My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Turning Yearning Into Learning

Aspiration is easy to confuse with a desire to move on in life. Aspiration implies a change into something else; this is antithetical to becoming more of oneself, to mature in other words. Aspiration becomes a virtue only when the idea of personal authenticity has been abandoned. At that point we enter into the delusion that we can shape ourselves into anything we choose - or more accurately what those around us, society, have chosen as worthwhile.

George Eliot never let aspiration replace her desire to become more of what she was. In this she has become an icon of women’s liberation in all the best senses of that term. What is perhaps less obvious is that she is also an inspiring figure for men for exactly the same reason. Aspiration is the culturally generated male disease par excellence. George Eliot’s resistance to that disease is clinically available for male inoculation in My Life in Middlemarch.

Mead’s triangulation of her own life with that of Eliot and the character development in her novels is as remarkably affective as it is effective. Mead shows how to read fiction - as simultaneously an exploration of the author’s life and an articulation of one’s own. Eliot is not among the great writers in the English language because she describes her own experience and general social conditions so thoroughly but because she writes things which are immediately recognizable as the truth of one’s own circumstances.

For me that truth is the extent to which social expectations determine what we think are personal decisions. We are confronted, however, by a set of ready made options from which to choose - doctor, lawyer, Indian chief according to the children’s rhyme. The choices are already rigged. This is Eliot’s profound insight. As Mead summarizes not just Eliot’s youth but her entire life: “She knew she wanted something. She knew she wanted to do something. She didn’t know what it was. She just knew she wanted, and wanted, and wanted.”

The wanting never stopped. It never turned into a position, a role, a self-image, actually a self-imposed idol. As Mead says of Eliot, “She turned her yearning into learning.” That yearning never degraded into a fixed aspiration, an ambition which would conform with acceptable norms. This takes the courage of a Ulysses to maintain. Most men don’t have such courage; they don’t even know they need it. Hence the importance of George Eliot to those with mixed chromosomes.

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