Middlemarch is an interwoven narrative of many lives, intertwining and developing over decades. George Eliot’s perhaps best-known work, the book offers much food for thought on the motivations behind marriages and the worlds they create.
One character in particular is forgettable. Yet, it is not a deficit but a fitting and admirable feature of her character. Susan Garth, the wife of Caleb Garth, the kind and overly generous businessman, is a vivacious and warm presence in the book. Yet, in the end, one will not be surprised to realize one can’t remember her name, likely because one has forgotten to think about her too much. She’s there so vividly: the heart of the Garth home, the conscience of her children and constant support to her husband. Yet, she fades from view so quickly.
This quality of being all but invisible is shocking and abhorrent to us post-moderns. We are proud; we demand recognition for our every modest effort. To be overshadowed by a man who does not manage things well and ungrateful children? A fate worse than death, surely.
Susan Garth spends her time managing a home on limited means because her husband has the unhelpful habit of doing work for free or unjustly low wages. Without money to send the young children to school, Susan, once a schoolteacher, drills the children in their Latin and prepares the boys to enter higher education. She is the homesteading, homeschooling mother so many Millennials of Instagram aspire to. But unlike the on-brand, picture-perfect, flowing prairie dress version of motherhood that people today imagine in such a life, the reality faithfully depicted in the fictional Mrs. Garth is a harsh one: she is forgettable.
She pours herself out in the many children; her best qualities come to be known in her daughter, Mary’s, virtues. Susan is clearly a talented woman. If she had better prospects in life, married a more ambitious husband, had fewer children, she could have accomplished so much. But who could say that raising so many children and managing so much on so little is not accomplishing a great deal? We all recognize that it is, and even feel a strong attraction to that degree of devotion and self-sacrifice. But we balk.
Where once we encouraged mothers in their difficult task, now we try to understand the many reasons why mothers may not measure up to the ideals embodied in Susan Garth or Susan Sowerby, another exemplary and fictional mother. However, we should not get distracted by keeping score and measuring up. Good mothers are not merely fictions, and one need only to be a “good enough” mother to make all the difference in the lives of one’s children.
As much as progressives may try to ply tax dollars and upend social expectations in the service of liberating mothers, most people recognize it simply cannot be done. As Amanda Hess writing for the New York Times notes, “[T]here are burdens of motherhood that cannot be solved with money, lifted by a co-parent or cured by a mental health professional. The trouble is motherhood itself, and its ideal of total selfless devotion…As these women discover, their menu of life choices is not so expansive after all.”
Simply being a mother compels a lack of personal ambition, recognition, and independence. Horrific in the eyes of the world, this is the beautiful daily choice on which we all depend as we were once children. Of course, fathers, grandmothers, friends, and relations can and do aid in taking care of children, but there is something in us that cries out piteously for a mother.
Standing by baggage claim at the airport one evening, a long day of travel behind all those wearied passengers looking for their luggage, one might see a girl flailing and whining, snot streaming from her nose, wails of protest, feet unwilling to walk another step. She is young, perhaps two or three. Where is her mother? Just ahead. Clearly brought to the edge of sanity traveling with a cheerful, chubby baby and another child in tow in addition to the hysterical mess of a child on the floor, helped along by a dutiful but short-tempered husband, the mother at first refuses even to glance back. The snotty child wails again, like a baby ape fearing abandonment, a degree of manipulative control that is truly impressive. Exasperated, the mother clearly wants to walk away and keep walking: Leave the bags, leave the baby, leave the snotty, snotty girl whining on the floor.
Who, if not her mother, will pick up the filthy and noncompliant child. Her father could intervene, but the girl is screaming for her mother. The crushing weight of responsibility, the unfairness, and the injustice are plain for anyone to see. Yet, being a mother, whether by choice, by accident, by fate, by adoption, it means surrendering self, cleaning snot, carrying on. And no one says “thank you” or even remembers your name.
The blistering impersonality becomes apparent at the playground when a child yells out, “Mommy!” and each individual mother would not be able definitively to say whether that was her child or not, the cries for a mother being so universal. There is a readily apparent death to self, an obliterating of that which is most easily discernable as personal and individual. In this, mothers have the opportunity to reside in their children, not as one living through someone but living for someone. Recognizing that our lives are not our own and we have no power to take them, we can do the highest, best thing: give them away.
No one ever said it was easy. And if they did, they were lying. But once the child comes into being, the alternative should be unthinkable. The sacrifice and obliteration of motherhood is a gift, though not one that most would choose. It is, notably, the nature of a gift that it is not chosen, only given.
When Caleb Garth learns of a significant offer of a job, he tells his wife, “It’s a great gift of God, Susan.”
Susan responds enthusiastically, adding, “And it will be a blessing to your children to have had a father who did such work: a father whose good work remains though his name may be forgotten.”
Almost before the words are out of her mouth, her name is already forgotten, but what a gift to her children her life is.
William Wordsworth wrote,
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
A mother need not be recognized for her sacrifices. The imprint of her actions shape the contours of her children’s hearts, treasure beyond compare. Whatever “untrodden ways” she resides in, her actions echo in eternity, known to those for whom they matter.
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