George Eliot explains why, in contrast to her predecessor, the epic satirist Henry Fielding, she could not undertake extensive narrative comments and digressions: “I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe” (171). Victorian England, which she resuscitates on the pages of
Middlemarch, is not only represented as a tapestry of figures confined to a single town and its surroundings. The characters whose lots she unravels are also conjured up out of the dark, attaining a clear form only owing to the light cast on them by the attention of this author. Eliot’s interest in shedding light on a set of characters whose destiny has brought them together undertakes a cosmogenic rhetorical gesture. Out of the chaos of relationships that determines the lot of her characters, her writing produces a meaningful cosmos by bringing to light what would otherwise have remained hidden in the dark. To negotiate the manners and morals holding together this community, but also to subject a select group of its members to her own moral judgment, she focuses on two of the most prominent families.
Mr. Brooke, a member of the gentry, inhabits Lowick with his two nieces. The younger, Celia, is married to their wealthy neighbor, Sir James Chettam, and leads the conventional life of a lady, but her older sister, Dorothea, reaches an unusual decision. The twenty-one-year-old heiress dreams of becoming a modern St. Teresa of Avila, willing to sacrifice herself to the noble ideal of helping others rather than pursuing her personal happiness. Planning to have better cottages built for the tenants of her uncle’s estate, this vigorous young woman rides out every day so as to familiarize herself with their everyday life. Yet she also seeks that martyrdom she reads about in old theological books at night. For this reason she decides to marry Edward Casaubon, a much older man of independent means. In him she believes she has found a way to acquire the knowledge of the classics for which she fervently yearns. Because young women in Victorian England were not permitted to attend university, she can only attain her goal by marrying a private scholar, and so she is willing to dedicate herself completely to helping him finish his great work.
The other members of her family advise her against this decision. They are afraid that Casaubon’s work on his Key to All Mythologies brings him too emotionally close to the dead, whose past worlds he is trying to reconstruct. Dorothea, deeply stirred by spiritual hunger and an excessive religiosity, is willing to embrace self-mortification and abstinence. She abandons all her plans for renovating Lowick, choosing instead to assist Casaubon with his magnum opus and “live continually in the light of a mind that she could reverence” (67). Through her husband she hopes to be able to see spiritual truth in the same light as the great philosophers before her. Shortly after her marriage, however, the fact that she has turned away from the business of the everyday will lead her into melancholy. Her marriage soon proves an emotional prison from which she will be able to liberate herself only after her husband has died and she has entered into a second marriage with his cousin, the artist Will Ladislaw.
The second family Eliot directs her gaze upon, and thus our attention to, is that of the businessman Mr. Vincy. At the beginning of the novel, his son Fred lives the life of a gentleman, refusing to learn a proper trade. He hopes to inherit a large fortune from his uncle who lives in Stone Court. However, angered by his nephew’s gambling debts, Featherstone disinherits Fred. To marry his childhood sweetheart, Mary Garth, Fred is forced to give up his life of leisure and, after finishing his theological studies, he must manage the estate under his father’s surveillance. Before accepting his hand in marriage, Mary had asked only one thing of Fred, that he make something of himself on his own. His sister Rosamund, following her desire to become a respected member of England’s high society, marries the doctor Tertius Lydgate, who moved to Middlemarch after finishing his studies in Paris. Because her frivolous expenditures force him into debt, Lydgate becomes involved in an intrigue that ruins his reputation as a doctor, compelling the couple to move to London.
The scandal revolves around Rosamund’s uncle, the successful banker Nicholas Bulstrode, who, as one of the most powerful citizens of Middlemarch, also stands for moral strictness. Although his behavior derives from his puritanical convictions, his self-righteousness has a clandestine dark side. The wealth on which his prominence within the community is based has its origin in his dark former dealings as a pawnbroker. When his first wife asked him to search for her runaway daughter, he denied having found her; upon his wife’s death, he inherited the entire family fortune. The fact that Will Ladislaw turns out to be the child of this daughter forges an unexpected connection between these two Middlemarch families. Neither Casaubon nor Bulstrode are under any legal obligation to this young artist, and yet the mere knowledge that he could assert a moral claim is what drives both men into the dark realm of Nyx—into suspicion, deception, and dishonesty.
Most scenes in Middlemarch take place during the day, and even the evening entertainments are seen as part of ordinary life. However, the few nocturnal scenes described at length function as a stage for ethic decisions that will determine the future of the two families. If Bulstrode stands in the center of the intrigue, Stone Court functions as the spatial navel of the tapestry, weaving together all the characters even while tying them to the unfathomable principle of fate. Although the miserly old Peter Featherstone lives in this manor house until his death, Bulstrode buys it from Featherstone’s heirs so he may use it as a retreat from his business in the city. Both owners of Stone Court use the cover of night to test how far their power extends over those they tempt into breaking the law. Featherstone will try to pressure Mary, who is nursing him during his final illness, to help him change his various wills, whereas Bulstrode undertakes clandestine actions at night in an effort to eradicate the origin of his prosperity. Eliot is fascinated by the fluctuations of the night because this offers a stage for the dissolution and reinforcement of moral convictions. Although her corrupt figures of paternal authority, Featherstone and Bulstrode, seek out the darkness of the night to secretly lay the plans for a day that will correspond to their fantasies of power, Eliot’s narration uses these nocturnal scenes to reveal to these characters the limits of their alleged omnipotence. After all, Nyx is the mother of justice as well as the chance that can only be accounted for, and not calculated.
In the first of these two nocturnal scenes, Mary Garth takes on the role of an ethic correction necessary to balance moral transgression. The narrative presents her as a straightforward, cheerful young woman, whose relations with others are marked by a sincere uprightness. Although she loves Fred, she insists that before she can marry him he must first take up an honest line of work and learn the real value of money. One night, while on his deathbed, Featherstone commands her to destroy the last version of his will. This request plunges her into a moral dilemma. Eliot skillfully uses the moral deliberation her heroine undergoes to illustrate what it means to take on a duty that includes a responsibility for the night. Shortly after midnight, Mary comes to watch over the sleep of the ailing man, but owing to the quiet of the room and its subdued light, she quickly abandons herself to recollections of the previous day. In her mind, she replays scenes that allow her to chuckle over the illusions harbored by those who believe they will come into a big inheritance once the miser dies. Still under the spell of her inner psychic theater, she hears Featherstone calling for her to come to his bedside, as though what was about to happen were a dramatic externalization of what she had just been imagining.
Sitting upright in his bed, the dying man has already produced a tin box and removed a key from it. He tells Mary to open the iron trunk in his closet and bring him the last version of his will so he can burn it. Although he offers to bribe her with money, Mary resists committing this illegal act because she sees her future days with Fred in her mind’s eye. Resolutely she asserts to the dying man, “[I] will not let the close of your life soil the beginning of mine” (352). Although she senses that her refusal will determine the fate of her beloved, she will not allow herself to be bribed. Although Featherstone wants to exploit the darkness of the night to keep this sudden change to his last will secret from others, Mary is only willing to act in the presence of others and in broad daylight. She uses the night to make certain that an action directed toward the everyday will prevail by determining destiny’s course on her own, against Featherstone’s explicit wishes. She forces the old miser to stick to the final version of his will, which will bring his suspicions of Fred to light.
After her dispute with Featherstone, Mary sits down in her chair again and doesn’t return to his bedside until dawn. Only then does she begin “questioning those acts of hers which had come imperatively and excluded all question in the critical moment” (353). At first, she sees the old man only vaguely, his body barely lit by a spark that flies into the room from the dying fire. Then she pulls back the curtains so that the quiet light of the sky falls onto the bed, revealing a macabre tableau vivant. Featherstone has died in his sleep. In his right hand he is holding the key to his safe, in his left all the gold and cash with which he had sought to bribe Mary. While night turned into day, he froze into a gesture of pathos, attesting to the way he wanted to determine the future of his estate to the end. Yet this body sculpture also brings to light the vanity of this egotistic illusion. The morning after his funeral, Mary will learn that the will she was meant to burn was the one denying Fred the inheritance he had been expecting. In the months to follow, she nevertheless insists that she could not have acted otherwise, while her friends assure her that the first will would not have been legally valid after the destruction of the second one anyway. Had she succumbed to temptation, she would only have carried the traces of nocturnal illusions into the day, rather than clearing up the false expectations of her bridegroom.
Many months later, a second man dies in Stone Court at night. The strange circumstances surrounding this death, for which Bulstrode is in part responsible, make it impossible for the allegedly respectable banker to return to his habitual everyday life. With the sudden appearance of John Raffles in Middlemarch, the sinister secrets from Bulstrode’s past threaten to catch up with him. Like the gangster in Tourneur’s
Out of the Past, this small-time crook knows about the dishonest deals with which Bulstrode made his fortune. By blackmailing his former partner, Raffles plunges him into moral chaos. Until this unfortunate reunion with his past, Bulstrode was able to believe that, owing to his self-imposed penance, he had been forgiven for the crimes of his early years. Raffles seems to him to be a demonic spirit, sent to undermine the life he has since fashioned for himself as a charitable benefactor of the Middlemarch community. In turn, Eliot’s narrative positions the shabby crook as the doppelganger of the reputable banker to expose his self-delusion to the light of her moral judgment. As a self-righteous Puritan, Bulstrode is willing to acknowledge his guilt in private and pay out the inheritance that he morally owes Will Ladislaw. Yet he wants to continue concealing the dark side of his wealth from his fellow citizens. Raffles is only able to work his terrible magic because Bulstrode allows himself to be drawn into a morally dubious secret transaction. He prefers to pay extortion money to Raffles rather than publicly acknowledge his wrongdoings.
Bulstrode allows Raffles to move into Stone Court, where his tormentor’s sudden illness gives him an idea how to liberate himself from his extortionist. If Raffles were to disappear forever, he tells himself, he would no longer have to fear that his dark past might be revealed to his wife and peers. Like Featherstone, Bulstrode seeks the protection of the night to transgress the law. Although he believes he is protecting his good reputation, he actually arranges for himself a future in which everything that he wants to keep in the dark breaks out into the open. Lydgate tells him that the slightest intake of alcohol could be fatal to the patient. Bulstrode chooses not to pass this information on to the servant woman who tends the sick man at night. To alleviate his pain, Raffles ask for some cognac and Bulstrode silently gives her the key to his wine cabinet. The corpse that Bulstrode finds the next morning sets a wave of gossip in motion that will lead to a twofold disclosure. Soon everyone in Middlemarch knows about his background as a pawnbroker who made his fortune at the expense “of lost souls” (664). Because the other members of the city council also suspect that he expedited the death of his tormentor, he is compelled to step down from all public offices. Lydgate, to whom he had lent money in the hope that he would blindly sign the death certificate, becomes the collateral damage of this fall from public grace. Lydgate’s reputation is tarnished by association.
Bulstrode, like Mary Garth, is faced with an impending death and undergoes moral deliberations
at night that would ultimately determine the course of all his future days. Mary was able to resist Featherstone’s temptation, thus bringing to light the dying miser’s hunger for power. However, Bulstrode gives in to the seduction of chance. Because the justification for his offense is based on self-deception, his nocturnal actions are not allowed to remain in the dark. In
Middlemarch, the night as stage for moral transformation serves to rigorously distinguish between nocturnal imaginations and an ethical insight gained in the darkness of the night. Seeking to determine someone else’s future by illegally changing one’s will or taking advantage of a coincidence to shorten someone else’s life—these actions belong to the realm of egoistic vanity that makes us the prisoners of false dreams of self-determination. This night side of moral imagination is tantamount to a flight into irresponsibility. To reach the end of the night of all self-deceptions means consciously deciding against any dream that sheds only the light of one’s own demands and desires onto the world. According to Eliot, we are responsible for those whose lot is interwoven with ours even if, or especially when, they cannot be readily included in our own dreams.
Although both Mary Garth’s and Bulstrode’s need to awaken from egoistic self-delusions is condensed into a decisive nocturnal scene, the heroine of Middlemarch must experience a sustained moral chaos before she can reach a moral decision at night that will shape all her future days. On her honeymoon in Rome, Dorothea already senses the lightless confusion into which her marriage has cast her. She is compelled to recognize that Casaubon has penetrated so deeply into the past with his research that he hardly lives in the present. She compares his grim determination to expose the mistakes of other mythographers with a psychic night into which no light can penetrate: “With his taper stuck before him, he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight” (230). She begins to suspect the nullity of the scholarship to which she, as his wife and companion, has chosen to devote herself. Her admiration soon turns to disappointment, leading Casaubon to detect in his young bride a critical gaze that accuses him of his shortcomings. Owing to this suspicion, he increasingly shuts Dorothea out of his work, which triggers in her an internal rage that manifests itself in a mixture of rejection and desperate mental exhaustion. She is forced to recognize that her dream of bathing in the light of his knowledge has proved to be a terrible self-delusion.
Like her husband, Dorothea also turns away from the ordinary day, withdrawing instead into her own emotional darkness. At this point in her marriage she is still too proud to relinquish the egoistic will to knowledge her marriage to Casaubon seemed to promise. She stubbornly tells herself that she must stand by her husband, even while abandoning herself to deep despair, mourning her thwarted expectations. Having returned to Lowick Manor, the shared life of this couple is soon conducted under the sign of a double emotional blackout. The newlywed scholar withdraws into his sullen research and stubbornly remains in his library until late in the night, whereas his young wife gives up everything that used to get her out of the house. She neither goes riding nor does she pursue her housing plans for the farmers she used to visit. Instead, she is focused exclusively on helping Casaubon burrow into the writings of a dark past. With utter clarity she recognizes her marriage as a “moral imprisonment.” Her “blooming full-pulsed youth,” appears to her to stand in a “chill, colourless, narrowed landscape,” comparable to a “ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight.” Her sustained melancholy, fostered by the bleak pressure her husband imposes on her, corresponds to a dissolution of her everyday. All the hopes she had placed in her marriage to a man of letters have dissipated into fleeting memories, all existence reduced to “the struggle out of a nightmare in which every object was withering and shrinking away from her. Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted, was deadened” (308).
Casaubon remains strangely untroubled by any disappointed expectations regarding his young wife, and instead projects onto her his own self-doubts, which arise from his grim desire to make his research uncontestable. In an exaggerated manner he understands Dorothea’s criticism as a judgment that, if he were not to suppress it, would spread to others. Although he is incapable of openly admitting his own deficiencies, he has long since recognized that he has failed as a scholar. Projecting this discontent onto his young wife, he begins to suspect that she is betraying him. He imagines that a romance is developing between Dorothea and his relative Will Ladislaw, whom they met by chance in Rome. Casaubon’s irrational jealousy is meant to cover up his fallibility as a scholar. The dizzy spell he has in the library one evening allows him to strengthen his emotional hold over Dorothea. Although he cannot determine her judgment of his work, he can force her to be loyal to him as his wife. Because Lydgate has warned her that all emotional excitement should be avoided, Dorothea imagines that any dispute with her husband might cost him his life.
The night this couple shares with each other grows ever deeper as Casaubon increasingly withdraws into his solipsism and the jealousy this nourishes; meanwhile Dorothea, with equal persistence, basks in her melancholy. Withdrawing from her responsibility for her ordinary everyday, she is guilty of a flight into a dark imaginary. She conceives the possibility of occasionally meeting Will, in turn, as “a lunette opened in the wall of her prison, giving her a glimpse of the sunny air” (396), even though this vision does not impel her to return to the work she has abandoned—the renovation of her garden and the housing plan for the farmers. Although she recognizes her husband’s failure with a steady gaze, she tarries with him in their gloomy library, dutifully checking passages in a reference work or copying his notes so as to spare his eyes. Dorothea’s melancholy thus proves to be as much a nocturnal self-delusion as Casaubon’s jealousy and she, too, embarks on a proxy struggle to distract herself from her marital disaster and their shared disappointment that his scholarship will never see the light of day.
The scheme Dorothea devises in the dim light of her new home shifts from planning new homes for her tenants to straightening out the financial affairs of Will Ladislaw. Because his grandmother was disinherited, the family’s entire fortune passed on to Casaubon. Dorothea now tries to persuade her husband to change his will. She wants the portion of his assets that has come to her by marriage to be transferred to Will instead, thus securing for him the income to which he is morally, if not legally, entitled. If the lunette that has opened in the wall of her marital prison is connected to his person, she wants to devise for him a lighter future, hoping to lighten her own melancholy as well. The recognition that this act is both her and her husband’s duty comes to her “like a sudden letting in of daylight, waking her from her previous stupidity and incurious self-absorbed ignorance about her husband’s relationship to others” (408). Worried that this suggestion might unduly excite her husband, she waits for nightfall to speak to him. Because he suffers from insomnia, Casaubon has taken to getting up from his bed in the middle of the night and waking his wife as well, asking her to read to him. On this particular night, however, Dorothea is too excited by her new resolve to fall asleep. Instead, she lies awake for an hour in the dark, waiting for Casaubon to reawaken. Once he has done so, instead of reaching for her book and even before lighting a candle, she begins to speak about money.
Although her intention is to produce clarity that night, she only succeeds in deepening the couple’s emotional chaos. Casaubon resolutely forbids her to interfere in his financial affairs and Dorothea unexpectedly finds herself “shrouded in darkness (…) in a tumult of conflicting emotions.” Holding back her own anger, she listens to his breathing “with a dumb inward cry for help to bear this nightmare of a life in which every energy was arrested by dread” (410). No further words pass between them that night and instead they lie silently next to each other for hours in the dark, both unable to find sleep. If Dorothea had pinned her hope for a brighter future on the idea that Will’s financial situation might be improved with her aid, this nocturnal conversation once more darkens her own days. She is no longer allowed to receive Will as a visitor to Lowick. The more she finds herself hedged in by her marriage, the more passionately she clings to the moral condition that, by “desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of the light and making the struggle with darkness narrower” (427).
This nocturnal conversation has also given Casaubon a new, albeit darker faith. In his suspicion-clouded world, there is room only for a companion who admires him and mitigates his self-doubts by overlooking his deficiencies. She is meant to encourage his self-deception that he can keep his failure as a scholar from the public eye forever. A wife who judges him critically, thereby underscoring his own self-questioning, can only be demonic. His blind jealousy leads Casaubon to see fault in Dorothea, in the hope that the certainty of her guilt might compensate for his own self-doubts. In the figure of his nephew Will, this logic of repudiation takes on concrete shape. Jealousy offers relief. Given this change in their situation, the fact that Dorothea no longer loves him unconditionally seems to have nothing to do with his own intimation of his fallibility as a scholar. He can tell himself instead that Dorothea now sees him in a negative light because Will has managed to set her against him. Of one thing Casaubon is now certain: After his demise, his wife will defy his wishes and betray him with his nephew.
By comparing his jealousy to a narrowing of his vision, Eliot foregrounds the desperate scholar’s night side of the psyche, thereby also giving voice to her own moral judgment: “Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, leaving only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as the self” (456). Something has been born from the nocturnal conversation of this couple, but it is not the clarification Dorothea intended. By means of a codicil added to his will, Casaubon tries to prevent any marriage between Dorothea and Will beyond his death. Should they marry, Dorothea will lose her inheritance. In fact, by changing his testament, Casaubon makes public his suspicions regarding her loyalty to him. Their clandestine nocturnal conversation becomes an urgent affair of the day, not least of all because he has recently learned from Lydgate that he is suffering from a fatal heart condition. Eliot depicts a man who can no longer disregard the certainty that he must die to make a more general point about the ubiquity of death, by having recourse to the allegorical image of the night as mother. “Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death,” her narrator explains. “When the commonplace ‘We must all die’ transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness ‘I must die—and soon’, then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel.” To this description of death’s necessity she adds, “he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first” (461).
Yet the immediate desire of her embittered mythographer “was not for divine communion and light divested of earthly conditions” (462). Faced with his impending death, Christian faith reverts to magical thinking. Casaubon’s gaze is not directed toward the light of salvation, but at the grim children of Nyx, distrust, discord, and destruction. Vehemently he casts off Dorothea, enters his library, and shuts himself in “alone with his sorrow.” By refusing to allow his wife to share his suffering, he continues to keep her in the dark. The “serene glory of that afternoon” may fall into her bedroom through a bay window, yet Dorothea, who has retreated there to indulge in her private misery, throws herself on a chair “not heeding that she was in the dazzling sun-rays.” As she struggles to find words to express her confused anger, she blocks out all ordinary daylight: “What have I done—what am I—that he should treat me so? He never knows what is on my mind—he never cares.” Still, the fact that her scene of moral deliberation is illuminated by dazzling sunlight even if she does not perceive it, while Casaubon tarries in the darkness of his library, corresponds to the different attitude both entertain toward their affects. Dorothea realizes that an emotional separation from her husband is inevitable, yet she does not want to stand in the way of a final clarification of their misunderstanding. “In the miserable light she saw her own and her husband’s solitude—how they walked apart so that she was obliged to survey him” (463), and as the sun grows low, self-pity turns into angry accusations against her husband.
Because her husband has sent word that he is dining in the library, she waits as the world grows dark and still around her, noting that the noble habit of her soul reasserts itself. Focused entirely on her anguish, she can view her anger with sad remonstrance and recognize “it cost her a litany of pictured sorrows and of silent cries that she might be the mercy for those sorrows—but the resolved submission did come” (464). She leaves her bedroom and waits outside in the darkness for his “coming up-stairs with a light in his hand.” Casaubon is startled to find her there and yet, in the middle of this night, a kind, quiet understanding passes between them. Dorothea’s sudden appearance in the candlelight is so unexpected that she does not appear to him as the phantom of his jealousy, but as a person separate from all egoistic imaginings. He can take her hand in his and walk together with her along the broad corridor, while she feels “something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature” (465). In Middlemarch, the night emerges as the stage for moral deliberations and insight, begetting two opposing attitudes toward the days to come. On the one hand, the night produces dark imaginings such as ambition, jealousy, or anxiety; it feeds egoistic dreams that lock the afflicted person in a blind solipsism refusing to acknowledge the separateness of the other. On the other hand, the night yields that mystic clarity that brings with it a correction of one’s moral compass, insofar as it entails a surmounting of narcissistic needs.
A few weeks later, the two use the night to address one last time the misunderstanding that the “troublesome speck of the self” has cast on their union. Although an egotistical dissolution of the world seems to prevail, the darkness of the night offers them the opportunity to articulate what they dare not discuss during the day. This time Casaubon is the one who starts the conversation, wishing to extort from Dorothea the reassurance that she trusts him implicitly. His wife, who had already fallen asleep, is “awakened by a sense of light, which seemed to her at first like a sudden vision of sunset after she had climbed a steep hill” (517). In the candlelight she sees Casaubon sitting by the fire, waiting for her to awaken. He lies down beside her, extinguishes the candle, and only after it is completely dark does he make his ominous appeal. She is to commit herself, in the case of his death, to carry out his wishes. He wants to know whether “you will avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire” (518). To her retort that she cannot make a promise when she is ignorant of what she is binding herself to, he replies, “But you would use your own judgment: I ask you to obey mine; you refuse” (519). He can only discard his suspicions if she consents blindly. He gives her no choice. Because she cannot bear the idea that she is not allowed to use her own judgment, she asks for a reprieve and promises to give him an answer the next day.
That night Casaubon falls asleep immediately after their nocturnal conversation has ended. Her refusal pacifies him, because he sees it as unequivocal proof that his suspicion is justified. Dorothea, by contrast, finds no sleep for four hours, subjecting herself to further moral deliberation. In the dark she hopes to find a way out of her uncertainty, given that the moral conflict inflicted on her by Casaubon only intensifies the chaos of her feelings. Ill and bewildered, she finally falls asleep, yet upon waking she is still unable to decide what her future days will be like. Mistakenly assuming that his request pertains to her continuing his scholarly work, she goes to find her husband in the library. Although she has the feeling that she is about to say “yes to her own doom” if she obliges herself to fulfill his secret demand, she also recognizes that “she was too weak, too full of dread at the thought of inflicting a keen-edged blow on her husband, to do anything but submit completely” (522). This flight into her all-too-familiar melancholy, born out of dread, does not yet constitute an ethical decision on which a new day might be founded. Instead, Dorothea, out of egoistic pity alone, is ready to pledge herself to the idea of continuing her husband’s work after his demise, even though the thought stifles her. Yet the night has also brought with it the idea that there might be a different form of awakening, even if at this point she is not yet willing or able to pursue this other thought.
It is utterly consistent with the moral imagination Eliot espouses that she does not allow her heroine to give her fateful word to her husband. Instead, Dorothea finds his corpse lying in the shrubbery where he had been walking. Caught in his magical thinking, his wife’s hesitation proved tantamount to Casaubon’s death sentence. Because Dorothea is not willing to subject herself to his command unconditionally, she cannot guarantee the stability of his world, ruled as it is by the law of egoistic desires. In that case, however, Casaubon is already as good as dead. His corpse merely signifies the logical conclusion to the gradual dissolution of his everyday reality under the auspices of the “troublesome speck” of his own ego. The revenge born from his jealous suspicion will continue to have its effect, carrying their nocturnal conversations into the day. The codicil he had appended to his testament specifying that Dorothea could inherit his fortune only as long as she does not marry Will Ladislaw, brings to light the night side of this marriage. The belated doubt that this legal document sheds on her wifely loyalty forces Dorothea to recognize she was deluded in her decision to continue his scholarship out of pity. Her insight into his deep-set jealousy justifies, in hindsight, the vehemence with which she eventually judged him; an anger that her false pity had sought to screen out again.
Yet like so many of Nyx’s children, vengeance is unpredictable. The codicil to his testament also gives a clear shape to the affection she harbors for Will. Up to this point, she had not allowed herself to imagine him as her lover. By using his will to publicly proclaim that he had long seen his nephew in this light, Casaubon produces the very conditions that will make a marriage between his wife and Will possible. Because an egoistic flight into mourning offers her a double pleasure, Dorothea continues to live apart from the world, wearing her widow’s bonnet longer than custom requires. Shut away in the library that has now become her privileged refuge, she can indulge in fantasies of rebellion against her late husband, even while dreaming of her forbidden love for Will. Her melancholy does not, however, cloud her sense of justice. She speaks up on behalf of Lydgate, defending him against the charges that come up in light of the scandal surrounding his former patron Bulstrode. She leaves her house of mourning to visit his wife Rosamund to deliver the check with which Lydgate can free himself of his debt to the banker. Owing to her grief, she has “less outward vision than usual this morning”; her eyes are filled instead “with images of things as they had been and were going to be.” The scene she lights upon as she enters the living room thus appears to her as though it were the melodramatic continuation of her dream of mourning. She sees Will sitting on the sofa next to Rosamund, whose flushed tearfulness gives a new brilliancy to her face. Will, leaning toward her, is “clasping both her upraised hands in his” while speaking “with a low-toned fervor” (832).
Overcome by the terrible revelation of what she takes to be a certainty, Dorothea fills in the details of the scene she has witnessed. As though the spirit of her deceased husband had taken possession of her with his dark distrust, she falls prey to fundamental doubts regarding the man in whom she had placed her hopes for a new day. Briefly mentioning the letter she had wanted to deliver in person, she glances at the two people who, suddenly aware of her presence, break their intimate pose. Then she abruptly leaves the room again. Overwhelmed by a feeling of contempt for Will, she has arrived at her night’s end. Upon returning home, she locks herself in her bedroom and abandons herself to an all-encompassing anguish. At the height of her egoistic self-absorption she admits to herself, in the past tense, what she had not dared to articulate in the present tense: “Oh, I did love him!” Sobbing, she mourns the loss of confidence she had placed in Will since her honeymoon in Rome. Once more she engages in a psychic battle in the middle of the night, comparable to a mystic struggle for spiritual illumination: “she besought hardness and coldness and aching weariness to bring her relief from the mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish: she lay on the bare floor and let the night grow cold around her; while her grand woman’s frame was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child” (844).
Two images of her forbidden lover emerge from this night. Because of the magical thinking that has taken possession of her inner eye, she at first believes she sees before her the “bright creature” she had entrusted with her confidence, because he had “come to her like the spirit of morning visiting the dim vault where she sat as the bride of a worn-out life.” She stretches out her arms toward this dream apparition, and “with a full consciousness which had never awakened before” she admits to herself her desire for his touch. This first image soon vanishes and is replaced by one representing her jealousy of the previous morning. Will stands aloof, signifying her deluded certainty that he had deliberately deceived her; he is “persistently with her, moving wherever she moved.” This second apparition embodies “a changed belief, exhausted of hope, a detected illusion” (845). Both the hope for a new day she had cherished in the past, as well as the disappointment that threatens to plunge her into a deep melancholia, take shape in these spectral apparitions that come to her in the middle of the night, “two images—two living forms, that tore her heart in two, as if it had been the heart of a mother who seems to see her child divided by a sword” (844). The insight that something has come to an end concerns Dorothea’s egoistic appropriation of her clandestine lover. To her nocturnal imagination, Will appears only as the reflection of her own desire, not as another human being separate from such projections.
For Eliot, Dorothea’s indulgence in her romantic disappointment represents an egoistic flight into the imaginary comparable to moral irresponsibility. This judgment of her heroine is rendered visible by virtue of the fact that the mystic clarity this night will afford her does not occur until both living forms have vanished. In the course of her anguished self-meditation, Dorothea loses all energy, “even for her loud-whispered cries and moans,” and subsides helplessly into sobs, until “on the cold floor she sobbed herself to sleep” (845). Only when words separate from affect, like the day separating from the formless night, can she reach the ethical recognition that will allow her to wake to a new condition, from a night in which all hope seems to have been destroyed. At the height of her solitude, as she lies abandoned on the cold floor of her bedchamber and wrestles with her grief, she breaks with the nocturnal logic of solipsistic doubt that had threatened to extinguish all future moral life. She awakes “in the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around her,” and recognizes “with the clearest consciousness that she was looking into the eyes of sorrow.” Her soul seems to have been “liberated from its terrible conflict,” able finally to accept her grief as “a lasting companion,” willing to make it “a sharer in her thoughts.”
With dawn, thoughts come quickly that allow her to “live through that yesterday morning deliberately” (845), and she is now able to dwell on every detail. If she experienced the actual scene with an inward vision, she can now reappraise all previous impressions with composed clarity. The emotional distance from her egoistic dreams—from her deceptive hope and blind anger—won over the course of the night, allows her to finally judge herself. She realizes that her “first outleap of jealous indignation and disgust,” had caused her to condemn Rosamund and Will unjustly, enveloping them in “her burning scorn, and it seemed to her as if Rosamond were burned out of her sight for ever.” Dorothea can now tell herself that, because fate has woven her lot together with both that of Lydgate and Will, she is under an obligation to more than her own selfish needs. In dawn’s early light, which corresponds to her spiritual awakening from her sustained mourning, she can now clearly distinguish between those figures her melancholia shaped and the actual people who exist separate from her imagination. The clarification she finds at night’s end means she must acknowledge her responsibility to those three lives “whose contact with hers laid an obligation on her.” She can now formulate the question that will lead out of mourning into the dawn of a new day: “What should I do—how should I act now, this very day if I could clutch my own pain, and compel it to silence, and think of those three!”
To take responsibility for the night means recognizing that she no longer requires a flight into nocturnal imagination. Having reached her night’s end, Dorothea is able to achieve what is impossible for Featherstone, Bulstrode, and Casaubon. She can distance herself from her mourning and all the imaginings it brought forth, and instead acknowledge her sympathetic participation in the world at hand. Dorothea recognizes that “it had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light piercing into the room.” To ask oneself how one should act—for others, not oneself—in the day, is tantamount to an ethical illumination that must be set up at night, so as to bear fruits in the day. Dorothea can now consciously cast off her inward gaze and open herself to the world outside. She pulls back the curtains and looks out toward the stretch of road that she can see from her window. The scene she encounters is not one produced by her imagination, even though it corresponds to the recognition she has won that night. This living form offers an answer to the question regarding the direction her action should take.
On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining (846).
This living image of the Holy Family walking steadily into the dawn that announces the beginning of an ordinary day helps Dorothea to finally leave her house of mourning. At the end of her journey through the night, she is seized by the manifold awakening of the world around her. Melancholia reverts to her acceptance of the business at hand. As her psychic mourning transforms into dawn, she moves into a state of ecstasy. Although it does not yet seem quite clear to her what she will resolve to do that day, the certainty that she could achieve something “stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness” (847). To signify that she is finally willing to relinquish her egoistic mourning, she takes off her widow’s crêpe and dons her new bonnet before she goes to Rosamund’s home a second time. Now that she can see beyond her own particular concerns, she can help herself by helping the woman whose life is bound up with hers. Lydgate’s wife is surprised that Dorothea, from whom she expects only jealousy, has come to see her, but she accepts her offer of an honest conversation. Because her alleged rival is willing to confide in her, Rosamund offers up a confession of her own that explains away all misconceptions of the previous day. Will had not come to her seeking love, but to confess his love for Dorothea to the only woman in whom he felt he could confide.
In giving up her melancholic inward gaze, Dorothea gains the wider perspective on the world that had been screened out by the “troublesome speck” of her own ego. Rosamund’s disclosure answers her question about what she should resolve to do that day. Rosamund tells Will about their conversation and sends him to see Dorothea who, liberated from all jealousy, assures him that she no longer harbors any doubts regarding his affection for her. Even though this conversation takes place in the morning hours, an incipient storm envelops the two lovers in an increasingly darkening sky and the kiss with which they seal their shared future is illuminated by flashes of lightning. Because Dorothea no longer perceives him as a “bright creature” promising to lighten her dull existence, she can also dissipate the false idea he has of her. He had forbidden himself to show her his love, fearing she might lose her fortune. Now she can confess that she does not need this money for her happiness, and in so doing she disperses the last piece of night in the day. In visiting Rosamund, she had taken off her widow’s weeds; now she fully leaves her house of mourning. She bids farewell to the false expectations and disappointments associated with the manor house, whose name indicates that it was a low wick on the candle of insight. Relieved by the codicil to her late husband’s testament, she gladly relinquishes her inheritance and with it all moral obligation to her late husband. “We could live quite well on my fortune,” she assures Will, “I want so little” (870).
With this paean to the ordinary everyday, Eliot’s heroine disappears from our sight. Dorothea will live an inconspicuous life with Will, dedicating herself completely to her role as wife and mother; she will never regret having forgone her social status and her fortune on account of this second marriage. Just as Dorothea had no eye for the actual world outside while living in her nocturnal house of mourning, the night similarly withdraws into this ordinary everyday. Eliot has a ready answer to any reproach suggesting that her heroine, given her qualities and advantages, could have accomplished more. It may be true that Dorothea’s finely touched spirit was no longer widely visible and that her full nature “spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.” But the “effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.” The final sentence of
Middlemarch, which brings the narrative to the end of its night passage, draws both the narrator and her readers to the vanishing point of the world that her language has shed light on and ends with the image of a gravestone. “That things are not so ill with you and me as they might be,” the narrator concludes, “is owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (896).
At the end of Middlemarch, all interplay between night and day is contained in a willingness to acknowledge the ordinary, which includes the continual shift from day to night and back to day. It is no longer illuminated by the external light the narrator’s gaze sheds on this world. For Eliot’s characters an other day begins, which, in a refiguration of Blanchot’s notion of the other night (autre nuit) of writing, also makes up the vanishing point of all aesthetic compassion. Eliot’s narrator shed light on the community of Middlemarch with her visualizing language, but now that she has reached the end of her tale she casts her characters back into darkness. Neither the public nor the author takes any further notice of their unheroic actions. It was the night side of morality—the transgressions and the deliberations it calls forth—that attracted our attention and sustained our interest. Yet although Dorothea vanishes from our sight, Eliot resolutely insists on one point: From within the darkness of her inconspicuous life, her heroine will have an effect whose good will move beyond the confines of the fictional world. Although she has vanished from our sight, Dorothea’s unnoticed deeds affect us as well. At the end of Middlemarch, the power of the night is sustained. Everything dissolves into a night’s end, which is not the other of the day. The other day of ordinary existence lived unnoticed by the public eye consists precisely in a world that has withdrawn from our gaze because poetic language no longer illuminates it, even although it contains the matrix for any future aesthetic shaping of the extraordinary. For George Eliot, there is a truth at midnight and a truth at midday.
