Middlemarch: Chapter 2
Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul? is a question, perhaps the question, put forth in Chapter Two.
Celia issues the taunt (with a touch of “naïve malice”) to Dorothea, but it’s a question the author seems to be posing to us, her readers, as well. One of the qualities already apparent in Middlemarch is George Eliot’s desire and ability to poke her readers’ assumptions.
We’ve been fully prepared for the dinner party rendered in Chapter Two. We know that there’s to be a dinner with Sir James Chettam, a baronet, and “another gentleman whom the girls had never seen, and about whom Dorothea felt some venerating expectation.” Chapter One ended with the two young women dividing up their late mother’s jewels—Dorothea, with ambivalent feelings, leaves her late mother’s emeralds on her wrist and hand and Celia puts on the amethyst necklace—and for the first time they wear jewels to a dinner party, which includes two single unmarried men of the neighborhood. Could this be a ceremonial evening, a sort of coming out?
We’ve been told that Dorothea has “childlike ideas about marriage,” and imagines herself married to Hooker or Milton, but only after he became blind, “or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said ‘Exactly’ to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty,–how could he affect her as a lover?”
Theologian Richard Hooker and blind Milton, with his daughters reading to him
Enter Mr. Casaubon.
But first. Not to interject the assumptions of twenty-first-century autofiction upon George Eliot, but don’t we (as readers) already take Dorothea’s side, a bit? Don’t we too feel attracted to the beautiful light of emeralds but also feel a little conflicted in that very pleasure?
The chapter opens in medias res. Mr. Brooke, the benevolent, rambling uncle and parental figure, has begun his scattered name-dropping as we witness Dorothea’s mortification.
His conversation is marked by the repeated phrases:
You know
That kind of thing
It would not do
(a bit later in the book, he adds the fear of going too far)
He drops the names of Sir Humphrey Davy, Wordsworth, Adam Smith, Wilberforce, and Southey, without any memorable story or point being made.
Because we know already Dorothea’s fantasy (“the really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it”), we are not surprised to discover some electricity between her and Mr. Casaubon. What surprised me was my own unwillingness to join her on the ride.
Why not? Mr. Casaubon’s manners, approved of by Dorothea, strike the reader well, too. He’s quiet. He seems intelligent, yet patient with Mr. Brooke.
Am I alone in feeling that Chettam comes off rather better than expected in this initial round? Chettam is reading about agriculture, we learn, because he wants to improve his estates. He intends to take one of his farms into his own hands. This is exactly what Dorothea has wished she could persuade her uncle to let her do. Sir James could offer to build cottages on his property with Dorothea’s untrained architectural drawings. Wouldn’t that be the equivalent of publishing a twenty-year-old’s first stories?
“Mr. Casaubon turned his eyes very markedly on Dorothea while she was speaking, and seemed to observe her newly,” we’re told.
“Dorothea said to herself that Mr. Casaubon was the most interesting man she had ever seen.”
The romantic tension begins, even with this reader’s misgivings.
What exactly are those misgivings founded upon?
We’re told that “the set of his (Casaubon’s) iron-grey hair and his deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke.”
But are we as superficial as that? we ask ourselves, even before Dorothea confronts Celia with the same accusation. Casaubon is certainly “like a father” (in fact, he’s forty-seven, but he seems much older, with his failing eyesight and the admission that he lives “too much with the dead”).
Perhaps a lifetime of watching American romantic comedies in which handsome older actors are paired with younger actresses has changed us.
Dorothea tries in every instance to distance herself from Chettam, while Celia flirts with him a bit, “blushing as prettily as possible above her necklace” (her late mother’s amethysts).
“Mr. Brooke was speaking at the same time, but it was evident that Mr Casaubon was observing Dorothea, and she was aware of it.”
There is something appraising, rather than joyful, in Mr. Casaubon’s observation of Dorothea.
When Mr. Brooke says that young ladies are too “flighty” to be trusted with documents, Dorothea fears Mr. Casaubon will think he had some reason for this dismissal, when “the remark lay in his mind as lightly as the broken wing of an insect among all the other fragments there.”
In the drawing room, the two sisters talk. Dorothea compares Mr. Casaubon’s eye sockets to those of Locke.
Celia asks, “Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them?”
Dorothea compares Sir James Chettam to a suckling pig.
She says it pains her that Celia looks “at human beings as if they were merely animals with a toilette.”
We both recognize this as the pain of someone falling in love with a person whose attractions are not recognized by her family. We don’t think of ourselves as being driven by appearances and yet … there is something about Mr. Casaubon that doesn’t feel quite right.
Celia privately fears that “her sister was too religious for family comfort.”
If we substitute “intellectual” or “obsessive” for “religious,” the concern becomes modern and eternal. “Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, sitting down, and even eating.”
Do the men in North Loamshire follow the ladies into the drawing room for tea after dinner? Because there is James Chettam, annoying Dorothea again and provoking her to claim she will quit riding. (Interestingly, Dorothea is the equestrian, not Celia, in this case, being closer to the world of animals—though, not, as we’ll see a few chapters, in the case of miniature dogs.)
As Eliot dips into James Chettam’s interior world, we see that he has not in the least been put off by Dorothea’s snapping. He relishes in her intelligence and would happily let her dominate him.
Twice, Eliot speaks in general about romantic love in this chapter.
“He (Chettam) thought it probable that Miss Brooke liked him, and manners must be very marked indeed before they cease to be interpreted by preconceptions either confident or distrustful.”
And: “Dorothea’s inferences may seem large; but really life could never have gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions, which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization.”
And then of course there’s the chapter’s epigraph, in which Pancho sees a man on a grey ass with something shiny on his head, but Don Quixote recognizes as the resplendent helmet of Mambrino.
Join us with your thoughts here in the comments! And please share to help our reading group grow. For next Sunday: Chapter Three!
Mona Simpson is the author of seven novels, most recently Commitment, which appeared this spring.
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Images: Richard Hooker statue on the grounds of Exeter Cathedral, photograph by Ryan Grenzow, Wikimedia Commons; Milton Dictating to His Daughter, by Henry Fuseli (1794), Preston O. Morton Memorial Purchase Fund for Older Paintings, Art Institute of Chicago; John Locke, by John Greenhill (1672), National Portrait Gallery
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I’m noticing how much more willing I was to give credence to Dorothea’s enthusiasm for Casaubon when I read this as a young person! The one bit of it where I saw a spark in him in this chapter was the where he says we “must keep the germinating grain away from the light.” It suggested something protective toward her and some insight into what she understands as her latent qualities; but there was also something creepy about where his mind goes, toward darkness and airlessness. The first thing she hears him say is so terrible, it seems almost vampiric: that he “feeds on inward sources” in the same sentence in which he “live(s) too much with the dead,” i.e. the inward sources *are* the dead; and that his mind is like a ghost—a dead thing in his live body—and he is trying, amidst ruin and change, to refashion the live world on the model of this dead thing. And he associates this macabre process with the damage to his eyes—while Dorothea keeps referring to his “eye-sockets,” the absence of eyes (remember blind Milton). I would have said my high-school English teacher had too much sex on his mind for saying what I’m thinking of here!
I’ve not read Middlemarch in many, many years. It’s touching how differently it lands. But what I admired then and now is Elliot’s insight into human nature: the way a need worked over by desire, inflated by imagination (or projection) can be blinding. Haven’t I seen this often and at relatively close range? This is so exquisitely crafted in the character of Dorothea. And Mr Causabon is such a perfect object for her need to adore -- perfect in that he provides enough to receive her projection but still works to unsettle the reader. Elliot makes certain I understand the strength of Dorothea’s desire-- her attachment to this ideal of love. Right in front of me-- in the present tense--she forsakes a “real” love - her horseback riding and rejects the man who wants to foster that in her.
I’m also impressed in this reading by Elliot’s way of divvying up the internal “monologues.” The way she so gracefully moves from one character’s “head space” to another-- and who is excluded!