Ideas - Can you have compassion for someone you never agree with?

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Ask yourself: can you? It is a question that George Eliot asks over and over through her characters in Middlemarch, a 19th-century novel that speaks to our own fractious age. Eliot highlights how important it is to see the world from the point of view of others — even characters we don’t like. *This is second episode in our two-part series. It originally aired on April 7, 2002.We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.

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I first read Middle March as an undergraduate. I read it in a class in college. It was a gift from my mother. I didn't love it at first, which is funny, because I love it so much now. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Dr. Midgate. Welcome to Middlemarch, sir.

Middlemarch, a study of provincial life by George Elliott. It's set in a fictional English town called Middlemarch, a stand-in for the real town of Coventry, where George Elliott had lived as a teenager. What a sin, uncle, to spend money in finding out how to make the most of the land that supports us all. The ladies don't understand political economy, you know. A little light literature is more to their taste.

Uncle. Novels, you know. Poetry. This is the second and last part of our series, Love and Consequences, George Eliot's Middlemarch, featuring contributor Tom Jokinen, with an inquiry into how the Mid-Victorian novel speaks more than ever

to our own age. The book seems to offer different narratives, different storylines, different moods even, for different stages of life. Things are much more complicated and interconnected than we might initially suspect. A new Persian translation of Middle March, and that's not the first one, was released in Iran in January of 2022. Amazon's algorithms must go bananas, 150 years later and there's still a global market. Not just new readers, but those who keep going back to it.

But I didn't notice them. The first one, two, three, four, five, six, seven times I read it. This is why the book is amazing, that every time you read it, you're coming at it with something from your own life that is beginning to inform the reading. Maybe Middle March is a book to go back to not despite its size. It's 800 pages long, but because of it. It's the appeal of grand-scale epic stories, not just on the page, but elsewhere, too, in binge-watching television. The revolution will be televised.

He's our dad, but he was going to send me to jail. He'd do the same to all of us. That sounds like kind of dramatic, Tom. He says he's going to grind your bones to make his bread. Okay. The show Succession is a fourth. family drama with about a gillion characters in it. It owes a ton to George Eliot's Middlemarch, both in structure and in design. And it's all about people misunderstanding each other,

just as in Middlemarch. Same with the Sopranos and the Wire, and an online adaptation called Middle March the Web series. More on that later. I think it could be boiled down to something like four plots that start as relatively separate strands and then kind of knit themselves together, them set in and around a bustling but still fairly small agricultural town in the very middle of England. Hello citizens of Middlemarch, you know and I know that a great change is sweeping this country and not before time. I'm Nicholas Dames, and I'm a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City.

We have the chance to free ourselves from the crushing... Those four pots are first a young woman named Dorothea Brooke, who lives with her uncle, who is her guardian, very young, beautiful in a kind of inwardly directed or intense way, who I think is interested in something we might now call, like, social justice. I'm seeking to elucidate those elements which underpin every system of belief known to man. It's not perhaps a subject of great interest to young ladies. On the contrary, to me that seems like a wonderful endeavor. And she is about to make, when the novel starts, is just about to make a kind of disastrous marriage, but one that she enters into with a lot of idealism,

to a much older clergyman and scholar. I came back by Lark, you know. Talk to Cazbon. Saw his library, that kind of thing. Seems he greatly enjoyed his visits here over the last few weeks. I am very grateful to Mr. Cazepon. If he makes me an offer, I shall accept him. But this book about Dorothea Brooke is also a book about everything else and everyone else.

Rosamond Vinci and Dr. Lydgate. Dr. Lidgate? Mr. Vincey. I fear you must find us awfully dull in Middlemarch. Sir James Chatham, who loves Dorothea but marries her sister. Mr. Celia. Engaged. Cousal.

He has one foot in the grave. He means to take it out again, I suppose. And Dorothea's uncle, Mr. Brooke, with his clumsy politics. Progress. That is going to happen whether we like it or not, and that's why I am for it. There's also Will Ladislaw, the sensitive love interest, who has his eye on Dorothea for about 60 chapters. The best piety is to enjoy when you can. Well, Middlemarch is the story of a community, the web of all of these different people and relationships and events.

And there's all of these different plots. But what seems to really interest, Elliot, is how the plots intersect with each other. At the center of all these intersecting plots, where all the strands meet, are the grand themes, not least the lesson shot through the whole novel of sympathy. George Elliott wants to show us how important it is to see the world from the point of view of others. And that includes characters we don't like. You are a lot more sympathetic, I think, or you should be, to the tragedy of a person not becoming everything that they hoped that they might be. That's a terrible thing. And that's so much the theme of Middlemarch. And this is where Elliott speaks to our own.

fractured, fractious age. She asks us over and over through her characters, can you have sympathy for someone you can never agree with? Stop for a second and ask yourself. Can you? Let's start with Edward Casabon. He's a blowhard and a fool, constantly cutting down his young wife, Dorothea Brooke, for having the audacity to ask tough questions about his would-be great work of scholarship, the key to all mythologies. Surely, Edward, it must be time to expose your great theory to the judgment of your fellow scholars. My love, I think you may rely upon me to know the times and the seasons, the different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the superficial judgment of ignorant onlookers.

The judgment was a very superficial. Or it had been easy for me to gain some temporary effect, but it is ever the trial of the scrupulous explorer to be saluted by the impatient scorn of chatterers who attempt only the smallest achievement being indeed equipped for no other my judgment was a very superficial one edward what else could it be so shortly after getting to know him shortly after their marriage gets underway she already is beginning to detect the real limits to what he's devoted his life to and to his real limits the second he notices that the second he notices that his wife sees his limitations he can only

resent her. It's very easy when I was a young person reading the novel. It's very easy to think, oh, dried up stick of an old man. Engaged. To Casabon. Good God, it's horrible. It's very vexing, James. You've seen the man, mother. What business has a shriveled old bachelor like that to marry a young girl? I'm Rebecca Mead. I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker, and I'm the author of my life in Middlemont. He has one foot in the grave. But once you get to his age, which is in his 40s, you are a lot more sympathetic, I think, or you should be, to the tragedy of a person not becoming everything that they hoped that they might be. I have felt the disadvantage of loneliness

that inevitably accompanies any serious scholarship for the presence of youth, of cheerful companionship. Perhaps I've said too much. No, not at all. I feel I understand you. And if I say in my turn that I have longed for some great purpose in my life which would give it shape and meaning. You do not find such an aspiration ridiculous. Surprising, perhaps, in much so young, but not ridiculous.

No. Not ridiculous at all. So sure, hate Kasabon for his pomposity and for how he treats Dorothea and his tantrums and his childishness. But you're invited to feel for the man, too, for his loneliness, his failed ambition. George Elliott is asking us, can you do both? That would mean somehow thinking multiple thoughts at the same time that he is ridiculous and he's someone that should be pitied and he's someone that you should never have gotten involved with. All these things have to be true.

So you have to kind of be moving around constantly and that's what the narrator does is invite you always to be moving around your perspectives. It's part of what gives the novel its length because you have to see so many different viewpoints on any given person at any given moment. There's a quote that I think of often when I think of what she was trying to do, and I think she accomplished this in Middlemarch, where she says,

if art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally. And then she continues, the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything, but the broad fact of being struggling, airing human creatures. You feel for these characters on the page, and then maybe in your life you're able to translate that sense of empathy

for fictional characters into the people who live and exist around you. If we stop having that love for each other, then there will be no future for society. I think it was that kind of bleak for her, that art must be a place where we can feel. a sense of reverence, but without the divine presence. So in Middlemarch, she's writing a kind of secular Bible, how to aspire to living a moral life without believing in, you know, angels and demons and little winged babies.

One of the people who noted exactly that was the philosopher Nietzsche, who said much that same thing, but in a kind of dismissive way, he said, you know, what people like Elliot want to do is they want to eliminate the Christian God, but entirely retain Christian morality. So she wants us to revere the everyday, something that's imminent, something that's right in front of us, rather than something transcendent, something that has to be divine. We have to find the beauty, and as she says, the gnarled hands peeling carrots in a Dutch painting of the golden age. We can't see that as a symbol of God. We have to find the beauty. We have to find the beauty. We have to to see it as a symbol of humanity and still revere it,

because these are hands that have touched and loved people. And, you know, Nietzsche, for various reasons, saw that as a completely untenable project because you're asking people to act in a relatively self-sacrificial way without any hope of the rewards that Christianity might offer those who sacrifice themselves. So it becomes this kind of endless trudgery of duty. She rejected the kind of supernatural claims, of Orthodox Christianity. But I do think that she saw value

in the community that religion brought and in the moral impulse that it gives people. My name is Laura Gerke, and I am a PhD student in English at the University of Washington in Seattle. Elliot's own relationship to religion is so fraught and interesting. My name is Ranjani Chatterjee,

And I'm an affiliate assistant professor at Concordia University in Montreal. And I'm the editor of a forthcoming edition of the Norton Critical Middle March. I think she always maintained some kind of sympathy for something bigger to structure one's life. I mean, this can make her sound rather straight and dreary. and a bit too good to be true. That's certainly not what she is. And the authorial voice of Middlemarch is extremely ironical and funny and undermining.

But it's not cruel. It is always generous. The religious world that Elliot presents in Middlemarch is one where religion is very individualized. And Elliot uses the language of religion to talk about each person's individual passions or values. For Caleb Garth, it's business. She says that he says the word business with a tone of reverent regard.

For I'm to be as rich as creases. No. Oh, yes, indeed. I'm going to be agent for two estates. Like this is his religion. And she even specifically says, even though he'd call himself a Christian, his real religion was business. And the same with Mr. Kasabon. She says, Mr. Kasabon considered himself a believing Christian, but he wanted honor and respect for his scholarly work in the here and now.

he wanted other people to be impressed with him. Kazabon's engaged upon a great work, you know. Isn't that so, Casabon? I believe I am, yes. Perhaps too great a work for the mind of one man to compass. And Dorothea asks Will Ladislav, what is your religion? She says, I have been finding out my religion ever since I was a little girl. And he says that his religion is to find what is beautiful in the world and to love it.

The best piety is to enjoy when you can. It's no you to try and take care of all the world unless you allow yourself to feel some delight in it. So there's definitely the sense that each person kind of has their own religion, that they're figuring out for themselves. I know the biographer Philip Davis has written a manifesto almost to why this is a secular Bible and that George Eliot's narrator and her characters help us to live. They help us to think better and to feel better and to be more human. I'm Fenula Delan and I'm Professor of 19th century literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. She herself grew up in the Church of England,

became very interested in lots of different religions, in evangelical thought in particular, and went through an intensely religious period, but then started reading outwards and broadly and thinking about religions plural and the great history of humanity's quest to find meaning in life. Friends, a few brief words on this happy occasion I met together to celebrate the betrothal of my dear niece, Dorothea,

to my good and learned friend the Reverend Edward Casabon and to share their happiness. And I don't for a minute want to deny people that approach to Middlemarch in the same way that as an atheist I wouldn't ask people to read the Bible through my eyes. However, I think that George Eliot's more minor characters in this book are singularly pressing on this idea of sympathy extended to all.

You find these moments throughout the book, like here, in Elliot's own words, not from the BBC miniseries, but straight from the pages of her novel. There was light piercing in the room. She opened her curtains and looked out towards a bit of road that lay in a view, with fields beyond outside the entrance gates.

Alcia has this moment of realization. She has kind of a dark night of the soul and thinks through her selfishness in this reaction and she wakes at a kind of an early dawn and looks out the window and sees a man struggling with a burden. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby. In the field she could see figures moving, perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was a pearly light and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. Somebody has nothing to do with her at all, but they're struggling through their life.

She was part of that involuntary, palpitating life and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining. And she is this realization of other suffering and how she is not the center of the universe, which she knows quite well a lot, but it's a huge moment of realization. This character doesn't even have a name.

but it doesn't matter, because through him, something is revealed to Dorothea. She sees this man just once, in passing. He may not be named, but he's on the verge of turning into a fully-fledged character with a real life and real feelings and real problems. Even the minor anonymous. characters in Elliot's Middlemarch are doing what all the major characters are doing. They serve a moral

purpose. Like farmhand, Timothy Cooper. This minor character has a name, but he too comes and goes in a flash. There is a moment in the novel where a field labourer comes and protests against the stories he's been told

against the idea of development and the railways are coming. Why no lads? Oh, listen. Someone's been telling you lies. The railroad does no arms. That does no arm. They make cows cast their calves and carve a great sleight to a poor man's land

and the law says nothing to it. Nonsense. Railway's a good thing. Good for big folk to make money out on. What about the poor man, Mr. Garth? If times are hard, it's not... You know, you told me the canals would improve my life. It did nothing for me.

You told me this new road would improve my life. It bought nothing. Now you're telling me the railways are going to improve my life. It's bringing nothing. So there's quite a pushback. against lots of the dominant 19th century ideas of progress and colonisation through the novel in minor ways. George Elliott is brilliant at this, you know. She has them there as these disruptive depth charges through the novel. It could be your character who is talking about the railways, dagly challenging Mr. Brook for not repairing buildings on his farm.

These kinds of minor characters that are very minorly disruptive but sufficient to cause a problem to a real. reader. But I didn't notice them. The first one, two, three, four, five, six, seven times I read it. And I'm not saying that I'm brilliant for noticing it now. Obviously, what I've been doing is, this is why the book is amazing, that every time you read it, you're coming at it with something from your own life that is beginning to inform the reading. Vladimir Nabokov once said, you can't read a book. You can only reread it. The same book changes, not only with the age of the reader, but with the times in which it's read too. because of increasing interest and the consideration of why indigenous communities and

Black Lives Matter have to be part of our daily conversations and should be part of our daily conversations, Middle March becomes a different book to me again. And I become more interested in the way in which she is looking at the suppressed and minor characters and looking at the way in which inherited wealth and privilege that you have as a theme in the story is also linked to the way in which this book has become canonical because it reinforces this idea that our individual interactions matter, but not the wider structural change.

So what you get is a critique of class in Middlemarch from one of its minor characters, Timothy Cooper, or almost a critique because he shuffles off to his cottage and we never see him again. But he gets his shot in. So what in the end can we do with his complaint? Here's what Dorothy is on. uncle says at the wedding.

Progress, now, that is going to happen whether we like it or not, and that's why I am for it. But in a spirit of temperance and moderation, let it never be said that Brooke was not for progress and reform. Temperance and moderation. Excellent. Slow and steady. Keep calm and carry on. Wider structural change.

is not in the cards, not for George Elliott. Every week, new evidence comes to hand of the unity of the British Empire. In every farthest land... That's a way in which empire continues to be empire. But thoughts of home bring us to the greatest story of all, the inspiring tale of a little nation that has encompassed the world. You know, I know that this is wrong,

so I will do my individual bit, but there's no movement towards a broader social, structural, uprooting. You know, this has often been kind of critiqued about Middle March. It's seen as in this sense, kind of anti-revolutionary, because it can only imagine this kind of very patient, gradual change from within certain structures rather than erasing those structures entirely. And George Elliott was afraid of that as well. She was a meeliorist who wanted slow change that was affected from the heart as opposed to political change. For might and right go hand in hand in these great possessions beyond the seeds. There is little

doubt that the book is throbbingly ardent with the idea of sympathy. There is no doubt about that at all. And to deny it would be to disavow a very strong thread that runs through the book. But I don't. And I will say this quite clearly. As an Irish person, I don't have. Maybe it's not as an Irish person. Maybe it's just who I am. I don't know if I'm going to narrow it down to nationalism because I'm not a fan of nations. I don't believe in nations. But I've never had the kind of belief in George Elliott as a type of prophet or this canonical text. is something that should guide my life in any way. You're listening to the second of a two-part series called Love and Consequences,

George Eliot's Middlemarch, by contributor Tom Jokinen. Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, Across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca.ca. You can also find ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyed. Chambers Plan employee benefits is not-for-profit, and that's great for your business. Chambers Plan supports businesses with 1 to 50-plus employees across Canada and reinvest surpluses to help keep rates stable.

Get flexible coverage for you and your employees with outstanding customer service and unmatched value. Benefit together with Chambersplan. Learn more at hellochambers.ca. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes.

Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99. including an OCT scan. Book at specksavers.cavers.cairists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. Middlemarch launched countless other literary ships, bulging, epic books with multiple characters from Thomas Mann to Thomas Pinchin. But then so much of today's serial TV drama, what we've all been binge-watching on Netflix, owes a debt to George Eliot as well. As somebody who was interested in serialized fiction, I wanted to think about this canonical text

as something that was a predecessor to the Sopranos or The Wire. One of these extended TV serials. Look, man, I do what I can do to help y'all. But the game is out there, and it's either play or get played. Ponds, man, in the game, they get capped quick. Who's winning?

No one wins. Once I just loses more slowly. A man must have a code. No doubt. I'd like to propose a toast to my family. The long-form television serial is entirely indebted to the long-form serial narrative of the 19th century.

Someday soon, you're going to have families of your own. And if you're lucky, you remember the little moments like this that were good. As you have in the wire, when you're looking at the educational series, the one that focuses on the ports, the one that focuses in politics. This is more important than who knew what, when,

or who falls on his sword, or whether someone can use this disaster to make a political point or two. You could imagine how each part is like a book of the eight books of Middle March. What I can't forgive ever is how we, you, me, this administration, all of us, how we turned away from those streets

in West Baltimore, the poor, the sick, the swollen underclass of our city trapped in the wreckage of neighborhoods which were once so prized. City counselor Tommy Carcetti there in The Wire, the HBO drama. He's an idealist, about to become mayor, but it all falls apart.

As it does for Will Ladislaw and Mr. Brook in Middlemarch in the political chapters of the book. It is not as a class-focused because the wire covers race and class obviously as its kind of key drivers for understanding dependence and interaction at each other. In Middle March, it is a landed gentry,

the established church, the mercantile middle classes that are rising. So it is an earlier kind of emergence of class interaction than you'd have in something like the wire, but it's a similar pattern. This checks out. There are all these stories on a web, a network with intertwined characters and a narrative flight pattern.

Some connect and some don't. The class issue is there in the novel, too, but with no apparent intention to resolve it. It's what you see in The Wire, the Sopranos, Succession, and in Middlemark. Arabella, my dear. Brooke is invited half the town as well as the county. What a to do? Never want to spend his money like this.

That this was the kind of wide-ranging, multi-layered, multi-plot fiction that includes characters of different classes and sets them off into the same kind of landscape. That's what all this has got up and head of. Toadying to the Hoyapalai. So we begin to look at their interaction in this web of interaction, that metaphor she uses all the way through it. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys. yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust. As for Rosamond, she was in the waterlily's expanding wonderment at its own fuller life,

and she too was spinning industriously at the mutual web. All this went on in the corner of the drawing room where the piano stood. And subtle as it was, the light made a sort of rainbow visible to many observers besides Mr. Fairbrother. how they're in fact entangled with each other, even though they apparently seem like they're not. And in Middlemarch, her metaphor of society and how and why it's strong is that of a web, not necessarily as Spider's web,

but of the silk weaving industry of Coventry and Nun Eaton, where she grew up, lies behind Middlemarch, and one of the main characters owns a silk weaving factory. Yes, Fancy, the ribbon manufacturer. I'm quite happy to peruse his pattern book, but I don't want to eat my dinner with the fellow. And so the web there is a sense of all life as a kind of entangled, woven fabric

in which every thread has its part. And our richness and our beauty comes from that sense of entanglement, not chasing and tracing a single thread back to a source, but that sense of plurality and entanglement and weaving, being what gives society its richness and its strength and human culture, it's diversity and beauty as well.

So that was one whole reading of it was totally obsessed with that web and the interconnection of the various plot lines of the story and how some people are well known to each other, some people marginally meet each other over the course of the story, but they all begin to affect each other because it's an ecosystem. And one change in one part of the ecosystem will change something else. So a little piece of a scrap of paper that raffles picks up in his stepson's house leads to the downfall of Dr. Lydgate.

And so this whole ripple effect is something that I became obsessed with and tracing. The butterfly effect. George Elliott is fascinated with this idea, that one little detail can have major consequences, that things are connected in ways we can only imagine. That's the web to which she keeps referring. And it's not just a web of characters and how they interact, but by extension, the mechanics of an entire world. And so the metaphor of networks or webs,

work all the way through the book as a way of thinking about that interaction as the word wasn't used at the time as ecological. You know, that this is a biosphere or this is an ecology. And to understand the health of any kind of ecosystem, we have to have an understanding of the various parts within it. So we're talking about a medical community, the landed estate of the Brooks. You have the religious figures of Cadwallader and Fairbrother. You have the mercantile family of Mr. Vinci. This is one of the things that comes from my reading of March, maybe my 30s and 40s that I didn't have in my teens. You know, there's not been a film of Middlemarch.

Well, there was an Andrew Davis series. There was a series, but there's never been a film of it, which I'm fascinated by. You know, Salas Mariner has been filmed to death. We've had loads, plenty of the mill and the floss. Obviously, there's been a four-part series of Daniel Duranda as well. but there's the Andrew Davis series. That's quite old now, you know? That's 19904, I think.

I would like us to remove to London, Sir Godwin. Or perhaps to Bath. Bath's an amusing place, but it's damp. It's full of gouty admirals. I mean, it's been described, and it makes sense, that Elliot's telling, not showing in Middle March, to an extent that it's hard to dramatize it in film, that the narrator is so ever-present.

Yeah, I'm with them. There's a Tim Dooland, the Australian, critic has a good line on this and I entirely agree with him. He said, give more credit to filmmakers. Honestly, that's a terrible excuse for not having a film right now. You know, there should be, of course there's a filmmaker

who should be able to rise to this challenge. And the narrator is ever present for a lot of people as the mediating intelligence who's slowly helping us to see what George Elliott wants us to see. I think that gives too much respect to the narrator. What did you make of the web series adaptation of Middlemarch? I thought it was hugely imaginative and insightful and brilliantly tapped into the,

especially the idea of the ardent, throbbing life that runs all the way through Middlemarch. The web series is an entirely different adaptation from the BBC TV series. It's low budget on purpose, as it's set in a modern-day American college meant to look like a video blog on YouTube, put together. by students, where they tell their stories straight to the webcam. It's still on YouTube. It's called Middle March the Series, 70 episodes, each one know more than five or six minutes long. I think the adaptation is really interesting and so imaginative and so ambitious to take

something like that on. And its sense of perspectives that don't communicate well with each other. You know, it was the miscommunications, I think, are handled with great humor. So this year I made a kind of documentary, not about important causes or world events, but just about us, me and my friends and my roommate. My name is Rebecca Shoptaugh, and I am the writer and director of the modern adaptation of Middlemarch, which aired on YouTube in 2017. Rebecca Shoptaugh was a film studies major at Yale University when she thought up this web series.

The actors are students, film students, drama, students, law students, a student who majors in Middle East studies, a student whose previous experience acting was in a midsummer night's dream, playing a wall. Point is, our story isn't one for the history books. It's just the ordinary lives of a group of ordinary college students in the painfully ordinary college town of Middlemarch, Connecticut. Describe for me how Middlemarch began to form in your mind as something that you could do something with in an adaptation. Well, it's interesting. There's been this established tradition of the literary web series, starting with the Lizzie Bennett Diaries,

where people adapt classic works of literature into the video blog form. Hey, I'm Dorothea Brooke, and everyone calls her dot. I'd seen a few of them, and I'd always thought it would be nice to. do one someday. It was the kind of thing that logistically I could do just with a camera and tripod. Hey, I'm Dorothea Brooke, and I start sophomore year tomorrow, actually, at Loweck College in Middle March, Connecticut. One of the thing that catches people's attention, and that much has been written about, is adapting it from the point of view of LGBTQ characters and swapping gender. So tell me about that decision, those decisions to make it from a different point

view for most of these characters? A couple of the relationships, like between Dorothea and Will and Fred and Mary, there's so much going on that can carry over regardless of the gender, which is part of what makes them just like interesting relationships, but then also let me take the liberty to switch something without losing sort of the central character. I still have no idea what I'm majoring in. Oh, this is my roommate. and best friend Celia, the only person in the entire world who calls me daught for now. The changing of genders wasn't an attempt to fix anything. It wasn't like an intervention against it, whereas for something like pride and prejudice,

if you switch to gender, it would be gay pride and prejudice just because of the specific interplay of genders in the book. But in this case, I was trying to keep alive and bring across the spirit of Middlemarch, And I wanted this to be more like, you know, when people put on Shakespeare plays and they'll set it somewhere interesting. So the good news is that Jamie comes around here all the time and it's pretty clear that they like Celia. But the bad news is that Jamie is so boring. No, no, it's like They always just agree with me

Even if we're talking And I disagree with them They'll just be like, exactly Hey not Your Fred Vinci character describes himself as a gay disaster Which totally works for Fred Tell me your idea behind this character

You're Fred Oh goodness Well I was so fond of him The childishness And that was something we thought about a lot In costuming as well I mean obviously So we didn't have much of a budget, but we went to Goodwill and got a lot of sort of brightly colored shirts with silly designs on them and whatnot, and then gradually had him shift from those to more normal clothes as he grew up.

My name, as you know, is Fred Vincy. I'm a senior at Lowett College. I'm 21 years of age. I'm technically premed, though still very much pre. I'm forced to share a dorm room with my sister Rosamond, who apparently left her previous rooming situation because of creative differences, who I hope you never have to meet. I like taking unnecessarily long walks and cooking things and Macs. I think that's plenty for it. Right. He was really fun because he had a very heightened voice that was fun to write. But we were always playing with the persona versus his actual feelings coming through and sort of the facade falling apart in certain moments.

I think it was obviously hard. hard to say anything too explicitly because I wasn't using the narration, but I think one thing that I tried to do was put the audience through what you go through as a reader a bit with Middle March. Kasabin is very easy to hate. Rosamond Vinci is like a total villain of the piece, especially early on. But then over the course of the book, you actually experience things from their perspective and you have this sort of revelation like, oh, No, it's actually not that simple. So in the original novel by George Eliot, Cassabon dies,

and in his will, he forbids Dorothea from marrying his nephew, Will Ladislaw. And he's still pushing her around from beyond the grave. It's kind of a post-mortem blackmail. She won't get a dime from his estate as she defies him, even though he's dead. Now, you're Casabon. He's not old. He's a college kid. You can't kill him up. So how do you deal with that in the web series? That was a real question of like, what is something that Kasabin could hold over dot that would keep her and Billy from getting together, but ultimately turn out to be a surmountable

obstacle. Come in. Hi. Sorry, it took me so long to get here. So, do the hypothetical future viewers know what's going on? Oh, no, there's just been so much. I... Well, allow me.

I again turned to the medium and had what he's holding over her be footage. from the documentary that we've been watching. It was a dark and stormy night. It was like 7 p.m. and sunny. It was a more or less sunny evening when a certain Edward Kasabin made a series of Facebook posts about our damsel in distress. Hey.

Our heroine. And now everyone knows that our heroine supposedly cheated on Kasabin with Billy. He assembled all of the nasty things that people said about one another and was going to publish that. He has something on her, and he's threatened that if she now or ever dates Billy, he'll share it with everyone. Dot, like, you know whatever it is.

Like, we're not going to judge you. Jamie's right. There is nothing he could have on you that would ever make us change the way that we see you. It was a very good marker of character growth for Dot because by the end, when she's sort of relaxed a little bit, she can understand that it's actually not the end of the world if someone finds out something. something mean that you said about them. Right near the end, it's one of my favorite moments of the book, which is where Dorothea, she thinks that Rosam and Vincy and Willattislaw are in love, and everything is over for her. So she runs back to her, to her house, and she stays up all night just thinking.

And then she wakes up in the morning and she has this amazing experience where she looks out the window and sees all the life that's going on around her and realizes that her sadness is not actually the center of the universe and that there's a whole world of other people with their own experiences and their own inner lives. I feel different somehow. Lighter.

I'm still obviously upset, but... I am not trying to fight it anymore. It's a thing that has happened. And that's what pushes her to make this decision to go to Rosamond and say, you know, I support whatever is happening here. I'm so sorry.

I ran off like that. It's just, it's this moving outside of herself. I came today because I've been thinking about, what you must be going through and how sad you must be and I just felt like I wanted to do something that I think is so profound in the novel and was one of the most challenging things to adapt because obviously it's just internal she almost talks she thinks about talking and then we see her sort of go to the window and open the window So just as in the book, it's up to Rosamond to fill in the blanks.

She gets to fix it. When you walked in the other day, it wasn't what you thought it was. I mean, I did confess and things to her, but she didn't exactly feel the same way. She never really liked me, you know? Not many people do. It was just another one of my stupid romantic fantasies. Tell me about the reaction. I mean, what was the feedback that you got from people?

Because it was a popular series. So take me some examples of some of the things you heard about it. I mean, it was so much fun. I'd never had anything that had a fan base. My favorite thing was just that people got really invested. And because this is how I felt reading the book. I remember when I was like sitting in the cafeteria in college, when I read the scene where Will and Dorothea get together.

and I, like, gasped out loud. In an instant, Will was close to her and had his arms around her. But she drew her head back and held his away gently, that she might go on speaking, her large, tear-filled eyes looking at his very simply, while she said, in a sobbing, childlike way, things are much more complicated and interconnected than we might initially suspect. One question that comes up, course, and we've been at it in one way or another through this whole episode, is what does it

mean to look at a 150-year-old book through contemporary eyes? Is it even fair? The only way we can read these books is through a contemporary lens. The only way we can read Sophocles is through a contemporary lens. So that's how reading works. I think what Eliot's novels, including Middle March, what they teach us, is that you don't know. And Elliot tells stories of misinterpretations and misunderstandings. You feel for these characters on the page, and then maybe in your life, you're able to translate that sense of empathy for fictional characters into the people who live and exist around you.

Not that Middle March needs to be a blueprint for how to behave in the world, but there are certainly people that are intransigent on the vaccine matter, for example, who I can read the wisdom in Elliot that I need to have sympathy for them and then stop cold and say, no, I don't understand and they're making the world worse. So no, I refuse Ms. Elliott to have sympathy. How does she break through that or can she or does she not try? Put it this way.

Characters in Middle March, Lydgate and Bolstrow are good examples of this, can feel like they have failed but not really acknowledge it to themselves for quite a long time. You can kind of coast along in various ways of life for a very long time, sort of pushing at bay the knowledge that you failed. And that pushing at bay, the sense of your own failure,

means it means less likely to have sympathy for anybody else. And then finally it reaches the point in both of those cases where there's almost a kind of catastrophic collapse of who they thought they were. And it may be that collapse is necessary to jar you out of your difficult, in sympathizing with anybody else. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the real new future, which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind. And perhaps our frames could hardly be, bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about, well-wadded with stupidity.

So I think with Elliot, it's this ability to think into other people's point of view that many people lack or to think beyond one's own kind of egotistical point of view that many people lack. So it's not that thinking or overthinking itself is bad. It's when that narrows you into your own particular point of view. But I was reading that line more recently and I was thinking of it in the context of the way in which Dorothea and Brooks and the wealthier and privileged people in this novel have to have a sense of entitlement that is based on being well-wotted with stupidity so they can close their eyes to the suffering around them.

She mentions quite frequently a lot of things that I think we are thinking about in the contemporary. Like, what does it mean for some people to have a lot and for other people to be beholden to misery and suffering? What would it mean to change the balance if you have the means to do so? Why not radically imagine how people live? Whereas a more, I guess what she's interested in

is a kind of much more de-centered approach to consciousness and thought of can you move beyond thinking what this looks like from your own point of view and experience? Can you step away and imagine what the world would be like from the point of view of the squirrel or the grass that is growing? And just the thought experiment of that might be useful. It might stop us being very functional, but it would change our relationship with the world around us. That's an interesting lens to look at it through right now. I mean, there seems to be a crisis of sympathy around the pandemic and the separation of people who are vaccinating and who are not

and the politics around that, that there are plenty of people who refuse to sympathize with their neighbor, refuse to see the world from their point of view and are angry and are attacking. I think what we do see is an incredible emphasis on the moment on individual choice and freedom. And a lot of that is around, obviously, you know, particularly in the US.

I mean, it's a foundational sense of the identity of the US, but everywhere, that individual choices, you know, what you want to buy, what you want to wear, whether you get vaccinated or not, what you say on Twitter, what your profile is, you know, the emphasis on the individual as a commodity, as a thing in the world, as a representation of everything you are,

you have made yourself and you make your own choices is hugely important in, powering some of the energy and the more toxic energy in those debates. And Elliot has very ambivalent views about freedom and individuality, I mean, especially in Middle March. And so part of what the novel I think is encouraging is a thinking that avoids dreams of total freedom and total autonomy and tries to think through how What would be the conditions of partial autonomy that yet recognize the existence of others

and the existence of what are going to be ongoing structures in the world that you have to live within? And maybe by choosing to live within them, maybe you're capable of them of altering them. That means we're never quite free. And it's in that way that kind of opening up always how someone has come to be, how they are, through mistakes, through abuse, through, you know, and partly through character, limitations of character, small bits of snobbery. And there's always a sense that choice is determined by things that are beyond us.

There's no such thing as free choice out of nowhere in Elliot's work. So we can read it or reread it again and again, and every now and then, listen to the grasp. grow, or the squirrel's heartbeat. As a metaphor, not as some bogus meditation exercise. And we may see that we're not the center of the universe after all. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. But Middlemarch as a novel is 800 pages long. And I really believe that it needs 800 pages.

to tell you what it wants to tell you and to make you feel what it wants you to feel. And that's just one story in all the stories of Middlemarch. Her full nature spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts

and that things are not so ill with you and me. as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have loved faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs. This has been Love and Consequences, George Eliot's Middlemarch, by contributor Tom Jokinen. Readings by Morva Bowman. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas, technical production, Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly,

and I'm Nala Ayyad.