Middlemarch's Medium: Description, Sympathy, and Realism's Ambient Worlds

George Eliot's Middlemarch is unique among nineteenth-century British novels for its unusually light reliance on the modes of neutral, literal presentation that are supposed to characterize the realist novel. The described world of Middlemarch is distinguished by a surprising absence of objects that are just there, of details—especially details in descriptions of domestic interiors—that nestle in the descriptive prose solely to enhance the visibility of a fictional world, without rising to a symbolic or metaphoric plane. Critics have noted this quality of Eliot's description, observing that Middlemarch's descriptive language typically exceeds its basic local function of creating what Roland Barthes called a "reality effect," possessing instead an excess of elements that ascend or ossify into symbolic significance rather than remaining on the denotative level of mere literal description.¹ Although the narrator's description renders select objects highly memorable—Dorothea's poor dress, a pier-glass, the set of emeralds that Dorothea reluctantly admires in the first chapter—these items are so over-freighted with symbolic meaning, as Elaine Freedgood has observed, that they strain away from literal description and toward metaphor. Freedgood views this move as ideologically and aesthetically conservative, arguing that Eliot's narrator works aggressively to "curtail" the disruptive readerly potential of description by reducing the "infinite individual possibilities for metonymic interpretation" to "proper metaphors," a goal she achieves by exhaustively pursuing all the metonymic associations of a described object before fixing it with a dominant metaphorical (and thus "literary") meaning.²

Yet at the same time that Middlemarch does not read like an inventory of objects and interiors to the extent that we might expect from a Victorian realist novel (does any reader of Middlemarch come away from the book with a detailed sense of what Tipton and Freshitt are really like?), much of the novel's immersive power arises from its descriptions of weather and atmospheric phenomena. Rarely do the novel's characters set foot out of doors, or even glance out of windows, without the narrator pausing to note the atmospheric conditions that surround them. Some instances: when Fred Vincy tries his hand at fieldwork for the first time, "it was one of those grey mornings …when the clouds part a little, and the scent of the earth is sweet along the lanes and by the hedgerows."³ When Mr. Farebrother pays a visit to the Garths, he comes "up the orchard walk, dividing the bright August lights and shadows with the tufted grass and the apple-tree boughs" (378). Dorothea's first visit to Lowick, prior to her engagement, is on "a grey but dry November morning" (67), and her first meeting with Casaubon is followed by a solitary walk during which she notes "the solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other" (25). These are only some of the most casual, offhand notations of weather in the novel, which also includes meteorological descriptions with a much more emphatic emotional charge, such as the bleak winter that forms the background to the disappointing early months of Dorothea and Casaubon's marriage, or the violent thunderstorm that rages during Dorothea and Will's cathartic love scene at the novel's end. But these extreme instances that verge on pathetic fallacy are the exception, rather than the rule, in the novel, which more often presents a gentle alternation of rain, snow, sunshine, and shade, passing just below the threshold of readerly attention, and lending the novel its slow, diurnal rhythm.

This essay argues that the pervasive descriptions and notations of weather in Middlemarch are not merely an example of a Barthesian reality effect, nor a metaphorical apparatus that imbues the novel with literariness. Instead, I connect Eliot's atmospheric description to the emerging concept of the environment in a range of British sciences in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in the biological, psychological, and sociological writings of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes. Biological life itself came to be defined during this period as the interaction between...