DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

The Representation of Place in Middlemarch

Authors

Adam Wright

Date of this Version

2010

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 41 (2010)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

Critics in the past have tended to refer to the rootedness of characters in George Eliot's novels. This is particularly true of Adam Bede, where the naturalistic roots of characters are often explicitly stated, such as when Dinah affirms 'I'm not free to leave Snowfield, where I was first planted, and have grown deep into it, like the small grass on the hill-top'.1 Catherine Middleton, in her essay 'Roots and Rootlessness', when analysing Middlemarch refers to seven different types of roots in just four pages (,emotional', 'physical', 'moral', 'affective', 'social', 'intellectual' ,and 'local').2 These terms not only complicate our understanding of the novel but they also suggest a fixity, a rootedness, which the novel is in fact keen to resist (even 'rootlessness' suggests a fixed and definite inability to create place). People enter Middlemarch but people also disconnect themselves from Middlemarch and the place is in a continual process of reconstruction and renewal; towards the end of the novel, Middlemarch is constantly referred to by departures, as Bulstrode, Lydgate, Rosamond and Ladislaw all deliberate over their leaving Middlemarch and, by the Finale, Fred and Mary are the only main characters to remain in Middlemarch, Dorothea, Ladislaw, Rosamond and Lydgate all having dislocated themselves and relocated in London. Middleton's conceptualization of place in Middlemarch in terms of roots and rootlessness is therefore problematic but how can place in Middlemarch be better understood?

In the introduction to For Space, Massey posits three defining features of space: i) that space is 'the product of interrelations ... from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny'; ii) that space allows for 'the existence of multiplicity' in that 'distinct trajectories coexist' and people can interpret space differently; iii) that space is in flux, it is 'always under construction ... It is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed' .3 For Space is an argument for space as heterogeneous, open to interpretation and processual. Massey's spatial theory renders the counter positioning of space and place untenable. Instead she sees place as a spatio-temporal event integrating space and time; place is figured spatially (in Massey's terms) 'as open [ ...] as woven together [ ...] as in process' and temporally as 'a moment...as a particular constellation' in time (Massey, p. 131). According to Massey, the 'event of place’, i.e. the creation of place, is 'that throwntogethemess [which brings with it] the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now [and] the coming together of the previously unrelated' (Massey, pp. 140-1). In Middlemarch characters participate in this 'event of place' and place is created, both communally and personally, by anticipating Massey's theory of space. Her arguments inform our reading of both the domestic places in Middlemarch and the social place of Middle march.