Middlemarch: Chapters 17–22

This week we could talk about Lydgate’s pride, his refusal to admit the anguish he feels being forced to vote for or against Mr. Farebrother, whom he authentically likes, his reluctance to acknowledge the clear evidence of Farebrother’s gambling for what it is—a need for money, his own abhorrence of contemplating “the gaining of small sums,” a lingering tendency from his aristocratic family (which in fact seems more a name than a reality in his life as his wealthier relatives will apparently not fund him), but we are all so glad to be back with Dorothea that I think that is where our sympathies will run.

It’s hard not to think of these Rome chapters as Eliot’s meditation on her own biggest fears about her work, her place in literary history, and the relation of the great to the mediocre, the major to the minor.

It’s instructive, though, for those of us who write to consider all that Eliot did not feel duty-bound to render, as she swerves from our last glimpse of Dorothea, at her engagement party, to Mrs. Casaubon, in Rome.

1.     There is no mention of the wedding itself whatsoever: no dress, no dinner, no bridesmaids, no party, no toasts or gifts.

2.    We don’t see the newlywed couple’s arrival in Rome, we have little sense of the handsome apartment they’re occupying, how they’re eating (in restaurants, at home, together?), the couple’s actual rooms (and for that matter those of Tantripp, Dorothea’s maid).

3.    We don’t hear the conversations in which the pattern of their days is decided upon. Before the wedding, Mr. Casaubon asked Dorothea to bring Celia along to Rome so she’d have company, while he conducts his research in the Vatican Library. “You will have many lonely hours, Dorothea,” he warned, “for I shall be constrained to make the utmost use of my time during our stay in Rome.” But even so warned, whatever Dorothea imagined does not match the reality, or the reality of what she feels. Like Mr. Casaubon (who had won a lovely young woman but “had not won delight”), Dorothea has married the husband she chose, but neither does she feel delight.

4.    Most importantly, we can only intimate the internal movements that lead Dorothea to question Mr. Casaubon’s genius. To Dorothea, a young, spiritually-leaning aspiring intellectual, Mr. Casaubon was a prince, a provincial Pascal. Losing faith in the importance of his work is the equivalent of Cinderella learning that the prince whom she won with a glass slipper is in fact only a mid-level civil servant. But the gaining and losing of faith is one of the most subtle changes a character—or a person—can undergo.

We see numerous instances of Mr. Casaubon introducing Dorothea to Rome’s art and artifacts as “highly esteemed” or “celebrated,” or as those “which most persons think it worth while to visit,” to which Dorothea’s painful question is always: “But do you [italics mine] care about them?”

However her change of mood developed, it has already tipped by the time we meet Dorothea again in Rome, as Mrs. Casaubon. “How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?”

The narrator, whom we have already learned to trust as fair, wise, and kind, asks, “But was not Mr. Casaubon just as learned as before?”

One scene feels particularly pivotal and raw.

“I hope you are thoroughly satisfied with our stay–I mean, with the result so far as your studies are concerned,” Dorothea asks Mr. Casaubon.

“‘Yes,’” says Mr. Casaubon, “with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes the word half a negative.”

Frustrated, Dorothea pushes the matter.

“I hope when we get to Lowick, I shall be more useful to you, and be able to enter a little more into what interests you.”

With this, we glimpse a bit of the romance Dorothea had imagined her life to be: Mr. Casaubon conducting his profound investigations, with her at his side. Sherlock and Watson, Nancy Drew and Bess Marvin. She’s eager to for him (them!) to put together his great work.

“‘And all your notes,’” says Dorothea, “whose heart had already burned within her on this subject … ‘All those rows of volumes–will you not now do what you used to speak of?—will you not make up your mind what part of them you will use, and begin to write the book which will make your vast knowledge useful to the world? I will write to your dictation, or I will copy and extract what you tell me: I can be of no other use.’ Dorothea, in a most unaccountable, darkly-feminine manner, ended with a slight sob and eyes full of tears.”

It is telling that Dorothea opens her cri de coeur not with “Will you?” but with “Will you not?” She’s voraciously eager for him to finish the great book, to send it out into the world, and for it to gain him acclaim.

Mr. Casaubon does not take this ardent urging well.

“The excessive feeling manifested would alone have been highly disturbing to Mr. Casaubon” (more about this later) “but there were other reasons why Dorothea’s words were among the most cutting and irritating to him that she could have been impelled to use. She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers: she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity.” While he had unconsciously hoped for a young bride who would observe “his abundant pen-scratches and amplitude of paper with the uncritical awe of an elegant-minded canary-bird,” she now felt to him like “a spy watching everything with a malign power of inference.”

For Mr. Casaubon is afraid to release his great book. He hears many critical voices in his head. He’s afraid to be rejected, even mocked. He’s unwilling to lose what little he has—he lives comfortably on a country estate where his provincial neighbors generally respect him as a scholar, without understanding what exactly he does. He wishes to join the conversation of contemporary intellectuals, in particular those probing the sources of ancient myths, but he deeply fears their criticism, he fears the inadequacies of his own thoughts.

What novelist has not had these same fears?

And then there’s the sheer mountain of notes to get through! With each day, he’s adding to the already impossible task of making something coherent out of all these disparate jottings, an especially challenging task for someone who lacks the conviction to have spontaneous opinions, who relies on general consensus as to what is “esteemed” and “respected.” Mr. Casaubon has long ago lost the fire publish his masterpiece. Perhaps even without knowing it consciously he’s made a deal with himself to work daily but never “finish” the great work.

Of course, there’s another ghost hovering over the time elapsed since we last saw Dorothea and Mr. Casaubon at their engagement party and now: the marriage bed.

Alongside the unknowns within “mind weighted with unpublished matter” the question remains open as to the level of affection Mr. Casaubon is capable of.

Our narrator tips her hand with another glimpse into Dorothea. Although Dorothea, in the most immature corner of her nature, fluttered to the status of “being married to Pascal,” she is capable of more homely love.  “With all her yearning to know what was afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardor enough for what was near, to have kissed Mr. Casaubon’s coat-sleeve, or to have caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made any other sign of acceptance than pronouncing her, with his unfailing propriety, to be of a most affectionate and truly feminine nature, indicating at the same time by politely reaching a chair for her that he regarded these manifestations as rather crude and startling.”

We can infer all we might.

Enter Will.

As was the case when we last met Dorothea, at the engagement party, we first see her in Rome, at a distance. We come across her being regarded and assessed for her sexual body, before we are allowed any intimacy with her ourselves. There’s something crass about the German painter Naumann’s frank attraction and perhaps cruel, if funny, in his laughing at the incongruity of her with the “sallow Geistlicher” Casaubon.

Dorothea and Will (alone) have the kind of conversations about art and Rome that Dorothea had imagined having with her husband. “There is so little of the best kind [of art] among all that mass of things over which men have toiled so,” she says.

“Of course there is always a great deal of poor work: the rarer things want that soil to grow in,” Will answers. This is a less than comforting notion for Dorothea, whose mind is eminently capable of analogy; she would certainly prefer Mr. Casaubon’s work to be the rare, great work, not the poor soil other superior work can grow in.

Eliot, we can presume, as she is writing Middlemarch, hopes for her book to be the rare great work too, not the sacrificial general soil.

Dorothea has already entered a crisis of faith in her husband’s powers, and Will puts salt in that painful wound, saying “it is a pity that it [Mr. Casaubon’s efforts] should be thrown away, as so much English scholarship is, for want of knowing what is being done by the rest of the world. If Mr. Casaubon read German he would save himself a great deal of trouble … the Germans have taken the lead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at results which are got by groping about in woods with a pocket-compass while they have made good roads.”

When Dorothea sees Will again, days later, it becomes evident that she has a refutation prepared. “But there are very valuable books about antiquities which were written a long while ago by scholars who knew nothing about these modern things; and they are still used. Why should Mr. Casaubon’s not be valuable, like theirs?” says Dorothea, “with more remonstrant energy. She was impelled to have the argument aloud, which she had been having in her own mind.”

“The subject Mr. Casaubon has chosen is as changing as chemistry: new discoveries are constantly making new points of view. Who wants a system on the basis of the four elements, or a book to refute Paracelsus?”

“‘How can you bear to speak so lightly?’” replies Dorothea, “with a look between sorrow and anger. ‘If it were as you say, what could be sadder than so much ardent labor all in vain? I wonder it does not affect you more painfully, if you really think that a man like Mr. Casaubon, of so much goodness, power, and learning, should in any way fail in what has been the labor of his best years.’ She was beginning to be shocked that she had got to such a point of supposition, and indignant with Will for having led her to it.”

Dorothea is horrified at her own admission, to another person, of her loss of belief. “Promise me that you will not again, to any one, speak of that subject–I mean, about Mr. Casaubon’s writings–I mean in that kind of way. It was I who led to it. It was my fault. But promise me.”

Eliot’s emotional investment never feels more personal than here, writing about the shame that clings to the person who is audacious enough devote a life to a great book.

Nauman and Will play a trick on Mr. Casaubon; they flatter him, saying a sketch of his head would be valuable as a model for St. Thomas Aquinas. “As for Dorothea, nothing could have pleased her more, unless it had been a miraculous voice pronouncing Mr. Casaubon the wisest and worthiest among the sons of men. In that case her tottering faith would have become firm again.”

In the end, Mr. Casaubon satisfies the young men’s skepticism. Mr. Casaubon arranges for the portrait of himself, as Aquinas, to be sent to Lowick, leaving the sketch of Dorothea behind in the artist’s atelier. 

“It was as I thought: he cared much less for her portrait than his own,” Naumann says with pleasure.

In these chapters, the reader can savor Dorothea’s ease and intimacy with Will, like a platonic affair: we know it’s not to go anywhere, so we can enjoy the sweet impossibility.

“I should like to make life beautiful–I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it.”

“‘I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,’” said Will, “impetuously. ‘You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy—when you can.’”

Will tells her she is too somber for her age. “It is an anachronism for you to have such thoughts,” he says. “You talk as if you had never known any youth. It is monstrous–as if you had had a vision of Hades in your childhood, like the boy in the legend.”

The boy in the legend is Anskar, a ninth-century missionary to Scandinavia, who, at the age of five, had a vision of his dead mother.      

Of course, Dorothea, too, has a dead mother, and in this reference Will is the first person in the novel to touch on this great loss.

For next week: All of Book Three! Find our schedule here.

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Mona Simpson is the author of seven novels, most recently Commitment, which appeared this spring.

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Image: Giovanni Paolo Panini, Interior of the Pantheon, Rome (detail) (1747). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund