The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life

As a long-term lover of Eliot’s work, I really did not want this luminous and revisionary retelling of her life to finish. But in its final chapter Clare Carlisle’s quite revelatory frankness on the subject of Eliot’s marriage to John Cross—something so many previous biographers have approached with an odd mix of prurience, squeamishness, and sententiousness—gives it the perfect sense of an ending. Carlisle makes a persuasive case that Eliot’s marriage was primarily an act of self-preservation, not just of her emotional well-being, but of her story and legacy. Edith Simcox records Cross himself assenting to writing Eliot’s life during their courtship. In addition to respectability, marriage to Cross could produce, Carlile suggests, “the seemingly impossible life story she had hoped for: an autobiography, written by someone else” (257).It is at this point that Carlisle interrupts her narrative and leans in to interject the objections of her editor:Carlisle’s answer to her editor—and her willingness to break the frame of formal biographical conventions to do so—are the key to why this book is such a success. Many scholars have unpacked Eliot’s intellectual influences and the political context of the marriage question in the nineteenth century. Several biographers have trespassed into speculations on the psychodynamics of desire in Eliot’s relationships, unable to resist trotting down the well-trodden path of her delicious ugliness.1 But there are very few who have been able to bring together the extraordinary capacity of feeling thinking and thinking feelings in art and life that characterizes Eliot. Not since Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans (1994) has a biography of Eliot been almost as brave as its subject in transcending conventional boundaries between life, letters and fiction, storytelling and ideas, the writerly and the scholarly.Carlisle’s deceptively simple and existential question—Why does anyone get married and is any impulse ever unmixed?—is a clue to the affinities that make her a such a good biographer of Eliot. Eliot was, of course, a deeply philosophical writer and Carlisle is an academic philosopher who is a supremely talented writer. But it is more than that disciplinary complementarity that makes this book sing. As we shall see, Carlisle’s particular field of expertise does shed new light on Eliot’s conceptualization of singularity and marriage out with the much more familiar territory of the political context of the married state in the nineteenth century. But it is the—perhaps more foundational—match of taste and reflection on aesthetic judgment that makes this biography work so well. Eliot was just far funnier about love and human frailty than she is usually given credit for—and Carlisle’s bathetic interruption echoes that comedy found in so many moments in Eliot’s fictions. I was reminded of the terrible laughter provoked by Dorothea’s “large inferences” about what marriage to Casaubon might lead to and the narrator’s generalizing interjection that “really life could never have gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions, which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilisation” (Eliot 21).Carlisle is unafraid to stretch the rules of the writing game in her interweaving of lucid expositions of Eliot’s intellectual influences with how, Carlisle implies, these shaped her thinking and feeling about relationships in art and in life. Unpicking a letter to Edith Bulwer-Lytton, Carlisle reflects on Eliot’s contrast between “independent delight in ideas as an experience” and what she perceived as the danger of women living “too exclusively in the emotions” (Carlisle 189). “These few sentences,” Carlisle suggests, “reach for an intellectual life which does not deny or even resist the pull of emotions, yet provides a kind of ballast for love, passion, grief, without explaining them away” (190). In the couple of pages that follow in this middle chapter, entitled “Philosophy,” Carlisle weaves together Eliot’s absorption of Spinoza’s ideas of detachment and the endurance of the impersonal life of the universe, the extent to which Hegel was the inheritor of elements of Spinozan thought, Lewes’s interest in Hegelian ideas of development but skepticism of Idealism, and how that context might bear on the creation of Middlemarch. In my description it sounds like the kind of passage I would mark up in a chapter draft from a PhD student or colleague and urge them in a comment: “Give your ideas room to breathe!” But in this book, there is always light and air.It is possible that other scholars of nineteenth-century literature and history would, like me, make a number of initial assumptions about the focus of this book given its title. The prompt of the “marriage question” practically hits a drop-down menu in my mind, complete with likely source texts segmented into early, mid- and late-Victorian controversies from Caroline Norton on divorce through the long campaigns to reform the Married Women’s Property Act in the 1860–80s to Mona Caird’s revisionist article “Marriage” (1888) and all the New Woman writing on free love that followed. But that is not what Carlisle is interested in; and the book is all the more original for that. Where some of these usual touchpoints appear, they do so in the lightest of ways at its opening as external context for what this book implies are the more profound matter of marriage as a philosophical question: “that leap into the open-endedness of another human being” as Carlisle terms it (ix). The legal and material framework of marriage in the nineteenth century is just a backdrop here to more enduring matters of life in medias res. The narrative opens with Eliot about to set sail with George Henry Lewes to the unknown future in which her marriage would always be a series of questions. Daniel Deronda breaks apart our expectations of narrative sequence in a love story by asking at its make-believe beginning, “Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” Carlisle’s story of Eliot’s “marriage question” opens with her waiting to leave on honeymoon and speculating on what it was to be not married—but not unmarried either.For all my tatty photocopies of primary sources and lectures outlining the relationship between the Victorian marriage question and the nineteenth-century novel, Eliot’s writing bears out the deceptively simple truth of Carlisle’s approach. The deepest cry of pain about the nature of a bad marriage in Middlemarch is, after all, Dorothea’s confession to Rosamond that “there is something even awful in the nearness it brings” (Eliot 749). Neither Dorothea nor the narrator seem as concerned by her legal nonidentity as feme covert during her marriage or her property rights over her deceased husband’s estate. For Eliot’s long-standing friend and women’s rights campaigner, Barbara Bodichon, those first few chapters of Middlemarch and the “terrible foreshadowing of inevitable misery” in Dorothea’s marriage were the matter of tragedy rather than comedy. She felt “a sort of horror at [the] story” and dreaded how it would unfold. Others saw “wit, character, and liveliness” in the opening of Middlemarch with its exposure of the naivety of Dorothea’s “childlike ideas of marriage.” But for Bodichon, Dorothea’s profound sexual stupidity could only lead to a sorry end, however “noble” the book. “I can’t help feeling it desperately,” Bodichon wrote to Eliot:Barbara Bodichon was, of course, instrumental in early feminist campaigns to address the legal situation of married women. Her Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women appeared in (1854, repr. 1868). As Barbara Leigh Smith, prior to her own marriage, she assembled and led the Married Women’s Property Committee (1854) and the formulation of a petition for a change in the law headed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and she was instrumental in the foundation of the campaigning English Women’s Journal (1858), English Women’s Review, and the formation of Girton College (with some financial support from Eliot) in 1868.Bodichon had—in ways Eliot was to learn—experienced the limitations of love outside the legal framework of marriage in the nineteenth century. Her own parents lived together openly and were not married and, like Eliot, she had been encouraged by John Chapman to think of love before, after, and alongside legal marriage during their relationship in 1857. In that sense, Dorothea, as she appears in book 1 of Middlemarch, is the antithesis of the forms of practical wisdom both women had developed through two decades of negotiating relationships with men who loved them, but remained free. From 1868 Bodichon was involved in a revived campaign to amend the laws surrounding married women’s property, which resulted in the first of a series of landmark pieces of legislation across the coming decades, passed into law in 1870. That was, of course, just as Eliot was struggling with the two stories of courtship and marriage that, in the end, combined to make Middlemarch.The Victorian “marriage question” of legal identity, property, and “matrimonial causes” for divorce certainly hums in the background of Middlemarch in ways that still await a full exploration. Yet Carlisle’s frame of marriage as an existential question discloses riches too. Eliot’s letter to Cara Bray explaining her relationship with Lewes provides the subtitle to Carlisle’s biography: “It is a great experience—this marriage! . . . I can’t tell you how happy I am in this double life which helps me feel and think with double strength” (41). As Carlisle concludes, here marriage is an “experience” rather than “a legal, social, public matter” (41). For Eliot at this point in her life she had to make marriage understood as a concept and open question rather than a legal or religious institution for the sake of survival. Carlisle’s argument holds particular sway when she comes to explore Romola and the multiple currents of thought and experience at play in and around this, the most philosophical exploration of marriage in Eliot’s writing. Removed from any reference point to the political backdrop of nineteenth-century Britain, Romola plays out in the drama of marriage the questions of thought and feeling, curiosity and obedience, self-development and self-abnegation that underpin humanism. Carlisle’s illumination of the collision of ideas at play in the novel is very well done. A consummate exploration of Mariolatry and the iconography and ideology of the virgin mother, for example, frames Carlisle’s exploration of what the novel contends about love and betrayal, the risk of total self-loss, and the path to survival.It is this ability to see philosophical thought in the seemingly small matters of everyday communication that make Carlisle such an astute reader of Eliot. Histories of ideas in her hands are not multivolume works that we hear Eliot getting a headache from reading but still-living questions that are woven into the novel’s sentences. Returning to the interplay between Hegelian thought and Middlemarch, Carlisle writes:This “vibrant negativity,” Carlisle argues, is a particular characteristic of the style of Middlemarch in which “non-being jostles with authorial assertion” (201). Her example is the first introduction to Bulstrode in which we are instructed how not to picture him (“do not imagine that his sickly aspect was of the yellow, black-haired sort . . . ” [115]) before we learn what he does look like; but her observation lights up a constellation of further examples in which Middlemarch embodies what Andrew Miller, approaching from a different angle, has termed the “optative” mood of the Victorian novel.What might Eliot’s more politically engaged friends have made of Carlisle’s approach to the marriage question? For all Barbara Bodichon’s commitment to reform of the institution of marriage, her understanding of what it was to be married far outstripped anything determined by legal fiat. As I sifted through Eliot’s letters from Bodichon at the Beinecke some years ago, there was one in particular that remained unforgettable as an encounter. Bodichon’s always-flowing hand picked up pace and urgency as she dashed off a letter to Eliot after hearing of her marriage to Cross. Perhaps in anticipation of expressions of unwelcome surprise at the news by others—that someone so seemingly bold in a long, loving unmarriage had so rapidly moved on to marriage with a much younger man—Bodichon flew to reassurance, barely squeezing three words at a time across her notepaper. “Tell Johnny Cross,” Bodichon exhorts Eliot, “I should have done exactly what he has if you would have let me & I had been a man” (Letter to George Eliot 1880). If marriage is anything in Bodichon’s letter, here is a chance to give yourself to another in order to be redoubled. The optative mood of Bodichon’s phrasing and its series of “ifs” presents marriage as a series of unfixed possibilities that might lead to a dizzying array of destinations. Eliot’s consent has clear priority over the seemingly more fungible matter of sexual identity and legal sex in this vision of marriage as the horizon beyond which lie multiple futures. Even—or perhaps especially—for those campaigners laboring to redefining the legal framework of marriage, the “marriage question” was wider and broader than the political. Bodichon’s letter upholds the truthfulness and integrity of Carlisle’s work. Political pamphlets cannot contain the emotional and existential question of marriage as a leap into multiple unknown possibilities involved in committing your life to another. “You see,” Bodichon assured Eliot, “I know all love is so different that I do not see it unnatural to love in new ways & not to be unfaithful to any memory” (Letter to George Eliot 1880).