"It is never too late to be who you might have been."

[steepholm]

I've recently seen this rather facile apercu attributed to George Eliot, but without a specific source. Is it genuine? It seems a most un-Eliotic thought to me. Having Middlemarch fairly fresh in my mind, it strikes me that it's a book all about the realization that it's too late to be what one might have been. Look at Lydgate! Look at Casaubon! Look at Lydgate again!

I've not read all of Eliot by any means, and maybe she has her lapses into airheaded optimism, but I find it hard to imagine. I might have bought the quotation had it been attributed to Dickens, but even Scrooge can never be what he might have been - the contented husband of Belle. He can only be what he can still become, someone who "knows how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possesses the knowledge." Which may be better or may be worse, but certainly isn't the same.

Comments

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't know - I think you might be interpreting that a bit narrowly. If you think 'what you might have been' means circumstantially (brilliant doctor, highly-respected scholar, contented husband), then of course it's facile, and wrong. Lydgate isn't (wasn't? It's difficult to know how to do tenses in this case!) going to be the famous medical researcher he might have been, but didn't he have a choice about how to carry on the rest of his life in the light of the previous crap decision? When he finally gets the emotional wisdom he lacked before, he chooses to be the best husband he can be, despite his knowledge of how rubbish Rosamund is, and how much happier he'd have been with Dorothea. And Casaubon definitely had a choice - he blew it, but he could have moved past his past limitations when he was given a second chance in Dorothea. If he were a character 100% fixed on an inevitable path, I don't think the narrative switch to his perspective would be at all as interesting.

Lydgate's understanding of his commitment to Rosamund's being absolute might not fit with our understanding today, but one doesn't have to apply the parallels narrowly in order to see that there's always an opportunity now to choose, even within the constraints of one's past choices and their responsibilities. Oh - look at Mrs Bulstrode? The possibility of ever again being the respected figure in her society is taken away from her, but she absolutely becomes much, much more in that painful decision to be loyal to her husband, taken at a time in her life when she might well have decided she couldn't give up everything she'd always thought important. She's a nice counterpoint for Casaubon, showing that it wasn't too late for him to etc.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I agree with everything you say about Middlemarch, but I'm having difficulty relating it to the quotation, which you seem to want to parse as:

"Just because you can't be what you might have been doesn't mean that your life is over or that there aren't other worthwhile things you can still do and be."

If it had said that, I'd have had no problem with it! I grant it's not as quotable, though...

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

I may seem to be wanting to parse it that way, but an alternate possibility is that I'm understanding what one is rather differently from the way you're reading it.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

an alternate possibility is that I'm understanding what one is rather differently from the way you're reading it.

I don't understand this. Can you explain?

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

You'll probably think it's facile too, but I just mean that I'm seeing "what one is" as having little to do with what one accomplishes or one's role or identity as such, and instead as one's emotional centre.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Okay, I think I see what you're getting at. Possibly you could read the quotation in that way, but it doesn't seem to me a very natural interpretation. "Might have been" is surely a phrase that directs one's attention to circumstances, and the differences between past and present possibilities. "It's never too late to be what you are capable of being", or "It's never too late to be who you are", seem closer to what I think you're saying here, but I may well be misreading you.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to say that those owls are gorgeous.