The Ideal Marriage, According to Novels
As persuasively and sensitively as Tolstoy renders Levin and Kitty’s relationship, it is nonetheless a very particular type of marriage, one between a thinking man who sought not an intellectual partner but a complement, a yin to his yang—a lovely young wife, a “good” woman—only to find that coexistent with such goodness are desires of her own. Tolstoy treats this kind of complementary marriage as a given: what a sensitive but also sensible man like Levin would naturally seek.
This seems like a rather bleak perspective on marriage, but it should be read as a bleak view of a specific kind of marriage, and a critique of Lydgate’s romantic thinking. Where Tolstoy is sympathetic to Levin’s vision of love, Eliot is critical of Lydgate’s ideas.
.. Intelligence matters to these heroines because they crave, above almost everything else, conversation, the kind that requires mutual understanding.
.. the good marriages, that we see in their work may not represent, as we are often quick to think, a romantic sensibility or a form of sentimentality so much as an attempt to demonstrate the strength and desirability of equal marriages.
.. Herzog is a world-renowned scholar with a seemingly endless list of wealthy and successful friends; he has ample opportunity to express himself in writing, and to engage with peers. (Whether Ramona is an idiot or a savant, he won’t want for intellectual companionship.) Jane, on the other hand, is a lowly and lonely governess without any claims to status in the eyes of the world; her wit and originality of mind are entirely unrecognized until Rochester comes along and offers her the outlet she has long yearned for. For centuries, men have had far more opportunities to find intellectual outlets outside the romantic sphere—they’ve been able to travel more, to meet a broader range of people, to have professions, to win the respect of peers. Women, on the other hand, were forced to lean more heavily on love and marriage, for intellectual recognition and companionship as for everything else.