Middlemarch by Kerry McSweeney (review)

292Rocky Mountain Review KERRY McSWEENEY. Middlemarch. Unwin Critical Library, ed. Claude Rawson. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984. 167 p. Claude Rawson's introduction to the Unwin series, reprinted at the beginning of this book, says that the series "is intended for serious students and teachers of literature, and for knowledgeable non-academic readers" (v). I have a hard time imagining members of the latter group seeking out this volume, and the serious students and teachers would probably be better advised to consult a variety of secondary sources rather than this single volume of rather uneven quality. The weaknesses ofthe book may be traceable to its attempting to cover too much in too little space. This leads to some superficiality, particularly in the chapter on "Character and Characterisation," where, for instance, McSweeney notes a lack of "authoritative comment" on Farebrother, with the consequence that he has "the distinction of remaining the one imperfectly comprehended character in a novel otherwise bathed in omniscience" (80). McSweeney's preceding discussion is so short and enigmatic that his reader may be said to imperfectly comprehend his point — and may object as well to the tone of "bathed," which is of a piece with the fulsomeness and/or irrelevance of numerous other of his comments (e.g., that Eliot "engaged in activities — translating, editing, reviewing — that would today be called those of a left-of-center literary intellectual" [15] before she began to write fiction). McSweeney's discussion in chapter 3 of the novel's treatment of the Woman Question likewise only touches the surface; it collects together the right quotations but has little depth or breadth. And at other places where McSweeney touches on related matters he sometimes misses the point altogether. For instance, quoting the narrator's comment in chapter 10 that Dorothea yearned for knowledge and that "Surely learned men kept the only oil; and who more learned than Mr. Casaubon," McSweeney calls this section a "penetrating and prescient analysis which must strike a responsive chord in university teachers of literature who annually observe young persons — usually female — bringing to the acquisition of knowledge and the study of literature expectations that neither can properly satisfy." He then adds, "But if knowledge is not the lamp, what illumination is there for an intense young woman seeking fulfillment and a 'life beyond the self?" (110). First of all, in the novel, it is not that knowledge is not the lamp, but that Casaubon does not have the knowledge Dorothea longs for. And McSweeney's experience certainly differs from my own if his students do not find satisfaction of their expectations, and sometimes more even than they expected, in their study of literature generally, and the novels of George Eliot in particular. The most useful chapter for the non-academic reader is probably the one on the critical history, which gives a survey of Eliot's reputation from shortly after her death up to the present time. Such readers are not likely to get elsewhere a sense of changes in critical taste. But even this chapter is flawed by its failure to include anything of the immediate responses to Eliot's work, either generally or specifically in reference to Middlemarch. As a consequence, the reader may get the misleading impression that until recent times her work has been little appreciated. McSweeney probably did not want to go back to a subject he had treated briefly in the first chapter, but the division of material this way skews the final impression too much toward negativity. The author is too judgmental and assertive in his conclusions in an introduction of this sort. Discussing, for instance, the question of the novel's unity, he asserts, "One would like to say that Middlemarch gave one the same consciousness of Dorothea and Lydgate as kindred natures moving in the same embroiled medium. Book Reviews293 But it does not" (131). This is at least a questionable, and to my mind a highly doubtful conclusion. One might cite, for instance, Henry James' well known review: speaking of "the balanced contrast between the two histories of Dorothea and Lydgate" he says, "the mind passes from one to the other with that supreme sense of the...