Annual Essay

Nicolette Maimone
Monday, March 25, 2013
Junior Year Annual Essay

All in the Family

Families come in all sizes and forms, and everybody was at least born into one, whether they remain in communion with it throughout their lives or not.  Something so integral and universal to human experience as family life can easily be assumed to have a fairly great impact on the development of those individuals who are in the family.  This impact can be seen emotionally, mentally, and philosophically.  The impact that is made on these facets of the people involved comes through not only the personalities of the people in the family, but in the kinds of relationships they have to one another.

George Eliot's Middlemarch follows the lives of many intertwining families through a few-year period that is revealed to be one of immense change in the lives of many characters.  The characters' lives are connected not only be geographic proximity and neighborliness, but by the fact that many of them are related to each other by blood or marriage.  The family ties are often complex, but for the purposes of this essay, I will use "family structure" or "family unit" to refer to those related by blood who live together in one household.  It is also the case that my focus will be on the second generation in any such family unit, as they are those in whom we are more likely to witness development.

When someone speaks of a family, the most common structure that comes to mind is that of two parents and some number of children.  In Middlemarch we see two very different iterations of this structure in the Vincy and Garth families.  The Vincys have a number of children, two of whom are prominent characters in the novel.  They are of a fairly high class for Middlemarch society, and at the beginning of the time period that the book’s storyline covers, the Vincy family is -- or at least appears -- well off.  “They were old manufacturers, and had kept a good house for three generations, in which there had naturally been much intermarrying with neighbours more or less decidedly genteel” (pg 96).  The Vincys’ reputed affluence not only influences the readers’ perceptions of them, but even deludes their children, Fred and Rosamond, into believing that concern over tight finances will never trouble them and they can live as luxuriously as they please at all times.  "The Vincys lived in an easy profuse way, not with any new ostentation, but according ot the family habits and traditions, so that the children had no standard of economy, and the elder ones retained some of their infantine notion that their father might pay for anything if he would" (pg 230).  We do get our first hint that this is not the case from a visiting relative of Mrs. Vincy's brother-in-law, who says of Fred and Rosamond's father, "he's been losing money for years, though nobody'd think so, to see him go coursing and keeping open house as they do" (pg 106), and her assertion is seconded by the aforementioned brother-in-law's taunt to Fred that "He'll never have much to leave you" (pg 135).

Fred and Rosamond Vincy are not in all ways similar people.  We find, shortly after being introduced to them, that Rosamond believes “brothers are so unpleasant” (pg 98), and that Fred and Rosy are wont to quarrel over such trivial matters as the difference between slang and proper English (pg 99) and the agreeability of certain foods (pg 100).  However, over the course of this series of squabbles, the reader reaches the conclusion that Fred is essentially teasing his less linguistically astute sibling, rather than being truly invested in the debate.  Despite his cleverness and education, "wisdom is not his strong point, but rather affection and sincerity" (pg 514).  We also find that Fred is capable of going at certain endeavours in life -- hunting, flute-playing, basic leisure -- with “much ambition and irrepressible hopefulness” (pg 103) simply “because [he] like[s] it” (pg 100).  All around, he is a jovial and friendly, if somewhat unobservant and lacking street-smarts.

On the other hand, Rosamond, at our first meeting, is revealed to be much more concerned by the propriety of appearances.  She is opposed to “disagreeable” things, such as the smell of grilled bone and brothers.  She disapproves of “slang” language, so much so that she will even correct her own mother on use of certain phrases she considers "vulgar" (pgs 99-100).  She also "would have expressed the prettiest surprise and disapprobation if she had heard that another young lady had been detected in that immodest prematureness" of making plans for a married future with a man whom she has yet no solid reason to believe will take that kind of interest in her (pg 268), though Rosy herself is happy to make such "rapid forecast and rumination" (pg 268), which suggests that it is much more an interest in the appearance of propriety than an interest in propriety itself that drives her to these expressions of discontent with what is vulgar.  Still, despite her lack of tolerance on certain subjects, she is considered by Lydgate, and possibly others as the picture of

perfect womanhood...an accomplished creature who venerated his high musings and momentous labours and would never interfere with them; who would create order in the home and accounts with still magic, yet keep her fingers ready to touch the lute and transform life into romance at any moment; who was instructed to the true womanly limit and not a hair's-breadth beyond -- docile, therefore, and ready to carry out behests which came from beyond that limit.  (pg 352)

Though some of these expectations are to be disappointed, notably those of creating order in the accounts and being docile with regard to his behests, they give us a fair account of who Rosamond presents herself to be.

One fairly major similarity that Fred and Rosamond display, admittedly at different points in our acquaintance with them, is their lack of skill in managing finances.  On Fred's side, this is made apparent not long after our introduction to him.  Because of his enjoyment of betting on billiards and horse races and lack of enthusiasm for any of the professions that are considered appropriate for him, his expenses quickly surpass his means, as we find out when he is revealed to be heavily in debt (pg 134).  He also is not particularly in a position to begin rectifying his financial situation, for he has not settled to any profession, but has in fact failed his final examination to become a clergyman as his father wishes.  He also "was of a hopeful disposition" and "it always seemed to him highly probably that something or other -- he did not necessarily conceive what -- would come to pass enabling him to pay in due time" (pg 134), a belief that is sadly disappointed a number of times, first when some bets he made on races were losses (pg 234), and again when a horse from which he intended to profit became unsaleable (pg 241).

Rosamond, by contrast, does not experience financial trouble until some time into her married life, when she, like her parents before her, keeps "open house" (pg 106) despite the fact that her and Dr. Lydgate's income does not support their purchasing the luxuries she has been accustomed to and that, in fact, comprise the chief joys of her life.  "In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in" (pg 701).  Much of her motivation for marrying Lydgate in the first place was that she believed he would take her from "the faces and figures she had always been used to -- the various irregular profiles and gaits and turns of phrase distinguishing those Middlemarch young men she has known as boys" (pg 97).

The major difference we see between the Vincy children, with regard to their pecuniary straights, is the motivations and methods by which they overcome them.  Dorothea eventually manages to turn Rosamond's mind on the subject of marriage.  The self-centered young wife's initial "discontent in her marriage was due to the conditions of marriage itself, to its demand for self-suppression and tolerance" (pg 753).  During the visit of the selfless widow -- once dutifully submissive wife -- however, Rosy realizes that "marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love" that exists "even if we loved someone else better than--than those we were married to" and that "there is something even awful in the nearness it brings" (pg 797).  This is likely her arriving at the conclusion her husband has already formed, "that his marriage [is] of course a bond which must affect his choice about everything" (pg 796).

Fred's shift in concern for money matters is much more multi-faceted and takes place over a longer time, but -- like his sister's -- it is related (albeit more loosely) to marriage.  First, he unwittingly forces the family of the woman he loves and would like to marry to spend their savings paying off a debt he had incurred and could not pay off in time, as his plans for doing so fell through.  The unnecessary hardship visited on a family who can barely afford it and did nothing to deserve the loss "made Fred feel for the first time something like the tooth of remorse" (pg 248).

Second, the lesson is reinforced the hard way that -- contrary to his beliefs (pg 134) up to this point -- money is not simply going to fall into his lap when there is need, when his uncle-in-law Mr. Featherstone revokes the property he had originally planned to leave Fred Vincy in his will (pg 336-338).  Fred had been planning to use some of his potential inheritance in rectifying the situation he had put the Garths in by his earlier carelessness.  "He had thought that instead of needing to know what he should do, he should by this time know that he needed to do nothing...that he should be able at once to pay back Mr. Garth, and that Mary could no longer have any reason for not marrying him.  And all this was to have come without study or other inconvenience" (pg 342-3).

The result of these first two steps in his transformation leads to Fred's return to school, which is seen by his father to be the only path to appropriate employment for him.  However, both because Fred considers himself unfit for life as a clergyman, and because Mary will not have him if he does become one, it is an insufficient measure for him to take, and does not complete his transformation.  The schooling does prove, and perhaps even creates, his ability to apply himself to tasks -- for though we have already known he is clever.  Still, it does not provide him immediately with an income.  This comes only when Mary's father, Mr. Garth, decides to take Fred under his wing and teach the young man what Mr. Garth calls "business", which is not the business we think of today with desks and paperwork and money transactions, but is rather "a chance of getting a bit of the country into good fettle, as they say, and putting men into the right way with their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving and solid building done -- that those who are living and those who come after will be the better for" (pg 403).  Despite Mr. Vincy's outrage at the waste of Fred's college education, the "business" that Mr. Garth speaks of is significantly more conducive to Fred's long-term happiness than we as the readers have any right to suspect life as a clergyman would have been.  Mary does not refuse him her hand in marriage, and he does not have to spend his life feeling unfit for his profession.  As Mr. Garth says, "you must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin.  And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else.  You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well" (pg 562) and so Fred comes to do these two things and to marry the woman he has always loved.

The woman Fred eventually marries, Mary Garth, comes from a very similar family structure.  Like the Vincys, the Garths dwell in a household that is led by two parents and includes some number of children: six, total, though only one -- Mary -- figures prominently in our narrative.  The Garth family is not of so high a social class as the Vincys, nor do they make such a show of affluence.  In fact, we know that Mr. Garth has something of a bad habit of taking on work for free, which strains the family finances.  Mrs. Garth does her part as well as she can, multitasking so that she can combine her housewifely duties with the added responsibilities of teaching some of the local children grammar and history and such to bring in a little extra to save up for her own children's higher education (pg 242-3).

Mary herself seems to remain a fairly steady sort of character throughout Middlemarch.  Her relationship with Fred is probably the most dynamic part of her, and that changes mostly in proportion to (and therefore probaly as a result of) his transformations, which we've discussed above.  We know they had already plighted some form of troth with a makeshift ring made from an umbrella when they were children (pg 517), though, so in a way even their eventual matrimony isn't all that much of a divergence from their previous relationship.  For the most part, we see Mary as a steadfast employee and loyal daughter who "would not be happy without doing her duty" (pg 401).  She is also a very sensible, almost completely unromantic sort of girl when we begin our acquaintance with her.  She does not allow her fondness for Fred Vincy to sway her from her knowledge that there are some circumstances under which their life together could not be a happy one, despite their mutual love: if he had become a member of the clergy, for example.  Yet one ought not suppose she is at all times grave and stoic; she can in fact display a "sparkle of playfulness...which made its modesty more charming" (516).  Once the forbidding circumstances are no more, her lifelong affection for Fred is given sufficient rein that the young couple "achieved a solid mutual happiness" (pg 832).

A wholly different type of family which we observe in Middlemarch is that of the Misses Brooke and their uncle.  The sisters, Dorothea and Celia, are fairly different individuals, in much the same way that pairs of siblings often are.  The elder, Dorothea, is a young woman who is fairly Puritanical in her eschewing of trinkets and luxuries.  Her sister accuses her of "see[ing] what nobody else sees...yet you never see what is quite plain" (pg 36).  She is also demure in all her thoughts as to the role she will have to perform for whatever man does eventually find himself in a valid place of authority over her -- such as that of her husband -- "because it was [her] duty" (pg 736), though at the same time she has strong opinions and makes plans she wishes to implement, even though in society such as that we see in Middlemarch in the 1830s, that is regarded as an inappropriate pasttime of a young woman of her station.  This dichotomy between seemly womanly subordination and rebelliousness against societal norms and expectations has been called an "emotional extremism" by some, including Mr. Ludwig, and I agree.  She also "likes giving up" according to her sister (pg 18), though there is always some question as to whether one can like giving up, since - if it were something she liked -- would no longer be giving up, as it would therefore actually be self-indulgence (pg 19).  However, that discussion is not really in the purview of this essay.

Her younger sister Celia, on the other hand, is a vivacious, moderately worldly girl.  Celia is perhaps not so clever or lofty of thought as her sister, but she is seen by her neighbors as having rather more "common sense" (pg 7) than the elder.  She is "not impulsive" and does not "talk with energy and emphasis" (pg 32).  Where Dorothea's greatest aspiration in life is "since wrongs existed, ...that her husband should be in the thick of a struggle against them, and that she should give him wifely help" (pg 836), Celia finds it suffiecient to keep her household, since she believes that "where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central posing force" (pg 489).  She wants more to do with "administering what she thought a sobering dose of fact" (pg 490).

Sisters' having such opposing personalities is a fairly familiar theme in literature as well as in my experience.  It may be a question entirely of  the inherently different natures of two unique individuals, or there may be a conscious and purposeful attempt to create distinct identities, rather than to be known only as each others' twins or shadows.  In either case, it is commonly found that two sisters "should never admire the same people" (pg 49) or should be of differing temperaments or enjoy different pasttimes.  It is particularly interesting about the Brookes, though, that their strict dichotomy of personality has continued in such a normal-seeming vein despite their having spent much of their lives being passed from relatives' house to relatives' house, eventually settling -- about a year before our meeting them -- with their uncle.  One would imagine that in this kind of homelessness, two people would cling to each other as the only constant bulwark against the world so full of strangers.  The girls might easily assimilate facets of each others' characters in an attempt to continue to feel the closeness of sisterhood despite their lack of a nuclear family structure.

This lack is perhaps the most felt when Dorothea makes up her mind to marry, first Mr. Casaubon and later Mr. Ladislaw.  Despite the fact that their uncle has been made their guardian, he is still not their father-figure, either biologically or as the result of a long-standing relationship of that sort.  Despite many of their neighbours' both urging Mr. Brooke to his face to put a stop to these apparently ill-thought-out matches and discussing that "Brooke ought not to allow it" (pg 58), he does not feel that it is his place.  Yet, even if he is not truly the Misses Brooke's father, as Celia's future husband wonders when he first hears of the engagement, "what is a guardian for" (pg 58)?  Although Mr. Brooke asks if Dorothea has "thought enough about this" (pg 45) and says he "couldn't...have consented to a bad match" (pg 46), he does not seem to approve wholeheartedly at any point.  After Mr. Casaubon's death, it is felt by many of Dorothea's well-wishing relatives and acquaintances that "Dorothea was sacrificed once, because her friends were too careless" (pg 486).  One must wonder, of course, whether so headstrong and idealistic a girl was likely to be dissuaded from going through with her first marriage even by the force of parental dictate.  I think we can assume that had such dictate been handed down, she would have obeyed, for it is in her nature to be dutiful to those in legitimate power over her (pg 736), but had even a parent made such vague and barely suggestive arguments against her decided course, Dorothea would have continued in the same vein as she had originally wished and planned.

The Vincy siblings' paralleling financial difficulties seem to gesture to the idea that the two-parent, multiple-child family unit has given both of them some of their characteristics in common.  However, the fact that Mary Garth never experiences the same kinds of difficulties in life, despite her starting off in a more pecuniarily precarious position, suggests that it is more the family's circumstances than its form that determine this sort of development in those who live in the household.  The Vincy children do not become convinced of the stability of their finances and the idea that they will ever be capable of supporting a lifestyle of luxury and leisure by the fact of their having two parents at the head of their household.  They become convinced of this because their parents behave as though it is the truth, continuing to maintain an "open house" (pg 106) despite the fact that their breadwinner has been failing to win money sufficient for acquiring their choice kinds of bread -- which they keep getting even though it is beyond their means.

Mary and her siblings, on the other hand, have been exposed to parents who, though not particularly affluent or even careful about money in all cases, also do not make any show of pretending to be richer than they are.  Mr. Garth's fondness for taking on work pro bono has led the family into some financial difficulties, as does his good-natured willingness to back Fred Vincy in paying the boy's debts without absolute proof that the brunt of restitution will not fall on himself.  But the family saves where they can, and Mrs. and Mary Garth take on paying jobs and positions to supplement what Mr. Garth makes until his income is enough for the whole family.  The Garths do not hide their financial difficulty from their children, thus those children do not grow up assuming that no such hardship could touch them.

Dorothea and Celia Brooke, growing up without parents at all, are never known to us to have such difficulties of finance.  In fact, Dorothea claims that her inheritance from her first husband is "too much", and that she and her second husband, Mr. Ladislaw, can "live quite well on [her] own fortune" (pg 812).  Celia Brooke, admittedly, marries a man who is in no such financial straights as Rosamond Vincy's husband nor as Fred is prior to his apprenticeship and marriage.  Though she is not so Puritanical in dress, pasttime, and ornamentation as her sister, we have no reason to believe that she ever spends so exorbitantly on trinkets as to lead to there being trouble for her household on account of money.

Thus it seems more likely at this juncture that while family life likely does impact the expectations children form of the world, the actual scructure of a family unit -- that is, the manner in which those who live in the household are related -- does not seem to have a kind of impact that I can glean from the text of George Eliot's novel.  Middlemarch does follow a large number of individuals living in close proximity for a fairly lengthy period of time, but of these individuals, few are seen by us interacting with their family unit in a way that exposes its impact on their growth.  Still, the different natures present in the novel are sufficiently varying and are portrayed in such convincing depth that we can surely learn much about ourselves -- and by extension about our families -- from the inhabitants of Middlemarch.


*All quotes are from the Penguin edition of George Eliot's Middlemarch, edited by Rosemary Ashton and printed in 2003*