Clinical Commentary XXXV

This section departs from the more usual BJP format in taking for consideration not clinical material but extracts from a Victorian novel - George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2). As is the case with many novels, and especially with Eliot's last two great books, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, the text is peopled with personalities whose characters, experience of the world and self-experience may with validity be viewed thorough a psychoanalytic lens. Freud much admired Eliot's novels drawing on Adam Bede in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900) and, remarking of Middlemarch, that, in Ernest Jones's words, ‘It greatly illuminated important aspects of his relations with Martha’ (Jones 1953-57). It would be fascinating to know what these aspects of his marital situation might be. It is also known that Freud gave Eliot's novels as gifts to his friends (Ingram l988; Rotenberg l999).

At a time when the need for strict confidentiality makes it difficult to publish clinical material in the conventional form, perhaps clinician-writers in the field may feel encouraged by this BJP initiative to turn to literature to explore, illuminate or exemplify analytic work for purposes of publication.

Commentators were asked to consider the two extracts below from the novel. After a rapid decline in popularity following the author's death, Middlemarch, often seen as the first truly psychological novel, has retrieved its reputation as a masterpiece and as a great exposition of the anatomy of marriage.

The first extract concerns the attitude of the heroine, Dorothea Brooke, to the academic interests of the elderly cleric, Edward Casaubon. The second piece, after her marriage to Casaubon and during her disastrous honeymoon in Rome, focuses on Dorothea's early interactions with Mr Casaubon's young cousin, Will Ladislaw, a Shelleyan or Romantic figure.

The two vignettes thus offer views before and after marriage, with the second piece foreshadowing the possibility of the heroine's second marria