As George Eliot began to write fiction, she reread Jane Austen’s novels in the evening. But influence works in odd ways. Middlemarch can feel like an Austen novel turned on its side or balanced on a corner.
Another thought: I noticed that Eliot doesn’t linger much over setting scenes, but she gave us such a luminous picture of the afternoon of Dorothea’s walk, when she was “not consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other.” We suddenly feel the breadth of the landscape as an expression of her sense of possibility, such a contrast with the pinched, indoorsy Casaubon. We see her as a romantic heroine in a vista, like a Caspar David Friedrich painting.
Hi, Dan. No need to apologize. It’s from a letter, I believe, but I don’t remember to whom he was writing. I’ll see if I can find it and let you know. As you can tell I’m a little behind in my reading—trying to catch up.
“Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought ...” Love how Dorothea is constructing a fantasy about Mr. C. projecting her own qualities and longings onto him.
I was thinking this time, in the paragraph about how Dorothea "was impelled to open her mind on certain themes which she could speak of to no one whom she had before seen at Tipton," in the absence of Casaubon, didn't really have anyone who could challenge her in conversation or even provide access to much of a library; she has so few avenues to the sort of large destiny she vaguely intuits for herself. Though perhaps it is a certain vanity that she thinks she already knows the available options.
Love that, Ann, so few avenues to the sort of large destiny she imagines for herself. She wants stark difference from her ljfe. She wants more. Is it just escape she most needed, and religious fervor the available option this want settled on?
Yes maybe so. Perhaps in our time we've developed lots of ways of thinking about exaltation or larger purpose outside of religious language, but perhaps that was the only language available to someone like Dorothea. She and everyone around her understands her intellectual or moral ambition as "religious." George Eliot sort of makes a point that the Brooke sisters' experience isn't exactly metropolitan.
Yes! Reminds me how, when I'm newly excited about a romantic prospect, I invest them with all these qualities that I imagine to be true about them. Imaginary qualities.
Just to repeat what has already been said above, but which keeps resonating with me: Eliot keeps bending over backwards to be as fair as possible to each character as they enter on the next stage of their thoughts and actions. This is what makes the psychology of experiencing her text so pleasurable. Sir James becomes less objectionable to Dorothea, because he wants to help her with her project and she acknowledges this. And so our opinion of him changes as well, even as we see that he is losing the battle to win Dorothea. At the same time, while there are hints of the future, Mr. C. is also treated fairly. This fairness is a function of Dorothea’s need to project onto him, but it is also a result of the fact that we still don’t know that much about him. He could be shy, retiring, deep and thoughtful, but he could also be kind (i.e. his brittleness doesn’t seem yet to be mean-spirited) and appreciative of youth and life emerging. We just don’t know. Eliot’s ability to keep us on this side of a tipping point is one of her greatest assets.
Yes, Eliot is somewhat fair and balanced describing the romance of Dorothea and Casaubon, yet she is giving us delicious hints of self-delusion by both of them, which we will no doubt appreciate later. Will Dorothea get her cottages? Will Mr. C. appreciate the “cheerful companionship” he thinks he needs?
So true! It is both a human virtue and an artistic virtue—everyone gets their say, and the novel is more dimensional (and suspenseful!) as a result. See the interesting exchange elsewhere on here between Dan and Amanda about whether or not Chettam is an attractive character. Both reactions are there to be found in the language. We are also being taught to see from inside positions that we will perhaps later be tempted to reject.
"Celia, who did not like the company of Mr. Casaubon's moles and sallowness, had escaped to the vicarage to play with the curate's ill-shod but merry children."
This quote took me back to the time I taught little children and learned how conversation and play with them could refresh the mind. During some free time at the end of the day when I felt a bit stressed, I would sit and one of their tiny tables. A few would gather round me and I would look UP at their cheery, chatting faces as opposed to my usual stance which was looking down. My energy would come roaring back!
What a lovely observation, thank you! I too noticed how this aside offered a breath of fresh air. “Play”--both Celia and Dorothea are close to the playing age. And we notice how lightly children seem to pass over these barriers of class. Dorothea has to theorize about cottages but Celia simply goes.
Yes, Dorothea and her theories and ideas! So different from Celia. There is one special moment when Dorothea gets out of her head -- when something fresh comes over her, "a new current of feeling" This is the moment when she is looking at an emerald Celia is showing her. She has fallen into her sense life for a moment and becomes disoriented by something beautiful.
“Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought."
It's a reverse Narcissus. She sees in his shallows the depths of her desires. The word wanting shimmers with this sense of something wanting.
The two "wantings" are so different! The verb so intimate, the adjective so punitive. At least in today's English. Suddenly noticing the word "labyrinth" recurring, which hints at something dangerous at the end.
What struck me in this chapter is Dorothea imagining that “there would be nothing trivial in our lives. Everyday-things with us would mean the greatest things. She wants as Eliot describes “in every variety In experience is an epoch.” She surely seems in for major disappointment
"The movement of Dorothea’s romance... holds—for the reader—no real anticipation of pleasure." It's true. What a way to begin a book. I'm a first time reader, and it's hard to imagine where it goes from here — hard not to imagine the dread will just get worse and worse.
How could Dorothea be anything but naive? She has seen nothing of life other than the loss of her parents. She has been cosseted first in an English family, next in a Swiss family inorder to learn manners, how to be ladylike with the sole objective of becoming a good marriage prospect. Others have commented on this, the sisters have not had the benefit of a female mentor.
I’m super-glad Mona quoted that sentence about the puppy’s expressive eyes and nose. That’s marvelous in itself and for the way it differentiates author from heroine.
Yes. Still, do you agree, she has a good reason to reject the puppy if she feels coerced by Chettam, and her objection to 'creatures bred merely as pets' fits with her own deeper objection to marrying someone like him who would keep her as a parasite, a glorified pet?
It does seem though that Chettam wouldn't do that .. would let her take the lead and he would be the pet? ha ha She doesn't really know who Chettam is any more than she knows who Casuabon is .. yet. It's all her inner projections making her blind, or maybe willfully blind, as Eliot suggests.
That whole thing about letting her take the lead is a trap. Afraid I personally don’t trust Chettam, don’t like him one bit. Something about him rubs me the wrong way.
I mean, basically, while i find Mona's Austen-inspired salvaging of Chettam in chapter three refreshing, challenging, I believe the portrait of Chettam is laced with truly devastating satire. Consider phrases like "in the way most gratifying to himself," "stupid complimenting," "exactly," "genus" instead of "genius," "complacent sense" "He theorized a little," "A man's mind-what there is of it," this is from chapter two, "has always the advantage of being masculine." "predominance which a man could always put down" "even his ignorance is of a sounder quality." As for the cottages, that is only a means to a greater end for Dorothea. She wants to get right her relationship to other human beings. Chettam would use her idealism to hook her with cottage plans and then squash the deeper impulse.
Yes -- he is a (good-natured) foil for Eliot to skewer the idea of masculine superiority - but I think his intentions, while self-serving, are essentially honorable, to use an old-fashioned word. I do not believe he is trying to trap D. in anything malevolent or soul-stealing.
Chettam to D.: "I know when I like people. But about other matters, do you know, I have often a difficulty in deciding. One hears very sensible things said on opposite sides."
This is very honest, and that he admits it to a woman, no less .. and one he is trying to impress?
He engages Dorothea, or tries to, in real conversation about real things, he wants to know where she is coming from, unlike the other guy..
Still it seems a bit sad that her principle drives her to to reject a live creature who might benefit from love. There is something imperious in it, as though her moral purity is a higher priority than a more lowly being's needs. And yet perhaps Dan is on to something, that she cannot begin to accept these arrangements of patronage and submission or she will be lost.
I can see why she rejected the puppy. Her own needs most likely were not met, especially after her parents died. Additionally, she may have felt that accepting the puppy would lead Chattam on and that she would be indebted to him. A happier response, if Dorothea were able (emotionally) would have been to ask Chattam if she cmight accept the puppy on Celia's behalf. Although she has said she dislikes having a small creature underfoot. I can imagine how frustrating it must have been for Dorothea to feel there were so few outlets for her talents and passion.
Eliot is separated from Austen by the idea of the developing self, whether she gets it from German lit. I know not since it’s in englit too, “experience, that arch wherethrough...” (Tennyson “Ulysses”) If personal development is what matters, Jane Austen -type happy marriages come to seem a bit static, whilst even an unhappy marriage can give new life and energy, though this is admittedly kind of a dangerous idea
It did seem like there was some dynamism, potentially, in the E Bennett-Darcy combo. Maybe the backstage story is these women writers searching for a way forward within the confines of the marriage plot. As you noted, one had to be pretty brave to embrace spinsterhood! Perhaps a hidden question in these couple thought-experiments is--does the woman have to seek the upper hand (surrender to a submissive match like Chettam, in order not to be subsumed)? is equality, or a balance of power (read, maintenance of interest), possible?
Good questions, really excellent questions. Not sure I accept this is a marriage plot. By my admittedly limited reading, Dorothea’s developing self subsumes the marriage plot, and characters like Chettham only matter for the light their non-comprehension sheds on Dorothea’s Eve-like progress towards knowledge.
When Dorothea tells Sir James, "I am rather short-sighted," she is not kidding!
As well as being a religious fanatic with a penchant for self-sacrifice and a soft spot for emeralds?
As Austen was preoccupied with character Eliot is too. In Austen the lens of romance reveals character. The question that holds the tension is will the interested parties find their right match? It seems almost perverse of Eliot to right off the bat send her main character into a wrong match .. hard not to get ahead of ourselves assuming it is the wrong match with Casaubon, but there is no lack of clues embedded in Eliot's descriptions and observations to see that Dorothea is headed for a fall, or at least a trip on the edge of the Casaubon carpet ... it is unthinkable in Austen that a main character would marry the wrong man first ... in Austen's older married couples we see the pain and humor of long, probably ill-matched marriages ... the next generation is supposed to avoid their mistakes. But how? Character is the determining factor. Major mistakes in Austen are for minor characters, and there to demonstrate the serious risks to the main characters in committing them.
I find this statement near the end of Ch. 3 so interesting:
"It is difficult to say whether there was or was not a little wilfulness in her [Dorothea] continuing blind to the possibility that another sort of choice was in question in relation to her."
It is difficult to say .. is it up to the reader to decide, in other words? To me it seems that there is some awareness on Dorothea's part about where Sir James is coming from. Otherwise she is more of a dodo than ever, or more self-delusional. In the grip of her ideals, she is unable to see Casaubon, not only as others see him, but as he really is. I don't think there is any obfuscation on Eliot's part about who Casaubon really is. In Austen the reader is sometimes in the dark about where people are coming from, as if the events were playing out in real time. Eliot has adjusted the focal point and the time frame, as if she were saying, you'll see, a little fore-knowledge is not going to alter your interest in what happens to these people, or even significantly change what you might feel about them. As if knowledge is only useful at the right moment. So even as Mona says there is no real anticipation of pleasure, which there isn't or not yet, there is something else that is drawing us along and keeping us interested. Pleasure delayed?
Maybe the question is, Is finding "the right match" enough of a story to hold all of a woman's potential? Maybe the *ways* that this match goes wrong will illuminate something about the limitations of looking to matches for solutions …
There does seem to be such a difference among commenters over how much sympathy they feel for her! Maybe it's a signature type—this sense of aspiration. If it stirs in you, you can recognize it across the ages; if it seems silly to you, maybe the same!
Thank you! Just read it in the print version. I loved this. I felt grateful for the reminder not to be too pious about reading. With reference to the matter at hand, it led me to think—we could see Dorothea's limitations, and her yearnings, as an expression of the constraints that have been placed on her reading. She yearns for Casaubon because she believes he will open that world to her. Even the sexual dimension A. O. Scott identifies is there.
I'd like to see a large sample, over time, Middlemarch-based survey of how many enduring relationships match original expectations … Another way of saying, how much are our real needs the ones we think we have.
Was never sure and still remain unsure how to feel about Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies. It's easy to write off the project as hacky, grandiose, foolhardy, imperialistic. And certainly there's something self-aggrandizing and untrustworthy in C's almost defensive posture as he claims his version will be more just and thorough than all previous attempts. But am I mistaken in also perceiving something poignant in his tragic dedication, and something sensible in his thesis? You can't really write off Casaubon without writing off, say, Joseph Campbell. (How would Eliot feel about the latter, I wonder?) In Casaubon, she's is personifying the foundational aspirations of Western intellectual culture. It's a radically unflattering portrait, falling somewhere between melancholy and ominous, but a human one.
Ooh, you make me think that Casaubon is not so much a person as a personification of the intellectual ambitions that a person like Dorothea has. Maybe the ambitions themselves are somewhat dangerous. Perhaps a novelist would say the world is plural and unclassifiable.
Another thought: I noticed that Eliot doesn’t linger much over setting scenes, but she gave us such a luminous picture of the afternoon of Dorothea’s walk, when she was “not consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other.” We suddenly feel the breadth of the landscape as an expression of her sense of possibility, such a contrast with the pinched, indoorsy Casaubon. We see her as a romantic heroine in a vista, like a Caspar David Friedrich painting.
Henry James famously said the word “afternoon” is the most beautiful in the language and used it in opening sentence of Portrait.
Actually, he said “summer afternoon.”
Ok I see it’s from the story “An international episode.” Thanks again
Thanks, apologies for my carelessness and can you tell us where the quote is from?
Hi, Dan. No need to apologize. It’s from a letter, I believe, but I don’t remember to whom he was writing. I’ll see if I can find it and let you know. As you can tell I’m a little behind in my reading—trying to catch up.
Thanks for finding it.
Lovely!
Ahhhh.
“Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought ...” Love how Dorothea is constructing a fantasy about Mr. C. projecting her own qualities and longings onto him.
I was thinking this time, in the paragraph about how Dorothea "was impelled to open her mind on certain themes which she could speak of to no one whom she had before seen at Tipton," in the absence of Casaubon, didn't really have anyone who could challenge her in conversation or even provide access to much of a library; she has so few avenues to the sort of large destiny she vaguely intuits for herself. Though perhaps it is a certain vanity that she thinks she already knows the available options.
Love that, Ann, so few avenues to the sort of large destiny she imagines for herself. She wants stark difference from her ljfe. She wants more. Is it just escape she most needed, and religious fervor the available option this want settled on?
Yes maybe so. Perhaps in our time we've developed lots of ways of thinking about exaltation or larger purpose outside of religious language, but perhaps that was the only language available to someone like Dorothea. She and everyone around her understands her intellectual or moral ambition as "religious." George Eliot sort of makes a point that the Brooke sisters' experience isn't exactly metropolitan.
Good point.
Yes! Reminds me how, when I'm newly excited about a romantic prospect, I invest them with all these qualities that I imagine to be true about them. Imaginary qualities.
Imagination, so vital to desire!
OMG. So true--that intoxication that eventually wears off.
Just to repeat what has already been said above, but which keeps resonating with me: Eliot keeps bending over backwards to be as fair as possible to each character as they enter on the next stage of their thoughts and actions. This is what makes the psychology of experiencing her text so pleasurable. Sir James becomes less objectionable to Dorothea, because he wants to help her with her project and she acknowledges this. And so our opinion of him changes as well, even as we see that he is losing the battle to win Dorothea. At the same time, while there are hints of the future, Mr. C. is also treated fairly. This fairness is a function of Dorothea’s need to project onto him, but it is also a result of the fact that we still don’t know that much about him. He could be shy, retiring, deep and thoughtful, but he could also be kind (i.e. his brittleness doesn’t seem yet to be mean-spirited) and appreciative of youth and life emerging. We just don’t know. Eliot’s ability to keep us on this side of a tipping point is one of her greatest assets.
Yes, Eliot is somewhat fair and balanced describing the romance of Dorothea and Casaubon, yet she is giving us delicious hints of self-delusion by both of them, which we will no doubt appreciate later. Will Dorothea get her cottages? Will Mr. C. appreciate the “cheerful companionship” he thinks he needs?
So true! It is both a human virtue and an artistic virtue—everyone gets their say, and the novel is more dimensional (and suspenseful!) as a result. See the interesting exchange elsewhere on here between Dan and Amanda about whether or not Chettam is an attractive character. Both reactions are there to be found in the language. We are also being taught to see from inside positions that we will perhaps later be tempted to reject.
So psychologically astute of Eliot.
"Celia, who did not like the company of Mr. Casaubon's moles and sallowness, had escaped to the vicarage to play with the curate's ill-shod but merry children."
This quote took me back to the time I taught little children and learned how conversation and play with them could refresh the mind. During some free time at the end of the day when I felt a bit stressed, I would sit and one of their tiny tables. A few would gather round me and I would look UP at their cheery, chatting faces as opposed to my usual stance which was looking down. My energy would come roaring back!
What a lovely observation, thank you! I too noticed how this aside offered a breath of fresh air. “Play”--both Celia and Dorothea are close to the playing age. And we notice how lightly children seem to pass over these barriers of class. Dorothea has to theorize about cottages but Celia simply goes.
Yes, Dorothea and her theories and ideas! So different from Celia. There is one special moment when Dorothea gets out of her head -- when something fresh comes over her, "a new current of feeling" This is the moment when she is looking at an emerald Celia is showing her. She has fallen into her sense life for a moment and becomes disoriented by something beautiful.
“Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought."
It's a reverse Narcissus. She sees in his shallows the depths of her desires. The word wanting shimmers with this sense of something wanting.
The two "wantings" are so different! The verb so intimate, the adjective so punitive. At least in today's English. Suddenly noticing the word "labyrinth" recurring, which hints at something dangerous at the end.
What struck me in this chapter is Dorothea imagining that “there would be nothing trivial in our lives. Everyday-things with us would mean the greatest things. She wants as Eliot describes “in every variety In experience is an epoch.” She surely seems in for major disappointment
Indeed! Is it possible to start out this way and not be headed for disappointment...
"The movement of Dorothea’s romance... holds—for the reader—no real anticipation of pleasure." It's true. What a way to begin a book. I'm a first time reader, and it's hard to imagine where it goes from here — hard not to imagine the dread will just get worse and worse.
It's true, GE is almost daring us not to go on. It's almost like you want to see how she pulls something out of it.
“It is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Barthes has many things to say about the self-absorbed nature of "love"--which apply to our proud, naive Dorothea.
How could Dorothea be anything but naive? She has seen nothing of life other than the loss of her parents. She has been cosseted first in an English family, next in a Swiss family inorder to learn manners, how to be ladylike with the sole objective of becoming a good marriage prospect. Others have commented on this, the sisters have not had the benefit of a female mentor.
She maybe needs the pride, for protection, given the naivete.
Yes, I believe you are right. The pride is a defense mechanism.
I’m super-glad Mona quoted that sentence about the puppy’s expressive eyes and nose. That’s marvelous in itself and for the way it differentiates author from heroine.
It shines a spotlight on how excessive Dorothea is in her vision. Rather hilarious, too: offending puppy.
Yes. Still, do you agree, she has a good reason to reject the puppy if she feels coerced by Chettam, and her objection to 'creatures bred merely as pets' fits with her own deeper objection to marrying someone like him who would keep her as a parasite, a glorified pet?
It does seem though that Chettam wouldn't do that .. would let her take the lead and he would be the pet? ha ha She doesn't really know who Chettam is any more than she knows who Casuabon is .. yet. It's all her inner projections making her blind, or maybe willfully blind, as Eliot suggests.
That whole thing about letting her take the lead is a trap. Afraid I personally don’t trust Chettam, don’t like him one bit. Something about him rubs me the wrong way.
I mean, basically, while i find Mona's Austen-inspired salvaging of Chettam in chapter three refreshing, challenging, I believe the portrait of Chettam is laced with truly devastating satire. Consider phrases like "in the way most gratifying to himself," "stupid complimenting," "exactly," "genus" instead of "genius," "complacent sense" "He theorized a little," "A man's mind-what there is of it," this is from chapter two, "has always the advantage of being masculine." "predominance which a man could always put down" "even his ignorance is of a sounder quality." As for the cottages, that is only a means to a greater end for Dorothea. She wants to get right her relationship to other human beings. Chettam would use her idealism to hook her with cottage plans and then squash the deeper impulse.
Yes -- he is a (good-natured) foil for Eliot to skewer the idea of masculine superiority - but I think his intentions, while self-serving, are essentially honorable, to use an old-fashioned word. I do not believe he is trying to trap D. in anything malevolent or soul-stealing.
Chettam to D.: "I know when I like people. But about other matters, do you know, I have often a difficulty in deciding. One hears very sensible things said on opposite sides."
This is very honest, and that he admits it to a woman, no less .. and one he is trying to impress?
He engages Dorothea, or tries to, in real conversation about real things, he wants to know where she is coming from, unlike the other guy..
I guess my reading was just that she was being irritable and reactive to any gesture. I didn’t read any true considering into her rejection.
I feel like we are entitled to read more into her rejection if we want. It’s not the kind of dog for her, and he’s not the man for her.
Still it seems a bit sad that her principle drives her to to reject a live creature who might benefit from love. There is something imperious in it, as though her moral purity is a higher priority than a more lowly being's needs. And yet perhaps Dan is on to something, that she cannot begin to accept these arrangements of patronage and submission or she will be lost.
I can see why she rejected the puppy. Her own needs most likely were not met, especially after her parents died. Additionally, she may have felt that accepting the puppy would lead Chattam on and that she would be indebted to him. A happier response, if Dorothea were able (emotionally) would have been to ask Chattam if she cmight accept the puppy on Celia's behalf. Although she has said she dislikes having a small creature underfoot. I can imagine how frustrating it must have been for Dorothea to feel there were so few outlets for her talents and passion.
So true
Eliot is separated from Austen by the idea of the developing self, whether she gets it from German lit. I know not since it’s in englit too, “experience, that arch wherethrough...” (Tennyson “Ulysses”) If personal development is what matters, Jane Austen -type happy marriages come to seem a bit static, whilst even an unhappy marriage can give new life and energy, though this is admittedly kind of a dangerous idea
It did seem like there was some dynamism, potentially, in the E Bennett-Darcy combo. Maybe the backstage story is these women writers searching for a way forward within the confines of the marriage plot. As you noted, one had to be pretty brave to embrace spinsterhood! Perhaps a hidden question in these couple thought-experiments is--does the woman have to seek the upper hand (surrender to a submissive match like Chettam, in order not to be subsumed)? is equality, or a balance of power (read, maintenance of interest), possible?
Good questions, really excellent questions. Not sure I accept this is a marriage plot. By my admittedly limited reading, Dorothea’s developing self subsumes the marriage plot, and characters like Chettham only matter for the light their non-comprehension sheds on Dorothea’s Eve-like progress towards knowledge.
Convincing reading! Only add, very diminutively, that marriage is nearly the only vehicle for her developing self...
When Dorothea tells Sir James, "I am rather short-sighted," she is not kidding!
As well as being a religious fanatic with a penchant for self-sacrifice and a soft spot for emeralds?
As Austen was preoccupied with character Eliot is too. In Austen the lens of romance reveals character. The question that holds the tension is will the interested parties find their right match? It seems almost perverse of Eliot to right off the bat send her main character into a wrong match .. hard not to get ahead of ourselves assuming it is the wrong match with Casaubon, but there is no lack of clues embedded in Eliot's descriptions and observations to see that Dorothea is headed for a fall, or at least a trip on the edge of the Casaubon carpet ... it is unthinkable in Austen that a main character would marry the wrong man first ... in Austen's older married couples we see the pain and humor of long, probably ill-matched marriages ... the next generation is supposed to avoid their mistakes. But how? Character is the determining factor. Major mistakes in Austen are for minor characters, and there to demonstrate the serious risks to the main characters in committing them.
I find this statement near the end of Ch. 3 so interesting:
"It is difficult to say whether there was or was not a little wilfulness in her [Dorothea] continuing blind to the possibility that another sort of choice was in question in relation to her."
It is difficult to say .. is it up to the reader to decide, in other words? To me it seems that there is some awareness on Dorothea's part about where Sir James is coming from. Otherwise she is more of a dodo than ever, or more self-delusional. In the grip of her ideals, she is unable to see Casaubon, not only as others see him, but as he really is. I don't think there is any obfuscation on Eliot's part about who Casaubon really is. In Austen the reader is sometimes in the dark about where people are coming from, as if the events were playing out in real time. Eliot has adjusted the focal point and the time frame, as if she were saying, you'll see, a little fore-knowledge is not going to alter your interest in what happens to these people, or even significantly change what you might feel about them. As if knowledge is only useful at the right moment. So even as Mona says there is no real anticipation of pleasure, which there isn't or not yet, there is something else that is drawing us along and keeping us interested. Pleasure delayed?
Maybe the question is, Is finding "the right match" enough of a story to hold all of a woman's potential? Maybe the *ways* that this match goes wrong will illuminate something about the limitations of looking to matches for solutions …
And they so often are presented as solutions! No less here? Or is something different going on?
We shall see!
Dread propels narrative drive in powerful & compelling ways.
🎯
a trip on the edge of the Casaubon carpet ... I love that!
The imagination of the self fuses so easily with that of another...Dorothea’s recognizable at any age.
There does seem to be such a difference among commenters over how much sympathy they feel for her! Maybe it's a signature type—this sense of aspiration. If it stirs in you, you can recognize it across the ages; if it seems silly to you, maybe the same!
I thought this group would appreciate this link to A.O. Scott’s essay on reading:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/books/review/book-bans-humanities-ai.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Thank you! Just read it in the print version. I loved this. I felt grateful for the reminder not to be too pious about reading. With reference to the matter at hand, it led me to think—we could see Dorothea's limitations, and her yearnings, as an expression of the constraints that have been placed on her reading. She yearns for Casaubon because she believes he will open that world to her. Even the sexual dimension A. O. Scott identifies is there.
Yes! Qualities which will meet our needs! I guess romance hasn’t changed that much in 200 years!
I'd like to see a large sample, over time, Middlemarch-based survey of how many enduring relationships match original expectations … Another way of saying, how much are our real needs the ones we think we have.
Was never sure and still remain unsure how to feel about Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies. It's easy to write off the project as hacky, grandiose, foolhardy, imperialistic. And certainly there's something self-aggrandizing and untrustworthy in C's almost defensive posture as he claims his version will be more just and thorough than all previous attempts. But am I mistaken in also perceiving something poignant in his tragic dedication, and something sensible in his thesis? You can't really write off Casaubon without writing off, say, Joseph Campbell. (How would Eliot feel about the latter, I wonder?) In Casaubon, she's is personifying the foundational aspirations of Western intellectual culture. It's a radically unflattering portrait, falling somewhere between melancholy and ominous, but a human one.
Ooh, you make me think that Casaubon is not so much a person as a personification of the intellectual ambitions that a person like Dorothea has. Maybe the ambitions themselves are somewhat dangerous. Perhaps a novelist would say the world is plural and unclassifiable.