The Way George Eliot Read Paradise Lost: Raphael and the Temptation of Speculative Thought

Abstract: Through repeated quotations and allusions over the course of her novel Middlemarch, George Eliot suggests a relationship between that work and John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost. While this connection has received some critical attention during the past two decades, I contend that it runs deeper, and carries greater significance, than has yet been recognized. Through an analysis of the major epistemic course of each plot, I argue that Middlemarch is an attempt to carry Milton's account of faith and reason into the nineteenth century. ********** It is not often that a sickly, gaunt, rather dour old man gets compared to an archangel. And yet this is one of the first things that occurs in George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch (1872). Even if there were no other details of interest present (and there are), this fact alone would be enough to draw our attention to the strange relationship between the late-middle-aged scholar Edward Casaubon, and the beautiful young Dorothea Brooke, Eliot's heroine. The epigraph to chapter three lays the groundwork for this bizarre comparison. There, George Eliot, or her narrator, quotes a few lines from Book Seven of Milton's Paradise Lost (1674): Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphael, The affable archangel ... Eve The story heard attentive, and was filled With admiration, and deep muse, to hear Of things so high and strange. (PL 7.40-41, 50-53) A few lines into the chapter, we begin to see the relevance of this quotation. After a long, erudite conversation with Mr. Casaubon, Dorothea is mightily smitten with him, and particularly with the extent of his understanding: "For he had been as instructive [to her] as Milton's 'affable archangel," unveiling hidden worlds of knowledge "with something of the archangelic manner" (24). So George Eliot's narrator has set us up to think of Casaubon and Dorothea's relationship as analogous to that between Raphael and Eve in Paradise Lost. While we might flip past this literary connection as one among many in a learned author's eight-hundred-page novel, the correlation Eliot has drawn between her own work and that of Milton deserves serious reflection. After all, it is clear that Marian Evans read Milton avidly throughout her life, (1) and her letters and diaries show that she grew especially interested in him during the time she was working on Middlemarch, (2) an interest that left its mark not only on the linguistic surface of the novel, but on the basic structure of its plot. (3) At the same time, my argument is that Eliot's work bears a deeper intellectual relation to Milton's epic poem than anyone has yet realized: as I shall argue, George Eliot presents Middlemarch as a kind of literary, philosophical successor to Paradise Lost, drawing upon Milton's thought--especially his epistemological thought--and carrying it further in her own way. To put it differently, George Eliot reinterprets Paradise Lost in the pages of Middlemarch, transforming its central myth into a uniquely nineteenth-century drama: in her novel, Milton's narrative treatment of the relation between faith and reason comes out in a new, secularized form. By examining the relation between Dorothea and Casaubon, then framing it in the context of the relation between Adam and Eve and the angel Raphael, we may come to see not only how George Eliot read Milton, but how she understood his relevance for her own day. It is clear from the start that Dorothea, a "remarkably clever girl," is attracted most of all to Mr. Casaubon's learning. "Here was a man," she thinks to herself at one point early on, "a man who could understand the higher inward life, and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could illuminate principle with the widest knowledge: a man whose learning almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!" (2.22). These are strong words, but Dorothea is truly taken with the extent of the man's knowledge. …