The Squirrel's Heartbeat
George Eliot, Middlemarch
In this novel of life in a nineteenth-century English town, the young Dorothea Brooke has married the much older, bookish Mr Casaubon and they have just returned from their honeymoon in Rome. Inexplicably, Dorothea finds herself weeping instead of being, as she expected, a happy newlywed. But, the narrator assures us, this is not tragic.
Now read on:
Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I have already used: to have been driven to be more particular would have been like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows, for that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden dream. It was too early yet for her fully to recognize or at least admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted that devotedness which was so necessary a part of her mental life that she was almost sure sooner or later to recover it. Permanent rebellion, the disorder of a life without some loving reverent resolve, was not possible to her; but she was now in an interval when the very force of her nature heightened its confusion. In this way, the early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult—whether that of a shrimp-pool or of deeper waters—which afterwards subsides into cheerful peace.
What we love about this passage...
Why a squirrel's heart beat? And what does lie on the other side of silence? Eliot's imaginative metaphors energize her narrative, and they reflect her deep interest in science. She observes and studies her characters as if they were experimental subjects, like a scientist might study a 'shrimp-pool' or record the rate of an animal's heartbeat. We also love the way Eliot pauses her narrative at moments like this, taking time to reflect, contemplate, and ponder, and talking directly to us as if we were in the room with her.
About the author
George Eliot (1819-1880) was the pen name of the English writer Mary Ann Evans. She was an influential essay writer, poet, and novelist; some of her best known works are The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876). She was one of the first writers and theorists of realism.
To read alongside...
Toward the end of her novel Orlando (1927), Virginia Woolf directly echoes Eliot's text when she describes Orlando walking in her garden in a state of extreme stress and tension: 'here the shadows of the plants were miraculously distinct. She noticed the separate grains of earth in the flower beds as if she had a microscope stuck to her eye. She saw the intricacy of the twigs of every tree. Each blade of grass was distinct and the marking of veins and petals.'
Brian Friel's play Molly Sweeney makes a great companion to these earlier works of literature. He adapted a case study by the neurologist Oliver Sacks about a man who was blind from birth but was granted partial sight through ground-breaking and risky surgery ('To See and Not See'). Friel's play turns Sacks's male case study into a woman, Molly, who is essentially forced by her husband and male doctor to have the operation. He shows how overwhelming it is for Molly to suddenly see--an ability most people take for granted, but that takes time to develop, because we have to learn how to see. There is so much to look at that Molly finds the world suddenly 'disquieting; even alarming. Every color dazzled. Every light blazed. Every shape an apparition....And suddenly the head imploded and the hands shook and the heart melted with panic.'
Suggest a LitHit!
Tell us your own favourites from literature you've read, and become a Guest Curator. Just email us with the following information:
Your full name
The title of the book you're suggesting
The location of the excerpt within the book (e.g., "in the middle of chapter 5"), or the excerpt itself copied into the email or attached to it (in Word)
Why you love it, in just a few sentences
**Please note that we welcome all suggestions but at the moment we can only release excerpts that are out of copyright and in the public domain. This means 75 years or more since the author's death. You can find many such out-of-copyright texts on the internet, for example at Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks.
About LitHits
You might also enjoy...
Writers Make Worlds: https://writersmakeworlds.com/
The Ten Minute Book Club: https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/ten-minute-book-club
Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/
Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/
The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/
“Five Tips to Get Reading Again if You’ve Struggled During the Pandemic,” The Conversation (8 January 2021): https://theconversation.com/five-tips-to-get-reading-again-if-youve-struggled-during-the-pandemic-152904
Feedback
We'd love to hear your thoughts on our newsletter:
kirsten@lit-hits.co.uk
Graphic design by Sara Azmy
All curation content © 2022 LitHits. All rights reserved.