Matthew Rich goes into detail in his essay "Not a Church, but an Individual Who Is His or Her Own Church": Religion In George Eliot's Middlemarch about how we see religion in the novel. Rich suggests that Eliot isn't showing religion through organized causes such as church, but rather through individuals themselves. In other words, Rich shows how the individual characters do Gods work or practice their religion through their own work. Rich implies that characters such as Dorothea Brook looks at religion as a "re-connection with other human beings, in the form of an ardent desire to do something for her fellow creatures to mitigate their suffering" (650). Or Caleb Garth who "re-connects with the land; his is a religion in which hard work and sweat take the place of form and ceremony, and the highest good is not salvation, but the satisfaction that comes with a job well-done and done well for others" (650). In the rest of Rich's review he brings up other characters and how they practice religion.
Matthew Rich brings up the word "re-connect" often in his review. He associates the word with the character he is mentioning in the sense that the character has again found their calling. In other words, Dorothea re-connects with human beings to look to soften their suffering. Caleb re-connects with his land and Harriet Bulstrode re-connects with her husband in his time of loneliness. It seems that Rich is suggesting that all these characters have once connected with their specific items. However, at the moment they re-connect they are doing it in a more religious way. A way that allows them to practice what they see as Gods work. These characters seemed to have an epiphany. I wondered if Eliot showed herself a little bit in these characters. Rich points out how "Middlemarch is a novel of reform. And Religious reform is as important a theme for George Eliot" (650). These characters are playing into Eliot's bigger themes of political and social reform by looking to help people who need it. Just as Eliot was trying to do with her novel. She was trying to show that things need to change. I think that through these characters re-connection with their work Eliot is showing a piece of herself. The part of her that is trying to make a difference in a world that was filled with harsh realities.
Side note: I just realized that I did this blog on the recent criticism, so my next one will be on the contemporary criticism. Sorry! I am just going to switch them around.
Rich, Matthew. "Not a Church, but an Individual Who Is His or Her Own Chirch: Religion in
George Eliot's Middlemarch." Middlemarch. By George Eliot and Bert G. Hornback. 2nd ed. New
York: W.W. Norton, 2000. 649-56. Print.
Maybe Eliot made it so that each character had one of Eliot's traits, and throughout the novel, made a change that she herself wanted to make. If you were to take each character from the novel, and smash them up into one character, that character would be pretty well-rounded; the knowledge of Casaubon, tenderness of Dorothea, the strong sense of self of Lydgate... There is a lot of change throughout the novel, and I do agree with you that Eliot is trying to show that reader that change can be good, although scary. I also think that Eliot was trying to show what she thought would make a perfect world, but also that there is not such thing as a perfect world because everyone and everyplace has its own problems.
ReplyDeleteThis blog--and your mention of "harsh realities"--reminds me a bit of the "criticism of life" concept from your other blog on Middlemarch criticism. While lots of readers--including quite a few in the class--feel that the novel would be better if Eliot had made Dorothea more modern and feminist, it doesn't line up with her other purposes in the novel.
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