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!
And it is creepy! Causobon feels dusty and vampiric! Even in Eliot’s economic portraits of Chettam and Causaubon. I was caught by a wish to rescue Dorothea from the wave of attraction she feels for a sere, sexless scholar who unknowingly stirs up her fantasies of being of service, when beefy Chettam is so alive and also offers her a place in which to be of use but on horseback, on a living farm! Brrr!
I know, right? We are so enlisted! We want to intervene but there is nothing we can do! I was thinking about the way that the only form of relationship she can imagine is subordinating herself—if she must subordinate herself, it must be to something grand, it's the only way to redeem it. It is hard, even in the twenty-first century, to envision a large purpose for yourself that's not tethered to someone else, as we know 😉
"It is hard, even in the twenty-first century, to envision a large purpose for yourself that's not tethered to someone else" - That's why I've always related to Dorothea's attraction to Causobon. Who hasn't attached themselves to an object of adoration and security, determined to ignore, misread, or even elevate his deficiencies? To fetishize his creepiness? We want to make someone a god as a way of staying safe and abdicating responsibility for ourselves. It's easier, especially when you're extremely young, to lean on a male authority than to self-actualize through service to a more mysterious kind of higher power. Eliot's notorious moralism is moving to me because she seems so acutely attuned to the moral challenges of being a woman, in a world where most archetypes for moral self-actualization are either men or the women who nurture and serve them.
Great comment. Eliot was a true pathfinder in this respect. Her ethical compass is always there, and yet you sense the hesitancy to impose. No Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, this.
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!
I was so aware of that too! I think twice we have dipped into "the depths of" Celia's heart, where she doesn't even go herself, and we are invited to experience Sir James's simple, self-approving reasoning as our own. She makes it feel as if this is the natural way to experience a dinner party rather than something magical and exquisitely selective.
Like your “a need worked over by desire, inflated by imagination (or projection) can be blinding”! Dorothea has so much want and ambition for herself but only two options, self-flagellating Christian follower or wife (I guess a third option is to become a spinster). But she’s so removed from vital options, experiences that it’s all abstract, aspirational, and without experience, she’s searching for the vessel to pour herself in and shape her life. There is so much agenda, and so little presence.
If only her uncle weren’t so remote. If only she had a more genuine relationship with her sister. See, I’m in the searching and yearning phase of wanting to save her from herself!
I try to imagine my way into her experience of marriage as offering the prospect of a rich and vital way forward, since in her domain there was so little in the way of alternatives. I wonder if George Eliot is wrestling herself with trying to locate vital possibilities in marriage while at the same time being pessimistic about what marriage could really offer women.
At this point in reading MM as always, I dislike both Dorothea & Causabon & feel they deserve each other. D for her religious pomposity & C for his utter lack of imagination & creepiness.
I understand the impulse to be annoyed with both D and C. But I feel much harsher toward C. Much. Maybe the BBC production influenced me as well. The “types” of D and C seem so dated in our anything-goes 2020s. When I saw Juliet Aubrey’s D in the series, in the context of her youth and attractiveness and bookish standoffishness (mainly with Chettam), it caused me to feel protective toward her when she enters, so idealistically, C’s spidery orbit. To be honest, maybe I was responding to her vulnerability (i.e. damsel in distress situation), which Mary Ann Evans, given her own challenges on the battlefield of eros, would have had zero sympathy for. Already from the beginning, quietly, thread by thread, C controls her with his need, which we know she seeks. His type of reclusive scholar knows just what to say to her type of tentative maiden. No, for me there is no contest, given the time and the cultural expectations: C’s potential for really bad, possibly evil, behavior is much greater. His passive-aggressive manipulation borders on the predatory. He could be a character in Dostoevsky if he weren’t in the middle of 19th-century British fiction. Someone eaten up with self-hatred like the Underground Man, only with C we get virtually no glimpse of interiority. I realize we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, but look what he does with his will and with his denying of access to Ladislaw, who is the partner that D ultimately warms up to in all the right ways. I thought Rufus Sewell was the perfect Ladislaw as antipode to Patrick Malahide’s C. (had to look up Malahide).
Perhaps I misunderstood the “assignment”, but though most of us have read MM more than once, I assumed we’d resist “jumping ahead” to comment re plot & character development, etc., which seems to undercut Mona’s chapter by chapter focused attention on Eliot’s authorial accretion.
I see this chapter reading & commentary as a kind of anti-dote to our 2023 screen-jump instant psych non-exegesis - or non close reading.
Just my two cents, sorry. Forgive me, I’d prefer no movie takes either. Eliot has the director's cut here.
Sorry to be late to this one! There aren't any rules, but I have been hearing from the younger folks who are here for the first time that maybe we old timers are overwhelming things with our retrospective experience—which I've been the first to dwell on! Might be nice to encourage the kids by trying to stick with the chronological unfolding, plenty there certainly. I was noticing with Chapter 3 how much GE is trying to give us D's benefit-of-the-doubt re Casaubon. We can see as she walks on the hill how, in her eyes, at this point, he may seem like someone who can give her the kind of recognition that no one else in her orbit can. It is the old dangerous alchemy of the student-teacher attraction.
"... the fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I am fastidious in voices, and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader." Run for the hills! But no, this is like music to Dorothea's ears!
"Dorothea said to herself that Mr. Casaubon was the most interesting man she had ever seen.."
How many men has she seen??
Sir James is only "perverse" because he is preventing Dorothea from spending more time mooning over Casaubon.
"Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on Biblical Cosmology." An absurd and hilarious statement from Dorothea on Casaubon. Why does no one laugh at her? Maybe that's the reader's job?
Sir James: "As to the excessive religiousness alleged against Miss Brooke, he had a very indefinite notion of what it consisted in, and thought that it would die out with marriage." This is also funny .. and leads GE to make one of her pronouncements about the wider world and the people in it -- "a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition."
She has got Sir James under a microscope, and he is not coming off at all badly for the scrutiny!
Mr. Casaubon on the other hand .. the word that comes to mind is ominous ... his mind is full of "fragments" that will never make a whole --
And this from Mr. Brooke: "A great mistake, Chettam," interposed Mr. Brooke, "going into electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlour of your cow-house. It won't do. I went into science a great deal myself at one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything; you can let nothing alone."
GE must have had an absolute ball writing this book ...
I also loved that bit about the gum or starch for the limpest personality! It is so hilarious. Mona mentions that Mr. Brooke later maligns things for "going too far"; we see a hint of it already here. "It leads to everything." Indeed!
Indeed! Ha ha! I like how Eliot keeps reminding us that Mr. Brooke is "good." It doesn't mean he always does or thinks or says the right thing. It somehow places him right where she wants him to be. His views on women come across as almost benign though they aren't. He is not calculating like Casaubon, does not cause things to happen except by a kind of broad-minded ignorance. He seems to be the one who has got caught in a kind of "everything" and won't take a firm side in anything!
Ahead of this first encounter with Casaubon, Eliot gives an epigraph in which Don Quixote believes that the pot on a man’s head is the famed helmet of Mambrino. This first novel derives its tension from the conflict between perception and reality, and here in Middlemarch the heroine suffers from the illusion that this ugly old man is a great mind worthy of devotion.
Really enjoyed the discussion. Dorothea wants to serve something bigger than appearances, although appearances are all one has to go on when meeting someone new. Casaubon appears deeply read and serious, which he is when we learn more, but just as his intellectuality is ultimately sterile, so too is his entire person: he is asexual, while Dorothea is young and full of life and, while she seeks to hide it, a maiden awaiting a proper partner. Casaubon is not that partner, as we eventually find out. The father figure/teacher model does not work as a relationship for Dorothea; Eliot is suggesting that the lovers have to feel an essential equality for the relationship to work. Do Casaubon and Dorothea ever consummate their marriage? I assume not.
Eliot presents both Dorothea and Casaubon as self-absorbed in their own version of self-righteousness. We can shrug our shoulders somewhat in relation to Dorothea due to her inexperience but Casaubon is on a mission seeking to mark his place in history and views her as a means to his own end. Neither is able to see the other clearly outside of their pre-conceived expectations. Now we get to follow this ill-conceived relationship in its struggle to find resilience.
Would it be right to feel also that Casaubon is given a certain social liberty to adopt this importance? The society's willingness to defer to this sort of pedantry, especially when it comes to religion, weakens Dorothea's defenses against it.
I've read Middlemarch a couple times before (age 20, age 40....) and I now realize that I never looked closely at which men Dorothea is pointed towards, by her own desires or by the expectations of others, and which men are off that list. Chettam is considered a suitable match for respectability, the merging of estates, his health and age, his easy temper, and his genuine desire to make Dorothea happy (as best he understands how). Dorothea is drawn to Casaubon, a man with no blood in his veins or original thoughts, and later to Will Ladislaw, who has many original thoughts but lacks the grit to make them reality. The man who seems perfect for her, really, appears a bit later... Dr. Lydgate.
The doctor is ambitious, hardworking, and wishes to help mankind with his studies. On her side, if Dorothea must find fulfillment in her husband's life, Dr. Lydgate would make a fine partner. She would admire his studies, read research to help him, learn about his lab, and run a frugal household (not to mention, if the doctor must have ordinary patients, and he must, Dorothea seems to relish nursing the ill).
Yet Dr. Lydgate never seems to even look at Dorothea, and Dorothea never looks at him. I wonder if the rightness of their pairing seems obvious to other modern readers? did it occur to Eliot's contemporaries? Is the class divide so impermeable? I'm looking forward to looking at whatever slight contact the text indicates between Lydgate and Miss Brooke to see why they disregard each other.
I remember thinking this when I read it in college (though perhaps a professor helped underscore the point) and finding it so tragic! And then realizing in subsequent years that maybe most people - or at least a lot of them, or the most intense ones - have this tragic habit of choosing ill-suited partners.
I had exactly the same experience! I kept waiting for this to happen and never quite understood why it didn't. I half-remember wondering at the time if I were being rebuked in some way for my marriage-plot expectations. I'm interested to see how I experience it now.
Yes! I think she wants to renounce the superficiality of what it means to be a woman and engage in the life of the mind and doing serious work. She cannot square what she perceives as contradictions and instead embarks on her “self-mortuary” ways. This term, self-mortuary, gets me every time. Chilling, and yet something women have been actively engaged in for centuries.
It’s true that mr. Brooke mentions Sir Humphrey Davy rather pointlessly, but on some meta-level I’m wondering if the mention of this romantic chemist who invented laughing gas, the Davy lamp, wrote some beautiful poems, lived and loved intensely (Anna Beddoes) isn’t accidental. Sets a mark on the chapter about affinities, chemistry between people.
What a beautiful observation! Reminds me of this moving tribute to Davy by Oliver Sacks, in which he talks a lot about science and love, recalling for instance "my twelve-year-old self most romantically and deeply in love—more deeply, perhaps, than ever again—with sodium and potassium and chlorine and bromine; in love with a magical shop in whose dark interior I could purchase chemicals for my lab … Humphry Davy was for me—as for most boys at that time with a chemistry set or a lab—a beloved hero; a boy himself in the boyhood of chemistry; an intensely appealing figure, as fresh and alive after a hundred years in his way as anyone we knew … " And: "At this time, there still existed a union of literary and scientific cultures; there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come. There was indeed, between Coleridge and Davy, a passionate parallelism, a sense of an almost mystical affinity and rapport." Can send if you don't have a subscription https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/11/04/the-poet-of-chemistry/
Look closely: The painting shown of Milton doesn’t depict Milton’s daughters reading to him, but rather the blind Milton dictating Paradise Lost to one of his daughters. (Its title is Milton Dictating to his Daughter.) Familiar roles in Academia: The great man appropriating the talent of a younger woman. Roles that Casaubon and Dorothea aspire to fill.
You're right! Caught me! I have the correct title in the caption down below actually. I decided to let it go because the subject of being read to is the theme in the chapter and Milton's being read to by his daughters is the reference of the moment. I wondered as I was posting if that's another daughter there in the background, not that that effaces the little cheat!
One thing that strikes me as very important is this bit about "reconstructing past worlds." Casaubon, perhaps jokingly named after the great philologist Isaac Casaubon, presents himself as "wandering about the world and trying mentally to reconstruct it as it used to be in spite of ruin and confusing changes." Dorothea picks up on that especially: "To reconstruct a past world...what a work to be in any way present at..." I'd submit that is what seals the deal, it's a big part of the electric charge between them, strange as it might seem.
So far Celia seems to be better grounded than Dorothea. Dorothea wants to find a father, while Celia has her eye on Sir James Chettam. I wonder which one of these Mary Ann Evans identified with herself?
I realized when I read Mona's comment, but not when I was reading myself, that I think Eliot actualy gives us hints that she thinks that Chettam might have been a good match for Dorothea even as she also filters the scene through Dorothea's eyes. Some prejudice keeps her from seeing Chettam's qualities.
What a dull life Dorothea would lead with Chettam! Dorothea has a creative spirit (her drawings) and serious intellectual nature. And she’s a dreamer. I think she can do better!
It would be great to stage a debate: Chettam pro and con! Is he ready to grow and respect her, or narrow and self-regarding! She gives clues in both directions!
Yes, you’re right, she can do better. But how many young lives (young female lives) were ruined in the time GE was writing by marrying older, available, financially secure bachelor types, who also could be creepy men (I’m thinking here more of the educated classes) like Casaubon and it was a life sentence--they didn’t conveniently die. I think that’s the part we often lose sight of.
True. And think of arranged marriages in most of the world! Even thinking about romance in marriage was pretty much only in European (and American) society and even then not taken seriously.
Still, a woman in those days was better off marrying (someone, anyone!) than becoming a spinster. A spinster was beholden to her family and expected to take care of children, the aging and infirm. Sylvia Townsend Warner has demonstrated the only valid solution to this dilemma is to become a witch.
Mary Ann Evans identified more with Mary Garth than with either Celia or Dorothea, imo. The latter two are “entitled,” as we would say today, although they are still decent and appealing. Mary Garth is not comely (like her author), but she is smart, grounded, resourceful. She will not give herself to Fred until the latter gets his act together. She cares less about “propriety” and more about what makes things sustainable long-term.
Is it possible that what's coming through in this chapter though is also that Dorothea is denying something of herself? Chettam appreciates her riding—and she does too, but she won't admit it! Such a direct metaphor for her rejection of sexuality. Chettam thinks her "religiousness" will die out with marriage. He is perhaps too patronizing for her—or perhaps he offers a more full-blooded existence than Dorothea realizes she needs. Just working from what we have read so far!
An interesting thought. So maybe Dorothea’s mistake in not simply that she is choosing the wrong husband, but is incorrectly choosing asexuality for herself?
I think it's that she fears sexuality, because she has no language for it. She moves herself in a direction that she can master through reading and argument, but this part of life has been kept from her.
It occurs to me that Dorothea’s motherlessness is relevant here--and the fact that Mr. Brooke (himself a bachelor?) has not provided her with a woman to talk to.
The great little detail of Dorothea enjoying but denying her enjoyment always reminds me (by contrast) of Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. Say what you will about Mary, she doesn't reject pleasure!
We are so educated now in being connoisseurs of pleasure. It's hard to imagine the constriction of the centuries in which people (esp women) were raised to think of pleasure as inherently suspect.
I think you nail it with what you say about Dorothea and Chettam. He seems too “right” for her (in all respects) at this juncture and she resents it. It’s not that he “settles” for Celia, it’s that she is actually a better match for his “robustness” at this point.
The play of all the reds! Celia blushes prettily but Dorothea "reddens" from "high delight or anger," and Sir James is "a blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered type."
Another warning sign about Casaubon (and sign his soul might not be great-excellent question, Mona!) is his self-absorption. That opening speech of his has eight “I”s in a row, and “my mind.” I...I...I...”my eyesight.”
Never read Middlemarch, and when I bought this hefty book I knew I'd need a support system to take it on. What great comments and suppositions and insights by all. this will be a terrific summer!
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!
Yes, “vampiric” is the right word for Casaubon. I don’t even think this is conscious on his part. His natural tendency is to “live with the dead.”
And it is creepy! Causobon feels dusty and vampiric! Even in Eliot’s economic portraits of Chettam and Causaubon. I was caught by a wish to rescue Dorothea from the wave of attraction she feels for a sere, sexless scholar who unknowingly stirs up her fantasies of being of service, when beefy Chettam is so alive and also offers her a place in which to be of use but on horseback, on a living farm! Brrr!
I know, right? We are so enlisted! We want to intervene but there is nothing we can do! I was thinking about the way that the only form of relationship she can imagine is subordinating herself—if she must subordinate herself, it must be to something grand, it's the only way to redeem it. It is hard, even in the twenty-first century, to envision a large purpose for yourself that's not tethered to someone else, as we know 😉
"It is hard, even in the twenty-first century, to envision a large purpose for yourself that's not tethered to someone else" - That's why I've always related to Dorothea's attraction to Causobon. Who hasn't attached themselves to an object of adoration and security, determined to ignore, misread, or even elevate his deficiencies? To fetishize his creepiness? We want to make someone a god as a way of staying safe and abdicating responsibility for ourselves. It's easier, especially when you're extremely young, to lean on a male authority than to self-actualize through service to a more mysterious kind of higher power. Eliot's notorious moralism is moving to me because she seems so acutely attuned to the moral challenges of being a woman, in a world where most archetypes for moral self-actualization are either men or the women who nurture and serve them.
Great comment. Eliot was a true pathfinder in this respect. Her ethical compass is always there, and yet you sense the hesitancy to impose. No Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, this.
More Tolstoy! The reading list beckons!
Touché, touché
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!
I was so aware of that too! I think twice we have dipped into "the depths of" Celia's heart, where she doesn't even go herself, and we are invited to experience Sir James's simple, self-approving reasoning as our own. She makes it feel as if this is the natural way to experience a dinner party rather than something magical and exquisitely selective.
Like your “a need worked over by desire, inflated by imagination (or projection) can be blinding”! Dorothea has so much want and ambition for herself but only two options, self-flagellating Christian follower or wife (I guess a third option is to become a spinster). But she’s so removed from vital options, experiences that it’s all abstract, aspirational, and without experience, she’s searching for the vessel to pour herself in and shape her life. There is so much agenda, and so little presence.
If only her uncle weren’t so remote. If only she had a more genuine relationship with her sister. See, I’m in the searching and yearning phase of wanting to save her from herself!
I try to imagine my way into her experience of marriage as offering the prospect of a rich and vital way forward, since in her domain there was so little in the way of alternatives. I wonder if George Eliot is wrestling herself with trying to locate vital possibilities in marriage while at the same time being pessimistic about what marriage could really offer women.
At this point in reading MM as always, I dislike both Dorothea & Causabon & feel they deserve each other. D for her religious pomposity & C for his utter lack of imagination & creepiness.
I feel like such a tractable reader! Too ready to believe what these characters want me to believe! GE will show me up.
I understand the impulse to be annoyed with both D and C. But I feel much harsher toward C. Much. Maybe the BBC production influenced me as well. The “types” of D and C seem so dated in our anything-goes 2020s. When I saw Juliet Aubrey’s D in the series, in the context of her youth and attractiveness and bookish standoffishness (mainly with Chettam), it caused me to feel protective toward her when she enters, so idealistically, C’s spidery orbit. To be honest, maybe I was responding to her vulnerability (i.e. damsel in distress situation), which Mary Ann Evans, given her own challenges on the battlefield of eros, would have had zero sympathy for. Already from the beginning, quietly, thread by thread, C controls her with his need, which we know she seeks. His type of reclusive scholar knows just what to say to her type of tentative maiden. No, for me there is no contest, given the time and the cultural expectations: C’s potential for really bad, possibly evil, behavior is much greater. His passive-aggressive manipulation borders on the predatory. He could be a character in Dostoevsky if he weren’t in the middle of 19th-century British fiction. Someone eaten up with self-hatred like the Underground Man, only with C we get virtually no glimpse of interiority. I realize we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, but look what he does with his will and with his denying of access to Ladislaw, who is the partner that D ultimately warms up to in all the right ways. I thought Rufus Sewell was the perfect Ladislaw as antipode to Patrick Malahide’s C. (had to look up Malahide).
did say “at this point” in reading.
Perhaps I misunderstood the “assignment”, but though most of us have read MM more than once, I assumed we’d resist “jumping ahead” to comment re plot & character development, etc., which seems to undercut Mona’s chapter by chapter focused attention on Eliot’s authorial accretion.
I see this chapter reading & commentary as a kind of anti-dote to our 2023 screen-jump instant psych non-exegesis - or non close reading.
Just my two cents, sorry. Forgive me, I’d prefer no movie takes either. Eliot has the director's cut here.
P.S. Don’t know what “anti-dote to our 2023 screen-jump instant psych non-exegesis” refers to. I just paid my money and jumped in.
Jump in however you want. Just voicing my opinion -
Sorry. I’ll try not to assume beyond the assignment. Also, won’t mention movies. My bad. Didn’t understand the rules.
Sorry to be late to this one! There aren't any rules, but I have been hearing from the younger folks who are here for the first time that maybe we old timers are overwhelming things with our retrospective experience—which I've been the first to dwell on! Might be nice to encourage the kids by trying to stick with the chronological unfolding, plenty there certainly. I was noticing with Chapter 3 how much GE is trying to give us D's benefit-of-the-doubt re Casaubon. We can see as she walks on the hill how, in her eyes, at this point, he may seem like someone who can give her the kind of recognition that no one else in her orbit can. It is the old dangerous alchemy of the student-teacher attraction.
"... the fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I am fastidious in voices, and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader." Run for the hills! But no, this is like music to Dorothea's ears!
"Dorothea said to herself that Mr. Casaubon was the most interesting man she had ever seen.."
How many men has she seen??
Sir James is only "perverse" because he is preventing Dorothea from spending more time mooning over Casaubon.
"Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on Biblical Cosmology." An absurd and hilarious statement from Dorothea on Casaubon. Why does no one laugh at her? Maybe that's the reader's job?
Sir James: "As to the excessive religiousness alleged against Miss Brooke, he had a very indefinite notion of what it consisted in, and thought that it would die out with marriage." This is also funny .. and leads GE to make one of her pronouncements about the wider world and the people in it -- "a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition."
She has got Sir James under a microscope, and he is not coming off at all badly for the scrutiny!
Mr. Casaubon on the other hand .. the word that comes to mind is ominous ... his mind is full of "fragments" that will never make a whole --
And this from Mr. Brooke: "A great mistake, Chettam," interposed Mr. Brooke, "going into electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlour of your cow-house. It won't do. I went into science a great deal myself at one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything; you can let nothing alone."
GE must have had an absolute ball writing this book ...
I also loved that bit about the gum or starch for the limpest personality! It is so hilarious. Mona mentions that Mr. Brooke later maligns things for "going too far"; we see a hint of it already here. "It leads to everything." Indeed!
Indeed! Ha ha! I like how Eliot keeps reminding us that Mr. Brooke is "good." It doesn't mean he always does or thinks or says the right thing. It somehow places him right where she wants him to be. His views on women come across as almost benign though they aren't. He is not calculating like Casaubon, does not cause things to happen except by a kind of broad-minded ignorance. He seems to be the one who has got caught in a kind of "everything" and won't take a firm side in anything!
A very crafty way of making us think about what we think of as “good”!
Great commentary. Bravo. 😎
Ahead of this first encounter with Casaubon, Eliot gives an epigraph in which Don Quixote believes that the pot on a man’s head is the famed helmet of Mambrino. This first novel derives its tension from the conflict between perception and reality, and here in Middlemarch the heroine suffers from the illusion that this ugly old man is a great mind worthy of devotion.
Like Dorothea is the believing witness Don Quixote imagined for himself …
Really enjoyed the discussion. Dorothea wants to serve something bigger than appearances, although appearances are all one has to go on when meeting someone new. Casaubon appears deeply read and serious, which he is when we learn more, but just as his intellectuality is ultimately sterile, so too is his entire person: he is asexual, while Dorothea is young and full of life and, while she seeks to hide it, a maiden awaiting a proper partner. Casaubon is not that partner, as we eventually find out. The father figure/teacher model does not work as a relationship for Dorothea; Eliot is suggesting that the lovers have to feel an essential equality for the relationship to work. Do Casaubon and Dorothea ever consummate their marriage? I assume not.
I wonder what Mona thinks about that!
Eliot presents both Dorothea and Casaubon as self-absorbed in their own version of self-righteousness. We can shrug our shoulders somewhat in relation to Dorothea due to her inexperience but Casaubon is on a mission seeking to mark his place in history and views her as a means to his own end. Neither is able to see the other clearly outside of their pre-conceived expectations. Now we get to follow this ill-conceived relationship in its struggle to find resilience.
Would it be right to feel also that Casaubon is given a certain social liberty to adopt this importance? The society's willingness to defer to this sort of pedantry, especially when it comes to religion, weakens Dorothea's defenses against it.
Each moment of Dorothea’s ambivalence and certitude makes Middlemarch as current as right now....
I've read Middlemarch a couple times before (age 20, age 40....) and I now realize that I never looked closely at which men Dorothea is pointed towards, by her own desires or by the expectations of others, and which men are off that list. Chettam is considered a suitable match for respectability, the merging of estates, his health and age, his easy temper, and his genuine desire to make Dorothea happy (as best he understands how). Dorothea is drawn to Casaubon, a man with no blood in his veins or original thoughts, and later to Will Ladislaw, who has many original thoughts but lacks the grit to make them reality. The man who seems perfect for her, really, appears a bit later... Dr. Lydgate.
The doctor is ambitious, hardworking, and wishes to help mankind with his studies. On her side, if Dorothea must find fulfillment in her husband's life, Dr. Lydgate would make a fine partner. She would admire his studies, read research to help him, learn about his lab, and run a frugal household (not to mention, if the doctor must have ordinary patients, and he must, Dorothea seems to relish nursing the ill).
Yet Dr. Lydgate never seems to even look at Dorothea, and Dorothea never looks at him. I wonder if the rightness of their pairing seems obvious to other modern readers? did it occur to Eliot's contemporaries? Is the class divide so impermeable? I'm looking forward to looking at whatever slight contact the text indicates between Lydgate and Miss Brooke to see why they disregard each other.
I remember thinking this when I read it in college (though perhaps a professor helped underscore the point) and finding it so tragic! And then realizing in subsequent years that maybe most people - or at least a lot of them, or the most intense ones - have this tragic habit of choosing ill-suited partners.
I had exactly the same experience! I kept waiting for this to happen and never quite understood why it didn't. I half-remember wondering at the time if I were being rebuked in some way for my marriage-plot expectations. I'm interested to see how I experience it now.
Yes! I think she wants to renounce the superficiality of what it means to be a woman and engage in the life of the mind and doing serious work. She cannot square what she perceives as contradictions and instead embarks on her “self-mortuary” ways. This term, self-mortuary, gets me every time. Chilling, and yet something women have been actively engaged in for centuries.
Close to home...
It’s true that mr. Brooke mentions Sir Humphrey Davy rather pointlessly, but on some meta-level I’m wondering if the mention of this romantic chemist who invented laughing gas, the Davy lamp, wrote some beautiful poems, lived and loved intensely (Anna Beddoes) isn’t accidental. Sets a mark on the chapter about affinities, chemistry between people.
What a beautiful observation! Reminds me of this moving tribute to Davy by Oliver Sacks, in which he talks a lot about science and love, recalling for instance "my twelve-year-old self most romantically and deeply in love—more deeply, perhaps, than ever again—with sodium and potassium and chlorine and bromine; in love with a magical shop in whose dark interior I could purchase chemicals for my lab … Humphry Davy was for me—as for most boys at that time with a chemistry set or a lab—a beloved hero; a boy himself in the boyhood of chemistry; an intensely appealing figure, as fresh and alive after a hundred years in his way as anyone we knew … " And: "At this time, there still existed a union of literary and scientific cultures; there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come. There was indeed, between Coleridge and Davy, a passionate parallelism, a sense of an almost mystical affinity and rapport." Can send if you don't have a subscription https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/11/04/the-poet-of-chemistry/
Look closely: The painting shown of Milton doesn’t depict Milton’s daughters reading to him, but rather the blind Milton dictating Paradise Lost to one of his daughters. (Its title is Milton Dictating to his Daughter.) Familiar roles in Academia: The great man appropriating the talent of a younger woman. Roles that Casaubon and Dorothea aspire to fill.
You're right! Caught me! I have the correct title in the caption down below actually. I decided to let it go because the subject of being read to is the theme in the chapter and Milton's being read to by his daughters is the reference of the moment. I wondered as I was posting if that's another daughter there in the background, not that that effaces the little cheat!
One thing that strikes me as very important is this bit about "reconstructing past worlds." Casaubon, perhaps jokingly named after the great philologist Isaac Casaubon, presents himself as "wandering about the world and trying mentally to reconstruct it as it used to be in spite of ruin and confusing changes." Dorothea picks up on that especially: "To reconstruct a past world...what a work to be in any way present at..." I'd submit that is what seals the deal, it's a big part of the electric charge between them, strange as it might seem.
So far Celia seems to be better grounded than Dorothea. Dorothea wants to find a father, while Celia has her eye on Sir James Chettam. I wonder which one of these Mary Ann Evans identified with herself?
I realized when I read Mona's comment, but not when I was reading myself, that I think Eliot actualy gives us hints that she thinks that Chettam might have been a good match for Dorothea even as she also filters the scene through Dorothea's eyes. Some prejudice keeps her from seeing Chettam's qualities.
What a dull life Dorothea would lead with Chettam! Dorothea has a creative spirit (her drawings) and serious intellectual nature. And she’s a dreamer. I think she can do better!
It would be great to stage a debate: Chettam pro and con! Is he ready to grow and respect her, or narrow and self-regarding! She gives clues in both directions!
Yes, you’re right, she can do better. But how many young lives (young female lives) were ruined in the time GE was writing by marrying older, available, financially secure bachelor types, who also could be creepy men (I’m thinking here more of the educated classes) like Casaubon and it was a life sentence--they didn’t conveniently die. I think that’s the part we often lose sight of.
True. And think of arranged marriages in most of the world! Even thinking about romance in marriage was pretty much only in European (and American) society and even then not taken seriously.
And yet—so central to the development of the novel. Perhaps not a coincidence!
Still, a woman in those days was better off marrying (someone, anyone!) than becoming a spinster. A spinster was beholden to her family and expected to take care of children, the aging and infirm. Sylvia Townsend Warner has demonstrated the only valid solution to this dilemma is to become a witch.
Mary Ann Evans identified more with Mary Garth than with either Celia or Dorothea, imo. The latter two are “entitled,” as we would say today, although they are still decent and appealing. Mary Garth is not comely (like her author), but she is smart, grounded, resourceful. She will not give herself to Fred until the latter gets his act together. She cares less about “propriety” and more about what makes things sustainable long-term.
Is it possible that what's coming through in this chapter though is also that Dorothea is denying something of herself? Chettam appreciates her riding—and she does too, but she won't admit it! Such a direct metaphor for her rejection of sexuality. Chettam thinks her "religiousness" will die out with marriage. He is perhaps too patronizing for her—or perhaps he offers a more full-blooded existence than Dorothea realizes she needs. Just working from what we have read so far!
An interesting thought. So maybe Dorothea’s mistake in not simply that she is choosing the wrong husband, but is incorrectly choosing asexuality for herself?
I think it's that she fears sexuality, because she has no language for it. She moves herself in a direction that she can master through reading and argument, but this part of life has been kept from her.
It occurs to me that Dorothea’s motherlessness is relevant here--and the fact that Mr. Brooke (himself a bachelor?) has not provided her with a woman to talk to.
I think that is a super important point. It’s basically just she and Celia. Totally sheltered existence. Everything from books.
Yes, I think that might be it.
The great little detail of Dorothea enjoying but denying her enjoyment always reminds me (by contrast) of Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. Say what you will about Mary, she doesn't reject pleasure!
We are so educated now in being connoisseurs of pleasure. It's hard to imagine the constriction of the centuries in which people (esp women) were raised to think of pleasure as inherently suspect.
I think you nail it with what you say about Dorothea and Chettam. He seems too “right” for her (in all respects) at this juncture and she resents it. It’s not that he “settles” for Celia, it’s that she is actually a better match for his “robustness” at this point.
The play of all the reds! Celia blushes prettily but Dorothea "reddens" from "high delight or anger," and Sir James is "a blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered type."
Another warning sign about Casaubon (and sign his soul might not be great-excellent question, Mona!) is his self-absorption. That opening speech of his has eight “I”s in a row, and “my mind.” I...I...I...”my eyesight.”
Indeed. The eyesight thing is even a metaphor for it. And the sensitivity about other people's voices
More on this theme in Chapter 3! "He had not two styles of talking at his command"
Never read Middlemarch, and when I bought this hefty book I knew I'd need a support system to take it on. What great comments and suppositions and insights by all. this will be a terrific summer!
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Yes.