“Books that Matter: Middlemarch: Choose Thy Love, Love Thy Choice”

I’ve loved this phrase for many years. Before I painted my family room ten years ago, I had it in vinyl lettering on the wall with family and wedding pictures.

Humans are so funny, don’t you think? Perhaps I project when I say that, but it seems we generally struggle with the whole concept of cause and effect - making the concept of loving a choice one made trickier than it might appear on the surface. Put another way, when most humans pick up a stick, we too often fail to consider the other end of that stick with much forethought.

Which makes this statement quite profound, and put in simpler terms - NOT Simper terms - “Love what you have chosen.”

This post will possibly not appeal to two groups of individuals: those who married perfectly, never argue or resent one another, or have never spent a day disenchanted with their choice. To those of you who may have achieved Eden: I salute you.

This post will also most likely vex individuals who are on Attempt Number Two. Or Three. Or…

Please know: I’m not poking at anyone who has made another choice because the first became untenable. Sometimes, dissolving a marriage is truly the only way forward. I do NOT speak to that when I press this issue of loving your choice - no need to feel triggered or targeted.

I write this by way of finishing my review of Middlemarch, and to make the case for caution in the casualness in marriage in the current culture. It’s worth consideration to persevere with choices once both ends of the stick picked up are fully known.

I write to those for whom the marriage pendulum swings pretty normally: with days of being certain Saturday’s Warrior could have been written about you and your spouse; and other days of suspecting you were possessed the day you decided to marry this… Other Person.

In an 800+ page book where not much happens, three marriages are highlighted in Middlemarch - all of which underscore this statement: “Choose thy love, love thy choice.”

The first marriage is a couple who marry quickly and fairly impetuously, knowing next to nothing about each other first. Dr. Lydgate, a newcomer to Middlemarch, is completely infatuated with a town beauty, Rosamund Vincy, the mayor’s daughter. Rosamund naively and somewhat selfishly marries Dr. Lydgate, imagining she will become a grand dame of social standing in the community by marrying a doctor. Coming from a financially fickle family herself, she quickly runs the couple into near-ruinous debt. Every attempt to treat her as a true emotional partner in the ensuing problems blows up in Lydgate’s face - leaving him confused as to why Rosamund would marry him if she didn’t want to be married to him. Rosamund is equally confused as to why her every desire is not indulged and accommodated, and responds to Lydgate's attempts at economizing with passive aggressive manipulation. Upon discovering the other end of the stick, both Lydgate and Rosamund continue in their marriage disillusioned, love lost, with nothing but disappointment ahead of them.

The second marriage are young people who grew up in Middlemarch and have loved each other since childhood. Mary Garth’s family aren’t wealthy or socially prominent, but her father is a well-respected, hard-working land agent and farming manager. Fred Vincy is Rosamund’s brother, and at first he has selfish and short-sighted proclivities to rival his sister’s. In spite of Fred’s repeated attempts to convince Mary to marry him, Mary worries they will not be happy because of his impulsive decisions that land him seriously in debt - a debt which ends up costing her family a great financial loss. But Mary’s love proves a powerful motivation for Fred, who authentically grows up in the novel and humbly offers himself as an apprentice, willing to learn, to Mary’s father. Though the reader never sees the fruit of this marriage until the epilogue, Fred lives to make himself worthy of Mary. Her wisdom in considering both ends of the stick before the marriage gave the marriage a better than fighting chance afterward.

The third marriage includes the novel’s central character - Dorothea Brooke - whose fervent and genuinely sincere ideas of a life of service make her easy prey to a pompous, ineffectual scholar more than double her age, Edward Casaubon. Guard your gag reflex as you read one of the most narcissistic proposals EVER WRITTEN. To sum up in modern vernacular: “Honey, won’t it be great for ME, if you marry me?”

And bless Dorothea’s idealistic heart, she falls for it. Not long into the marriage, she realizes Edward really wanted nothing more than a secretary to catalog his massive collection of notes for a book he most likely will never get around to finishing.

The thing that made Middlemarch unique for me is that two of these three marriages were constructed in such a way as to give the parties of those marriages ample modern justification for abandoning them in one way or another - if not technically, in affairs, then certainly emotionally. A much younger cousin of Edward’s - Will Ladislaw - is quite taken with Dorothea as early as Dorothea’s and Edward’s honeymoon. And dig this for a romantic honeymoon - Dorothea spends every day - IN ROME - visiting museums alone, as Edward cloisters himself in libraries, poring over documents in preparation for his book.

In spite of this, Dorothea is faithful in every way to her husband, and innocently enjoys Will’s company over the course of her marriage. It isn’t until Edward Casaubon dies of a heart condition that she even begins to entertain the idea that she cares for Will beyond that of a friend. Her purity in this is somewhat unmatched in literature. Her extraordinary strength of character allows her to do more than grit her teeth through living with the untouched end of the stick she picked up in Edward Casaubon; it enables her to actually embrace it, as she comes to recognize him as almost disabled in his inability to love her in return.

It’s fascinating to watch these couples go through the process of learning to live with the other end of the sticks they picked up in their marriage choices. Two had a limited view of that other, untouched end - as do all of us who choose a marriage. It’s a marvel that even in 19th-century literature, a writer would portray these marriages - each with differing degrees of happiness and satisfaction - as being faithful - peopled with individuals who dealt with both ends of their sticks with fidelity. Each, in spite of everything, in one way or another, ‘loved’ their choices by not choosing someone else in its place. The portraits of these very different marriages serve as cautionary tales in a modern world that too often views marriage as disposable.

Loving our choice - learning to love both ends of the stick we pick up when we marry - is at the core of keeping the covenant of marriage - be it an earthly or an eternal one. It speaks to love as the verb that it is - as opposed to the emotional feeling it very often is not. It deepens the responsibility of the marriage as a covenant, recognizing that the feeling of love that ignites the creation of the marriage organism as simply that - an impetus, insufficient to sustain the marriage on its own.

C.S. Lewis writes of this covenant - the formalizing of choosing our love and loving our choice:

“The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.”

(C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, emphasis added)

Surrounding these three "love" stories, Middlemarch is also filled with a wide-ranging look at mid-19th-century rural living in England with the social attitudes and issues of its day. Plus, there’s a juicy scandal which has much to say of hypocrisy, hidden guilty consciences, and the lengths humans will go to in order to maintain their public image. But at the risk of my review being 800+ pages, I’ll tell you that simply as a teaser to further entice you to try this lengthy novel.

I recommend watching the movie first to keep the characters straight before wading into the depths of this insightful human nature study. What I DON’T recommend is that you read it my way. My world record in taking nearly a half-century to read a novel isn’t worth attempting to beat.

(https://www.laureensimper.com/post/my-47-year-overdue-book-report-a-prelude)