Modern Criticisms of Middlemarch

Of the recent criticism essays we could read, I liked Robert B. Heilman’s criticism called “Stealthy Convergence” in Middlemarch on page 618. I liked this essay or whatever you want to call it because it talks about Eliot’s use of an extensive character list as well. I really liked the last thing I blogged about because Henry James talked about how the characters were written and interacted with each other so that they projected the a great span of a community. Heilman’s article continues on this sort of path.

He discusses the technique which Eliot so perfectly referenced and utilized, called “stealthy convergence.” This technique allows for “interconnection among people who do not expect it.” What’s great about what Heilman has to say is that through this convergence, Eliot connects various characters whose stories might not directly relate but in reality, with such a small community, they do. That is what she wants to show off about a rural town like Middlemarch. Everyone is connected.

Heilman took a very studies approach to it. What I said above is basically what I think we was trying to say most of the time. He doesn’t talk about the characters so much as the technique in which the story is written. He talks about the chronological tie which was the “oldest and simplest” sort of transition. And it is! Because Eliot and so many authors with large character lists follow a linear chronological path, it’s easy for the reader to understand the transitions between characters. And that’s what Eliot had to master (and according to Heilman, she did): flawless transitions. These transitions had to make sense and Heilman uses a film reference to accomplish his explanation of what Eliot and many others have done, which is panning: “proceeding panoramically from one to another of the neighboring components of groups or scenes.” Heilman praises Eliot saying “no other nineteenth-century novelist, as far as I have observed has hit upon this polished way of transferring us, if not insensibly at least without our feeling the graceless yank of an author’s derrick, from part to part.” Sure, some of us kind of got angsty when we had all those Dorothea-central chapters at the beginning and then it totally switched to Lydgate and co. and we’re left thinking, ‘hey I thought this book was going to be about Dorothea!’ But Heilman breaks it down for us and we realize, ‘o yeah, there was a transition from Dorothea to the Lydgate during the dinner party.’ Ultimately, Eliot creates a cross-over which we can easily follow. These characters do this and that incites a reaction from these characters, etc. and in the end we observe the epitome of a rural community which is a web of interconnected actions and reactions.

p.s. I also really appreciated Heilman’s mentioning of “The Dead Hand” and explaining it as “wills through which dead men seek power over the living.” The book title didn’t make sense until then.