I revisited *Middlemarch* via Spotify this fall. I am not one of those virtuous people who listen to lots of audiobooks while they get chores done, that is too much going on for me. I like to listen to audiobooks and play videogames on the rare occasion when it is quiet enough around here for me to get away with it. (Sadly the Spotify one fell about five chapters short, but luckily I found them on Librivox, I just had to actually click through to the next chapter.)
Anyway, I love *Middlemarch* and was not at all disappointed by a revisit. The characters are vivid and even the more villainous ones are well-rounded. Even the arch-hypocrite Bulstrode has to wrestle with his conscience and we are not entirely unable to distance ourselves from his self-justifications. And the boring ordinary characters are deeply endearing--I honestly came a way with a lot of sympathy for Sir James and Cecy and for Mr. Brooke's colossal but warm-hearted bumbling.
When reading 19th century literature I always like to envision what the women would do if they *could* do things and how much this would help their frustrations. Dorothea, after a brief stint as Casaubon's graduate student teaching assistant (a relationship that would have suited both of them much better than marriage) would have gone into social work and wound up founding a large non-profit. I may be biased, but I believe Mary Garth would have been a wonderful small-town attorney: she has a strong sense of ethics, an ability to be tactful without being cowed, a very quick wit and tongue, and a deep loyalty to people and place. And she actually knows Latin. Rosalyn, I fear, would be an influencer, the kind that always wants everyone to give them things for free for "exposure." She might at least get some help for her postpartum depression, but fear it is too late to change her fundamental character.
Mostly 19th century novelists like to expose the follies and false limitations of society, but from the 21st century it is likely to induce a bit of nostalgia for having something resembling society at all--for actually knowing your neighbors and their forefathers and expecting to know their descendants. And of course, having to behave accordingly. Social constraints and the need to pay the bills are not all bad: They might have kept Lydgate and Dorothea from full self-actualization and the noble achievement of which they dreamed, but they also turned Ladislaw and Fred Garth into productive members of society instead of wastrels.
It seems to be a popular opinion about the book that Dorothea is too good for Ladislaw, or that she and Lydgate should have ended up together or something like that. I think this is quite wrong. She would have been as miserable with Lydgate as with Casaubon, because the primary issue with Casaubon is that he viewed Dorothea as a decorative furnishing for his own life, not as her own person with her own views. And Lydgate, though young and handsome and with a perhaps more useful ambition, views women exactly the same way. The fact that Rosalyn's independent goals and wishes are shallow and pointless does not change this fact. Sooner or later Dorothea would have thought about things differently than he would have, and he would have been as incensed by it as if the table suddenly declined to hold supper, and Dorothea would have been hurt and incomprehending because despite her wholehearted embrasure of model wifely duties, she is incapable of *being* a piece of furniture. Whereas Ladislaw, for all his weaknesses, simply values Dorothea as a person, for herself. Which doesn't mean no conflict, but does mean a chance of resolving it as fellow humans instead of locking themselves away into marital roles. Sure, she will be the dominant personality in their marriage, but then, why shouldn't she be? They are both happy that way.
