George Eliot and the Home Epic

September 27, 2019

Reading Middlemarch is the most pleasurable self-own known to man.
If you don't recognize yourself in Fred Vincy's inability to get his act together, or in poor old Casaubon's deep knowledge that he is unworthy of the task that he's set himself, or Arthur Brooke who is just Trying the Best He Can and doesn't seem to realize that it's not nearly enough--or worse yet, in Lydgate's inability to talk about the hard thing with his wife, or in Dorothea Brooke's desire to channel all that is St. Teresa in her towards someone else's big life project. And yet, and yet! It's such a slowly unspooling pleasure to see the ways in which all of these people's little pettinesses are eventually not hindrances to their own happiness (most of the time).
Middlemarch ends in much the same way as a lot of books of the period do--in a rash of marriages, and babies, and the like, but Eliot leaves it open, leaves it as a beginning. Here's a line from the last chapter:

[Marriage] is still the beginning of the home epic — the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.

There are good marriages and bad, and Eliot makes room for both in Middlemarch. All this made funny, of course, by the fact that George Eliot, Mary Anne Evans, was not, herself, married. She lived with a man, George Henry Lewes, who was married to someone else, and she appended his last name to her own. It was in this partnership that she wrote many of her enduring works, like Middlemarch, and even though it earned her a great deal of disapproval from her Victorian contemporaries, it must have been a deeply happy partnership. (For more on Eliot and her life, and the ways in which her own home life was an epic, I would recommend Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch, which is so good).
As I'm getting deeper into this whole wedding planning thing, the whole wedding thing is feeling like an end into itself as opposed to the beginning of a home epic. I love home epics. I think all the time about the relationships between some of my favorite writers and their spouses--Anne Carson and her husband, Curry, who is called "The Randomizer" in their collaborations, E.B. and Katharine White (I reread these lines of his Paris Review interview all the time: "I had a bird’s-eye view of all this because, in the midst of it, I became her husband. During the day, I saw her in operation at the office. At the end of the day, I watched her bring the whole mess home with her in a cheap and bulging portfolio. The light burned late, our bed was lumpy with page proofs, and our home was alive with laughter and the pervasive spirit of her dedication and her industry.") There are ways that art, and love, and letters can all coexist, and a lot of ways in which they already are for me. There are so many ways in which I'm already living the home epic, and have for the last two years, that my life is full of hard work, and so much love, and that I have a good home, and so many ways in which marriage won't change that at all, and it even feels silly to be thinking so much about the bullshit and the baggage that comes with being ~*an engaged woman*~, but society and the Knot's Wedding Planning Binder are great at making you have feelings about the fact that your envelopes MUST have calligraphy and not be printed, or how you want to start a good skincare routine a year out from the wedding, or like, any of it.
It feels weird to be thinking about the ways that patriarchal bullshit can sneak into these moments that are supposed to be super happy (we are planning a huge party for literally everyone I love, and it is the one time in my life I can tell people to come visit me on an airplane and they sort of have to! I get to make everyone I love listen to poetry I love for an undisclosed, but probably kind of long, amount of time! I get to make everyone cry because of how beautiful love is, and what tender little buttons we all are! I get to make HUGE promises that I fully intend to keep about being patient, and kind, and loving in measures I cannot yet predict to one of the people I care the most about on this earth! My dog will get to wear a little flower garland! Tacos, probably! All of this is amazing, and I CANNOT WAIT.) AND YET..I am. And it's weird that a book that literally has as one of its primary theses "marriage (especially in the Victorian era) is not great for women and their ambitions" is the thing that's seeing me to the end of all this weird party planning, but here we are.
This wedding is and will be just another chapter in the home epic, as was fitting our entire 8 ft. couch into a back of a minivan, and all the dinners I've made for us, and the laundry Jason has done, and the time Chico kept us up half the night being sick, and there will be many more chapters also. This chapter, though, is nice.