In my second year of university in England, I had one of the smallest rooms on campus but a beautiful view of the university town from the window in front of my desk. There, as the November snow fell outside, I spent hours poring over the great Victorian novels – Middlemarch, Bleak House, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. My professors encouraged close reading of the texts rather than paying attention to the critics’ interpretations.
For an essay, I focused on three chapters of George Eliot’s Middlemarch which recount the main character Dorothea’s honeymoon journey to Rome. Despite all the good will in the world, Dorothea and her new husband only succeed in hurting each other by failing to see things from any perspective beyond their own. Dorothea married Mr Casaubon admiring his vocation as a scholar and wanting to help him. But Casaubon has insecurities about his scholarship, and only sees her offer of help in terms of how it wounds his pride.
“She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers: she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity,” Eliot writes. “She had not yet listened patiently to his heartbeats, but only felt that her own was beating violently.”
That others have minds and feelings the same as our own seems an obvious statement. But Eliot’s novel allowed me to take a step back and marvel at how profound the implications of that “equivalent centre of self” really were.
Sitting in my college room, I felt as though I was suddenly seeing the world and all my encounters through new eyes. All of us, walking around in our “moral stupidity”, ignorant of each individual’s thoughts and emotions.
Eliot helped me realise that I can never fully understand another’s inner world, but that I have to try my best to do so, however imperfectly. The only problem has been keeping Eliot’s advice front of mind at moments of weakness, when I am most overwhelmed by my own grievances, my own perspective.
Understanding Eliot’s advice is only the beginning – putting it into practice is a lifelong challenge.
