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.