Renunciation in Middlemarch pivots against George Eliot’s belief in a need for self-sufficiency and necessary selfishness. The tension between these two principles dictates the marriages of Dorothea to Casaubon and Lydgate to Rosamond Vincy. The novel's first chapter is a small-scale, domestic vignette, introducing Dorothea’s instinctual, haughty habit of renunciation, which will amass graver dimensions when she allows it to stipulate the terms of her romantic and sexual self. Just as Dorothea sacrifices her vocational aspirations for misguided love, Lydgate’s professional ambition is subsumed by his inadvertent seduction of Rosamond; their marriage is built on the foundations of a myopic self-centredness, which gives way to its antithesis: a bitter, inescapable renunciation of the self. Renunciation seems to inevitably accompany love throughout Middlemarch, but is not simply dismissible as a negative trait, nor as a straightforward vector of suffering – in moderation, in fact, it is an attribute to be admired.
The novel’s early scene, depicting Dorothea’s renunciation of her mother’s jewels in a ‘Puritanic’ ‘assumption of superiority’, foreshadows both her subsequent inconsistency between ascetic renunciation and ‘childish’ impetuosity, and also the majority of Middlemarch’s characters’ ultimate inabilities to reconcile necessary selfishness with altruistic renunciation. The ‘exquisite’ and ‘remarkable’ jewels are marked by a voluptuous superfluity, and Dorothea initially staunchly refuses the jewellery’s ‘pirouetting’, flaunting splendour. Her ascetic sacrifice of the ‘trinkets’ – a term itself derisory and dismissive – is keenly felt by Celia, who feels alternately ‘uneasy’, ‘a little hurt’, ‘persecut[ed]’ and ‘unhappy’ throughout the course of the interaction. Dorothea’s penchant for martyrdom is later shrewdly noted by Celia (‘she likes giving up’) and even derided by Sir James’s sarcastic, dismissive attribution of Dorothea’s ‘self-mortification’ to ‘some high, generous motive’. The protagonist’s show of renunciation is smug and haughty, and an oddly tense atmosphere of competition pervades the scene; Celia ‘watches her with real curiosity’, expecting her to ‘renounce the ornaments, as in consistency she ought to do’. It is a cause for ‘wonder’ that Dorothea is disposed to the ‘weakness’ that is accepting the ‘ring and bracelet’. Dorothea’s own mind races to ‘justify’ the deviation from her typical restraint; she reverts to some vaguely ‘religious mystic joy’ in an endeavour to explain away her guilty ‘delight’ – the instinct to relegate her decisions to religious arguments will later serve as the catalyst for her marriage. Yet despite her spiritually procured defence, she remains ‘questioning the purity of her own feeling’ – as Celia attests, ‘inconsistent’ and indecisive. Eliot immediately sets up her novel’s wider interest in the balance between renunciation and self-interested autonomy through Celia’s inability to view the scene as more than a binary set of antitheses: ‘either she should have taken her full share [...] [or] she should have renounced them altogether’. The scene concludes with an examination of sisterly obligation, Celia rejecting the notion of being ‘bound’ to Dorothea’s opinions, yet described by the author as having ‘always worn a yoke’. Chapter I’s final image of a ‘yoked creature’ ominously portends the self-sacrificing ‘yoke of marriage’, and ‘vile yoke’ to which Dorothea and Lydgate will be subjected.
Dorothea’s puritanical renunciation of the jewels in Chapter I is solipsistic and condescending in its sanctimonious advocacy of martyrdom, but serves as the precursor to her self-emptying act of resignation in marrying Casaubon. Casaubon’s letter of proposal to Dorothea itself is figured in terms of renunciation; it is concomitant with having experienced ‘the temporary illumination of hope’ that any ‘resignation to solitude’ would be difficult. Furthermore, in projecting himself as a competent applicant, Casaubon indicates his lack of ‘shame’-inducing ‘backward pages’ on record – a qualification defined by absence, as opposed to any passionate, forward-facing proposal. Indeed, just as Casaubon is constantly referred to with reference to ‘past ages’ and seniority (even on first introduction he is ‘so sallow’, ‘dried’, and sports ‘iron-gray hair’ and ‘two white moles’) and refers to his past ‘experience’ as a means to evidence his suitability, Dorothea’s marriage to him also exiles her to the past. Her husband himself admits he ‘live[s] too much with the dead’, that his mind is ‘something like the ghost of an ancient’, inert and intransigent in the face of the world’s ‘confusing changes’. It is explicitly his renunciation and restraint of emotion – which Dorothea naively equates with ‘religious abstinence from [artificiality]’ – that strikes her as ‘adorable genuineness’. As with her ‘mamma’s jewels’ in Chapter I, Dorothea’s justification for her actions is religious – she is a ‘neophyte’, led by Reverend Casaubon to ‘a higher grade of initiation’. Dorothea renounces her sexual passion for her vocational passion, aware that her suitor does ‘not care about building cottages’. Yet even her humble aspiration to serve as a beacon for him is ultimately abandoned, supplanted by her fundamental, bureaucratic function: she ‘enable[s] him to dispense with a hired secretary’. Dorothea’s rapprochement to Casaubon thus embodies the ultimate form of renunciation – a sacrifice of youth, of vocation and of the extinguishment of her ‘brightness’ by his ‘rayless’ aura, his absence of light calling for her to serve as his ‘lamp-holder’. Sir James condemns it ‘a horrible sacrifice’, that Casaubon is corpse-like, with ‘one foot in the grave’; Mrs Cadwallader deems the marriage ‘frightful’ and Celia laments that ‘he is not half fond enough of Dorothea’. Even Dorothea herself demonstrates a subconscious awareness of Casaubon’s matrimonial impropriety; she ‘shrink[s] from’ informing Celia of the engagement, ‘dread[ing]’ her ‘corrosiveness’. Perhaps the most tragic indication of Dorothea’s misguided self-sacrifice is depicted in Casaubon’s reported thought in Chapter VII; he considers whether ‘some deficiency’ exists in his wife ‘to account for the moderation of his [sexual] abandonment’, but, unable to pinpoint the deficiency, or ‘to figure’ a more benevolent wife, he deems the ‘shallow rill’ of his ‘stream of passion’ unworthy of further contemplation – the poets had simply ‘much exaggerated the force of masculine passion’ (103). This testament to Casaubon’s incapacity to love infuses its ensuing passage with strikingly painful poignancy: upon Dorothea’s timid offer ‘to be more useful’, Casaubon condescends to teach her, instilling in her ‘a painful suspicion’ that her ‘woman’s reason’ falls short of his revered intellectualism. It is from the axes of the protagonist’s fundamental lack of awareness of her sacrifice, and the repeated admonitions and diatribes of Sir James, Celia and Mrs Cadwallader, that a tragic pathos arises, and Dorothea’s habit of renunciation, initially portrayed in the novel as a naive inconsistency and supercilious pretence, takes on suffocating, tragic dimensions.
Lydgate’s marriage to Rosamond Vincy is configured through the same sacrifice as Dorothea’s to Casaubon – his passionate vocational aspiration is obstructed by sexual embroilment; his ‘strictly scientific view of women’ (114) at first ‘take[s] the form of professional enthusiasm’ but his courtship with Rosamond ultimately subsumes his career ambitions, marriage for him revealing itself synonymous with ‘the patient renunciation of small desires’. Eliot’s portrayal of Lydgate and Rosamond’s marriage is shrouded in tragedy – there exists a dislocation in understanding from the very beginning of the couple’s courtship, a disjunction which is only intensified by the proximity bestowed by marriage. In the very same scene as Rosamond considers it ‘natural’ that ‘Lydgate should have fallen in love at first sight of her’, the omniscient narrator informs us that ‘by nature’ Rosamond is ‘an actress of parts’, and plays her role so well that her sense of self is deeply insecure: she does ‘not know [her character] to be precisely her own’. Rosamond’s renunciation of individual identity is the result of a constant self-conscious performativity, rendering her decisive ‘judgement’ of the ‘mutual impression’ of love following her first encounter with Lygate deeply troubling. She insists she can ‘absolutely’ ‘not doubt’ its ‘natural’ existence, but a character lacking any vital foundation of self-knowledge will inevitably have a flawed external focus – as Rebecca Mitchell intimated, ‘before one can feel like another, one must recognise that one is other’. Rosamond has renounced her authentic self, supplanting individuality with generalised ‘types’; she is portrayed through inexactitudes, a ‘creature like [...]’, possessing ‘just the kind of intelligence’ and a ‘sort of beauty’. The disconnect between the couple’s mindsets reaches its dramatic zenith at the scene of Lydgate’s proposal. His consideration of ‘this play at being a little in love’ as ‘agreeable’ and of nominal interference with ‘graver pursuits’ is chased down by Rosamond’s reported thought just a line later: she imagines the ‘various styles of furniture’ dressing her future ‘handsome house’. The ‘questioning flash’ which shatters Lydgate’s former certitude is an epiphany; he realises that Rosamond depends ‘on him for her joy’, and becomes a man ‘mastered’, leaving her house ‘an engaged man, whose soul was not his own’, but is newly ‘bound’ to a woman – his resignation of the ‘soul’ itself for an awed sense of passion stems directly from his shock and pity, serving as an extreme, even idolatrous, renunciation.
Eliot linguistically connects the proposal with echoes to the sisterly binding and ‘yoke’ imagery which concluded Chapter I’s jewellery scene, foreshadowing Lydgate’s ultimate disenchantment with the marriage’s ‘vile yoke’. Eliot’s subordination of him – he is ‘mastered’ by a woman – augurs Lydgate’s later inability to either soothe Rosamond’s ‘dreaded wretchedness’ or to release himself from his relationship’s ‘unmitigated calamity’: ‘she had mastered him’. Lydgate and Rosamond are victims of their respective renunciations of the ‘soul’ and of self knowledge, unwittingly and unintentionally forced by the repercussions of their initial assumption of mutual understanding to renounce any awareness of the other: they are perennially condemned to a ‘total missing of each other’s mental track’. The marriage is entwined with regret and a lack of fulfilment, and a kind of uneasy reconciliation is constructed in the novel’s finale – Rosamond seems to acknowledge the inescapability of human obligation to others, and relinquishes any claim or attachment to Will Ladislaw, in a redeeming display of renunciation: ‘Rosamond had delivered her soul under impulses which she had not known before’. While Dorothea’s renunciation of youth, light and vocation is undermined by Casaubon’s death and her ostensibly inexorable rapprochement with Ladislaw, Rosamond and Lydgate are not graced with a second chance. Lydgate ‘accept[s] his narrowed lot with sad resignation’, both him and Rosamond having dispelled the same ‘wild illusion’ that Dorothea also traversed, equipped now with the knowledge that every self and other has ‘an equivalent centre of self’ – an individual, subjective orbit which must be recognised, and not overly-compromised or renounced. Both Rosamond and Lydgate ultimately renounce their selfhood – Lydgate is condemned through his shocked revelation of Rosamond’s alterity (‘she did not distinguish flirtation from love’) to abandon his preconceived direction (‘he did not mean to marry for the next five years’). For her part, Rosamond’s superficial performativity of self gradually distances her from an authentic identity.
As the novel’s community-oriented title suggests, the renunciation of selfhood performed by Dorothea, Lydgate and Rosamond has an outward trajectory, evincing external, communal repercussions; all three characters mistakenly trust their assumptions about other's mental situations, sacrificing facets of their identity, whether consciously or not. There is a complex tension between renunciation and introspective self-rule however; Mary Garth’s ‘flavour of resignation’ is testament to her benevolence as a character, and her self-sacrifice for Fred Vincy is posited as felicitous and compassionate. Although renunciation of the self is not the vessel through which empathy, charity or love need, or should, be conveyed, neither is it merely a vehicle of self-destruction; and indeed, arguably it is the antithesis of renunciation – egotistical self-focalisation – which is the root of Lydgate and Rosamond’s trouble. They assume mutual understanding, too enveloped in their own ‘centre[s] of self’ to readily comprehend each other’s alterity; neither character fully renounces their prior self-sufficient egotism, which forces them into the liminal realm of a battling, resentful, and only partial renunciation. Dorothea’s renunciation is an all-encompassing, religiously-justified resignation of vocation, sex, youth and self, and Eliot exhibits the illusory, futile martyrdom of such a sacrifice – the result is a bitter, penitential ‘poisonous regret’. Most of the novel’s characters are unable to reconcile necessary selfishness and autonomy with altruistic renunciation; but the exception of Mary Garth’s and Fred Vincy’s ‘solid mutual happiness’ inhibits the novel’s otherwise seemingly pessimistic condemnation of love – marriage is a series of compromises and renunciations, but they need not erode one’s self-hood: Mary and Fred’s marriage stands the test of time, founded on ‘the spirit of joy’ and temporally extensive – enduring into ‘white-haired placidity’.
Further Reading:
Adams, Harriet Farwell, “Dorothea and ‘Miss Brooke’ in Middlemarch”, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 39, no. 1 (1984): 69–90. https://doi.org/10.2307/3044822
Barrett, Dorothea, Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines, (1989)
Mitchell, Rebecca N., ‘The Rosamond Plots: Alterity and the Unknown in Jane Eyre and Middlemarch’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 66. 3 (December 2011), 307-327
Smith, David L., ‘Middlemarch: Eliot’s Tender Subversion’, George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies, no. 40/41 (2001): 34–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42827730
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