The Middlemarch Market, Part 1 of 3: Rosamond

Earlier this year I read Middlemarch by George Eliot as a readalong with a thoughtful and fun group organized by my smart friend Marjorie. While it is definitely a masterpiece of a novel and I loved our group’s discussions generally, it turns out I have a ridiculous problem: I cannot help but see the various marriage plots in Middlemarch as anachronistic allegories for the contemporary academic job market.

Could George Eliot have intended this? No. Could I maybe get off my bullshit and just get over it? Apparently also no.

First of all, the parallels between the 19th century British marriage market and the academic job market are not new to me. After my grad school buddy Balaka and I had both gotten tenure-track positions, we compiled a guide for our alma mater called “Managing the Market” that drew on our shared love of Jane Austen novels to emphasize the focus on a good match for this decision that will theoretically last you the rest of your life.

In Middlemarch, the plot goes well beyond the wedding day for some of the young women featured in the narrative, and offers a different view of the marriage market from Austen’s. (Note: This post contains spoilers for the plot of Middlemarch, a famous novel published over one hundred and fifty years ago; and maybe also spoilers for what the academic job market is like now, particularly for Humanities PhDs in North America.)

The young women in Middlemarch have ostensibly been trained for wifehood as a career, but with differing emphases and different results. Dorothea and Celia, sisters, could theoretically avoid marriage due to their wealth; while both Rosamond Vincy and Mary Garth are both influenced by family financial concerns in their choices and constraints.

Part 1: Rosamond

First up for today’s post, I want to take a look at Rosamond. In her marriage plot, Rosamond is like a flashy job candidate who lands a flashy job. Rosamond is the acknowledged beauty of the region. She is the daughter of a prominent, though not independently wealthy, local man. She went to a finishing school specifically to train her to wife it up right, and then induced a proposal from the hot new doctor, Lydgate, by first demonstrating all her accomplishments, and then after a little time away, making him feel lucky to be so prized by her.

This is the committee interview with teaching demonstration or job talk, and then the second round Dean’s interview. She demonstrates her abilities by performing them fairly publicly, and then one-on-one demonstrates that she is both desirable and serious about the position. She passes the Dean’s Interview phase and Lydgate proposes.

Then, a few chapters later, after the engagement/hiring decision has been made public, there are suddenly funding concerns. It is revealed that Rosamond’s brother Fred has NOT in fact inherited a tidy sum from a family friend, and now Rosamond’s father has to rethink the family finances and reconsider his approval of Rosamond’s engagement to Lydgate.

Lydgate is not particularly wealthy, though he is high status and trendy as the new doctor in town. Marjorie has pointed out to me that Lydgate himself “starts changing what he says about the financial prospects of the marriage before it even happens,” for instance suggesting that “they get married first and finish the wedding clothes after.” It seems like some of the promises made in the interview process might have been overstating the college’s funding. Who among us in the contemporary academic job market does not know a worthy colleague who was offered a job, joyfully accepted, and then had it snatched away at the last minute because funding for another department fell through?

Rosamond’s father relents and she and Lydgate marry, but that is not the ending of their story. It becomes clear that while her finishing school had trained her admirably to GET a husband, it had not, in fact, trained her for the many practical tasks of being a doctor’s middle-class wife. This, of course, is a well-known problem with graduate studies in the humanities. One of the reasons it is so hard to get a good job in higher education is that PhD programs regularly turn out more graduates than there are positions to hire them. This encourages ga lot of rad programs to make their students look as attractive as possible to hiring committees, rather than train them to do the many-faceted job of tenure-track professor.

Rosamond took a job at a sleek-looking new campus and is now discovering that there are unanticipated funding issues and a lot of unpleasant administrative tasks associated with her position that she had not anticipated, like dealing with the appraisers and doing what her husband tells her to do. It had never occurred to her to ask if these would be part of the job.

Part 2: Dorothea is coming next week!