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Why We Need to Talk About Marriage | The New Yorker

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“Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” So says Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” a novel that explores the many different ways in which the institution of marriage can be a site of discovery and delusion, proximity and estrangement, comfort and misery. Dorothea’s insight is informed by her own ill-advised marriage, to Edward Casaubon, a desiccated scholar and the blocked would-be author of a “Key to All Mythologies.” Dorothea’s words, which arrive close to the end of the novel, are addressed to Rosamond Vincy, the mayor’s daughter. In Rosamond’s marriage to Dr. Tertius Lydgate, a newcomer to Middlemarch, Eliot provides another illustration of curdled marital expectation, with each spouse disappointed and embittered by the other’s intransigent sense of selfhood. Between these two poles, Eliot offers refracted perspectives on more or less successful marriages: the complacent bourgeois harmony of Mr. an

Save this story Save this story “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” So says Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot ’s “ Middlemarch ,” a novel that explores the many different ways in which the institution of marriage can be a site of discovery and delusion, proximity and estrangement, comfort and misery. Dorothea’s insight is informed by her own ill-advised marriage, to Edward Casaubon, a desiccated scholar and the blocked would-be author of a “Key to All Mythologies.” Dorothea’s words, which arrive close to the end of the no

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