Tertius Lydgate is in Emotional Consumer Debt

Middlemarch is a) the greatest English novel and b) about a young woman who wants to do the most good that she can, but whose idealism is often hampered by her failure to understand social norms and the people around her.¹ So if you’re reading this blog you’d probably like it.

I don’t think “spoilers” are a coherent idea when it comes to classic literature. These books are better on a second (and third, and dozenth…) reading; “spoilers” make the first reading easier to follow, more like a second reading. But if you care about spoilers, stop here.

A lot of readers see Middlemarch as a love triangle between Dorothea (the idealistic young woman) and two men: Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious doctor who plans to change the world with medical research and reform, and Will Ladislaw—basically a charming kid with a lot of taste and not much else, who when the novel begins has spent his time flitting between different artistic careers and experimenting with opium.

Dorothea ends up with Will, who goes into politics and becomes a member of parliament, fighting for sociopolitical reform (basically a Charles Grey type—reform in that time and place meant stuff like slavery abolition). Lydgate marries the beautiful Rosamond Vincy² and goes into severe consumer debt, giving up his ambitions of reform & research to become a fashionable and successful doctor to the rich.

A lot of Middlemarch fans ship Dorothea and Tertius, and find the Dorothea/Ladislaw endgame disappointing and unrealistic. Now I’m personally Team Ladislaw. I think Ladislaw is the victim of readers pattern-matching him with fuckboys they know, because Ladislaw actually is the kind of guy that fuckboys pretend to be. We could argue about Ladislaw—whether the text supports my interpretation over theirs (it does), whether “the type of guy fuckboys pretend to be” ever exists instantiated as a real dude or only exists as a mask for fuckboys (the answer to this is much less clear)—but I want to argue about Lydgate.

When people defend Lydgate, they defend him on the basis of his research and reform. But….he never actually does any of that! Lydgate fans give Lydgate way too much credit, which, given his financial habits, is the last thing he needs. They tend to blame Rosamond for Lydgate’s downfall. Adelle Waldman expresses this view clearly:

In the end, Lydgate and Rosamond’s marriage is far less happy than Levin and Kitty’s, in large part because Lydgate is not as rich as Levin. That is, while Levin can afford to indulge Kitty’s material desires without penalty to his own projects, Lydgate is ultimately worn down by Rosamond’s complaints. He puts aside his aspirations in favor of more lucrative work in order to provide her with the material things she deems necessary.

One reason it’s easy to think this is because Lydgate seems to think this, at least when he’s mad: “Tertius, whose temper never became faultless…to the last occasionally let slip a bitter speech which was more memorable than the signs he made of his repentance.” But “Rosamond had a placid but strong answer to such speeches. Why then had he chosen her?” And she’s right! It’s not like this is an arranged marriage. Their marriage doesn’t cause him to get into debt: it’s the first external sign of his debt-based psychology. Eliot is very clear about this, from the beginning of their courtship:

Lydgate’s spots of commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardor, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without his telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons. He did not mean to think of furniture at present; but whenever he did so it was to be feared that neither biology nor schemes of reform would lift him above the vulgarity of feeling that there would be an incompatibility in his furniture not being of the best.

I had a big Financial Audit phase. Even if you haven’t listened to a full episode, you’ve almost definitely seen the clips. It’s better than Maury. It’s worse than Maury. Hammer sniffs out the cope-y-est, least self-aware broke people he can find, who are all too happy to go on his show, and goes through their budgets. If you’re trying to break the modern literary taboo against money plots, you can find a lot of material here.³ But for the purposes of this essay, the most intriguing cope or justification on the Financial Audit bingo card is justifying present spending by future ambition. “I’m applying to law school!” or “The army will pay for my degree!” To which Caleb Hammer reasonably responds: “Okay, sure, maybe you’ll get into law school, and lawyers can often afford Bottega Veneta bags or whatever, but how can you get through law school when you’re spending like this?”

The Last Psychiatrist touches on this:

[T]he problem here is debt. Not credit card debt, though I suspect that’s substantial too, but self-esteem debt. They’re borrowing against their future accomplishments to feel good about themselves today, hoping they’ll be able to pay it back.

In all but social class, Lydgate is absolutely typical of Caleb Hammer’s guests. Maybe an established medical researcher/reformer could be excused for choosing a wife as an adornment for his leisure hours, “reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven,” and maybe unavoidably with these criteria, picking a wife who is somewhat shallow and frivolous. But Lydgate isn’t a researcher or reformer yet! He just believes that those are things he cares about, meanwhile consistently acting in ways that foreclose research and reform as possibilities.

Why do I call this emotional consumer debt? Obviously, financial debt is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it allows people to do useful things they couldn’t have done otherwise. I think the same applies to self-esteem debt. TLP agrees: “Melinda’s 26, at that age some self-esteem debt is reasonable as long as you use it to hustle.” To a certain degree, embarking on major projects requires a little self-esteem debt. Law school is hard, maybe to get through it, you need to think of yourself as a future lawyer. And I wouldn’t object to Lydgate’s image of himself as the lifesaving researcher if he were just using that self-image as fuel for late nights studying (emotional commercial debt). I don’t even object to declaring self-esteem bankruptcy: hyping yourself up to take a huge risk, failing, and then moving on. I’ve read, wish I could remember where, that one reason American economic development and social mobility outpaced other countries is the comparative ease of bankruptcy here, I think that’s probably a good thing, to let people fail and fail and try again and win. But Lydgate is using his big dreams to justify doing things that couldn’t possibly help him fulfil his big dreams…like marrying Rosamond! It’s emotional consumer debt because he can’t possibly use it to build anything that would justify taking on the debt. It’s not like he’s brokely marrying Dorothea or (possibly even better) Mary Garth, someone who could help him fulfil the goals that would allow him to deserve her.

You know how sometimes people praise an author by saying their depiction of a character is “convincing?” Usually that basically means the character is realistic—which Lydgate absolutely is, you can visit any bar a block from a hospital and meet a doctor who totally would have cured cancer if it weren’t for his greedy bitch wife. But Lydgate is convincing in the sense that he convinces us of his copes. I think most Middlemarch readers are smart enough to see through this in real life. We don’t necessarily believe the doctor at the bar, or the Ivy League grad who’s gonna go into political organizing as soon as he’s done with a couple of years in consulting, or the hardcore partier who believes they’re going to be a great parent, etc etc etc. Why are we more convinced by Lydgate than we are by the real-life drunk doctor?

Partly it’s just because George Eliot is a genius and better at dreaming up convincing copes than most people are. And also—we need to believe Lydgate actually could do it or the tragedy doesn’t land. But….I think it’s unfortunately an unavoidable structural issue with trying to write about this emotional-debt personality structure in a fictional narrative. When we hear someone’s dreams and copes in real life, it’s pretty easy to distinguish between the real-life stuff they’ve actually done and the stories they’re telling themselves and us. But Lydgate exists entirely in a story. The stuff he “actually does” exists as prose; his dreams exist as prose; in the same medium, it’s hard for one to feel more real than the other. I keep trying to imagine how you could possibly solve this problem with dramatizing emotional consumer debt. Maybe it would work better in a movie, where you see what Lydgate does and hear how he talks and the distinction is clearer? But he’s not really the blustery, boastful type, it’s mostly happening internally. Voiceovers???? Could you write a novel where all the things that actually happen are in prose and all the characters’ wishes and dreams and hypotheticals are, like, in verse…..? Not sure I’ve ever had a worse idea.

When Ladislaw loses the Lydgate-Ladislaw comparison in readers’ minds, I imagine that they’re thinking something like, '“Ladislaw is just a dilettante, Lydgate is a great doctor.” I think that this is punishing Ladislaw for his virtues. Will tries various stuff, fails at it, tries other stuff, eventually succeeds. He never tells anyone else that he’s a great artist or writer or whatever. He never tells himself that he’s a great artist or writer or whatever! He certainly doesn’t depend on his self-image as a great artist or writer or whatever to justify questionable choices. He gets a lot of shit from modern readers for taking money from Casaubon. But…he stops taking money from Casaubon and gets a job that can support him. Meanwhile, Lydgate is in deepening debt to merchants, to Bulstrode, eventually to Casaubon too. As a Ladislaw fan, I like his realism about himself, his internal locus of control, his discipline about not blaming others for his problems. But his relative self-awareness makes it much easier to judge him than Lydgate, whose self-protective fantasies are well-written enough to be all too convincing to readers.

1. And, to be fair, their failure to understand her.

2. “Rose of the World” versus “Gift of God.” Get it? Get it? Get it? Get it? Get it?

3. And then you’ll stop listening to it, because—could it possibly be morally okay to listen to this? You listen to the ads and get an unfortunate sense that these are ads targeted at people who make bad financial choices? But then you listen to the followup episodes, and, almost unbelievably, Hammer’s yelling and carrying on, seems to have redeemed some of his guests and changed their lives???????????