Tess's Contemporary Reception

I knew I was forgetting something when I woke up this morning and lo and behold I did forget something. I even circled and wrote the blog assignment many times, but that's beside the point when half points are better than no points amirite. I didn't find all that much very interesting in these eight reviews because they were all very much the same and none presented a really intriguing idea besides, 'it was good', 'it was good but with flaws', or 'it was decent to bad'. I did however enjoy the interview with Hardy and the letters between James and Stevenson.

The Recent Critics' Take on Middlemarch's Structure

From the recent criticisms I read, the two that I finished were somewhat different in their topics than other criticisms or reviews. The first of these critical reviews was Mark Schorer's "Matrix of Analogy", a critical look not so much at the story and characters of Middlemarch, but at how Eliot uses metaphors in various methods. Schorer shows several metaphors set up in binary oppositions and keeps hounding that they all add up to create the vision that Eliot had. After seeing him go through so many different binaries, I lost his message and purpose for the criticism, but Schorer did say two things that I found interesting.

Schorer brought up the idea of character names, something I didn't even think about while reading, but his two examples were Lydgate and Mr. Brooke. Schorer made the comparison between an actual brook and the character which makes sense since Mr. Brooke is constantly going and going never really stopping to take inventory of what's happening around him at any given time. He leaps into things rashly, like politics, and just keeps running any brook does. This comparison was rather interesting and then Lydgate's name was brought. Schorer says this of Lydgate, "his progress blocked by his wife, twice-blocked by his name" (591). Both of the syllables in Lydgate's name are things that contain or block something, those being lid and gate. Schorer most likely meant that his position was blocked from any sort of improvement, but again an interesting idea but Shcorer just glosses over this rather odd side-tangent and goes right back to metaphors unless he meant the name things as metaphors for the objects they represent, which is probably the case, I just missed that connection.

The second interesting part was when Schorer compared the characters to religious prophets. With Dorothea's love triangle, Casaubon represents the false prophet while Will is the true prophet leading to all kinds of talk about true love (591). This idea to was rather interesting and felt shoehorned into an essay all about binary oppositions among metaphors and not religious metaphors.

The second review I read and the one that looked more at the novel's structure and presentation showed a great way to think of Eliot's take on a living city of people. Robert B. Heilman's "Stealthy Convergence" essay put forth the idea of "photographic stills" (620) that Eliot uses to show the multitude of characters that she does. Heilman speaks about how fluid Eliot weaves her narrative from character viewpoint to character viewpoint and it made me think of this novel as more of a movie being shown not by a camera, but a bird that happened to be flying all around from character to character letting readers see everything that happens. this notion I think is what gave the novel such a rich cast of characters to follow and they each get fleshed out enough that they feel like real life people going about a daily life. I liked that analogy to photographs or my extension to a movie or bird because it makes the scope of the novel seem very large and the purpose to be many purposes for each character at different times of viewing said characters. How well do you think Eliot pulled off her point of view shifts from the like of Dorothea to Lydgate or any other character? Does the novel feel large in scope the way it is presented or is the bird analogy too much? I don't know, but I like to think of the narrator as an anthropomorphic bird experiencing the events and recanting them for readers. It adds whimsy to the narrative or I'm just too imaginative.  

Contemporary Middlemarch

Reading the reviews for Middlemarch, the Saturday Review stood out as an interesting take on a certain aspect of Middlemarch that I didn't even think of while reading. The Saturday Review brought up the idea of selfishness as a key aspect to each and every character in the novel. Thinking back about each character each one's goal has something to do with their own motives. Dorothea marries Casaubon only to learn and grow her intellect through the many books and conversations with Casaubon. Casaubon uses Dorothea as a secretary while Will uses others to get jobs. Each character's goals are somewhat noble in the end, but the means to get there are pointed out by the Saturday Review as selfish. this is an interesting concept that I don't think Eliot even thought about as she was writing her characters.

Something else this review pointed out was an interesting take on Casaubon's character. the review claims that, "Mr. Casaubon represents learning as opposed to science" (Saturday Review 575), something that seems contradictory to his persistence on writing his book. He doesn't really display his characteristics as something who is learning a whole lot because if he did then He'd probably figure out his book's information has been published by Germans already. Casaubon instead seems to predisposed to watching Dorothea and maintaining his jealousy towards Will Ladislaw, if anything his preoccupation should be towards reputation and false pretenses. If Casaubon ever learned he would have figured out the whole Will and Dorothea dilemma in an adult manner instead of pent up jealousy till he dies. I think Dorothea represents a better archetype for learning as she actually does so as she learns how to really live a life of her choosing.

One thing I don't quite understand is how the Review makes it seem like if girls imitated Dorothea, then the world would be "a less comfortable world without being a better one" Saturday Review 574). this notion doesn't really make sense to me in what the reviewer is trying to say. How would the world be a less comfortable one? Would the girls stop marrying for love and turn into Dorothea-like characters who aren't individuals? I'm not really getting the full gist of this sentence.

Gaskell's Flawed Characters

While reading some of these criticisms most seemed to be more in talks with another critic than Gaskell's novel entirely. The John Lucas essay "Why We Need Mary Barton" offered more confusion than an answer to his initial question and really just helped to befuddle me as a reader. I still have no idea why this book was needed based on Lucas' ideas. The other more tangible essay is Lucas' "Carson's Murder and the Inadequacy of Hope in Mary Barton" where he explains the flawed John Barton became more of a scapegoat and flaw than Gaskell had originally intended.

Mary Barton's Contemporaries

Of all the reviews contained in this Norton Edition, one stands out as just very odd. The Long Strike: A Drama in Four Acts really seems out of place as review for Mary Barton itself because it's more of a retelling only in play form and it seems to have convoluted Gaskell's initial story of the Industrial Revolution. But none of this is really what I want to talk about I just thought it odd. I read a multitude of the first few reviews and they all practically restated the same things about the novel's good points and accurate portrayal of the living conditions in Manchester so nothing of note there, but it was in Leon Faucher's piece that an idea struck me.