Middlemarch Middle Of the Night

Had a pretty much sleepless night last night. I normally have no problems with descending into oblivion, but last night was terrible. I lay awake, eyes wide open, staring into the darkness, pretty much worrying myself into a nervous attack. I couldn’t stop the old brain. Took me a while to even admit that I was having a bout of insomnia, I lay there wide-awake and worrying for waaayyyy too long. Finally, I had had it.

I got up. Turned on the light. Poured a glass of water and started reading Middlemarch, curled up under a fleece blanket in my now diagonally-placed chair. I read until 5 o’clock this morning. And then finally, I felt like sleeping. Put the book down, slept a couple of hours.

I had to have read 250 pages of Middlemarch last night, although I didn’t count. I finished the second-to-last part (called “Two Temptations”), and now I am in the final part of the book, entitled “Sunrise and Sunset”.

In a weird way, it was the worst thing to read during a sleepless night, because as the book races towards its conclusion, things keep getting worse and worse. George Eliot describes things so exquisitely well that it is impossible to not find examples in your own life and reflect upon your own regrets, the mistakes you have made, the bleaker moments of existence that we all have in our past.

Mr. Balustrode has emerged as a very important character (which I should have foreseen), and he, in a very short time, has become a ruined man.

Lydgate, too. The description of his marriage, and what it had become, is beyond awful. You feel for the guy. Rosamond … one of those people in the world who cannot believe that life is not set up to please her, to make her life easy. She has no sense of loyalty to her husband. None. She thinks nothing of going behind his back, she does not stand by him. As a matter of fact, as her contempt and disappointment grows, she begins to subvert him. IN the sneakiest ways. When she wrote to Lydgate’s uncle and asked him for money, I wanted to reach through the pages and smack the complacency off her face. I felt like I was Lydgate, and that she had betrayed me. How DARE you shame your husband like that? How dare you, you ignorant little bitch? She’s an enraging character. Circa 3 a.m., when I got to the part of her letter to Uncle Godwin, I had to put the book down for a second. I got too angry. It was making me nervous. And then comes Uncle Godwin’s letter to Lydgate, saying: “Don’t send your wife to do your business. It’s disgusting.” Meanwhile, Lydgate had no idea that Rosamond had gone behind his back … so even though I was thrilled that Rosamond would feel at least SOME humiliation for her appalling behavior, I felt – on the flipside – true dismay for Lydgate, because her secrecy and ignorance of how the world works (God, I want to smack her face, I’m serious) has ruined his chances to have a happy life. What a character. Rosamond is so alive that I felt her presence in my room. I wanted to speak to her, I wanted to make her realize how mistaken she is, how much she has missed the point, and how she has NO business being a wife. NONE. Her mind is completely undeveloped, and she has no sense that she ever needs to work on herself. No. Everything is justified, in her mind. She has no self-reflection. And in this, she completely abandons Lydgate (her husband) to his fate.

Another thing which struck me: The description of Lydgate’s mounting debt, and what it feels like to be in debt, how it creeps up on you, and how it suddenly takes over all of your thoughts after the debt reaches a certain point … Lydgate’s debt is described with such chilling accuracy that I found myself getting a little upset. Is there a better description of the emotional side of being in debt than in George Eliot’s book? It’s incredible. It is so accurate. Lydgate becomes more and more obsessed with this load of DEBT and how it poisons his entire life, and if he could just get RID of it – if he could just make it GO AWAY, then real life could begin. The desperation becomes so acute (and his wife is so supremely unsympathetic) that he does something so out of character that you ache for him. You ache for his loss of principles, you ache for the character you met at the beginning of the book. Because now, by the end, that character is no more. In his place, is a miserable desperate lonely man, pretty much under the control of the wife he once “loved” (ha – No, he didn’t.) – He thought she would be the comfort he could come home to, he thought she would be the soft pillow he could rest on at the end of a hard day. He did not recognize the faults in her character. He couldn’t see her essential selfishness and ignorance. She’s an awful person. I can’t stand her.

I am very sorry that Lydgate is being punished so completely, and his psyche so shattered – but he made a terrible choice in a wife, and that’s his fault. He was blinded by her beauty. He couldn’t imagine that that soft and pleasing exterior could hide such a sneaky hard disloyal person underneath. Her appearance fooled him. It is my hope that Rosamond gets hers in the end. And BADLY. (Please, don’t reveal what happens if you’ve read it. I will probably finish it tonight or tomorrow.)

So I found the entire “Two Temptations” section of the book really nerve-wracking (I could feel that events were spiralling out of control, and that things were going from bad to worse) – but I still couldn’t put it down. Also, and even more disturbing: I actually care about some of these characters now. I care about what happens to them.

One word: Caleb Garth is pretty much the only person in the book who acts according to his principles. I find that intensely moving. I love Caleb Garth.