Blast | November 17, 2023

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In “No Great Name on Earth,” Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon muses on the similarities between her mother and Dorothea Brooke, the main character from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Apparently without regret, both women give up public pursuits for unsung family lives. Perplexed by this outcome, Wiltshire-Gordon weaves literary criticism with personal memoir to investigate how values and aspirations can shift over time, opening up new and valid avenues for happiness.

No Great Name on Earth

Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon

 

The summer after my freshman year of college, my mother read Middlemarch out loud to us. My older brother was away for a summer research program, but three of us were at home: my twelve-year-old brother, sixteen-year-old sister, and me. It wasn’t unusual for my mother to read books aloud, but we knew that George Eliot’s most famous novel was her favorite. We grew up with the story of my mother’s ultimatum to my dad early in their relationship: if this was going to go anywhere, he’d need to read Middlemarch.

I was working as a camp counselor that summer, and in the afternoons when I came home, or after dinner when it was still light out, we’d sit in somebody’s bedroom and listen to her read. We usually picked my little brother’s room, since it was the biggest and he was the most difficult to corral. I’d sit on the bed, knitting; Virginia would stretch out on the floor; Skip would sprawl next to me or needle Virginia or dig through his closet for forgotten amusements.

In July, after we’d read about a third of the novel, Virginia left to clear trail in Maine for six weeks. Loath to wait for her return, we decided to record our reading sessions and email them to her so she would be up-to-date when we were together again in August. By the end of the month, we’d sent her seven and a half hours of footage, which she dutifully listened to among the eastern pines.

I forgot about these recordings until ten years later, when I was assigned Middlemarch in a graduate seminar on the realist novel. I loaded them onto my phone and played them on long runs: Eliot’s story and my mother’s commentary and our sporadic interjections made a calming soundtrack along the COVID-quiet streets.

***

If you ask him now, my brother will insist that he was bored the whole time. This claim is not without evidence: “Skip, don’t throw that, please,” my mother says more than once. At one point I yelp because Skip has poked me with my knitting needle. There’s an altercation involving a blanket, which he wants off and I want on. Still, he wasn’t entirely disengaged. He sounds genuinely upset when Fred Vincy defaults on a loan, forcing the poor Garths to sacrifice their savings to cover for him. Fred had a hundred pounds toward the debt, but he spent it on a horse that has gone lame. “I have tried everything—I really have,” Fred insists.

“No, you didn’t!” Skip interjects. “First of all, just use the hundred pounds to pay the—”

“Sell the flute,” I suggest. “It’s not like he can play it anyway.”

“Yeah, sell your flute! Or beg from your sister!”

“Well, but he enjoys the flute,” my mother says reasonably. “He could get a job, how about that?”

My mother is not a theatrical person, but she reads with expression. She adopts a monotonous drawl for Casaubon; an earnest, straightforward voice for Dorothea; a light, musical tone for Rosamond. Occasionally the text doesn’t make it obvious who’s speaking, and she mixes up the voices. “Oh, this is Sir James,” she realizes once, after beginning in Celia’s light flutter; she rereads the speech in a more sensible baritone. She offers definitions and editorial commentary as necessary: “When you say ‘friends’ in an English novel, it means ‘close relatives’”; “tatting is like knitting, but tatting is making lace.” When Mr. Brooke announces his run for office, she gives a brief history of the English parliament and the changes happening at the time. We get a description of Dorothea after her honeymoon, and she points out the aesthetic contrast: the Christmas-red of Rome gives way to Lowick’s spare white walls, enclosed and tomblike.

***

The Fred Vincy–Mary Garth storyline held the most pathos for my brother. But for the novel itself, Dorothea Brooke is more central: Middlemarch begins and ends with a reflection on Dorothea as a modern-day Saint Theresa, an “ardently willing soul” in search of “the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.” And at the novel’s climax, Dorothea’s choices are the ones the narrator asks us to attend to most closely.

Still, I can understand why Skip wasn’t drawn to her. She’s idealistic and earnest, and at times comes across as holier-than-thou. In the opening scene, Dorothea and her younger sister are looking at some jewelry they’ve recently inherited. Dorothea makes a little speech to Celia about how she doesn’t care for earthly things. But then she sees an emerald ring that she particularly likes and has to do some mental gymnastics to make room for her liking it: “They look like fragments of heaven,” she says. The narrator tells us that “her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colors by merging them in her mystic religious joy.” (Celia, who also likes the emerald ring, is irked.)

But Dorothea has a commitment to helping others that overshadows these small hypocrisies. And her performative morality diminishes as she finds opportunities to do real good, to make a meaningful difference. She learns that her husband’s aunt was denied any inheritance for marrying a Polish refugee, and she’s willing to sacrifice her own income to make restitution. She sees the poor conditions of the tenant-farmers on her uncle’s land, and she devises a plan to build what’s essentially an affordable housing development. (This was the part of the novel that my father, an urban planner, found most compelling.) Dorothea has principles, and she’s not content for them to remain an abstraction. The narrator tells us she feels a “desire to make her life greatly effective. What could she do, what ought she to do?” This is what draws me to her—why I like her, even in spite of her initial Puritanism. She wants to do something that matters. She has education, money, and energy, and she feels a call to make the most of it.

***

My mother had time to spend afternoons reading to us because they decided my dad would be the one with the career. After all, his job could support the whole family, whereas she was teaching as an adjunct lecturer in anticipation of an academic position once she finished her PhD. She started her dissertation the year before my brother was born, and she kept teaching and writing even once there were two of us. But her progress slowed, and when my sister arrived three years later, they moved to the Chicago suburbs to escape the intensity of the city. My mother packed her dissertation notes into brown boxes that traveled with us to our new house, where they sat in the study unopened and unmissed. She’s still on the rolls at the University of Chicago in a state called “ABD”: all but dissertation.

Of course, her intellect didn’t shrivel once she gave up academic work. Instead of the Tudors and Stuarts, her focus was the Wiltshire-Gordons. “Hyphen. G-O-R, D-O-N,” we’d hear her on the phone, the same patient cadence for every parent-teacher conference she scheduled or doctor’s appointment she confirmed. She found more interesting projects, too. She rewrote the bylaws for the community school we went to when we were little. She managed the household finances: long-term and short-term savings, diversified investments, charitable donations. She organized family trips and redesigned her mother-in-law’s dilapidated kitchen with my uncles serving as the labor.

The ease with which my mother accomplished these tasks has always made me feel that she could do absolutely anything she wanted to.

“Mom, would you say you’re undaunted?” I asked her once.

She laughed. “That would not be a word I would use.”

“You never are daunted, though,” I said.

“Well, nothing has ever come along to daunt me.”

***

Early in the novel, Dorothea marries Edward Casaubon, a man much older than she, whom she’s drawn to for his knowledge and seriousness. She imagines that her marriage will be something like a research assistantship, providing her with the training she needs in order to make a difference in the world. “I don’t feel sure about doing good in any way now,” she reflects. But “I should learn everything then…I should know what to do, when I got older: I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life.”

It doesn’t quite turn out this way. Casaubon is insecure about his own work, reluctant to let her help him, and jealous of her efforts to help others. Dorothea embodies every virtue he wants from a wife. But “whether Providence had taken equal care of Miss Brooke in presenting her with Mr. Casaubon,” the narrator wryly observes, “was an idea which could hardly occur to him. Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man could choose not only his wife but his wife’s husband!”

We must have read this passage soon after my birthday: my mother notes, “Maisie, you are now Dorothea’s age, because she’s nineteen.”

“But I’m not married to Casaubon,” I say.

“No, and you’re not likely to be, either,” she replies.

It’s not likely, of course, because Casaubon is a fictional character and thus not available to marry a real human; furthermore, he has already chosen Dorothea, to whom he remains married until his death in Chapter 48. In any case, I hope I’d know better than to marry a man thirty years older who gives no sign of emotional readiness for partnership. Having held a research assistantship myself, I am quite satisfied for that experience to remain a professional one.

I can see the appeal for Dorothea, though: the possibility of building a life with an intellectual equal, someone who thinks deeply and shares her principles. How tempting—I know this!—how tempting to ignore practical concerns in favor of the electricity of thinking with someone who knows things I don’t. But my vision is too clear—or maybe it’s that the practical has a way of making itself painful—and I’ve always given it up.

***

The literary critic Catherine Gallagher argues that Middlemarch is “structured like a triptych”: continually moving between specific description, general type, and back again to the particular case. For example, a description of Mary Garth gives way to what Gallagher calls “the general category of persons by which we are to make sense of [her]”: “If you want to know more particularly how Mary looked, ten to one you will see a face like hers in the crowded street to-morrow.” But such generality “seems to want experiential grounding,” Gallagher writes, and the narrator soon returns to Mary’s unique traits: her distinctive smile, her singularly sharp tongue. “If you made her angry, she would not raise her voice, but would probably say one of the bitterest things you have ever tasted the flavor of; if you did her a kindness, she would never forget it.”

“Experiential grounding” would be an apt euphemism for the various side plots captured on our recordings. In Chapter 27, my mother worries that the hat I’m knitting will be too small; in Chapter 36, she is proven wrong. Skip starts throwing things in Chapter 23 and never stops. But my favorite moments happen when our dialogue weaves with the story itself. It’s a sign of Eliot’s ear, and her success at creating characters who are at once particular and universal. The matronly Mrs. Garth has two young children who follow her around the house, doing their lessons as she cooks and folds laundry. Her instruction is peppered with various asides: “Those apple peels are for the pigs, Ben.” My mother’s narration features similar interruptions. “Please don’t toss that, honey bun.” (Later, more forcefully: “Skip. Stop throwing that.”)

In Mrs. Garth’s lesson on the Romans, Ben has trouble remembering yesterday’s facts about Cincinnatus. Moments later, when Fred is confessing his debts to Mrs. Garth, Skip chimes in: “He can sell Diamond, right? Can’t he sell Diamond?”

My mother patiently reiterates the central plot point from ten minutes earlier. “No, Diamond is lame now.”

“What?! He’s totally lame? I thought he was only a little lame.”

“If a horse is lame, you can’t get much money for it! He had a bad temper, nearly killed a groom, caught his foot in a rope, and lamed himself. That’s the situation. Skip, please don’t do that.”

On the next day’s recording, Fred is still worrying over his debts when Skip pipes up again. “But Fred has more money now. For selling the—for putting the horse down.”

“He doesn’t have any more money. He gave it to Mrs. Garth.”

“No! Horse flesh! Horse meat!”

My mother is baffled. “Horse meat? No, they don’t eat horse meat.”

“No, c’mon,” Skip says. “They don’t eat it, but he sold it. That’s what he was doing in the alleys.”

“That’s what he was trying to do; he never managed to do it! The horse was lame—he had the buyer lined up, and the horse went lame!”

“Yes, I know, but now he can sell the horse meat.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, they don’t eat horse meat. Anyway, we’re trying to hear about Mr. Wrench, who is coming on the morrow…”

(Listening to this recording again, I finally located the source of the misunderstanding. Skip is at least partially vindicated: Fred’s unsuccessful foray into horse-trading is described as “a bad bargain in horse-flesh.”)

***

My mother and I both feel dissatisfied with the end of Middlemarch. After his death, Casaubon leaves Dorothea an inheritance but restricts it with a petty codicil: if she ever marries Mr. Casaubon’s cousin, she must forfeit the whole sum. Dorothea, who finds she does in fact love Mr. Casaubon’s cousin, gives up the money.

In the epilogue, we learn that Dorothea devotes herself to her new husband’s career. It’s a good career: he’s working for political changes that increase representation and help the common people. But she doesn’t do any of the things she used to want to do. She doesn’t manage money for public interest projects. She doesn’t design and build an affordable housing development. And—what I find most unsettling—she’s okay with this. She feels that her life is happy, fulfilled, valuable: “Dorothea could have liked nothing better, since wrongs existed, than that her husband should be in the thick of a struggle against them, and that she should give him wifely help.” It seems like the novel wants us to be okay with this, too. Its closing exhortation asks us to see an immense ethical value to her life with her husband and children, even though it’s behind the scenes, even though it’s not public and well-documented like her husband’s work.

But my mother and I both feel a grief at this. We feel that Dorothea had plans, and we wish she could have executed them. My mother isn’t quite as taken with Will Ladislaw as Dorothea is. “She could have found someone else,” she says.

“But she wanted to marry him,” I say.

“Heaven knows why,” she says.

My dad, of course, was a sensible choice in every way—and she loved him. So I suppose it’s hard to know what she would have done if he hadn’t been a sensible choice. Probably she wouldn’t have loved him.

***

In his essay “The Art of Decision-Making,” Joshua Rothman describes a fundamental paradox to the way we approach life-changing choices. We make those choices based on what’s important to us, what we value. But, for big decisions—whether to change jobs, move across the country, have children—the result will change what we value. “Before having children, you may enjoy clubbing, skydiving, and LSD,” Rothman writes. Or “you may simply relish your freedom to do what you want.” After having a child, these things are much harder to come by. Instead, you stay in on the weekends, looking at trucks on the street and reading books about racecars where the couplets don’t quite scan. You’ve given up the things you used to want to do. “And yet,” Rothman writes, “as a parent, you may not miss them. You may actually prefer changing diapers, wrangling onesies.” Parenthood will turn you into the person you feared becoming. But you may find that this is exactly the person you want to be.

How do you plan for your own future, then? How do you make decisions in pursuit of a sense of fulfillment—a life you find valuable, enjoyable—when the terms of that fulfillment are subject to change based on the very choices you’ve used to pursue it?

Even if my goals go unchanged, my career path is far from assured: I’m working toward a PhD in the humanities, where jobs are notoriously hard to come by. I know that even though I love the work I’m doing, and even if I keep loving it, it might someday be relegated to a hobby—the way it was before grad school, when I would spend my workdays wrangling Microsoft PowerPoint and weekends parsing Levinas and Wittgenstein. I can imagine changing the way I spend my time. But it’s more disconcerting to imagine changing my values: that something could be so important to me and then, simply—stop mattering.

***

My mother picked me over the English legal system and development of common law under the Stuarts. I don’t mean to make a false dichotomy here: people study English common law and the Stuarts without shortchanging their children. My mother doesn’t frame it this way, either, as if one choice was virtuous and the other morally bankrupt. Still, there are subtle variations in the story depending on when you ask her.

“I didn’t have time for it once Virginia was born,” she says sometimes, as if the dissertation naturally fell by the wayside. But every choice she makes is deliberate, it seems to me; and if something falls by the wayside it’s because she has decided to let it fall by the wayside.

“Well, yes, that’s true,” she says. “We decided that Dad would be the one with the career.”

“Why?” I ask her.

“I wanted to spend more time with all of you,” she usually says.

We have this conversation a lot. I don’t know why I keep asking her the same questions. Maybe because it seems so out of character, that she would choose not to finish something that mattered to her. But this is what she keeps trying to explain—that it stopped mattering to her. She cared about it, and then she found that she cared about being a parent more. For all her planning ahead, she’s not rigid. You can make a plan and then change it, which is still more useful than not having a plan at all. If she reads a book and discovers it’s repetitive and superficial, she won’t waste her time making it to the last page. (That said, she reads so fast that she might as well finish it.)

Sometimes she comes a little closer to what I guess I’m fishing for. “Dad was more established. When we got married, he was almost done with grad school, and by the time I was deciding whether to finish my dissertation, he was making enough to support all of us.”

Regret: I think that’s what I’m trying to hear. A sense that she still feels the PhD was a worthwhile endeavor, that in a different world she would have liked to finish it. And I care about this because I am in the middle of a PhD myself: I am about to start my dissertation, and I find it intimidating, and I worry about not finishing. And so I’m listening for reassurance that this is a worthwhile way to spend my time. It’s the sort of thing children often want from their mothers, I suppose: validation and encouragement. I want to know that she thinks I’m doing something worth doing. I want to know that she’s proud of me.

But maybe I’m also listening for regret because I know it’s a gift she gave me—that time with her growing up, those afternoons reading Middlemarch. And so I’m alert for any indication that she wishes it had been otherwise. Are you sure it was worth it: I know what it cost you.

***

Dorothea is a serious person. “Ardent” is the narrator’s favorite epithet for her. She’s not dour—she laughs along with others’ light-heartedness—but I don’t think she tells a single joke in the whole novel. My mother just manages to surpass her in this regard: she knows one joke, and she will tell it if you accuse her of a lack of levity. (It is not a funny joke. “How do you make a peanut butter sandwich?” it begins—something along those lines—and I don’t remember the ending, except that if you have the gall to ask my mother for a joke you are getting what you deserve.)

But she laughs at our jokes, my dad and my siblings and me. I suspect she knows we need this from her, because she has a genuine laugh, but also a laugh-of-acknowledgement that recognizes the attempt at humor and responds to the bid for connection: your jokes aren’t funny but I like that you tell them. Her real laugh is a much greater prize; and sometimes when we’re all in the kitchen we’ll each try our various gambits, the repartee for her benefit, to see who can provoke a genuine smile.

“Do you relate to Dorothea?” I asked her once.

“No,” she said.

“But Dorothea has principles, and you have principles,” I said.

“Well, she has principles and ambition. And I just have the principles.”

In fact, this does sound like Dorothea—Dorothea at the end of the novel, who gave things up but wanted to give them up. She wanted a life with Will Ladislaw more than the life she could have without him. She never did the grand things she planned. But her small acts of selflessness ripple outward, and they turn out to make her own happiness possible, too.

What are the big things you could have done? You could have done anything you wanted. You could have had a career like my dad’s, if you had decided you wanted one.

“I did do what I wanted,” she says.

***

Three weeks ago, I took my qualifying exams. I sat across a table from a classicist, a literary theorist, and a philosopher and answered questions for three hours while the sweat soaked my shirt. Then they sent me out of the room while they deliberated. An eternity later, they called me back and declared my competence.

This means that I am now, like my mother, ABD.

***

There are so many respects in which I want the same things as my mother, so many ways I want to be like her. I’m a different person, I know that: she’s more analytical; I’m more interested in feelings. She likes logistical projects; I prefer creative ones. But I’m better at my creative projects because she asks me how I plan to manage them. I’m more emotionally stable because I see how placid she is, how calmly she responds to discord, how she’s able to take one issue at a time without letting old hurts spill into new ones. And she’s the one who taught me to care about academic work, she and my dad both: to investigate ideas deeply, to work hard at them. To care about literature.

And if I turn out like my mother, how could I be anything but grateful? She’s not perfect, of course she’s not—but if someone said, this is the life you’re going to have, I would count myself lucky beyond belief: not least because it means having four children who love each other. “I did do what I wanted,” she says, and I want her to have done it; I want her to have read Middlemarch to me on summer afternoons.

I don’t know how to want something else for myself, though. I mean, I do—I do want something else for myself. I want to do things that are bigger, that are more public. I’m wary of the impulse toward selflessness, wary of giving in to it, as much as I believe in it—as much as I think it’s one of the most important things about me or about any person.

With anyone else it would be easier: to say, we’ve made different choices, and that’s fine. But I have tried so hard to make choices the way my mother does, because she is wise and honest and thinks ahead. So I find myself following along with her decisions, wanting so much of what she wanted, and wondering whether I will come to the same moment: ABD and deciding not to finish. She says it doesn’t feel like grief. But we both grieve for Dorothea, for what she didn’t do.

***

Dorothea is not my mother’s favorite character. Wry and judicious, Mary Garth holds that honor. Dorothea, by contrast, strikes her as childlike—even at the end of the novel, when she has decided to marry Will and reconciles herself to a life without riches.

“Remember what she tells him?” my mother says. “‘I will learn what everything costs’! Whereas all those other Middlemarchers have had to pay attention to what things cost the whole time.”

I have more sympathy for Dorothea than she does, although I’m also fond of Mary Garth. But my favorite character in the novel is the narrator.

“Is that cheating?” I ask her.

“I guess not,” she allows. “It’s not Eliot herself; it’s a voice she’s created.”

In case my mother’s opinion holds less weight outside her family, I’ll add that the scholar J. Hillis Miller is also on my side: the narrator asserts a personhood, he argues, through subjective choices about how to tell the story. At the beginning of Chapter 15, the narrator explicitly comments on the task at hand: “I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web.” Miller asks us to “note that personifying ‘I.’ The narrator of Middlemarch can only with difficulty be thought of as a purely neutral or neuter narrative voice.”

Middlemarch’s narrator is the reason the story is worth reading. She is funny yet insightful, satirical but never belittling. On its own, the plot offers its share of intrigue, but it’s the narrator’s keen eye and turns of phrase that make the novel what it is. Self-important patients like Mr. Trumbull, for instance, are no rarity—but only our narrator finds quite this way of describing it:

“[Mr. Trumbull was] much sustained by application of the thermometer which implied the importance of his temperature, by the sense that he furnished objects for the microscope, and by learning many new words which seemed suited to the dignity of his secretions. For Lydgate was acute enough to indulge him with a little technical talk.”

Many of the characters in Middlemarch imagine futures for themselves that have little grounding in reality: Fred’s faith in his own good luck; Casaubon’s expectation that marriage will bring rapturous happiness. But the narrator is playfully, thoughtfully attentive to the world as it is. Miller describes the voice as “sympathetic…but also deliciously ironic, mocking, and clairvoyant in his (her, or its) insight into human folly.” She’s an alert observer of the life around her, and the novel invites us to join her in that observation.

In other words, she is a writer.

***

All but dissertation: as if my coursework constituted everything, as if the dissertation really were the only thing left.

Maybe I am listening for my mother’s regret because I can’t choose what she did. When she was my age and writing her dissertation, my mother had been married for six years, already had my brother, and was pregnant with me. Whereas the choice I have right now is between writing on Henry James or Virginia Woolf.

For my mother, “ABD” seems much more accurate. She really did do everything else, everything that mattered to her. And when you have the rest, maybe you don’t need the dissertation after all.

***

The novel closes by reflecting on Dorothea’s life and impact, with sentences as exquisite as they are famous:

“Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

The irony, of course, is that Dorothea’s life does not remain in obscurity. Even as the narrator asks us to recognize the ethical value to acts unseen and unsung, she herself has taken up the task of seeing and singing them. We recognize the exquisiteness of Dorothea’s generosity in part because of the exquisiteness of that sentence—that public, historic sentence. I admire Dorothea’s selflessness. But I also admire the narrator, who found language for it.

The narrator: who perhaps never faces the forked path that Dorothea does. We don’t know much about her life, after all—whether she’s married; even whether she’s a woman. And we don’t know whom she’s addressing. She could be speaking to three teenagers sprawled in a childhood bedroom, the youngest of whom only pays intermittent attention—or to a committee of literary scholars hanging on her every word. Of course, she does speak to both these groups, and indeed anyone who picks up Middlemarch, whether she can imagine that audience or not: we are all reading the novel that gives words to a hidden life.

Dorothea didn’t need the words, though. She never knew her life was narrated, that millions of readers saw her choices and her kindnesses. And as far as I can tell, she didn’t wish for it.

When I told my mother I was working on this essay, she said, “No need to write about me!” I’ll clarify, then, that it’s not for her I’m writing it. This is no favor to her, to publicize her quiet life: she studied history but she never needed to be part of it.

“Do you think you’re Dorothea?” I ask again, always circling back to the same questions.

But she has never been one to indulge a metaphor if she doesn’t have to. “No, I’m just myself,” she says.

And I am narrating her, not because she needs her life to be told, but because I would like to tell it. I want to make something that lasts, and this seems worth saving: that things are not so ill with me as they might have been is mostly owing to her.

***

Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon is a 2022-2023 Emerging Critics Fellow with the National Book Critics Circle and a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, studying the relationship between ethics and literary form in twentieth-century novels. Her essays and reviews appear in The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, Kirkus, and elsewhere.