Hawksquill's Scribblings

Middlemarch as Hopepunk Middlemarch is one of my favorite books. I first read it in high school and found it challenging yet transcendent. Teenaged me could sense greatness lurking in the impenetrable epigraphs and meandering internal monologues, even if I did not fully comprehend them (I was reading an edition without footnotes). It almost seemed like the novel was calling to my future self as it waited for me to grow up enough to appreciate it. Our next encounter came in 2020, when I participated in the Year of Middlemarch challenge on Reddit. The r/ayearofmiddlemarch subreddit creates a year-long schedule which divides the 800-page tome into more manageable chunks, with weekly discussions and an optional viewing of the flawed BBC adaptation at the end of the year. What a strange and fortuitous time to read Middlemarch, a book set in a community experiencing great uncertainty and change. There’s even a cholera epidemic lurking in the background (according to Eliot’s research notes, she originally planned for cholera to play a much larger role in the book). In 2020, the book spoke to my soul in ways I still struggle to articulate five years later as I write this blog post. I marveled at the genius of the prose, the painful realism of the characters, the sardonic humor of the narrator’s voice. Most of all, I felt a great kinship with Eliot herself. Middlemarch is a laborious book in every sense of the word: long and wordy and painstakingly plotted and researched. You can sense the extreme effort Eliot put into every single word. As a writer who sometimes takes myself too seriously, I could sense Eliot’s thirst to prove herself as an author and use her talent in the service of creating a better, kinder world. I loved the year-long reading experience so much that I did it again the next year, this time getting an edition with proper footnotes. In 2021, I also signed up to write some of the questions for the weekly discussions on the subreddit. My third reading was more analytical than emotional, focusing on understanding Eliot’s historical, literary, and philosophical milieu. Researching Eliot’s extraordinary life only made me love her more. She received an unusually good education for a girl, partially because she was considered so exceptionally unattractive by contemporary beauty standards that marriage didn’t seem likely. Eliot experienced a major crisis of faith in her young adulthood, but found solace in the works of German moral philosophers who emphasized the historicity of the Bible and humanistic ethics which were decoupled from religion. On top of being a ridiculously talented writer, she was also a translator of controversial philosophical texts from both Latin and German. To top it all off, she lived openly with a married man (who was himself in an open marriage) and included an explicitly feminist passage in the final chapter of Middlemarch, which she was later pressured into removing from subsequent editions. A woman after my own heart! You see why I got a bit parasocially obsessed with her. I read an outstanding new Eliot biography by Clare Carlisle and countless articles about Middlemarch, including one suggesting that the book contains a covert reference to abortion (I personally wasn’t convinced, but I’ll include a citation at the end of this blog post). There was even a 2021 piece drawing parallels between cholera in Middlemarch and the COVID-19 pandemic, which had resonated with me so strongly during my 2020 read. I talked up the book and the year-long reading experience so much over the years that I’ve convinced multiple people to give it a try. This year, my partner and friend are both diving in headfirst, and since it’s been a whole three years since I finished my last reread, I’m going to join as well. A few days ago, I revisited David Russell’s introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition and was struck by a new lens for reading the book: Middlemarch is hopepunk as fuck! Hopepunk is a relatively new term, first coined by fantasy author Alexandra Rowland in a 2017 Tumblr post that went viral. Quoting Wikipedia: “Works in the hopepunk subgenre are about characters fighting for positive change, radical kindness, and communal responses to challenges…with a worldview that fighting for positive social systems is a worthwhile fight. There is an emphasis on cooperation as opposed to conflict. There is an awareness within hopepunk works that happy endings are not guaranteed and that nothing is permanent.” What a perfect way to describe Middlemarch, which is set during an unsettled period in English history, just after Catholic emancipation and before the Reform Act of 1832, which expanded the qualifications for (men’s) suffrage and shifted political power away from rural landowners and towards industrial cities. These events were forty years in the past to Eliot, which allowed her to explore philosophical questions about how society changes and becomes more tolerant in a historical setting which was still within living memory for her readers. According to Russell’s introduction, “Eliot’s essays in criticism, written in the 1850s before she turned to fiction, attacked the inadequacy of the cultural resources of her time to the purpose of nourishing an expansive moral sentiment between people. She condemned the narrowing effects of punitive evangelicalism, inauthentic poetry, and in particular those ‘silly novels’ that shrink from the world to take refuge in sentimental romance.” Eliot viewed her novels as a way to demonstrate how everyday people can become more moral and, by extension, transform the world into a kinder, more just place. Middlemarch’s heroine, Dorothea Brooke, begins the novel as an extremely pious young woman who longs for martyrdom. She has rigid opinions but an even deeper sense of empathy which allows her, over the course of the book, to realize that the world is not as black-and-white as she previously believed. Doing good can mean many different things depending on the context, and close-mindedness is often the evil that does the most harm in everyday life. The characters of Middlemarch often pass judgment first, without granting their neighbors the grace and humility that they would hope to receive themselves. The book’s shifting kaleidoscope of narration often reveals parallels and similarities between characters to the readers, while the characters themselves miss these opportunities for connection and growth due to their own pigheadedness. Interconnectedness is one of the main themes of the books, and metaphors about webs and mirrors are particularly abundant. Another major character is a doctor whose research focuses on investigating the “primary webs of tissue” which he believes underlie and link all life. This is yet another metaphorical cloak for Eliot’s central thesis, which she elucidated in an essay later in life. Morals, in their full meaning, are “the conduct which, in every human relation, would follow from the fullest knowledge and the fullest sympathy—a meaning perpetually corrected and enriched by a more thorough appreciation of dependence in things.” Here I see a real anticipation of the ethos behind hopepunk: communal responses to challenges, a willingness to listen to and learn from others, and a sincere belief that care and kindness are always worth it. Dorothea ends the book married to an artistic young man, supporting him in his career as a reform-minded member of the House of Commons. It’s an ending which has disappointed readers for generations, and has even been called unfeminist and regressive. (Never mind that Eliot did include a passage blaming Dorothea’s relatively lackluster fate on the sexist society in which she lived, but critics disliked it so much that it was removed from later editions.) In this reading, Dorothea reaffirms the traditional gender roles of marriage and ends up a helpmeet to reform rather than a crusader in her own right, as she had once dreamed. Here, I see yet more echoes of hopepunk, in which “happy endings are not guaranteed and nothing is permanent.” Eliot was also critical of unrealistically tidy endings in which villains are punished and heroes rewarded with uncomplicated happily ever afters. In one essay, she wrote that “the notion that duty looks stern, but all the while has her hand full of sugar-plums, with which she will reward us by-and-by, is the favourite cant of optimists, who try to make out that this tangled wilderness of life has a plan as easy to trace as that of a Dutch garden; but it really undermines all true moral development by perpetually substituting something extrinsic as a motive to action, instead of the immediate impulse of love or justice, which alone makes an action truly moral.” She wanted to write books that were true to life, where virtue sometimes goes unrewarded and people choose to do the right thing anyway. Doing the right thing is the thing, Eliot might say. I personally don’t find Dorothea’s ending all that depressing. To me, her arc is about coming of age and shedding her childish dreams, as most of us must do. I once fantasized about being a bestselling novelist, defiant spinster, and UN diplomat, but I’m not terribly disappointed that instead I became a happily-married librarian with two cats and this little blog. Would my current life be called disappointing and unfeminist if I were a character in a novel? Russell says that “we might understand Dorothea’s trajectory as one in which she learns to instil her values within the everyday world, and so end her attempts to flee the ordinary for some imagined higher realm—without losing ideals entirely, and falling into despair.” I like this interpretation, and I think it gels with my hopepunk reading very nicely. In the end, I think Eliot says it best, in the final passage of the novel: “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.” Now that you know how much I love George Eliot, you won’t be surprised to learn that I consider this one of the best closing lines in literature. It also reminds me of a reflection written by Unitarian Universalist minister Victoria Safford, about the “strangely soothing epitaph” she finds on an old tombstone: “She attended well and faithfully to a few worthy things.” Were all Victorian women just proto-hopepunks? Maybe so. Either way, I can’t imagine a better epitaph for Dorothea, Eliot, and anyone who strives to live a good life in the confines of our fucked up world. It irks me when historical figures, particularly women, are described as being “ahead of their time.” To me, it comes off as condescending and presentist. The fact is that George Eliot was of her time, yet she still had these ideas and aspirations which I have dubbed hopepunk. There have been many people down the centuries who imagined a better world and did what they could to bring it about. Many were marginalized in similar ways to George Eliot, and many more did not have her privileges. Our struggles are linked, we fight the same battle, and we are all hopepunks in my estimation. Am I projecting my modern sensibilities and this newfangled literary term on a book that was written over a century ago? Maybe. To me, it feels like I’m putting a name to the feeling I’ve had since I first read Middlemarch over fifteen years ago, an intangible sense that Eliot and I yearn for the same things, and more importantly, envision similar ways of bringing them about. “For character too is a process and an unfolding,” Eliot writes, another favorite Middlemarch quote of mine. Revisiting this novel is a process and an unfolding, each time bringing new lenses for understanding both the text and myself. During my 2025 unfolding of Middlemarch, I’m going to be particularly attentive to the novel’s depiction of hope without expectation and goodness for its own sake. At a time when it’s all too easy to despair, I think I need it more than ever. Further reading David Russell, “Introduction.” Middlemarch (Oxford World’s Classic edition, 2019). Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life (2023). Doreen Thierauf, “The Hidden Abortion Plot in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.” Victorian Studies 56:3 (2014). Diana Rose Newby, “The Hidden Narrative in Middlemarch that 2021 Readers Will Spot.” On Literary Hub here. Victoria Safford, “Set in Stone,” from Walking Toward Morning (2003). Full text available here.