the multi-dimensional
by rantywoman
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/05/george-eliot-and-the-secret-of-motherhood.html
Eliot sometimes referred to her books as her children, and the writing of them as a form of parturition. She once wrote in a letter of the experience of completing a novel: “the sense that the work has been produced within one, like offspring, developing and growing by some force of which one’s life has served as a vehicle, and that what is left of oneself is only a poor husk.” The image of a new mother as dried out and used up is one of the few places where Eliot’s comprehension strikes me as limited. There are doubtless many new mothers who do feel this way, but it seems to me that a more typical experience might be that which combines utter exhaustion with an unprecedented sense of vitality. (Nothing has ever made me feel so alive as actually producing a new life.) Perhaps this image of being devoured or despoiled by a voracious, needy infant helps explain why Eliot did not follow a conventional course of motherhood. The way she describes it doesn’t sound particularly appealing. Eliot may have decided that she could meet the needs of only one incessantly demanding voice, and that was the voice of her inner creativity.
And yet in her fiction she was able to give expression to an entirely different experience of motherhood than the one she sketchily characterizes in that letter. As I write in my book, one of the most moving moments in “Middlemarch” occurs when Fred Vincy, the mayor’s son, is dangerously ill. Suddenly his mother, the silly, frivolous Mrs. Vincy, is catapulted from her mundane diversions into the direst fears for her firstborn. “All the deepest fibres of the mother’s memory were stirred, and the young man whose voice took a gentler tone when he spoke to her, was one with the babe whom she had loved, with a love that was new to her, before he was born,” Eliot writes. The precision and comprehension in that characterization floors me. How did she know so well, and so exactly, what that experience was like? In a few, perfectly apt words she expresses what was for me at least the most dumbfounding surprise about motherhood: the way in which becoming a mother granted me access to—forced me into—an entirely new sphere of love, care, selflessness, and terror, a dimension that I had no idea was there. From out of nowhere, I knew a love that was new to me.
thebitterbabe 
The precision and comprehension in that characterization floors me. How did she know so well, and so exactly, what that experience was like?
Elliot knew because her art, like all great art, was inspired.
She remains one of the great geniuses of English literature. Her timeless portrayal of the depth and complexity of human experience remains, in my mind, the equal of Shakespeare and Joyce. I have often felt, particularly in Middlemarch, that her characters are “more real than real people.”
Elliot’s ability to render the experience of motherhood serves as an excellent example of her staggering range in this regard. Contrast the portrayal of Mrs Vincy, for example, with the portrayal of Celia and “baby” early on in the novel. The latter is the finest exposition of parent-centricism I’ve encountered in literature |(soaring above Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”), It rings as true in 2014 as it must have in the 1870s (and is also, as so much in Elliot is, hysterically funny). Truly there is nothing new under the sun.
As for rendering the experience of the idealist falling for the wrong person for the right reasons, the prelude to both Dorothea’s marriage to Causabon and Dr Lydgate’s to Rosamond are unlike anything I know in literature.
Gawd, I love “Middlemarch.”
I have yet to read Elliot but you have inspired me to do so!