Lessons from George Eliot in the age of Trump

 

I found George Eliot's remarkable life story and her novel Middlemarch inspiring reading during the troubled summer of 2020, when U.S. President Donald Trump and Covid anti-maskers took selfishness to new lows. A biography of Eliot by Gordon Haight shows that even though she was born in 1819 and lived in a very different society, her life and her novels still contain some lessons for us today.

In a narcissistic, individualistic age that has seen bragging, lying and selfishness driving the U.S. agenda for the past few years, there is something heartening about spending time with the opposite. And lately, George Eliot, the 19^th-century English writer, translator, thinker, multi-linguist – and social outcast – has been my conduit to a different world; one in which kindness, forgiveness, generosity and unselfishness matter.

For me, the essence of what Eliot is about – both in her own life and in her novels – is illustrated in a searing scene toward the end of her novel Middlemarch. It features her upper-class heroine Dorothea Brooke, who – like Eliot herself – is drawn to idealism, self-sacrifice, justice and good works. The scene occurs after the recently widowed Dorothea finds her new lover in what appears to be a romantic tryst with another woman. The woman is the spoiled wife of the town’s idealistic young doctor, who faces professional and financial ruin because of his efforts to keep her happy. Dorothea had earlier discovered the doctor's dilemma and – idealism reaching out to idealism – had taken it upon herself to pay his debts, resuscitate his reputation and save his troubled marriage, the latter prompting an unannounced visit to his wife. When she sees her lover and the doctor's wife in a close tete-a-tete in the drawing room, she flees, wordless.

Dorothea’s subsequent response to that shock points, I think, to the huge contrast between Eliot’s approach to the world and the less-heartening one familiar to us after four years of Donald Trump. At first, Dorothea behaves as we might expect of someone thunderstruck by losing love to a rival. Tortured, she spends a sleepless night writhing in bitterness and anger.

But by morning, she has made a shift that many people never make in a lifetime. She begins to think of the doctor, his wife, and her own putative lover as people in crisis whom she has been called on to assist: “She said to her own irremediable grief, that it should make her more helpful, instead of driving her back from effort.” Dorothea asks herself: “What should I do – how should I act now, this very day if I could clutch my own pain, and compel it to silence, and think of those three!” Opening her curtains to the sights of an ordinary day – a man walking down the road with a bundle, a woman carrying her baby, a shepherd and his dog – reminds her of the “largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance.” She feels part of that “involuntary, palpitating life, and [that she] could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.”

 And so she moves from anger to sympathy to a desire to help, culminating in a second visit to the doctor’s wife that very day. Her behaviour there, exposing her own vulnerability while reassuring the troubled young woman of her husband’s love and explaining his struggles, is a masterpiece of how humans can help each other through honesty, kindness and generosity. The wife, at first resistant and suspicious, is finally touched by her visitor’s transparent well-meaning. Then, meeting truth with truth, she rewards her with an honest explanation of what was really happening in that drawing room: her own overtures were being rejected and the young man was in fact pleading his love for Dorothea.

Nobody writes such a passage out of narrowness or ignorance, and in Eliot’s case, I think it was the result of a giant intellect and a generous heart evolving together over a lifetime. Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans in 1819, did not have an easy life. An estate manager’s daughter, she had no fortune, little formal education, and was plagued by the curse of unusual plainness. But she was also brilliant, a voracious scholar who learned Latin, Greek, French, Italian and German and was not only translating – but also absorbing – German philosophical/religious works by her 20s. She supported herself by writing, translating, reviewing and editing for London magazines, but the skimpy pay left her in deep poverty until she began writing her popular novels in her late 30s.

The defining act of her life was her decision to live openly with an already-married man, a bombshell scandal in those times. For complex legal reasons, her lover George Henry Lewes couldn’t divorce his wife, who was already having children by another man. As Eliot noted, she was only doing openly what others were doing secretly, but the punishment was to be cast out of London society. She had expected to lose friends and acquaintances, but she was heart-stricken when her brother – the beloved playmate of her childhood – cut off all ties and insisted the whole family follow suit. Over the years, her increasing fame and fortune restored her social status, but even when she was being courted by royalty, her brother stayed aloof. He relented only after Lewes died, 25 years later.

Throughout, Eliot worked unrelentingly hard, helped raise Lewes’ sons by his first wife, and kept her heart wide open. When her brother finally sent what Eliot’s biographer Gordon Haight called a “stiff, meagre” note after Lewes’ death, she quickly responded that it was a “great joy to me to have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones.” That same forgiveness was extended to friends who once shunned her but wanted to resume relations. Financially, she was always generous. In the days when she and Lewes were so poor that they noticed how much better they felt after a proper meal, she tried to give part of her small income to her sister, who was struggling. When she began making good money, she donated to causes and urged it on friends who had come upon hard times; even Lewes’ wife and her children by another man benefited. Eliot’s generosity assumed other forms. When she became such an icon that her conversation was jealously sought at gatherings, she would make a deliberate effort to talk to the less famous folk who otherwise would have been shouldered aside. Despite her success, Eliot never absorbed the idea of herself as a great talent. Long after her literary reputation was established, she was so tentative about her work that Lewes guarded her from reviews and the comments of friends lest someone drop a word that she would perceive as critical and be discouraged from carrying on.

Out of such a life, and such a person, came novels about flawed characters who were often wrestling with right and wrong in the face of severe dilemmas. Her goal, Eliot told editor John Blackwood early in her novelistic career, was not to create irreproachable characters, but to present “mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity and sympathy.”

For me, this summer was a perfect time to be immersed in Eliot’s life story and philosophy. Her biography and her novels were heartening antidotes to the last eruptions of the Trump reign and his supporting cast of anti-maskers defending their right to ignore the safety of others.

Remembering back to Dorothea’s decision to turn her attention away from herself and toward the hurting people around her – and the subsequent good that resulted – we can see how a single act of unselfishness can untangle a web of hurt and pave the way to healing.

I’m thinking that Eliot’s works may be just the thing for our narcissistic, individualistic age. What could be better than books that inspire “tolerant judgment, pity and sympathy”?