It’s been years since I watched As the World Turns and now that endless narrative has ended (RIP ATWT 1956-2010). It’s also been years since I read a Victorian novel quite as long as Middlemarch (Well, I did read Tess of the d’Urbervilles about three years ago- thought it was too long and not as good as the other Hardy I’d read).
I’m struck by how very like a television soap opera Victorian literature is. The slowness of the story, stretched to fill vast lengths of time. Daytime soaps are made to fill a TV timeslot five days a week and, plotwise, exciting things can’t be happening all those days, so most of the content is really just filler.
19th century fiction comes from a time we can barely even understand now. I don’t suggest that the majority of people were literary or even literate then, but those that were had attention spans. These were the days before radio and comic books, let alone movies and all that followed. If you were going to read a novel you wanted it to last a good long while, entertain you for a couple of months. So, just like on the soaps, the Victorian novel is chock full of filler. Not that it’s all pointless: George Eliot usually has intelligent points to make. It’s just that the plot is diluted with philosophy and filler to the point of being obscured. It’s like, let’s stretch this out so it’ll take you more time to read.
The first hundred pages not much happened. Then a whole bunch of new characters were introduced (just like on a soap), but it didn’t turn down the faucet of filler. Middlemarch, moreover, is the small town where all these characters live. Just like Oakdale.
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