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At this time of sheltering in place, reading books can provide distraction and comfort. George Eliot’s masterwork, Middlemarch, also gives us a valuable guide to empathy. Eliot said she wrote novels so “those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.”[1]
Eliot called this ability sympathy, but today we call it empathy.
In Middlemarch, published in serial form from 1871-72, Eliot intertwines the lives of provincial characters in the English countryside. There is the wealthy Dorothea, whose early marriage to the scholar of religion, Causabon, is her imagined route to a meaningful intellectual life, an idea that goes terribly wrong. The smart young doctor Lydgate comes to town hoping to reform the medical profession, but gets ensnared in local politics. He marries the coquettish Rosamond, and their indulgence in a large home with expensive furnishings lands them in colossal debt.
We follow Dorothea, who is only 19 at the outset of the novel, through her hopes for marriage, her harsh disappointment, and her friendship with the journalist Will Ladislaw. Her few hurried exchanges with Ladislaw give her the only opportunities to express her ideas and yearnings. Ladislaw is an outsider to English society, and is commonly thought to carry “any cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican or Gypsy.”[2] Dorothea only slowly comes to realize that she is in love with Ladislaw. Eliot's message to the reader is that the “other” is indeed lovable.
Late in the novel, Lydate confides in Dorothea about the wretched state of his marriage, and Dorothea promises to visit Rosamund to help. But when Dorothea arrives at Rosamund’s house and peeks into the living room, she glimpses Rosamund sitting next to Will Ladislaw with her hand in his. Devastated, Dorothea flees and spends the night sobbing on the floor of her room.
Eliot then shows us, step by step, how Dorothea moves from despair to empathy.
1. We must first make friends with our misery.
After her tumultuous night, Dorothea rose in the dim light of morning, and wrapped a blanket around her. Dorothea was “no longer wrestling with her grief but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.”
2. We then push ourselves to look at the situation in light of another’s life, not only as it affects our own.
Dorothea was not prone “to see in the narrow cell of her calamity, in the besotted misery of a consciousness that only sees another’s lot as an accident of its own.” She must therefore re-assess the situation. Dorothea “began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately again, forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible meaning.”
3. We must go beyond our own feelings to capture a more accurate account of the event.
Dorothea asks herself: “Was it her event only?” She realizes that it is not. But to see the situation as Rosamund might have experienced it, Dorothea must put aside her jealousy that “makes a woman more cruel to a rival than to a faithless lover.” A more complete understanding of the event gives her “the truer measure of things.”
4. We must call upon memory and good judgment.
Dorothea recalls that she had first gone to see Rosamund so that she could counsel her about her failing marriage to Lydgate.
5. When we grasp the situation in its entirety, our outlook expands.
Dorothea now notices the morning light “piercing into the room.” She opens the curtains and looks out the window “towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates.” She sees a man walking with a sack on his back and a woman holding her baby, and beyond them she could see figures moving in the field.
6. We now see ourselves as only one participant among many.
Dorothea takes in the view from her window, but not as a distant spectator. She instead feels immersed in the bustle of life around her, and realizes “she was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life.”
7. We take action.
Dorothea asks herself, “What should I do?” After drinking some coffee, and changing her clothes, she begins to walk toward Middlemarch, “having made up her mind that she would make as quietly and unnoticeably as possible her second attempt to see and save Rosamund.”
8. We experience empathy’s rewards.
Rosamund is so touched by Dorothea’s kindness that she tells her that the previous morning Ladislaw had confessed his love for Dorothea.
Eliot displays her psychological brilliance in narrating Dorothea's journey from despair to empathy. Middlemarch reminds us that at a time of crisis, expanding our empathy for others not only lightens another's load, but gives us gifts in return.
References
[1] As quoted in Rebecca Mead. (2014). My Life in Middlemarch. New York: Crown Publishers, p. 56.
[2] George Eliot (2015). Middlemarch. Penguin Books. p. 675. All further quotations are taken from pp. 740-742.
