Chekhov’s Mistess

Considering the Classics: My Other Village

As ever, books were my consolation.

My family immigrated to Queens, New York in March of 1976 when I was seven. My two sisters and I enrolled at P.S. 102 that spring so I had three months of second grade then went on to the third grade in the fall. I mention this tedious bit of biography only because I have been trying to figure out why I was so profoundly unpopular in lower and middle schools. Should I attribute my lack of friends to not speaking English, bad clothes, conspicuous height, shyness, homemade hair cuts, the uncorrected nearsightedness or to the historical fact that I missed six critical months of second grade when popularity could have sprouted? My sisters and I shared some of the unavoidable traits coming from the same family, but they achieved earlier social success. At age thirty-eight, I have moved on somewhat, managing to find and keep friends, marry and to beget a child—another famous way to stave off loneliness. Perhaps why I felt set apart from others defies easy explanation, but I was not without comfort.

Being unpopular early and not having enough resources to get into trouble made me read. Falling for books early in life and remaining aimmiscible with my peers during adolescence—thereby causing me to read more—made me a particular kind of reader.

It is not clear how I learned to read either Korean or English. As slow as I am in mathematics, science and any form of mechanics, I am a quick language person. I am one of those people who savors words. If you wield a word with precision, you can impress me. Come to think of it, my husband and I never lived in the same city before we married. Yes, I think I married him because of his well-written letters. A girl can be wooed on less. I digress, sort of.

From the beginning, I read mostly stories. Throughout my childhood, young adulthood and even today as I approach middle-age, the books I adored had these aspects in common: They were heavily populated and lengthy. I was grief stricken when books ended. I missed the people from the books. I grew lonely for them. The antidote, of course, was to read another thick volume.

Middlemarch, my favorite novel, was published in 1871. George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, was fifty-two years old at the time. It was her sixth novel, and Eliot was also a brilliant critic and poet. But of all her works, I love Middlemarch best, because she wrote about a community and how its citizens live through their desires and errors. Set in the 1830s, the book is named after the village Middlemarch, a provincial and fictional town in England. V.S. Pritchett, an autodidact writer of brilliant short stories including “Blind Love” (if you read one long short story in your life, please shut yourself away and start this tale now) and genius literary critic said this: “No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative…I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot…No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully.” That’s quite a blurb, but it might not be enough for you to commit to its 799 pages. (The Modern Library, 2000, Introduction by A.S. Byatt)

As an enticement, I could tell you about how the story starts with Dorothea Brooke’s stubborn wish to marry a pretentious geezer Casaubon to attest to her moral superiority and cleverness, or describe Casaubon’s trajectory as a failure to become a chronicler of importance, or that the book has a requisite love triangle among Dorothea, Casaubon and Casaubon’s dashing and impoverished part Polish cousin, Will Ladislaw. There is also my favorite doctor character of all time, the ambitious and high-minded Tertius Lydgate (a precursor character to Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith—another fabulous novel that is rarely picked up which features a doctor’s struggles with conscience, commerce and significance.) whose arrogance leads him to great unhappiness. The other female characters in the book, Mary Garth, Rosamond Vincy and Dorothea’s vapid younger sister Celia who lands the groom Dorothea had cast aside, each unbelievably get their own story lines which rise and fall and satisfy—the testament to Eliot’s superb narrative architecture. I can go on for quite sometime about these individuals who live brightly in my mind, but I think if I had to confess why I love Middlemarch, it is the same reason why I found solace in books when I was seven. A truly good book as fine as this one can provide an alternative to what is before us. An author as smart as Eliot can provide insight, amusement, but most of all worthy companionship. I fear that I sound like a crank about real life, and perhaps I am somewhat guilty, but I have to say too, that reading a book like Eliot’s has given me a greater sense of compassion toward new acquaintances and wisdom in how I can love better the seasoned members of my coterie. For Eliot cared a great deal about being a wise person who loved fully, and in her world of Middlemarch, she offered another paradigm—of how things are and how things should be. Eliot understood people, their limitations and their ambivalence. She did not judge their flaws, instead she let them live through their truths in drama—far more compelling to this reader than a stack of sermons (and by the way, I am fond of a well-written sermon, too). Also, I can feel Eliot’s protection even as the characters stumble. That a narrator will be just is such a relief. An earnest reader yearns for real life to be improved after she finishes the pages. I have read and re-read Middlemarch, and with each term, I am astonished by the author’s intellectual power in the midst of this highly entertaining story about a village and its troubled and comic members. What finally impresses me most is that her smarts never get in the way of the story; Eliot lets us be smarter in the reading, and I think, that makes Eliot a generous author.

I have lived in New York for most of my life, since 1976 as I said before, and in August, I shall move to Tokyo with my husband and son for a few years. No doubt, I will feel lonely again, afraid again, unpopular again before I learn to manage, but through it all, Middlemarch will be with me, its people, its stories, and I will remain in its good company.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Min Jin Lee
• Date: July 31, 2007
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: George Eliot

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