“A Beginning as well as an Ending”: The Narrative Power of Death and Remarriage in Middlemarch

• Published in: Studies in the novel Vol. 54; no. 1; pp. 45 - 64
• Main Author: Hoffer, Lauren N
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Denton Johns Hopkins University Press 01.03.2022
• Subjects: 19th century; Bigamy; British & Irish literature; Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-1880); English literature; Fatalities; Fiction; Literary characters; Marriage; Narratives; Novels; Personal relationships; Victorian period
• ISSN: 0039-3827; 1934-1512; 1934-1512
• DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2022.0002

Taken from a larger project positing remarriage as a phenomenon that revises social, ideological, and narratological structures and assumptions in and about the Victorian novel, this essay analyzes George Eliot’s Middlemarch as exemplary of the ways the death of a character simultaneously allows and disallows consequential developments to character and plot. Drawing on Deborah Lutz’s theory of relics to read the novel’s preoccupation with material and dialogic markers of Edward Casaubon’s death as pre- and reproductions of his decease, I argue Eliot deploys relics and other reiterations of Casaubon’s absence as narrative tools in both story and discourse to construct and propel her remarriage plot. This emphasis on Eliot’s use of endings to forge new beginnings demonstrates how one of the period’s master realists radically revises the traditional marriage plot, using death and remarriage to illuminate how narrative possibilities are framed and fictional lives created.