Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the fourth of four on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). We consider the status of Middlemarch in the 21st century amid controversies about religion and public life and an emphasis on literature as offering an ethic of “empathy,” an ethic Middlemarch, with its emphasis on what constrains and therefore enframes the feeling self, may complicate; we consider Joyce Carol Oates’s relative demotion of the novel among its rivals; we discuss Eliot’s portrayal of women in marriage and her portrayal of marriage itself as a practice of necessary self-sacrifice; we revisit the question of the novel’s politics and its “conservative reformism”; we revisit the question of its Christian ethics without Christianity; and, in conclusion, we link these post-Christian Christian ethics to a potential politics of culture, literature, and education akin to that of other Victorian intellectuals, all in service to “the growing good of the world.” Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss our upcoming focus on American literature, including Moby-Dick, beginning next week with Emerson, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, our previous sequence on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and the first three episodes on Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
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