I like the following passage:

"Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessman had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own . . . You would be especially likely to be beaten if you depneded arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments."

--from Felix Holt, the Radical

As I noted in a blog post several months ago, lots of political leaders and their academic advisors, and also more than a few business executives, fail to understand this point about the kind of "chess" that they are playing.

Also..writing in Barrons in 2004, money manager David Richard cited this passage from Silas Marner:

"The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent."

Wonderful. Thanks, David.

I read Middlemarch, and I studied it. Not perfectly, but a fair bit. My un-moderated response is that the book should be subtitled: ‘Where’s Freud When He’s Needed.’ In a P. G. Wodehouse story written in the 1930s, a female literary critic wrote: ‘The sex motive in fiction: Is there to be no end?’ With respect to Middlemarch, written in the 1870s, I would ask: ‘The sex motive in fiction: Is there to be no beginning?’ What a difference from the 1870s to the 1930s.
Surely the characters in Middlemarch were driven by sex, as we all are, but they didn’t seem to be aware of it. The author, for her part, neither commented on the sex drive of her characters, nor their seeming unawareness it, even as she accurately and meticulously depicted them and their inter-actions, some of which surely had a strong sexual dimension. It’s one thing for an author to present sexually clueless characters; it’s another for the author to fail to comment on that. Am I the only one creeped-out by my inability to not wonder about Dorothy’s sex life with Casabon, and his with her? Both had a sex life whether they had sex or not. Everyone has a sex life, even it it’s “weird” or “perverted.“ Dorothy’s decision to marry a man so bloodless that tumescent sufficiency was a wispy dream at best, needs to be examined. Anyone’s decision to do that needs to be examined. And what about attractive Will Ladislaw lolling on the floor with an equally attractive Rosamond and Tertius Lydgate? When scenes rife with sexual implications are presented without any specific discussion of the sex motive, I have to ask the following question about Middlemarch, and all “Victorian literature:” Was sex not discussed because 1.) the characters were above that; were not motivated by sex because their minds were on higher things that overcame any attempted push from their instinctive sexuality; or 2.) sex was so much a part of Victorian life, happening as frequently as it did with barnyard animals, that there was no need to discuss it; and that only clueless readers, and professional prudes, would believe that physically healthy and attractive people would find themselves in sexually stimulating situations and not do anything about it; or 3.) something else?
I googled Middlemarch and Freud but didn’t find much. If Erin, or anyone else, knows of anything written on the subject (or has an opinion on it) I’d love to see it. More, I’d like to know if I’m the only one troubled by this.

Hi David -- I don't have time to comment at length right now, but just wanted to post a brief, if necessarily incomplete, reply. The short answer: I respectfully disagree with your assessment of Middlemarch as sexless!

Eliot was bound by the moral conventions of her time and there were limits to what she and other writers could discuss frankly in their fiction. Recall that 20 years later, Hardy was censored when he (circumspectly) described Tess being raped and then having a child out of wedlock; recall that across the pond, a few years before Middlemarch, Flaubert was tried for obscenity after likewise fairly circumspectly (but still very evocatively!) writing about Emma Bovary's adulterous liaisons. Eliot, for her part, was *highly* alive to what sex meant between men and women (she herself became a novelist while living out of wedlock with her lover), and dealt with themes of unwanted unmarried pregnancy, the destructive power of unacknowledged erotic attraction, and similar in her pre-Middlemarch work. As these examples suggest, Victorian novels were far from sexless--but they *were* very much engaged in finding coded, acceptable ways to talk about love, desire, and sex. There was a line--and the trick was to walk that line with great suggestive skill.

Middlemarch itself is absolutely structured, in many ways, around the question of sexuality. The problem people have with Dorothea marrying Casaubon is that they see him as dried up, anerotic, unmanly, and just not likely to satisfy her in any way. No accident that no child issues -- whereas Celia and James Chettam beget like bunnies from the first, being red-blooded, loving, and physical. No accident, either, that Casaubon tries to control Dorothea from beyond the grave: he is quite explicitly sexually threatened by Ladislaw and doesn't want Dorothea to sleep with him ever -- even long after he's dead. And so on. You've also go a great portrait of a tease in Rosamond, and a bonus subplot in her miscarriage, acquired while flirting upon a horse.

This is a very brief overview. But if I had time I could pull out lots and lots of language from the novel that works to underscore Eliot's scrupulous and frank attention to sex. And to be honest, I like what she does with the subject a lot more than Freud, who in many ways may be said to be the *descendant* of the kinds of psychological mappings writers like Eliot did in an era before there was a concept of the unconscious or the id. One might also speculate about whether Freud has deprived us of some of the expressive nuance that writers like Eliot had access to--he's done so very much to color our perceptions of sex, and to help license the equations we tend to make between sexual explicitness and things like honesty and authenticity.

I'm biased, of course. People become Victorianists because they *love* Victorian literature and culture--and they love it not because they think it's repressed, but because they think it has an exceptional way of thinking about life and death and love.

Hi Erin,
Thanks for your reply. I wish I’d had it before I commented. I would have raised my point differently. You say Middlemarch, in many way, is structured around the question of sexuality. I agree! I don’t find it sexless at all. I find it teeming with sex, and, even more, the potential for it. More’s the pity then, that a book structured around sexuality can’t discuss sexuality openly. I find the characters fascinating, but I don’t understand them because I don’t know their attitudes toward sex, let alone their sexual behaviors. Take Dorothea. (Sorry for referring to her as Dorothy in my previous comment.) Why did she MARRY Casaubon? She could have helped him in his work without that. She could have been his reader and secretary, even a devoted disciple, without marrying him. She’s presented as attractive, and, at the height of her sexuality—isn’t an explanation needed as to why she gave that to him, or gave that up? Brooke and Celia found that odd. Shouldn’t we? And Dorothea and Ladislaw? Yes, Casaubon saw Ladislaw as a sexual threat, but all Casaubon’s will prevented was Ladislaw and Dorothea getting married; it didn’t prevent them hooking up. Did Casaubon really think they would not have sex unless they were married, and that if he could prevent their marriage, he would prevent them having sex? Or did he think, ‘Yes, they’ll have sex, but I’ll make sure their relationship is never legitimate?’ Is it realistic to believe that Dorothea and Ladislaw, two attractive people in love, neither of whom are married, both headstrong and physically attracted to each other, refrained? Is it realistic to believe that Victorians, under similar circumstances, refrained? Or, if they did refrain, doesn’t this have to be examined and explained? I find the Victorians fascinating, but, as I said, I don’t understand them because I’m not sure weather they “did it,” or not.