I am entirely bored and uninterested in the lives of the characters in Middlemarch (a book published 1871, about some small-town people living in ~1830). They do things like (a) get married, or (b) don't get married.
Yet it is one of my favorite books. The things the author is interested in match my interests. For instance, the main character of the book is a woman who has beliefs and ideals, while everyone else in the book is in turn baffled and annoyed by this. They are constantly complaining about it! And that is something that interests the author, seeing a true idealist interface with the world in some detail.
Here are some quotes that show what I love about the book.
And how should Dorothea not marry? – a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers. A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick labourer and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles – who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
I think this quote captures the tone and content of the book that I like.
It is a general fact about me that I love a lot of art that accurately describes something I deeply care about, even if it has a sign flip on the value of that thing.
They go on to complain about her having ideas later:
Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.
Some time after her mother passes away, she and her sister eventually are to split the jewelry she has left them. Her sister is trying them on, and says Dorothea should have one, and she replies:
'No, I have other things of mamma's – her sandal-wood box, which I am so fond of – plenty of things. In fact, they are all yours, dear. We need discuss them no longer. There – take away your property.'
Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.
She has a visceral aversion to it. When Celia suggests she wear a cross, she says:
'Not for the world, not for the world. A cross is the last thing I would weear as a trinket.' Dorothea shuddered slightly.
'Then you will think it wicked in me to wear it,' said Celia, uneasily.
'No, dear, no,' said Dorothea, stroking her sister's cheek. 'Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.'
and
'Nay, Celia, that is too much to ask, that I should wear trinkets to keep you in countenance. If I were to put on such a necklace as that, I should feel as if I had been pirouetting. The world would go round with me, and I should not know how to walk.'
Yet! Later she finds a gem that works well for her.
'How very beautiful these gems are!' said Dorothea, under a new current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. 'It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think that emerald is more beautiful than any of them.'
[..]
'They are lovely,' said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet on her finely-turned finger and wrist, and holding them toward the window on a level with her eyes. All the while her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colours by merging them in her mystic religious joy.
She eventually agrees to keep that one ring and bracelet pair.
'Yes! I will keep these – this ring and bracelet,' said Dorothea Then, letting her hand fall on the table, she said in another tone – 'Yet what miserable men find such things, and work at them, and sell them!' She paused again, and Celia thought that her sister was going to renounce the ornaments, as in consistency she ought to do.
When Celia asks whether Dorothea will ever wear them in company, she says
'Perhaps,' she said, rather haughtily. 'I cannot tell to what level I may sink.'
Then her sister feels chastised by this, and later Dorothea makes an implicit apology, which is accepted.
I think that this would be read widely as weakness. I don't fully see it that way—I think it is common for people to find desires to bend or alter their stated principles, or to find versions of them that allow for new edge cases they've found. Insofar as these gems have a rare quality to them unlike other gems, is it definitively wrong for a pious religious person to keep them? Really? Alternatively, insofar as some deeper part of her tells her that it is worth being able to look upon this beauty, perhaps that part of her is right and her principles wrong. We should never presume that all of our principles are certain and correct.
(To be clear, in this situation my own stance is that beauty is a great thing and it is well worth having beautiful things, and this impulse is a great instance of her finding that her frugal and pious religious instincts are anti having beauty in her life, and picking the right call—frugality and religious devotion make little sense to me. But regardless, I think it is a common struggle within the principled, and I don't see it as definitive weakness that she made the choice she did.)
A key plot point is that she falls in love with an unattractive older man ("Mr Casaubon").
'He thinks with me,' said Dorothea to herself, 'or rather, he thinks a whole world of which my thought is but a poor two-penny mirror. And his feelings too, his whole experience – what a lake compared with my little pool!'
He is a religious scholar with an unfinished book. She resolves to be helpful to him.
'I should learn everything then,' she said to herself, still walking quickly along the bridle road through the wood. 'It would be my duty to study that I might help him the better in his great works. There would be nothing trivial about our lives. Everyday-things with us would mean the greatest things. It would be like marrying Pascal. I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by.
She is growing from having high standards and high aspirations. I think a younger version of me would have been embarrassed on her behalf, for her to have aspirations she will surely fail at (to learn everything), but this is because the younger version of me (a) had false beliefs about what is truly possible—today I believe that relatively average people can discover and accomplish great things if they are bringing themselves well in alignment with reality, and (b) because I would find failure to be too uncomfortable to deal with or think about. Yet a substantial amount of my growth as a human has to become okay with failing, and to learn that it is not so bad. So overall I am greatly supportive of her sudden and wildly high aspirations.
She generally is enrapt by him:
Mr Brooke was detained by a message, but when he re-entered the librarym he found Dorothea seated and already deep in one of the pamphlets, which had some marginal manuscript of Mr Casaubon's, – taking it in as eagerly as she might have taken in the scent of a fresh bouquet after a dry, hot, dreary walk.
Dorothea is interested in the older unattractive man; a different, younger, cooler guy ("Sir James") is interested in her. She has no conception of his interest, she doesn't register it, she presumes he keeps coming over because he's interested in her sister, and she just finds him annoying.
Anyway, there's a moment where she says something that, again, I presume others see as weakness, but I think is entirely healthy and correct. Her admirer has spontaneously found her on a walk, and shown her that he's brought a cute dog with him. She looks at him with flushed cheeks of annoyance that he takes to be interest and attraction.
Sir James interpreted the heightened colour in the way most gratifying to himself, and thought he never saw Miss Brooke looking so handsome.
'I have brought a little petitioner,' he said, 'or rather I have brought him to see if he will be approved before his petition is offered.' He showed the white object under his arm, which was a tiny Maltese puppy, one of nature's most naive toys.
'It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as pets,' said Dorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that very moment (as opinions will) under the heat of irritation.
I think that this can be considered unprincipled, but I think that this is a totally natural way to form and stress-test opinions. I think our emotions of anger and defensiveness are often tracking real things, and it is a perfectly natural way to find a position worth defending.
As someone who believes that being disagreeable is necessary to having opinions and thinking for oneself, I find lines like this amusing:
'You mean that he appears silly.'
'No, no,' said Dorothea, recollecitng herself, an laying herh and on her sister's a moment, 'but he does not talk equally well on all subjects.'
'I should think none but disagreeable people do,' said Celia, in her usual purring way. 'They must be very dreadful to live with. Only think! at breakfast, and always.'
Dorothea laughed. 'O Kitty, you are a wonderful creature!' She pinched Celia's chin
It is later said of Celia:
Celia had no disposition to recur to disagreeable subjects. It had been her nature when a child never to quarrel with anyone – only to observe with wonder that they quarrelled with her, and looked like turkey-cocks; whereupon she was ready to play at cat's cradle with them whenever they recovered themselves.
I used to be very agreeable in this way and at risk of being a people-pleaser. I am less so today.
She continues in this vein, when Celia tells a third party about Dorothea's engagement:
'She is engaged to marry Mr Casaubon,' saiad Celia, resorting , as usual, to the simplest statement of fact, and enjoying this opportunity of speaking to the Rector's wife alone.
'This is frightful. How long has it been going on?'
'I only knew of it yesterday. They are to be married in six weeks.'
'Well, my dear, I wish you joy of your brother-in-law.'
'I am so sorry for Dorothea.'
'Sorry! It is her doing, I suppose.'
'Yes: she says Mr Casaubon has a great soul.'
'With all my heart.'
'O Mrs Cadwallader, I don't think it can be nice to marry a man with a great soul.'
'Well, my dear, take warning. You know the look of one new; when the next comes and wants to marry you, don't you accept him.'
This is a short quote that has long stuck with me from the book
'Why,' rejoined Mrs Cadwallader, with a sharper note, 'you don't mean to say that you would like him to turn public man in that way – making a sort of political Cheap Jack of himself?'
'He might be dissuaded, I should think. He would not like the expense.'
'That is what I told him. He is vulnerable to reason there - always a few grains of common-sense in an ounce of miserliness. Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip on. And there must be a little crack in the Brooke family, else we should not see what we are to see.'
I am so dismayed that he might be only vulnerable to reason there! And also glad that they are paying attention to it. I think of that line often.
In Chapter 20, Dorothea and her husband are on their honeymoon. They have gone to the Vatican City, in part for him to read original documents relevant for his research, which she wants to help with. She is often left alone by him in the day while he does work, which is odd for a honeymoon, but she doesn't mind, because she's there for him to do his work.
However, in this chapter we find her distraught and sobbing.
The chapter essentially talks about two reasons, both fundamentally the same: the colliding of her far-mode ideals and visions, with near-mode reality and its details.
In her religion, she has grown up a Puritan and frugal girl, and she is now in the wonder and splendor of the Vatican, which is really quite oppressively grand, and this is not what her ideal religious place is like, and here we see she is somewhat alienated from it.
She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.
...the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.
...Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.
In her marriage, she had great ideas for what this would be, to join the intellectual life of her betrothed; yet she has agreed to come companion-less, to be alone for most of each day while her husband goes off to read old manuscripts. And she isn't finding all of the conversations to satisfy her desires as she had hoped.
How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
and
Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea’s was anything very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to “find their feet” among them, while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.
...It was too early yet for her fully to recognize or at least admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted that devotedness which was so necessary a part of her mental life that she was almost sure sooner or later to recover it.
...The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same... we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.
Anyway, I empathize with much here. Perhaps I too have spent most of my life as a youthful idealist, repeatedly coming into sudden contact with reality and all of its unexpected and sometimes unwelcome details.