Middlemarch, Torah and the Art of Teaching

Over the Sukkot holiday, I took the opportunity to read Middlemarch, George Eliot’s (aka Mary Ann Evans’s–various motives for her pseudonym can be found here) monumental novel about a small town in England ca. 1830. The book is famous for its realism, including the author’s research into political, medical, and other details of the time. Admittedly, it is at times a hard slog to get through, with a writing style distinguished by long, often florid and dense sentences packed with obscure references, even by the standards of Victorian prose. Nonetheless, the book’s breadth of conception and penetrating insights into the characters’ minds render it among the greatest of novels.

One of the book’s spectacular achievements lies in its depiction of character. In a typical novel, one character is shown with a degree of depth, complexity and special sympathy, while the others are more or less two-dimensional, in the background. (A slightly longer novel might extend this depth of analysis to one or two more.) In Middlemarch, an extraordinary number of characters are depicted as “round” (in E. M. Forster’s term), perhaps a dozen or two, spread across the town and engaged in various occupations. Scholar, clergy, doctor, writer, farmer; women who are married and single, richer and poorer, unhappy and satisfied; people who are seeking and contented, driven and apathetic, philanthropic and miserly. The opening of the novel leads the reader to expect that the book will focus on one main character, Dorothea Brooke; and yet she is absent for much of the narrative and returns only at the end to resume her central role in the action. For today’s reader, no doubt, much of the novel’s interest lies in its portrayal of women, their ambition and social restrictions; but the depth of her depiction of some of the men is also notable, especially the figure of Lydgate, the struggling country doctor.

The other most striking feature of the novel I found in the author’s stunning psychological observation, both subtle and crystalline. The greatest insights come at moments of crisis, when characters reach a dead end in their relationships and social standing. Confronted with a marriage whose initial promise sputters into disappointment, some characters become bitter and even angry, while others find solace in new pursuits or change entirely by adjusting their expectations to the needs and realities of family life. When one of the town’s financial stalwarts has a precipitous fall in reputation, his wife reaches out to friends and relatives to pick up the pieces and find some small degree of redemption. Many of the characters prove capable of surprising us, themselves, and others with inner resources they did not know they possessed.

Eliot harbors a mix of sympathy and criticism for nearly all of her characters; this is not a book for people who want clear-cut, good-and-bad, heroes-and-villains. (She is far from Dickens in this regard, despite other similarities.) Middlemarch resembles the Bible in its wide canvas and multifaceted sense of human character. So many Biblical figures are rich, nuanced, open to multiple perspectives; they face numerous scenes of crisis and conflict that reveal archetypal challenges, layers of depth, sources of strength and mysterious sides to their personality. Similarly, several characters in Middlemarch change profoundly and break through their initial circumstances in ways that few works of imaginative literature achieve.

Eliot’s method of characterization, her extension of radical empathy combined with insight into people’s challenges and shortfalls, illuminates as well the work of an educator. Teachers need to work from a stance of empathy for all students while possessing the ability to evaluate their learning objectively to help them improve and grow. Educators today come to possess a novelist’s understanding of their students, including their “backstory,” their learning profile from previous years of schooling; not only their academic proclivities but also their social and emotional lives, as observed in the classroom and on the playground; to some degree, their families and lives beyond school; their interests, passions, obstacles and more. To teachers, every student is a “round” character with enormous reserves of talent and capacity for growth in so many ways.