Unhistoric Acts

A 900 page Victorian novel might not strike you as gripping, inspirational reading, but Middlemarch by George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) touched my 20-year-old soul. One of the central characters of this complex English novel is Dorothea Brooke, through whom Eliot showed, impossibly, that she knew exactly what my life was like.

Dorothea and others in the novel try through activism, scholarship, and marriage to achieve great deeds, and all fail, crushed under nothing more dramatic than the weight of an indifferent, mundane, day-to-day world.

For me, raised on the stories of the mythically epic 1960s but trapped on a cause-less campus of the 1990s, this dilemma couldn't have been more relevant. Eliot knew the too-often ignored pain of the idealistic young: "if youth is the season of hope, it is often only so in that our elders are hopeful for us... [for youth], each crisis seems final, simply because it is new."

Yet Dorothea makes small, "incalculably diffusive" changes in the lives she touches. She repairs a friend's marriage and escapes her husband's selfish attempt to stifle her gifts even beyond his own death. Eliot not only forgives Dorothea for the small scale of her deeds, blaming it on her era, "for there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it," but also validates their importance. "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Even if we're born in the wrong place and time to become an activist hero, says Eliot, we can still do real good for real people. That was the message I needed to hear to keep me going.