Re-Watching (Masterpiece Theater) Middlemarch

This mini-series first aired in 1994—before streaming, so I HAD to make sure I was in front of the TV to catch all 7 episodes. I wasn’t familiar with the story, but loved dramas and literature and period pieces.

Middlemarch by George Eliot was a wide-ranging novel following the lives of several residents and newcomers to a proverbial town somewhere in middle England right before the railroads came through and at the rise of Industrialization, which upended the 19^th century. Virtually everything was about to change. At the center of the novel is Dorothea Brooks, a woman you admire and at the same time want to slap silly. Her idealism is ambitious and totally lacking in common sense. She seems to stumble from good intention to good intention while sinking in a quagmire of her own making. She aims for an ideal of love by marrying a stodgy cleric given to vain academic pursuits, hoping that she might be able, by proxy, to expand her own knowledge,

I get it. Women of that time period were bound by class, culture, and their gender. Eliot, herself, by writing Middlemarch was kicking against the times. In contrast to Dorothea is Rosamond who flirts and schemes and gossips into getting what she wants. She uses the feminine powers allowed to her, while Dorothea lets her soul and spirit lead the way. Neither woman, we see as the novel winds its way to its conclusion, gets everything they desire. They each have to subjugate or adjust their expectations—though Dorothea does, in the end, find true love with a younger, poorer man, who relies upon her to be his partner.

The book concludes with this summary of Dorothea: “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.”

Small deeds, though perhaps unnoticed, are rather felt by those around us. I remember thinking this very thing during the pandemic when it felt impossible to change the direction of the world, to stop the ravages of death and disease, or stop an impulsive president from recommending we drink bleach to stop the virus. The idea of controlling anything was ridiculous, let alone our own lives. So I told myself if ever given the chance, hold the door for someone. At any given time in the highrise lobby where I lived, I’d hold the door for people behind me or about to enter. It seemed the least I could do.

How many of us are leading little lives. But, perhaps, within our narrow circle of friends we are holding doors, organizing meal trains, offering rides to the doctor, buying groceries for the mom of three behind us, even doing favors or simply listening to someone of a different political persuasion. These unhistoric acts, with the accumulation of time and faithfulness, may make a difference.