading, though, concentrates not on ethics but on interiority as form, in the oddly literalized way Eliot handles it. It notices the innerness, as well as the outerness, of fictional selves and the spatiality of those selves as they see and encounter one another. One of the things I am trying to do is shift our attention to relationality in Eliot from a regime of ethics to a regime of looking and sensing. When we read Middlemarch's men and women in this way, we perceive them as subject to phenomena of access, along with coordinates of both space and time. We become newly aware of how the novel is trying to make us feel and evaluate through its form.If dismissing Eliot's ethics and tracking her as an aesthete seems flawed, that may be because it seems wrong to view her writing as nonpurposive in the Kantian sense. How could she possibly care disinterestedly about beauty, or expect her reader to, when her fiction is famously interested in weighing how to balance egoism with social-mindedness? On a broader level, viewing Eliot aesthetically may also seem flawed because of how high realism, of which she is often taken as a standard bearer, is usually periodized: as morally bent and sometimes outright didactic. In this schema, it will take a historical break, around the start of the twentieth century, to transform art away from earnestness into an experience for its own sake, alive to medium, form, and sense. But Eliot's interest in the phenomenon of the ordinary encounter—in what it looks and feels like, both within the text and to its audience—mashes up such demarcations, hinting at their inadequacy.Realism has a multiplicity and longevity with which we have yet to reckon fully. This is especially true when it comes to statements about its sociality or people interacting in verisimilar worlds. Realism's common association, especially vis-à-vis the Victorians, with tendentious social ideology—as in that emphasis on a marriage plot veering tidily toward a bourgeois familial conclusion—rushes over its formal texture, along with the affective impact of its relational dynamics. This essay is an experiment in stepping outside the normal, ill-fitting boxes of literary history and not reading Eliot's social realism ideologically—not locating a didactic morality within it.4 It reads instead for character feeling inseparably with space and time, in part by tracking Middlemarch's unusually self-aware statements about verisimilar art. As I will unfold, realist relationality in this novel adheres to an aesthetics of the petty, in a specific sense that comprises both human relations and dimensional form. This aesthetics makes person-to-person contact subject to sense perception, and it takes the marital encounter as exemplary. Looking closely at Middlemarch's couples gives us fresh ways of perceiving densely empeopled fictional environments, including their difficulty or discord.Early in Middlemarch, the narrator describes the moment when Lydgate, as a child, happened on the subject of anatomy and developed an immediate passion for it. The intrusive narrator notes that we do not talk much about this kind of passion, the vocational one. And then comes this snarky aside about the passions we do talk about all the time: “We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's ‘makdom and her fairnesse,’ never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings . . . ?” (144). Here, as often in Middlemarch—for example, in the well-known “but why always Dorothea?” passage—Eliot is self-consciously aware of her own fiction making. In this case, specifically, she is adversarially aware of literature's repetitive narrative patterns: the plots we tell over and over, to a wearying degree, featuring the same stock figures of the fair maiden and her lover. This commentary, shoehorned into the exposition about Lydgate's scientific education, is awkwardly placed, and it seems all the more so for its derisive tone—that jab at the love story's excessive poetry and stupidity. As such, it comes off as an urgent, partisan statement of authorial values.Eliot overtly demeans the erotic romance. (That reference to a poetic troubadour tradition is especially significant, I will suggest later.) But more covert instances of Eliot's literarily principled opposition to the romance as such are dispersed throughout her novel. The most evident of these is Rosamond's prefab narrative fantasy of Lydgate. Upon his arrival in town, delighted by his nonnative, non-Middlemarch origins, she creates a “little future”: “Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind. . . . And a stranger was absolutely necessary to Rosamond's social romance, which had always turned on a lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher. . . . And here was Mr Lydgate suddenly corresponding to her ideal” (117–18). The narrator's meshing of Lydgate with the hero washed up on shore, clinging to a raft implies a capacious generic category. Not only has Rosamond internalized the love story romance (Flint 263–64); it is continuous in her mind's lore with the seafaring romance: both stories thrill and carry the reader away through sensational events revolving around a stranger-hero (the stranger factor, or distance, is also important, as we will see). Of course, Eliot's ultimate gambit is that Rosamond's fantasy will be nothing like her eventual relationship with Lydgate. That will be a tedious tale of the daily drip-drip of financial woes and the boredom of small-town life.While Rosamond craves a full, thrillingly punctuated narrative, even in Eliot's own time her readers well knew to expect a narrative oriented around psychology, to the detriment of plot. As Robert Laing, a reviewer of Middlemarch, proclaimed, “[Eliot] does not write . . . for the sake of the story”; instead, she shows a “love for her characters which induces her to follow them through the weariness of their lives.”5 Laing contrasts her with Walter Scott, who aims “to fascinate, to transport his reader,” always including exciting events—some “freak of fortune, . . . some fear of fate.” But Eliot, he says, “has none of Walter Scott's passion for . . . his ‘occupation as a romancer.’” In Middlemarch, “[t]here has been no hero, there has been no romance” (Laing 361–62).Interestingly, Laing (like many critics today) adjudicates the character-versus-plot polarity on the generic ground of the romance: Eliot's favoring of the one over the other goes hand in hand with her rejection of that genre. But even more significant is what Laing says when he gives a description of how Eliot's character-orientedness works. Specifically, he uses a then-significant but now undernoticed term: analysis. This would become common parlance in later nineteenth-century reviews. It was a label for novelists' minute examination of motives, thoughts, and feelings—in short, psychological realism (Graham 102–7). Laing notes that Middlemarch shows a “stringency of analysis,” especially of Lydgate and Dorothea (346). He was not the only one to call Eliot's mode analytic; others also noticed her great attraction to “inner life” (Graham 103, 110). Analysis was a loaded term. The image evoked was, indeed, very strongly of life—a vital, physiological self who seems really alive and who is being probed, even intrusively, by the author. Reviewers reinforced that idea of biological life by oscillating between the term analysis and the terms vivisection and dissection, which describe cutting into live or recently live creatures.6This concept of analysis is useful for appreciating Eliot's idea of character, even apart from a familiar scientific discursive reading of her work. In formal terms, rather, analysis intimates Eliot's understanding of character as, unlikely as it may seem, a physical object. It intimates her understanding of characters as objects with interiority, in a spatial sense. For what do those figures—analysis and vivisection—suggest but a cutting into? To cut into character imaginatively is to experience its exterior and, correlatively, to accentuate its interior—as something to be uncovered. In later Victorian novel reviews, the term analysis would become a byword for authorial obsession with probing or penetrating inner personality so as to expose it utterly, to lay bare what was not obviously externalized through action. It was code, then, for an almost physicalist intrusion. Another reviewer, for example, using a related anatomical metaphor, declared a dullness in the fictional person who is “analysed and ‘introspected,’ till there is nothing new to be done with him or her either as an écorché, or with the skin on, or with clothes on the skin.”7 Character is again penetrable beyond an exterior: an écorché is an anatomical model of the body that strips away the skin, revealing the muscle beneath.Such metaphors—vivisecting, flaying, exposing—emphasize interiority as a thing with dimension: as three-dimensional. In calling Eliot's method analytic, what her reviewers were picking up on was her insistence on interiority as interiority, or as inside—a quite formally provocative concept when you think about it. Further, they were picking up on her depiction of this interiority as a problem for characters within the storyworld itself. That is, Middlemarch is hyperattentive to the outlines or boundaries of interiority, as these boundaries are perceived—and perceived as obstructive—by other characters. The reason that the narrator probes characters so ruthlessly is that so much of their innerness remains hidden, bounded, within the plotted sociality of the Middlemarch world. And nowhere is this hiddenness more apparent than in the novel's scenes of marriage. In its extraordinarily tight sociality, the bond of marriage exaggerates characters' status as objects in relation to (outside) one another. As such, it illuminates the problem of mutual psychological nonaccess. Ironically, moreover, this problem occurs in the very context that stock love stories promise as offering the highest degree of access, an apotheosis of emotional union.Thus arise many moments in the novel of what I think of as frictional relationality. These are scenes in which characters run up against each other's outlined selves, their separate, individually motivated personhood, and then feel frustration.8 We see this happening abundantly with Rosamond and Lydgate in their many scenes of irritated, unspoken bitterness at their disparate life goals—his professional ambition versus her genteel aspirations. This is also the situation of the Casaubons. In their case, Eliot particularly emphasizes the spatiality of character: how encountering someone else's mind can feel like encountering obduracy.9 The impression of another's mind is an affective experience of a kind of shaped-ness. For instance, about Dorothea, the narrator describes her coming to know, drearily—as an “idea” felt, the narrator says, with “the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects”—that Casaubon “had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference” (211). The following passage, too, is remarkable for its depiction both of this couple's spatial distinctness and of Dorothea's vexation because of it. Casaubon, depressed about his failing health but of course silent about this feeling, has just rebuffed one of Dorothea's kind gestures with an “unresponsive hardness” (425). Now Dorothea has returned to her room—filled, the narrator reports, with “anger.” She wonders aloud: “What have I done—what am I—that he should treat me so? He never knows what is in my mind—he never cares.” . . .[S]he saw her own and her husband's solitude—how they walked apart so that she was obliged to survey him. . . . Now she said bitterly, “It is his fault, not mine.” In the jar of her whole being, Pity was overthrown. . . . And what, exactly, was he?—She was able enough to estimate him—she who waited on his glances with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison, paying it only hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please him. In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate. (426)That last line is worth pausing over: “In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate.” Dorothea is really mad. Apparently even would-be Saint Theresas get extremely irritated. On that note, I want to address the issue of ethics, again in order to deprioritize it. It may be tempting to estimate Dorothea's anger here as a bad waystation in her struggle for moral generosity with Casaubon. Or it may be tempting to read it as an experience of Cavellian skepticism, in the sense that Andrew H. Miller has articulated in his argument for the Victorians' relational moral perfectionism, often looking at marriage in particular: as a fundamental doubt that the other's existence can be known and coordinated with one's own desire. However, Dorothea's reaction to Casaubon rings differently for me. It is neither a moral lapse nor an epistemological query about the other. It is much more mundane and commonplace, not conscientious at all. Dorothea is not in any doubt or confusion about Casaubon's innerness, nor does she even care to figure out what constitutes it. She is simply, in the moment, very aggravated.This moment is unattractive, hard to look at ethically. Additionally, though, it is only a moment: even by the next page, Dorothea has mustered forgiveness and sympathy. However, Eliot invites and even forces us to pay attention to that moment. In an insightful reading, Summer J. Star has shown that Middlemarch's realism is an aesthetics attentive to form and sensual dimension and that it is essentially phenomenological in its operation; characters feel reality—and readers feel it with them—through their slow, minute affective experiences, which involve perceptual bodily movements that pass by barely noticed and that for that very reason give the everyday sense of lived dwelling in the phenomenal, physical world. I would suggest that the embodiedness of this experience entails characters' sense—a strange, illusory one—that what they are feeling is not quite bodies but selfhood as such. Additionally, this sense is most pressing for Eliot in scenes of character interrelationality, especially very close relationality—and as a phenomenology, it is unsettlingly mixed. For her part, Star concludes that there is a “mutual dependence between aesthetics and morality”: characters feel sensually “in the midst” of their worlds, and this is a self-rightsizing reinforcement of their limited perception of the whole (852, 849). But presuming this “ethical upshot” (854)—a necessary ameliorative resolution—threatens to short-circuit our attention to sense and form, in that it ignores a shiftiness across the novel of affective experience: a multitude of disturbed and disturbing perceptions and emotions, like Dorothea's with Casaubon.There are so many rough, raw social moments in Middlemarch that one begins to suspect that Eliot was more interested in dissatisfaction and spite for their own sake than in the endgame of morality.10Middlemarch's characters are, from page to page, feeling bundles of interpersonal response, buffeted from one experience to another. Significantly, Eliot was greatly intrigued by Baruch Spinoza's complex, phenomenological theory of affect, which posited not a governing, Cartesian will or imagination—as in Adam Smith's Enlightenment concept of the sympathizer—but rather the changeful propulsions of embodied life, including the “peremptory desire of the being who swings between love and hate” (Armstrong 299). Understanding Eliot's view of affect in this non-Cartesian way requires fine-tuning what “interiority” means in her case. For Eliot, interiority is imperatively real, but only because (it is a big because) it is experienced as real to characters, as they socially move and interact in the world. That is, interiority is less a self than a “self,” born of grievance at impeded desire: hurt feelings feel like a “solidity.”11 How might this Spinozan theory of affect have met up with Eliot's theory of art in their common grounding in a spatiotemporal framework?Eliot was so interested in plots of marriage because she found interpersonal being most emotionally, and hence formally and aesthetically, vivid when the social or interpersonal means a marital relationship. The vividness comes from the fact that marriage's quotidian closeness gives a constant supply of encounters full of important-to-the-“self” feelings—and not just positive ones, but also all the rest.12 Eliot's marital closeness is in effect a limit case of intimacy as described by Nancy Yousef in her study of Romantic-era thinkers and writers. For Yousef, intimacy (of any kind, in any encounter) is a “palpable proximity” and a phenomenological flux of ordinary, dynamic impressions; moreover, its affect pushes and pulls between, on one hand, a desire to be known by the other and, on the other hand, a seeming “inward region of irreducible privacy.” Intimacy entails much more than sympathy, in the sense of perfect ethical reciprocity or recognition; rather, it is affectively variegated, producing a range of transitory results: “appreciation, gratitude, awkwardness, frustration, humiliation, and even indifference.” Mutual sentiment and perfect morality are simply the “ideals” of intimacy, imaginable “only at a distance” as a “relational telos” (Yousef 1, 21–23). Inversely, we can say, Eliot stakes her realism on intimacy's incessant unfolding and its imperfections, tensions, and failures, especially in wedlock, with its daily experience of the ordinary encounter. Interiorities, weirdly dimensional, interact with each other as physical objects, and marriage in Middlemarch makes character most dimensionally real through those everyday, up-close moments of friction. The friction comes from the occlusion of inferring, without fully understanding, the difference of a spouse's thoughts, concerns, and motivations.This friction involves reacting in a way that can best be described as petty. The novel repeats this adjective often. Significantly, petty is here not just a moral evaluation; it is even more meaningful in its etymological sense of small or petite. A phenomenologically sketched life is full of such small moments.13 In that passage above about Dorothea—“She was able enough to estimate him—she who waited on his glances with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison, paying it only hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please him” (emphasis added)—pettiness is at once an affect and a size: Dorothea resents that her self is forced to become small enough to fit a locked room. At the same time, her feeling itself, like Casaubon's own, is both small and ugly. Marital pettiness in Middlemarch—available to all—is like the “ugly feeling” theorized by Sianne Ngai: not large, “dramatic,” or morally cathartic, as is the feeling in an Aristotelian play, yet still significant because it is a “dura[ble]” tonal “amplifier” that “makes things matter” (7, 53–54). Dorothea is merely frustrated at Casaubon's frustration, yet the moment has considerable significance.Consider another of the narrator's metafictional reflections: A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glorious in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot-house. (141; emphasis added)To an extraordinary degree, Eliot's narrator creates a competition with another storyteller through judgments in measures of scale, space, and time. Henry Fielding's prowess is an out-of-touch grandiosity, literally. He is a “coloss[us]” with “huge legs” who tells the story from afar and tries to capture a wide scope, like the “great historian” he is. Moreover, he is careless of the passing moment: seated in a plush “arm-chair,” enjoying his own “fine English,” he is prone to “digressions.” The Middlemarch narrator, by contrast, embraces the “pettiness” moving beneath those huge legs and is always aware of how fast the “clock tick[s]” now. Note too the polemical edge to the narrator's self-comparison—a sarcastic false modesty about her own mode of design: Fielding “insisted” on doing things his way; me, I'm nothing but a “belated historian,” but I'll do things my way.Rife with such artistic competitions, Middlemarch is invested in pettiness in a way that encompasses but also exceeds ethics. Bracketing Eliot's ethics—putting it to the side, provisionally—makes more visible her formal, affective, and aesthetic choices. This is especially true in the case of the interesting dynamic of the couple in love (or “love”). Scenes of marriage remind us to slow down, attending to every moment, even the small and mundane, and even the unpretty. Marital realism trains us to a certain pace of reading and, with it, to a certain scale. At that pace and scale, we can better see the value Eliot confers upon character, including its complicated negotiations with plot.Eliot's dimensional character sinks into the moment, distending it. I called it three-dimensional, but it is more like four-dimensional because it involves space (interiorities, exteriorities, and frictions) inseparably from time. Vivisectible, dynamic, and phenomenologically feeling around for its reality, this character experiences the storyworld in a way that, for the reader, dilates time, forcing a pause over short-lived actions and feelings (like Dorothea's vexation). All of this is not so beneficial for the forward momentum of a plot. It is especially detrimental to plots that rely on brisk action and fast emotion—the romance or, alternatively, the sensation novel, which became popular in the decade right before Middlemarch was published. Nonetheless, the novel curiously insinuates that latter genre in the plot of Raffles and Bulstrode, which involves both blackmail and murder. What are we to do with this touch of high genre, which threatens to devitalize character, transforming it from a living self into an element of a predictable narrative? I would argue that Middlemarch gestures toward such narratives but only, finally, to hint at their limitations, and that Eliot finds the best place to reassert her priorities within scenes of marriage.14 These generic denials operate as an exaggerated downshifting, or slowing. The move works in this way: having incorporated some genre known for producing fast, big emotion through excessive plot, Eliot then lowers the speed, so to speak, through the vision of some conjugal union's much smaller emotional intricacies. This glimpse decisively closes down titillation and the reader's blithe avoidance of ordinary life, with all its ordinary, rough relational surfaces. Marital realism, in this way, reaffirms Eliot's authorial orientation toward the occlusions of deep character as it exists moment to moment, in small space and slow time.Take for instance that Raffles-Bulstrode story line. It is important that when Eliot brings its thrills to a close, she does so by turning for virtually the only sustained time in the novel to a seemingly insignificant side story, barely touched thus far—Nicholas Bulstrode's life with Mrs. Bulstrode. The novel briefly glances at how his deeds will affect his marriage's emotional fabric. After learning of her husband's scandal, Mrs. Bulstrode goes home and “lock[s] herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life. . . . A new searching light had fallen on her husband's character” and on his twenty years of “concealments” (749). This private moment in Mrs. Bulstrode's room figures her sudden, almost physically literal awareness of her and her husband's mutual interior hiddenness. “It was eight o'clock in the evening before the door opened and his wife entered”: her mustering the will, finally, to leave her room and see him is the crossing of the barrier of a door. Even once face-to-face, the couple maintain a tortured silence, for fear of knowing what really lies in each other's minds. The very last, jarring lines of their chapter reinforce their separate, secret thoughts: “[Mrs. Bulstrode] shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness. . . . She could not say, ‘How much is only slander and false suspicion?’ and he did not say, ‘I am innocent’” (750–51).Dimensional interiority is about more than symbolism—rooms, doors, and walls. It is about the way those ordinary architectural structures, like that precise hour of going through a door (eight o'clock), locate the self's paltry unfurling in space and time.15 The sensational event is brought to the common level of daily, slogging experience. Even Mrs. Bulstrode's devastation, at first an overwhelming emotion, must be integrated into the ordinary. The description of her realization of this is perhaps Middlemarch's most poignant episode. Behind her locked door, she knows she will unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and