Dear Serial Readers,
This story has now swerved into a portrait of an abused wife, with the harassed Evangelical minister on the periphery. Eliot offers an array of reactions, none helpful--how Janet's mother-in-law blames this misery on Janet's failures in housekeeping, and how her own mother sees and feels helpless, and how the people in Milby see and gossip and do not feel enough. Eliot implicates the reader in this futile search for origins of abuse: "Do you wonder how it was that things had come to this pass--what offence Janet had committed in the early years of marriage to rouse the brutal hatred of this man? The seeds of things are very small: the hours that lie between sunrise and the gloom of midnight are travelled through by tiniest markings of the clock: and Janet, looking back along the fifteen years of her married life, hardly knew how or where this total misery began..."
Several "Poor Janet!" moments--reminds me of Eliot's penchant for this pitying address in later novels, especially MIDDLEMARCH.
At the end of this installment, Dempster has locked Janet out of their house--at least he did not murder her, as she expected. But to be locked out in the cold also thrusts her domestic plight into public. I'm anticipating Tryan to the rescue.
On this serial reading and ahead: I see the conversation has fallen off in recent weeks. I am curious if this relative quiet has anything to do with the stories themselves. I have been searching for how these "Scenes" are a series, but it's clear the narrative threads are unevenly stitched, with Gilfil before Barton in time, and this tale of Tryan and the Dempsters seemingly unhinged from the other two, except for the "clerical life" theme. Two more episodes and we're through with SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE. For next week: 15-21.
Upcoming serial--Dickens again! We'll start reading MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT, the last of Dickens's picaresque novels (with PICKWICK as the first),in a few weeks.
Serially yours,
Susan
1 comment:
I haven't much enjoyed reading the Scenes from Clerical Life, partly because I'm not so fond of the narrator, who seems quite different to me from the Middlemarch narrator, but perhaps it's just been too long since I've read Middlemarch!
I do feel that Janet, for whom I have a great deal of sympathy, somewhat abuses her mother, but I understand the need to turn to someone in one's sorrow.
So, is she drinking? I think the narrator hints that she has.
And Eliot is good at pointing out that abuse is the choice of the abuser, not the fault of the recipient of the violence, as Susan notes.
I go up and down in my attitude toward Tryan, and in this section I like him a great deal. I wonder whether the young women want to marry him because he's an available option or because his personality is particularly attractive?
I will be interested to see how Janet and Tryan cross paths again.
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