What is the nature of Rosamond’s attachment to Lydgate?
Quote:
“…if he had been able to discriminate better the refinements of her taste in dress, she could hardly have mentioned a deficiency in him. How different he was from young Plymdale or Mr. Caius Larcher! Those young men had not a notion of French, and could speak on no subject with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing and carrying trades, which of course they were ashamed to mention; they were Middlemarch gentry, elated with their silver-headed whips and satin stocks, but embarrassed in their manners, and timidly jocose: even Fred was above them, having at least the accent and manner of a university man. Whereas Lydgate was always listened to, bore himself with the careless politeness of conscious superiority, and seemed to have the right clothes on by a certain natural affinity, without ever having to think about them. Rosamond was proud when he entered the room, and when he approached her with a distinguishing smile, she had a delicious sense that she was the object of enviable homage.”
It seems that Rosamond’s romantic feeling is primarily underpinned by the economics of class. The ways that she perceives Lydgate is different from others are outward manifestations of the rank; proficiency in French, manners, and, of cause, the accent that distinguishes nobility from new gentry. There is a chain of despise in the town: the nobility that has established themselves hundreds of years ago with incomes from land and inheritance despise emerging gentry who make wealth through work and industry, and they in turn despise the rest who are poorer than they are, like the Vincys’ attitudes towards the Garths. The middle class is perhaps most aware of the social hierarchy; they have the sense of superiority over normal people who are not rich as they are, however, it’s at the same time checked by the landed nobility, and that is probably why they are ashamed to mention their career.
It is interesting that Rosamond, also a member of Middlemarch middle class, despises her fellow comrades in favour of Lydgate the outsider. She has the ambition to move up the social ladder to become richer and, more importantly, a true noble lady like Dorothea. For her, Lydgate is the instrument that can levitate her to her dream as it’s rumoured that he’s from a distinguished family and that his demeanour appears agreeably well enough to be in concord with this rumour. No, Rosamond doesn’t love the person Lydgate, she is infatuated with his rank. She projects her own fantasy on Lydgate and is thus blind to who he really is; she has no notion of what he thinks, his concerns, and the fact that he is too occupied in his career to take the prospect of marriage seriously right now.
Just like the way she fantasies who/what Lydgate is, Rosamond is also enchanted in her own subjective view/illusion of her relationship with the bachelor. Notice that she feels ‘proud’ when Lydgate enters the room in the presence of other male guests. ‘Proud’ is a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction as a result of one’s own achievements, qualities, or possessions or those of someone with whom one is closely associated. In other words, the feeling ‘proud’ must and inevitably entails the notion of ownership. Here, it seems that Rosamond is capitalising on the idea of ownership, that Lydgate is her man, her lover, her dream, and her fiancé (“To Rosamond it seemed as if she and Lydgate were as good as engaged.”). Her girlish subjectivity somehow distorts the way she sees the world and leads her to believe that she has already possessed this formal romantic relationship/love with Lydgate at this stage that affords her to display the sense of proud for his qualities (clothes, manners, dexterity in medicine, expectation etc).
What I’ve said are, in fact, already anticipated and preceded by Elliot’s brilliant anecdote at the beginning of chapter XXVII about an optical phenomenon, that on reflective surfaces like a lens or polished metal, with the presence of a light source the scratches will appear to be concentric around the centre of illumination. I think Elliot has brilliantly combined scientific discoveries and human experiences (at least in the novel). For Rosamond, she is the centre/source of illumination and the scratches are everything else in the world going in all directions. But from her perspective, all the people and events align uniformly in a single orientation orbiting about her like the planetary motions in the solar system. Her ego shapes they way she perceives the world that everything is about her and for her, but that is just a trick of the light; Lydgate doesn’t necessarily love her as she thinks, nor their union can guarantee the high life she craves. Fate leads lives and events in all directions like the scratches on a lens, yet it’s difficult for Rosamond and us not to see the world subjectively.