From Middlemarch to Wisteria Lane

Middlemarch ran so that Desperate Housewives could also run

I recently read Middlemarch for class and while I was reading there was a constant thought hovering in the back of my mind: this is exactly like Desperate Housewives. Before you sneer and cluck your tongue just wait. WAIT! Let me cook! There are undeniable parallels both structurally and thematically.

George Eliot’s Middlemarch was considered the first novel that wasn’t embarrassing to be seen reading when it came out in 1871 - it completely changed the way novels were regarded in its time and opened the door for all the novels after it to be respected and adored and seen as an art form. In a similar way, when Marc Cherry’s Desperate Housewives premiered in 2005, it changed television by inspiring and spawning the Housewives franchise. And sure, being responsible for the Housewives isn’t the same as singlehandedly validating the novel as an art form. But their vast impact isn’t where the similarities stop and there are much stronger parallels between the two than you might expect.

For starters, Middlemarch is dubbed as a survey of provincial life and revolves around the interwoven lives of those who live in the neighborhood - Middlemarchers. Is that not literally exactly what Desperate Housewives is? Each story bounces seamlessly between the lives of the community members, showing us the parts of their lives they wouldn’t show their neighbors. Both Middlemarchers and the residents of Wisteria Lane are faced with unprecedented changes in their neighborhood and livelihoods: the motif of a stranger coming in and shaking things up takes form in Mike Delfino in Housewives and Lydgate and Riggs in Middlemarch. Mike shares traits with both of Middlemarch’s strangers: he is an eligible bachelor like Lydgate and mysterious with a hidden motive for coming to town like Riggs. New neighbors that shake things up are a recurring trope in DH; the Wisteria Laners typically get a new neighbor every season or so. Both Eliot and Cherry understood the dramatic value of throwing someone new into a neighborhood where everyone knows each other and each other’s business.

Going back to Lydgate, let’s talk about his wife, Rosamond. Rosamond and Gabrielle Solis are cut from the same cloth: beautiful women accustomed to a beautiful lifestyle who marry successful men to get it, and then have the rug pulled out from beneath them when his finances go south. Gabrielle and Carlos are like the soap opera versions of Rosamond and Lydgate - they face similar issues but at an exponentially more dramatic level. I think it’s fair to say in general that Desperate Housewives is the soap opera-ized version of Middlemarch.

The thing that immediately set off Desperate Housewives alarm bells in my head while I was reading was the role of the narrator in Middlemarch - an unnamed but completely omniscient voice telling the story of the Middlemarchers, occasionally inflecting her own views of the situation very subtly, often showing sympathy by using the word “poor”, as in “poor Rosamond”. The voice in my head while I read this book was Mary Alice’s, the narrator of Desperate Housewives. The pilot episode begins with Mary Alice’s suicide, which acts as a catalyst all the drama to follow but also allows her to act as an omniscient narrator; from beyond the grave she is able to observe all and know all, including the things her neighbors don’t know - namely the reasons behind her own mysterious suicide. While the narrator is unnamed in Middlemarch and therefore their personal life does not instigate any plot points, their all-knowing knowledge and their attitudes towards the situations at hand place them very clearly, in my mind, as a member of the community. It is easy to imagine the narrator as a Middlemarcher who knows all the gossip and readily shares it in exchange for any they do not know, or even as an amalgamation of all the town gossips, putting their information together into a glossary of gossip that enables them to tell the reader all sides of the story.

Besides loving Desperate Housewives and being inclined to see the world through Wisteria Lane tinted glasses, the reason I was so stricken by these parallels is that it proves the timelessness of Middlemarch. Despite being written in 1871, it is so easily adapted to a contemporary context: there’s a picture perfect neighborhood filled with picture perfect neighbors but actually...they’re messy as hell. It’s a concept that has been reiterated upon hundreds if not thousands of times since Middlemarch’s release, in variously sinister levels. I have to imagine that when people first read this book upon release, they were eating it up the same way people of the early aughts were eating up Desperate Housewives.