appear to give a revealing and perceptive picture of characters' mental states, and passages which seem to be disinterested narration, can be shown to serve a very different function in the novel.
* * *
Section I: Ungrounded Descriptions
The focus of this section is the mental ascriptions which are a central technique of George Eliot's creation of character. The omniscient narrator of Middlemarch is not restricted to an external view of her characters. Often we come to understand characters by gaining insight into their innermost feelings. Casaubon, for example, says and does very little, and his character emerges chiefly through our insights into his private inner qualms. If this is to be regarded as a device of realism, the language in which she deals with Casaubon's states of mind must have genuine psychological content.
There certainly seems to be psychological content. As we read, we feel that we rather despise Casaubon. We feel he is absurd and morally unsound. We believe he is self- absorbed and self-blind, priggish and selfish. But nonetheless we feel we pity him. And that combination of beliefs and attitudes is precisely what we are meant to feel. We are
inclined to think that our moral and emotional response to him is generated by the subtlety 1 with which George Eliot's characterisation mirrors Casaubon's state of mind. The
suggestion here is that the language shapes our attitudes very differently: the passages are not realistic description, and her use of language shapes our response to Casaubon at the expense of her development of his character. Some of the crucial developments in the account of Casaubon's character seem to depict feelings which, while they are much too
subtle and precise to be sufficiently grounded in his behaviour, are in no way grounded in his own consciousness either.
First, by way of contrast, look at the economical, and legitimate,
introduction to Lydgate’s callow response to women. Lydgate does not of course realise that his response is callow. His attitude is indeed unconscious. But in this case, as in the case of Lady Glencora, in Can you forgive her?, the unconscious mental state is not revealed to us by detailed description of the stuff of Lydgate’s co n scio u sn ess.^^ The
ascription of an unconscious mental state to Lydgate is informed by his own
consciousness; there is a subde interaction between public facts and avowable states. Into
the context of our good opinion of Dorothea, built up carefully over the previous chapters, « George Eliot simply drops Lydgate's remark,
"She is a good creature - that fine girl- but a little too earnest. It is troublesome to talk to such women." (PI 19)
It is not spoken aloud, of course. But it might easily have been. It is certainly avowable, certainly available to consciousness. It is dispiriting. He has simply not seen in her what we had hoped he might. His unconscious feelings about women are further explored in this passage.
"To a man under such circumstances, taking a wife is something more than a question of adornment, however highly he may rate this; and Lydgate was disposed to give it the first place among wifely functions.To his taste, guided by a single conversation, here was the point on which îÆss Brooke would be found wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty. She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle." (pl21-2)
The glimpse into Lydate's unconscious chauvinism is not a description of an inaccessible private inner experience which lies behind a deceptive surface. We do not need to unpack what this thought feels like from the inside. We don’t need to know what meaning he
l^Lady Glencora's unconscious mental states are discussed at some length in the final section of Chapter Three.
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privately attaches to the words 'proper feminine angle'. In fact we can't. There is nothing to know; the insight here is embedded in the knowledge we share with the author that it is an empty cliché, the cliché of a man whose attitude to women is not so far removed from Mr.Chicheley's. Both Chicheley and Lydgate are inclined to think that women in general are in some sense at the disposal of men, to be chosen with an eye to how well they will fulfil wifely functions. Insight depends on our understanding the significance of his conscious avowable thoughts in a way which Lydgate himself does not, but it does not float free of his avowals.
The 'insight' does not work by exploring mental facts which are simply unnoticed by Lydgate; it does not work in a way which is only possible in a novel. It works by setting Lydgate's avowable thoughts in a public context which makes plain their absurdity. And these insights are equally available to the more perceptive of his companions. Notice how closely our reaction to Lydgate is echoed a few chapters later by Farebrother's. Farebrother is curious to know how Mary Garth has struck Lydgate. He asks,
"Do you know the Garths? I think they were not Peacock's patients." "No; but there is a Miss Garth at old Featherstone's, at Lowick." "Their daughter: an excellent girl."
"She is very quiet—I have hardly noticed her."
"She has taken notice of you, though, depend upon it."
"I don't understand," said Lydgate; he could hardly say "Of course," "Oh she gauges everybody. I prepared her for confirmation-she is a favourite of mine."
Mr. Farebrother puffed a few moments in silence, Lydgate not caring to know more about the Garths. At last the Vicar laid down his pipe, stretched out his legs, and turned his bright eyes with a smile towards Lydgate..." (P205)
Lydgate is as dismissive of Mary Garth as he was of Dorothea. Unlike Dorothea, Mary is not likely even to be able to fulfil the first of wifely functions. Farebrother knows enough of Mary to feel disappointed in Lydgate's failure of perception. Farebrother too has learned something about Lydgate's mental and emotional shortcomings, in just the way that we did. There is no veil between Farebrother and Lydgate. Lydgate casually reveals his
attitudes to Farebrother without understanding them himself. But note that, even though the subject doesn’t understand his own mind as well as we do, if thoughts are to be attributed to him they must be apt to play some role in his own consciousness. The insight has to be grounded in Lydgate's actual thoughts about women. Imagine, for example, if we
suspected that Lydgate was not disposed to think that a woman should look pretty for her husband, and did not believe that women should have feminine intuitions and leave intellectual matters to men. If we suspected that those thoughts would grate on his sensibilities as much as on ours, we could no longer accept that Eliot's chilling clichés about 'adornment' and 'proper feminine angles' had any insight to offer. But in fact, the thoughts are plausibly Lydgate's own, and indeed he is punished for them.
This is in stark contrast to the passages in which George Eliot's purpose is to give us insight into Casaubon's feelings. For example, look at this sentence, taken from the passage where, for the first time, we are given some insight into Casaubon's view of his impending marriage.
"Mr. Casaubon did not find his spirits rising; nor did the contemplation of that matrimonial garden-scene, where, as all experience showed, the path was to be bordered with flowers, prove persistently more enchanting to him than the accustomed vaults where he walked taper in hand." ( P i l l )
The thoughts here are too subtle and the language too specific to be grounded purely in context and behaviour. The question is whether there are thoughts we can plausibly believe Casaubon has which could make it true that the expressions Eliot uses are apt mental ascriptions. Those expressions shape our response to his character; the question is whether that response can plausibly be thought of as a response to the mental state she describes.
The language here seems to function in just the way that the passage about Lydgate's attitude towards women functions. With a few well chosen words and phrases we seem to have insight right into Casaubon's unease as his marriage to Dorothea
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approaches. It seems, to be sure, to give us a picture which is much more informative than Casaubon himself could have given, but then so did the passage explaining Lydgate's disappointingly blank response both to Dorothea and to Rosamund. But we have an explanation of how the insight into Lydgate functions: Lydgate's avowals are informative because they show how limited is his judgment of women in general, and how inadequate his perception of these two young women in particular. To understand Lydgate's thought we need a sense of both, and of course Lydgate has neither. But he is aware of the
judgements which the insight centres round; he simply doesn't understand how they reveal his unconscious attitudes.
The remark about Casaubon functions very differently. It looks as if it describes Casaubon's innermost feelings. His spirits did not rise, and he did not find the
contemplation of certain things enchanting. Of course, what those 'certain things' are is told in George Eliot's language, but it is tempting to think that when something is an object of thought, it can be described entirely independently of the subject. But this is clearly a temptation to avoid. Even if the object of thought is an external object, there are problems of cognitive significance to worry about. If we say that the old lamp seller preferred a dirty old lamp to a nice shiny new one, then unless we know that he prefers it under the
description 'magic lamp', we are likely, like Aladdin's wife, to misunderstand his motives. At least, though, we know which lamp the vendor will choose, but when the objects of contemplation are purely mental, unless the subject's own conception of the objects can be reconstructed, it is not clear we have learned anything at all about his preferences. We are told Casaubon did not find something persistently more enchanting than something else. The descriptions George Eliot chooses have the effect of simultaneously giving us the impression that we now have a firmer grasp on what kind of character he is while stifling our curiosity about Casaubon's motives. Our judgement about his moral and spiritual
worth is paradoxically made firmer, while our understanding of his moral and spiritual worth is no richer than before.
The sentence is interesting, its irony works in many directions. Casaubon's attitudes are attacked on all sides, but we seem to have little or no insight into what they might be. First, 'that matrimonial garden scene' scoffs at the idea that marriage is a state of unconfined joy. It is naive and absurd to think that marriage wiU necessarily bring
happiness as its natural corollary. But however common and absurd the fantasy that marriage will be the solution to all problems, it is clearly not one that Casaubon suffers from. He does not find his spirits rising. And we can conjecture good reasons why he shouldn't. His relationship with Dorothea is almost wholly based on her idolisation of him, which, whether justified or not, is no basis for marriage. And he knows well enough that it is «or justified. He may have been beginning to realise that beneath all her intense questions about God and morality and goodness is a very strong need for him to know all the
answers her meagre education has failed to supply. That should make anyone quail. But that is just conjecture. All George Eliot gives us by way of insight into Casaubon's unease is a sneering reference to rejection of a fantasy of marriage which cannot be relevant to Casaubon’s feelings. Casaubon's own perception of marriage, and the ways in which he is finding he has to revise that perception, are left untouched.
Second, his feelings about his magnum opus are not entered into. The 'accustomed vaults where he walked taper in hand' leaves us in no doubt about the narrator's opinion of its status. If Casaubon ever sheds light on anything, it will be a feeble light and it will be shed on something far removed from life itself. But how does Casaubon regard it? How does he picture it to himself? He presumably doesn't actually believe his multitudinous scribbles are leading anywhere. But why then the reluctance to relinquish it? Might it be that it has a deep symbolic value for him? Might he be sustained, buried in the outskirts of
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