Middlemarch and Mistakes

My foot really slipped. I meant to do it.

Early in Middlemarch, there’s a scene in which Tertius Lydgate, a young, promising doctor, falls in love with a beautiful actress who is suspected of murder. The circumstances of the murder are melodramatic: the actress and her husband are acting a scene in which she pretends to stab him to death, but one night her foot slips, she plunges the knife in, and he dies in front of the horrified audience.

Lydgate is convinced of her innocence. After an investigation finds her not culpable, he tracks her down and proposes marriage. But she dissuades him by telling him the truth: My foot really slipped, she says. And then: I meant to do it.

My foot slipped, and I meant to do it. The mistake, and the intention both.

Middlemarch is concerned with mistakes, but not the kind of mistakes that drive tidier stories: inciting incidents, chance derailments, wrong men. It is instead concerned with mistakes we make when we believe our eyes are fully open and we are doing exactly what we mean to do, mistakes that we only recognize as such after months or years. It shows what our choices make of us — this is the heart of Middlemarch’s morality.

Lydgate believes that his experience with the actress has inoculated him against future bad decisions in love: he’s learned his lesson about infatuation. But he doesn’t have enough insight about himself or others to avoid making the mistake a second time. He flirts with a woman and believes he can disentangle himself whenever he likes, but he is mistaken. In the moment he gives in to her he doesn’t foresee that it will cost him every ambition he once held.

Lydgate’s mistakes only compound, and the book’s other characters are forever undoing themselves: they enter into bad alliances, bad trades, bad debts. They work on bad books and launch bad political campaigns. They always have their reasons, and they always suffer for it.

The heroine Dorothea’s mistake is in some ways the same as Lydgate’s: she marries the wrong person, and does not foresee how the marriage will diminish her. But hers is not a case of having her head turned by a charmer — in fact the opposite. The decision to marry the much older scholar Mr. Casaubon is exactly in step with her values and her plans for her life: to transcend the petty occupations of the village and dedicate her life to the service of higher causes. What is her error, exactly? Certainly her naive idea of what a great intellect looks like is partly at fault. But at much greater fault is her lack of self-knowledge: that she does in fact need to be loved, by someone who can see what is great and beautiful in her.

Neither Lydgate nor Dorothea triumph over their mistakes, and neither do the other characters who make bad decisions. Instead of triumph there is a slow overcoming, like a tree growing a burl over an injury, surviving but misshapen. Lydgate never achieves the things he planned; his ambitions are drowned like kittens by the circumstances of his life. Dorothea is granted more happiness, but Eliot hints at a great loss, saying that Dorothea felt “that there was always something better which she might have done, if she had only been better and known better.”

We might attribute our mistakes to foot-slips, but they can also be made after careful consideration. It is possible to act methodically and deliberately, and from the impulses of your best, highest self, and still make a mistake. And the mistakes we make when we are young have our whole lives to lay waste to our idea of ourselves and what we might become.

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