Hebdomadal topics (week 6) (Updated 2/27)

If one of the hebdomadal topics from last week caught your eye, feel free to tackle it! You might particularly consider last week's prompt about allusions in light of the question Kelly (305) raised in lecture today: why does GE anachronistically refer (two or three times) to an "Italian with white mice" -- that is, to Count Fosco from Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White? What does it mean that GE is referring, almost in the same chapter, to the great authors of western literature (Dante, Shakespeare) and to a contemporary writer of detective stories?

Topic 1: Speech and structure in Middlemarch

In lecture today, Prof. Ortiz-Robles worked out how promises structure social and moral development in Middlemarch. In your hebdomadal, work through how a different kind of speech reveals the structural and ethical underpinnings of the text. Some possibilities:

• Gossip (e.g. about Lydgate: ch. XLV, pp. 273-284)
• Threat (e.g. Raffles, pp. 328ff)
• Newspaper editorializing (e.g. about Brooke, p. 239)
• Flirtation (pretty much any time Rosamond speaks, e.g. pp. 270f)
• Reading aloud (e.g. Trumbull butchering Anne of Geierstein, pp. 196-7)
• Drunken abuse (e.g. pp. 246ff)

(Frankly, I'm most excited about gossip: it has the advantage not merely of concrete social effect, but it also has some of the titillation of drunken abuse.)

Topic 2: Painting and zookeeping in Middlemarch

I remain fascinated by how incongruously GE deploys symbolic effects in Middlemarch alongside brutal realism. There are probably a thousand sustained images in the novel, but here are two that trouble me:

• Animals are nearly everywhere. (One particularly striking example: on p. 283, Lydgate is called "an emotional elephant.")
• Pictures
• 137ff: DB and EC painted in Rome
  
• 151: Horrock looks "as if he had been a portrait by a great master"
  
• 205-6: EC as Thomas Aquainas
  
• 246: Dagley's cottage "would have made a sort of picture"
• 253: Mary and Letty "made a pretty picture in the western light"

In your hebdomadal, use the analysis of one of these symbols to revisit our broad question from two weeks ago: what is the role of symbolic language in a realistic novel? Is Middlemarch itself a kind of picture -- and, if so, what does that mean? Why would that be significant? Are the Middlemarchers of the book all animals of a sort? Why is that important?

(Jenna [306] prompted the second part of this question with her hebdomadal last week. Thanks, Jenna!)