Yes, there is murder in Middlemarch!
More famously, George Eliot’s Middlemarch is full of disastrous and disappointing marriages, marriages that seem promising at the start —between Dorothea and the dry historian Causabon, between the physician Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy, the list goes on.
But the novel also contains a disastrous near-marriage, and one that sheds a lot of light on the remainder of the novel’s unsuccessful unions.
Long before Lydgate had ever met Rosamund, he had fallen in love with Madame Laure, an actress in a play he had seen in Paris. A married actress. Indeed, Laure’s own husband had played her lover in the production, a character she was to stab. But one night, while Lydgate was in the audience, Laure stabbed her husband for real. He died onstage.
Lydgate, who had leapt onto the stage and then helped with the investigation, was thrilled when the case was not ruled a murder. Indeed, Laure had protested that the stabbing had been an accident, all along. In light of the scandal, she left Paris. Lydgate followed her, to ask for her hand in marriage. But, when Lydgate found her, she revealed to him that she had meant to commit murder all along.
Lydgate fell in love with Laure, in the first place, after watching her onstage. She was not a great actress—the text notes that her acting was “no better than it should be”—but Lydgate fell in love with her looks, and her onstage demeanor. Indeed, when some had accused her of committing murder, Lydgate “vehemently contended for her innocence, and the remote impersonal passion for her beauty which he had felt before, had passed now into personal devotion.” Her beauty had initially captivated his attentions, and, even after such treacherous circumstances, her beauty indicated her innocence. So did her good acting—after she stabbed her husband, “A wild shriek pierced the house, and the Provencale fell swooning: a shriek and a swoon were demanded by the play, but the swooning too was real this time.” She had meant to kill her husband, so the swoon which had seemed real was truly false. Lydgate had fallen in love with her stage beauty, and ignored what he had perceived to be her mediocre acting abilities—and was fooled by what ultimately turned out to be a brilliant, layered, calculated performance.
Just as Laure’s bad acting was a helpful part of this trick, her profession as an actress also, more generally, prevented Lydgate from believing that she had been performing, all along. Her beauty, which had captivated him, was a performance, just as the swoon was (and these elements caused him to leap onto the stage to try and cradle her in his arms after she hurt her head—thus joining her onstage, in the performance for her innocence). Working as an actress, even generally, is also a performance. Lydgate was able to find Laure after she decamped from Paris because “Hidden actresses, however, are not so difficult to find as some other hidden facts, and it was not long before Lydgate gathered indications that Laure had taken the route to Lyons. He found her at last acting with great success at Avignon under the same name…” The actor’s stereotypical need for attention was another tool Laure employed—she left Paris, but did not go into hiding (divas do not choose obscurity). Perhaps hiding would have revealed her guilt. But when she finally stopped acting, and told the truth of her guilt to Lydgate, his love for her ended. She was no longer a stage goddess—she was both a real person, and guilty of a real crime.
Being an “actress” or being able to act, is represented as being part of a dupe elsewhere in Middlemarch. Rosamond Vincy, whom Lydgate marries, is not only also a performer (she is a musician), but she is also, plainly referred to as an actress, and is a “hidden one,” at that: “(Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.)” Just like Laure, not only is Rosamond accustomed to performing an identity for a crowd, but she also acts constantly in regular life — performing an identity more charming, sweet, and demure than her real one. Lydgate flocks to actresses, and he is initially uninterested in Dorothea because he believes she is “too earnest.”
Dorothea is, herself, too earnest to realize when she is being duped by a bad actor—Edward Causabon, the listless scholar whom she marries. Causabon longs to marry Dorothea because he believes she will be a compliant, unassertive, and devoted servant to the scholarly undertaking that truly consumes his devotion. He attempts to sound romantic, or to present his marriage proposal in a romantic manner, but fails miserably, writing a pedantic, dry, and self-absorbed letter. Dorothea, though, is too convinced by the offer of marriage and the attention he pays to her to even notice that he is playing his part terribly, and, upon receiving his proposal, she “trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her knees, buried her face, and sobbed”—a far more melodramatic reaction than merits his insipid overture.
Dorothea believes she loves Causabon because she believes his scholarly efforts lift him above the other men she knows. She longs for knowledge, and to be able to do the kind of scholarly work that she imagines he does—and she convinces herself that marrying Causabon will permit this. Indeed, Dorothea, who soon learns that she is far less biddable than she once thought, is so earnest, she doesn’t even realize when she is acting out a fantasy, for herself.
Thus, in Middlemarch, purposeful acting is read as an interpersonal dupe, a kind of damaging manipulation. But everyone, even the scholarly-minded Dorothea, has a sense of the theatrical, has an internal dramatic presence. It doesn’t always lead to murder, but it can.
