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Just learned about history. Appalled
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hi y’all i just wanted to put you onto this fundraiser for the buffalo nations grasslands alliance. they’re trying to recoup some of the funds for black-footed ferret conservation on tribal grounds that the trump/musk administration has frozen, which is impacting not only the conservation efforts themselves but the livelihoods of the people working on them. the frozen grant is 1.1 million but this fundraiser has a goal of 50,000.
the fundraiser has 24 days left and has only reached 2% of its goal with 11 donations. black-footed ferrets are an endangered lazarus taxon that was thought to be extinct from 1979-1981 before being rediscovered by accident. they’re a miracle of conservation and it would be horrible to lose them for good, not to mention (again) the impact of people working with these animals losing their jobs which is outlined in the fundraiser link. indigenous-led conservation efforts are extremely important for a wide variety of reasons and as someone in the zoology area i feel obligated to share this fundraiser to contribute to those efforts.
i know that things are hard right now and there’s a lot of people and organizations all across the world that need help, so don’t feel pressured BUT if you have extra money and you can contribute to this fundraiser or share it with people who can that would be great.
super cute black-footed ferrets ^
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I read Middlemarch by George Eliot a couple years ago on ebook, and liked it very much; today I brought a paper copy, and find myself – as with the introduction of my copy of Jane Eyre, as with many of the literary-criticism bad takes on Dracula that people have discussed in Dracula Daily – dissatisfied with the attempt at feminist literary analysis made in its introduction.
The analysis, though largely positive, says that “The portrayal of Rosamond’s motivation is less sure than Lydgate’s,” and suggests that it is a detraction from the work’s feminist qualities that “while criticizing Lydgate’s expectations for a wife, George Eliot seems also to blame Rosamonfd for not putting her husband’s views and needs before her own.” It also sees “ambivalence” in the conflict between “sharp satire of Mr. Casaubon’s requirement of complete devotion in a wife and warm authorial devotion of Dorothea’s desire to serve her husband selflessly.” And finally, the analyst is troubled that Eliot’s praise of Rosamond is highest when she overcomes her own jealousy and unhappiness to go to Rosamond to save Rosamond and Lydgate’s marriage and likely save Rosamond herself from disaster: the analyst says, “There is nothing feminist or progressive in her action or the narrator’s presentation of it…Dorothea’s achievement is a purely personal one.”
These quotes and the ideas in which they are embedded give me the impression that the analyst is mssing something very crucial about the book by attempting to divide it into actions and attitudes that are “feminist” (women doing what they want or acting outside of their designated spheres) and those that are “non-feminist” (women acting inside the ‘personal/familial’ sphere or acting in service to others). It makes for a very shallow and lacking take on the novel. It comes from imposing the analyst’s own framework – one the novel is not designed to meet – and finding anything that does not mesh with that framework inconsistent or ambivalent.
The division that is of importance to the novel and its author, I believe, is between actions – whether by women or men – that are directed at the well-being of others or at a higher purpose, and actions that are directed at the satisfaction of one’s own comfort, complacency, or vanity. This very straightforwardly illuminates why Dorothea should be admired both for her desire to serve a higher goal in contributing to better housing for workers, to meaningful academic research, to anything, and for showing kindness, compassion and selflessness even within the limited sphere where she has been placed. It likewise illuminates why the author (while being clearly critical of the society that has produced Rosamond and that holds up her uselessness as the feminine ideal) can also convey some blame of Rosamond by thinking only of her own desires and comforts and not even trying to understand or sympathize with Lydgate’s higher goal of giving people useful medical care.
The tragedy of Rosamond is not only that she is placed within a limited sphere, taught not just to only know but to only value what belongs to that sphere, and that she then frustrates her husband by them being what she was taught to be – it is that she contributes nothing to the world and does not want to contribute anything to the world. What I feel from the book is that Eliot feels the greatest thing in human life is to exercise your capacities fully to serve and benefit others, and that Rosamond’s tragedy (which she does not even know to recognize as a tragedy) is her self-centredness as much as her ‘feminine sphere’, and that those two things are both intertwined in what society and education have taught her that a woman should be. The book is saying: “Look at this woman – she’s what you want, she’s what you teach women to be, and not despite but because of that she is unable to be a partner to her husband, which is the only goal you say women should have!”
Dorothea’s virtue is that all her goals are about living for something larger than herself; she and Lydgate stand out in that desire, and if she is initially thwarted in it, by the end she at least gets to do it to a greater degree than he does.
There’s also something else I find feminist about the novel, and it touches on the third of the three main relationships – Mary Garth and Fred Vincy – which the literary analyst in the Intro completely ignores, presumably because they find it uninteresting. There seem to exist a variation on the same novel in many different cultures, the story of a woman who is dissatisfied in her marriage, has an affair with a man (who has very little appealing about himself) as an outlet fir her dissatisfaction, and dies or is ruined. In Russia it is Anna Karenina, in France it is Madame Bovary, in Germany it is Effi Briest, in the United States it is The Awakening. George Eliot is writing a novel that could very easily follow that model, and she doesn’t. All three of her women make marriages that could end in disaster for them: Dorothea misunderstands the man she marries and is already unhappy by her honeymoon, when she meets a younger abd more attractive man; Rosamond falls out of love with her husband over financial matters, nearly has an affair, and is discovered in it; Mary Garth is a good, responsible young woman who ‘throws herself away’ on a man whom we first see as an irresponsible gambler. But in this book, none if them are ruined, and all of them “win”. Dorothea outlives her husband and marries another man whom she loves and who suits her better, and with whom she can pursue meaningful goals; Rosamond gets the comfortable life she wanted; Fred turns out surprisingly well and he and Mary are happy. Instead, it is the main male character who is ruined by his matrimonial choices – Lydgate is deeply unhappy in the un-meaningful, profit-seeking life, and dies early, and the bitterness of his life is powerfully evoked in his description of Rosamond as a “basil-plant…a plant which flourishes on murdered men’s brains.” Eliot, unlike other authors of her time, lets her women make marriage decisions which are or might be seriously erroneous without deing destroyed by them. All of them, get happy endings, by their own definitions. And Dorothea, her central character, is in my view far more interesting than the main characters of the aforementioned novels because she has a real goal – to do good for the world in a meaningful way – rather than just an inchoate dissatisfaction that becomes expressed in sexual or romantic desire, as if that was the only thing women cared about.
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Anonymous asked:
what are your thoughts on tertius lydgate wrt marking shifts in discourses of medicine? his position in the novel fascinated me as someone who feels very strongly about the role of doctors in society, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the matter
YES lydgate rules so hard in my personal pantheon of doctor characters. sorry this has been in my inbox for a thousand years i had was rotating.
so first of all one of the things that makes 'middlemarch' interesting is that it's a historical novel. so, when george eliot creates a doctor character for the year 1829, writing from 40 or so years later, she's using him to comment on (her perception of) changes to medical science in britain over the course of several decades. so for instance, the fact that lydgate trained in edinburgh and paris tells us immediately that we're supposed to understand him not just as a member of a newly 'respectable' profession, but specifically as having a viewpoint that is informed by radical student politics (edinburgh) and conceptions of the doctor as a social reformer (paris) as well as the research traditions of raspail and bichat. indeed this is why lydgate's crusade in town includes his ideas about sanitation and public health; in contradistinction to the other physicians, he sees his medical and scientific authority as giving him the ability and responsibility to reform the town more broadly. like his parisian counterparts, lydgate clearly sees a link between, eg, cholera and more general social and political unrest. he fashions himself as someone who can doctor the social body as much as the individual patient; given his parisian training we can place him loosely in a social-hygienist context here.
lydgate is also a pretty early example in british literature of a doctor character who's presented as a) not a charlatan and b) heroic explicitly on the basis of his medical and scientific status. british medical practitioners were subject to a new licensure requirement in 1815 i believe (i'd have to double check this date i don't read as much in 19thc britain); 'middlemarch' was written around 1870 and set in 1829–32. so, for eliot, lydgate was genuinely part of a markedly new wave of physicians—men who were licensed (read: state-approved) and occupied a new social position. lydgate is also minor aristocracy, which is part of what makes it possible for him to scoff at the town's older physicians, but much of his social position in the town is accrued in conjunction with the newly and increasingly prestigious status of his profession. this is not really a character type that would have been plausible in a realist novel set in the same country a generation or two earlier.
eliot herself was married to a man of science and also kept abreast of medical and scientific ideas (for example, she was extremely interested in phrenology, an influence you can see throughout 'middlemarch'), and lydgate is very much a man of the times in this respect: he diagnoses george's scarlet fever in the early stage, for example, and refuses to dispense his own prescriptions or to take money from pharmacists. these, along with his emphasis on public health and sanitation measures, mark him as not just an idealist but someone whose medical practice was genuinely steeped in current principles of scientific and ethical reform. even his embrace of bichat's tissue theory, though presented somewhat vaguely, would have signalled to a reader familiar with recent anatomical theories that lydgate was not just a fashionable thinker (bichat died in about 1802, but his work came to popularity over the next 3-4 decades in england and france) but also a precise and naturalistic one, aligning himself with a research tradition that emphasised specific, local lesions as etiological agents (compare this to the brain-localisation ideas of the phrenologists).
ultimately, lydgate's tragedy is that his medical knowledge isn't matched by any social acuity, and his match with rosamond is dissatisfying for both of them. i don't read this as eliot condemning the aspirational early stages of lydgate's career; his mistakes are all made in the interpersonal arena, with both rosamond and the raffles affair. had he played these situations smarter, who knows what he may or may not have accomplished for the residents of middlemarch. instead, he ends the book as a successful but dissatisfied physician to the wealthy, in a position of financial security and medical specialisation but without the kind of moral or political status that he sought earlier in the book by presenting himself as both a social and medical reformer. eliot thus engages, i think, another new type of doctor character: lydgate at the end of the book still has no trace of the quackery or charlatanism that characterised many previous representations of doctors, but he's also been purged of the youthful idealism that pervaded the edinburgh and paris medical education he received. the social status he attains at the end of his life is based on his wealth and the general respectability of the medical profession; treating gout doesn't give him any higher prestige than that, and certainly not the kind of moral authority or fulfillment he wanted back in middlemarch.
so, and recognising that this sort of leaves aside a lot of the psychological nuance of the novel, lydgate's storyline gets at two of the major historical points eliot is interested in. first there's the changing status of british medicine and medical practitioners. lydgate begins the novel as the self-styled hero-reformer; experiences a social fall from grace that compounds with the resistance he already faces from the other town physicians for the threat he poses to their professional status; and ends as the consummate specialist, performing the same boring, lucrative work day in and day out for wealthy londoners (note also the use of gout here to indicate a high degree of moral lassitude and overconsumption among his patients, lol). secondly, and relatedly, there's a shift in class positions going on here. lydgate's initial position in middlemarch is as minor (not wealthy) nobility; by the end of the book he's in a newly high-status professional class, has gained more wealth (though ofc not enough for rosamond), and has been forced out of the countryside. this all tracks with both the expansion of cities generally in this period, and the strengthening of the middle class / petit bourgeois (consider the 1832 reform bill).
although eliot's own views about medicine were largely concordent with the kind of positivistic naturalism of her peers (see again her interest in phrenology), part of what she does with lydgate is, i think, intended as a warning: here's a confluence of forces that have turned an idealistic public health reformer into a dissatisfied man pursuing his personal material security at the direct expense of his philanthropic and altruistic aims. it's a success story for the medical profession in many ways (financially, reputationally) but also a tragedy in the eyes of anyone who believes that physicians ought to have more responsibility to their patients and their polities than their pocketbooks. we're meant to understand medicine as not just a personal curative, but potentially a socially enlightening force---but, only if its aspirations in this direction aren't hindered by the very forces turning it into a more respectable and lucrative career for the rising professional class.
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I FINISHED MIDDLEMARCH AND I LOVED IT
i was dubious about whether dorothea and will being together would be a good thing for a long time but of course the only way to escape the "moral imprisonment" she experiences would be to break out of the bounds of middlemarch propriety and say with her actions as well as her words that she doesn't give a fuck about the classist and xenophobic conventions that would prevent the person she loves from being a part of her life. the sexism of the time meant that she was kept from ever fully expressing the greatness in her soul in a way the world could see and recognize but she could still get free from the compliance a "respectable" middlemarcher's life demands which lydgate ended up mired in. and to a smaller degree fred also defied respectability by willingly "going down in the world" to become a person worthy of mary and he ended up happy as well. it goes to show you things
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Interview with the Vampire 1.03 | "Is My Very Nature That of the Devil"
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top 10 things patients love to hear from their brain surgeons
- “I’m better at it now”
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my favorite freak
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