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.
An interesting point. I can’t think of an example now but I can recall stories from the past about couples stumbling along until one day they just “get” it. Then things really get interesting. (Think FDR and Eleanor or even Victoria and Albert.)
Thanks for a truly insightful account of these chapters. The only thing I would add, from the point of view of psychology, and I don't know what to make of it, is how very important anger is in Chapter 20, where Dorothea and Casaubon get in their fight. It isn't only, as you say, that Dorothea is eager and ardent (unless we take ardent in its literal sense of burning) and then disappointed. She is surprised to find herself angry ("...her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger...") even before they have their fight, simply being in Rome. And then, after she speaks of the notes becoming a book, "Casaubon's face had a quick, angry flush upon it." Finally, we are told they are both shocked "...that each should have betrayed anger toward the other." Anger is an emotion that can accompany real insight, according to some philosophers. It may also be an index of their intense involvement with one another, despite Casaubon's prim physical distancing you describe so well.
This seems very true to me. The stifled humiliation/resentment of that. You see it also in these dawning glints of revulsion (her "inward fits of anger and repulsion"; his coming to "affect her with a sort of mental shiver")
There is something quasi-sexual maybe about "And all your notes...all those rows of volumes-will you not now do..." It's as if Casaubon has invested all his libidinal energy in his notebooks, which are imagined as something physical Dorothea wishes to cooperatively seize, but is denied, and after his reply, Eliot writes "[his speech] rushed out like the round grains from a fruit when sudden heat cracks it."
That is such an interesting point. This anger felt so real to me, and their disturbance that it "seemed like a catastrophe" that it should surface on their honeymoon. Once again there is the emphasis on Casaubon's innocence, "he never having been on a wedding journey before." I wonder how much behind it is their sense that it is an aberration not to have consummated the union—if not literally, emotionally. How much does Eliot expect us to be wondering about this? Casaubon at least must know what even religion expects marriage to deliver (so to speak).
Good question! Along those lines, I wonder if, say, from a Freudian perspective, their anger can be seen as repressed sexual energy (or even a death drive) needing to find an outlet. It is a real engagement, however painful, and will resurface. Would it be too weird (ungeheuer, to quote Naumann) and creepy to call their anger itself a consummation, a diverted sex scene? Greek tragedy treats outbursts of rage in this way...
p.s. I realize you are referring to the biblical injunction to "be fruitful and multiply," but not all Christian authorities would have endorsed this idea. Perhaps Casaubon could comfort himself with assurances that a Christian married couple can be spiritual help-mates without the need of progeny.
Perhaps I am projecting backward in time, but I was thinking more about the way Christianity has only countenanced procreative sex: for so long all sorts of other ways of finding sexual pleasure were forbidden.
Marriage and sexuality and religion in Victorian England is such a can of worms. I am not sure what to say. Eliot avoids the question but it's in the air. No one, i think, in the book raises the question of their having kids, even though that would be a normal thing to say? Because it is just being assumed that they are like this studious couple devoted to higher things, but perhaps Victorian propriety is also playing a role? I highly recommend this book Dead From the Waist Down by A. D. Nuttall if you don't know it. It's incredibly funny and learned and a great read and all about Casaubon (!). Rebecca Mead draws on it in her Middlemarch book. He has a page or two about John Ruskin's marriage to Effie Chalmers Gray (divorce with attendant publicity 1854). Their marriage remained unconsummated and details about their non-sex-life came to public attention.
I have always assumed that Casaubon and Dorothea did not consummate the marriage. That may not have even been on the agenda. She seems so idealistic with her head in the clouds (although that doesn’t necessarily mean anything), while he seems so frail, retiring, and kind of disembodied.
I found the lines that Mona quoted though about her thwarted impulse toward affection so convincing though. She may not have known quite what to expect, but she seems to have expected something. Perhaps her orphanhood also left her with a need to be touched and held. I was also struck by this passage, adjoining Mona's quote: "These characteristics … might have longer remained unfelt by Dorothea if she had been encouraged to pour forth her girlish and womanly feeling—if he would have held her hands between his and listened with the delight of tenderness and understanding to all the little histories which made up her experience, and would have given her the same sort of intimacy in return, so that the past life of each could be included in their mutual knowledge and affection—or if she could have fed her affection with those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll."
That is a very interesting thing to think about, Eliot's fear about her own work. It does throw more sympathy on Casaubon to see it that way. I like how Eliot lets Will say horrible things about Casaubon because it satisfies an itch, for the reader too. It is wearying to be so broad-minded and sympathetic all the time. Not that I am! But I think the narrator is. Which is one of the great things about the book, to have both kinds of commentary going on.
I am glad to see Dorothea again, but I do find the descriptions of her still a little annoying. All the perfect beauty and quivering young sensitivity. I almost feel more sorry for Casaubon in a way! I can't believe I'm saying that .. but he is set in his ways and while he may get some unpleasant shocks he is not going to change course or suddenly become a different guy. Exploring his character has its limits though if anyone can make him multi-faceted it's Eliot.
Will fell very quickly in love ... like everyone else in this book!
So true! It does sometimes seem like Eliot is pushing us to admire Dorothea, sensing that we might share her neighbors' skepticism. At the same time you remind me of another passage that aligns Casaubon and Eliot, when Dorothea seems to him "the personification of that shallow world which surrounds the ill-appreciated or desponding author" and brings out of him a long-gestating speech in defense of his methods. It's as though all these characters are situated around the work of writing a novel and regarding it through their own needs and limitations. She is empathizing, serially, with those who would dismiss or caricature her work.
I like Mona Simpson‘s point about the Rome chapters hiding Eliot’s own insecurities regarding the reception of her novel. But I also sense something else going on, something that Eliot, even a sometimes insecure and doubting Eliot, must have felt. Eliot is contrasting a novel of ideas, her own, that still is fully embedded in “real life” and a project of the mind, Mr. C’s, with its “small closets and winding stairs,” that is going nowhere and thus can’t make its way back to the ‘big picture’ and to people’s hearts (the necessary ingredient of inspiration). Eliot is a strong writer and the flourishes she allows her narrator (the metaphors, the period realia presented in different scenes, the stylistic registers capturing different ‘voice zones’ of the people) do not suggest a retiring or hesitant mind. Did she have her insecurities? Yes. Did they prevent her from putting herself out there? No. For me the main difference between Eliot’s ‘project’ and Mr. C’s: the former convincingly ‘models life’ (we are so taken in we believe what we are reading), the latter does not.
Yes! I think there are things she says about science--about its embrace of the particulars--that apply to her, a contrast with Casaubon's project of reducing everything to shared abstractions.
With regard to feeling sympathy for Casaubon, it would help if his scholarly project could emerge in clearer outline. It seems like he’s collecting and collecting and collecting, but we’re never allowed to see how he proposes to get from point A to point B and turn that progress into a story. The reason for this, which we’re only gradually beginning to find out, is in Casaubon himself: his insecurity, his intellectual timidity, his inability to separate the forest from the trees. Everything is kept rather vague, which is presumably intentional, as it shows the hesitancy of Casaubon‘s mind in all matters except propriety. Also, it’s in Rome where Dorothea begins to inwardly challenge Casaubon because, while he tries to make things interesting for her (a good thing) by pointing out which antiquities are cited by the cognoscenti, he refuses to say--indeed is incapable of saying, what truly moves him. Where I do feel sympathy for Casaubon is in the way he feels trapped: he wanted a helpmeet scribe who would copy but never judge. That’s what he thought he was getting. But in these chapters Dorothea begins to sense that the “big picture” is not there, that the project is possibly a fraud, and this causes him to want to retreat back into his shell or, when confronted, to act defensively and unkindly. In these situations, I feel some sympathy for Casaubon. But not much, to be honest. He is too frail physically and fragile psychologically, too fearful of criticism and closed to other perspectives, too blindly focused on what is not going anywhere. His “life of the mind” is not the kind that survives.
Yes. Dorothea is too good and is never going to hate Casaubon, only find ways of pitying him. On the honeymoon that is supposed to bring them together she is instead forced to see their separateness from each other, and even more, Casaubon's independence from her in moral terms. Near end of Ch 21 "... she had felt the waking of a consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own." This is about as far as sympathy can travel and where empathy may begin.
Casaubon is not a caricature, unfortunately.
I've even wondered if all his professed labor has become no more than a fictional screen between him and other people and if he is just going off for a snooze somewhere when he's supposed to be in the library ... perhaps there is more to his failure than meets the eye?
Maybe we don't see how he proposes to get from A to B because he can't even try, and as for turning it into a story, that's for the Eliots of the world to do. Small wonder then? she - Eliot- can afford to be generous?
“if he is just going off for a snooze somewhere when he's supposed to be in the library ...”
I know a few senior scholars who fall into this category!
And I love your line: “This is about as far as sympathy can travel and where empathy may begin.” Any close relationship that has reached such a state is likely in a death spiral
And I loved your line that “C is not a caricature, unfortunately.” We know these people; they bring out pity and annoyance in me. Neither a delightful quality.
This is such a thoughtful response from Mona. Thank you.
I was reminded of the glacial sense of history inscribed in the landscapes of Canada in Alice Munro's stories. Some lakes look like claw scratches in the rocks. In Rome, among ruins of a great civilization, we see a quick marriage's facade already crack. Vanitas. We see this in the portraits, one of Casaubon as a dead man, and one of the living Dorothea, which her new husband shuns.
Yes! It makes sense that landscape and portraiture should come into play now that we are in a world of painters (comparing painting to writing). I was noticing how Dorothea's inner world is often described as a landscape, and Casaubon's as a warren of small rooms, though which he passes with his taper.
I'm with you all in thinking that the bedroom anger is a deliberate hint by Eliot of sexual frustration, at least on Dorothea's part.
Meanwhile, I just want to draw attention to Chapter 17, I love the description of Rev Farebrother's 'den'...'nothing but pickled vermin and drawers full of bluebottles and moths with no carpet on the floor.' In the early 1830s, it was the Reverend Farebrothers everywhere who were pioneering scientific studies of botany and anatomy that within the next fifty years would revolutionise our understanding of science and evolution. Charles Darwin had just finished his degree at Cambridge and was setting off on the Beagle. For many of these proto-scientists, their studies would come at the cost of their beliefs - or leave them torn and in denial (such as Philip Gosse, as portrayed in Father and Son by his son Edmund.)
Finally, wince with me when Lydgate says, about moving out of London to the country, 'one makes less bad blood, and can follow one's own course more quietly.' He is about to find out that one is never safe from the dangers of picking the wrong side!
Oh what an interesting observation! The whole play of faith and science here, and how science seems to have sympathy with the novelist's work—seeing things as they are rather than as they "should" be, trusting observation and not abstractions—I find so suggestive. And the awareness of the openness and adventurousness of these pursuits before they were professionalized. Pure curiosity and interest.
Great question. Although Lydgate is kind and caring to his patients and helps them in concrete ways (cf. D’s charitable projects), my sense is Dorothea is more in sync psychologically/spiritually with Ladislaw. That could also just be me being influenced by what I already know. But it is touching how her initial reactions are always to show kindness and put people at ease.
Absolutely! That’s why she gets such high marks for presenting the “beautiful” female characters, Dorothea here and Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda, with such psychological penetration and empathy.
Casaubon’s feelings toward Will: “There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire:it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.” Casaubon does have feelings but they’re hidden so deeply there’s no spark, just sadness and a simmering anger.
There are so many good and right things said about this latest reading. There is no way I could have imagined them all without Mona's in-depth, insightful commentary and the comments that followed (and I have read all of them). Thanks to everyone, especially Mona, for taking the time to contribute intellectually to this thread, which I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated. A posthumous thanks, too, to Mary Ann Evans, who clearly had more in mind than "cashing in" when she wrote Middlemarch.
I must confess that I found many passages in this past week's readings to be troubling and difficult to follow. Were it not for knowing of the light to eventually be cast upon them at week end by the learned folks assembled here, I would have cast this book aside and never lifted the cover again. I loved Dickinson's brief sentences gorged with meaning, whereas Elliot spins paragraph after paragraph from every direction, page after page probing choice situations, which at times I found cumbersome and tiring. I am also starting to find the continuous references to classic literature at the beginning of each chapter, and historical references peppered throughout the text, as a bit "over the top" in my mind. In some instances the inferences and citations work, but many times, I was scratching my head and consulting notes to the text before moving on. Perhaps in Victorian times people had more time to ponder "why?" or the references were more in the popular domain than they are now. Or is Eliot trying just a bit too hard to impress us? Perhaps all of these things.
Troubling, too, because I never thought as deeply about some of these subjects as Eliot has done. I love Rome and have spent months there. It never occurred to me that gallery after gallery in the Vatican was anything but amazing, but the observations of their sameness are not undeserved. Troubling that, yes, we all make self interested choices and blind ourselves to our less-than-noble rationales. Troubling because we all tend to look with less than a gracious eye at times upon our own benefactors, whether they be parents, friends, bosses and yes, even the government with so many folks collecting with one hand and critical of the actions that don't benefit us personally on the other.
By no means am I another Will Ladislaw making dispersions upon Mr Casaubon, muddying what is clearly a masterpiece work. Nor would I expect anyone to be as impressionable as young Dorothea, allowing my observations to colour their own opinions in a negative way. I wouldn't even bring this up if the scenes and actions committed to the paper didn't work and form an image in my mind that we all can relate to, and the work products we are experiencing weren't worth some small thoughtful contribution and reaction on my part, as well.
Perhaps it is unwise to speak one's mind in any critical way here about an author, especially when I don't have a deep appreciation for the times and circumstances during which the work was written. But maybe I am the elephant in the room and a speaker for our times, too, an aspiring writer who has come to believe, in much the same way Dorothea is starting to worry about her new husband's possible contributions (or lack of them), that all of our work eventually becomes "soil" for new and better artwork to feed upon, like our own ashes that eventually form the soil which produces the food consumed by the pregnant mother and her fetus, all marching towards the day when our galaxy is sucked into a black hole and our race catapults to another sphere or is vanquished.
I also offer these remarks as further elaboration of remarks made previously about my appreciation for being led into this novel by Ms. Simpson, a work I would have tossed to the side after the last 50 pages. I am thankful for being spoon-fed and babied along to make it to the eventual finish line.
And now I am starting to mimic Eliot, going on and on looking at a point from every which way. So let me say I am troubled by reading my own comments, too. It is time to stop, hit "post" and walk away. Nothing produced by mankind is perfect and never will be. There is a big crack running through it all. Emerson said it so well.
Please do go ahead and speak your mind! That is what you are here for, and I don’t think Eliot herself would have wanted us just to accept her authority and not be true to our own reactions! I hope that, having been encouraged to stick with it, you’ll feel it was well worth it in the end!
I do think, as some have said here, that we are meant to see Dororthea’s indifference to what she finds in Rome to be a register of the state of her inner development more than a mark against Rome. As for the epigraphs, I have started to think of them as sort of a joke. I learned from the footnotes in my edition that some of them are made up by her, and it strikes me that they are sometimes meant to sound a little faux-pompous, or to sort of parody the didactic tone of such things. I’ve taken to going back and reading them again when I finish the chapters and I often find them to be, and I think this is intentional, wryly off kilter.
I am trying to catch up with everybody!!! Visualize woman hunched over reading w great earnestness, a la someone in a spin class (only took one in my life so have no idea what I’m talking about there). I am liking; I am admiring; I am curious and determined to read the whole of Middlemarch - these are my issues, female identity/societal expectations- but, so far, I am not loving Middlemarch. At about p. 157. Still reading.
Oh I hope you persevere! Where are you finding your resistances? Sometimes I feel slowed down by the level of detail, but then she suprises me with her humor.
The long passages of exposition. I want more in scene. Her observations are brilliant and really gob-smackingly so, thinking about when she was writing this, but it’s too dense (for me). One sentence distilling a really developed, thoughtful observation about the way society really works, as opposed to the surface, after another. Some, or many, sparking reactions that take time. I need more breathing space and other balancing elements. In a way it’s like really rich bread pudding without a little milk (non-dairy for me, please!).
It's interesting. It's reminding me of Henry James a little, at this point, these long intervals to describe minutely subtle and even internally contradictory states of mind. I find it hard as a modern person to settle into this pace of thought... We're so trained to move on.
Just came across this quote in the new book by Clare Carlisle: Eliot's partner George Lewes is complaining about the detailed descriptive passages in Goethe's "Elective Affinities," and Eliot disagrees, saying they "are artistic devices for impressing the reader with a sense of the slow movement of life."
Also, I’m almost caught up, and that lessens a sense of pressure. And I got into the after-effects from Fred’s SELFISH and STUPID behavior and actions w money. How amazing was it that Eliot spent that time showing us Mrs. Garth’s life and personhood. I felt the pain of the consequences of Fred’s SELFISH and STUPID actions so much more than if she had taken a shorter path to the point of that scene. Then Mary!! Wow, I loved her emotional reactions and Eliot’s keeping us so close as we saw this horrible news fall on her, then her strength and connectedness to her family and core of who she was in the dialogue b/w her and Fred.
I think in addition to the long exposition sections, my enjoyment had been negatively impacted by the length of time that we are away from the central characters. Like pages and pages of distance.
Anyway I shall not quit on this book or this really wonderful read-along led by you and Mona and peopled by so many other passionate avid readers!
This beautiful write-up reminds me that Eliot does such a deft job of showing the link between Dorothea's hero workshop/self-abnegation and the early loss of her mother. Just as Dorothea isn't conscious of this wounding, the reader might only be barely conscious of it.
Another question I have is about the Roman setting. What use is Eliot making of Rome in these chapters? There is one great paragraph about Dorothea's response to Rome that would be worth discussing. It might seem that her response to Rome is unrelated to her changing feelings about her marriage, more a matter of her Quakerish predisposition, but towards the end of this paragraph we realize that she is projecting her feelings of disappointment onto the martyrdoms, etc. frescoed around her. No wonder they affect her so powerfully. Paradoxically, she seems to have a more authentic, vital response to Rome, though a sorrowful one, than a great critic like Ruskin whoever, who projects his energy outward. Similarly, when Naumann discovers her, he finds her more alive than the Ariadne she dreamily ignores.
Great point. For this reader, her sexuality is always there, never simply sublimated or intellectualized outward. Maybe this is simply my projection, but it seems Eliot is trying to capture something that is alive and thinking at the same time, so that the cognitive and the emotional/affective/physical are not separated out. That’s what I think the “male” gaze of Naumann is seeing and kidding Ladislaw about: the attraction for the artist of the obvious undividedness.
I feel like with the Rome thing too we are seeing a bit of Eliot's insecurities in her youth. She grew up in this cloistered, small-town environment with aspirations of her own and probably encountered some of these confusions when she ventured into the bigger European world. The corporality, vividness, drama of Catholicism also: intentionally isolated from puritannical English culture. I think perhaps we more worldly readers are a little disappointed and surprised that Dorothea doesn't find more of what she is looking for in Rome, but Eliot is reminding us that she still needs to learn and grow. She was misled by Casaubon because she doesn't really *know* what she is looking for.
Great point about Eliot’s own small-town, cloistered, sternly Protestant England and Dorothea’s “culture shock “ experience of vivid, corporeal, Catholic Rome. And of course Mr. C. is not a good guide for the latter. Will L. would have been better but the timing is off.
I find it touching how open she is with Will and yet meeting him doesn't seem to startle her especially. Perhaps we are trained to look for a better match for her. Does Eliot predict expect us to think this way? Is Dorothea's almost comradely response to Will (and her lack of interest in Lydgate) an intentional bucking of our expectations?
See I actually think Dorothea does perceive an awful lot in Rome. Her perceptions are subjective and determined by her situation but that makes them more interesting than the tourist perspective. On another, hegelian level, Rome is a "world-city" and whatever happens there has "world-historical significance." Thus Naumann can synthesize pagan and christian perspectives in his aesthetics of Dorothea. Who knows, maybe Dorothea Casaubon nee Brooke, in Rome, is a "world-historical figure"! This is only half a joke. Eliot was so deep in German thought and lit after doing those translations, I think she almost thinks in german, and the passages in Rome are especially Hegelian.
I beg you all to reread the paragraph beginning "To those who have looked at Rome..." near the beginning of Chapter 20. It may be one of the best things Eliot ever wrote. Nuttall thinks so. It's so layered with irony and implication, so bold! An especially interesting move is "But let them perceive one more historical contrast..." That's where she (subtly but audaciously) demands what I am calling "world-historical" status for her heroine, which isn't to take away from the here-and-now elements we've been focusing on...
"Like a disease of the retina," so strong. I spent years making an academy in Rome and thinking about that tradition, even taking it for granted (didn't work out exactly on a couple of levels, but that's another story). Dorothea's antipathy is so startling, but it also opens up something about the ways she is unrealized and what her latent possibilities are. It does make you think again about how rough it must have been before it was sanitized by tourism. I happened to have been reading Henry Adams just before starting this adventure, just at the early point where he gives up on Germany and succumbs to Italy almost in spite of himself.
There are so many good and right things said about this latest reading. There is no way I could have imagined them all without Mona's in-depth, insightful commentary and the comments that followed (and I have read all of them). Thanks to everyone, especially Mona, for taking the time to contribute intellectually to this thread, which I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated. A posthumous thanks, too, to Mary Ann Evans, who clearly had more in mind than "cashing in" when she wrote Middlemarch.
I must confess that I found many passages in this past week's readings to be troubling and difficult to follow. Were it not for knowing of the light to eventually be cast upon them at week end by the learned folks assembled here, I would have cast this book aside and never lifted the cover again. I loved Dickinson's brief sentences gorged with meaning, whereas Elliot spins paragraph after paragraph from every direction, page after page probing choice situations, which at times I found cumbersome and tiring. I am also starting to find the continuous references to classic literature at the beginning of each chapter, and historical references peppered throughout the text, as a bit "over the top" in my mind. In some instances the inferences and citations work, but many times, I was scratching my head and consulting notes to the text before moving on. Perhaps in Victorian times people had more time to ponder "why?" or the references were more in the popular domain than they are now. Or is Eliot trying just a bit too hard to impress us? Perhaps all of these things.
Troubling, too, because I never thought as deeply about some of these subjects as Eliot has done. I love Rome and have spent months there. It never occurred to me that gallery after gallery in the Vatican was anything but amazing, but the observations of their sameness are not undeserved. Troubling that, yes, we all make self interested choices and blind ourselves to our less-than-noble rationales. Troubling because we all tend to look with less than a gracious eye at times upon our own benefactors, whether they be parents, friends, bosses and yes, even the government with so many folks collecting with one hand and critical of the actions that don't benefit us personally on the other.
By no means am I another Will Ladislaw making dispersions upon Mr Casaubon, muddying what is clearly a masterpiece work. Nor would I expect anyone to be as impressionable as young Dorothea, allowing my observations to colour their own opinions in a negative way. I wouldn't even bring this up if the scenes and actions committed to the paper didn't work and form an image in my mind that we all can relate to, and the work products we are experiencing weren't worth some small thoughtful contribution and reaction on my part, as well.
Perhaps it is unwise to speak one's mind in any critical way here about an author, especially when I don't have a deep appreciation for the times and circumstances during which the work was written. But maybe I am the elephant in the room and a speaker for our times, too, an aspiring writer who has come to believe, in much the same way Dorothea is starting to worry about her new husband's possible contributions (or lack of them), that all of our work eventually becomes "soil" for new and better artwork to feed upon, like our own ashes that eventually form the soil which produces the food consumed by the pregnant mother and her fetus, all marching towards the day when our galaxy is sucked into a black hole and our race catapults to another sphere or is vanquished.
I also offer these remarks as further elaboration of remarks made previously about my appreciation for being led into this novel by Ms. Simpson, a work I would have tossed to the side after the last 50 pages. I am thankful for being spoon-fed and babied along to make it to the eventual finish line.
And now I am starting to mimic Eliot, going on and on looking at a point from every which way. So let me say I am troubled by reading my own comments, too. It is time to stop, hit "post" and walk away. Nothing produced by mankind is perfect and never will be. There is a big crack running through it all. Emerson said it so well.
There are so many parallels in play. Waiting for death, of course, refers primarily to Featherstone, but Book Four opens with Featherstone's funeral and Dorothea, Casaubon, Celia,Sir James, Mr Brooke and Mrs. Cadwallader watching from above, in Lowick Manor. By now, Mr. Casaubon also seems nearer to death. Dorothea is trying to summon back her faith, her love, her hopefulness, though it now feels in such different tones.
Lovely thought, about the changing sense of time. It would be so interesting to try to track that. Such an expansive notion also of faith: Dorothea rests too much faith in this man because she does not have enough faith in herself to live fully at the level at which she wants to. She recognizes her own calling as religious (faith beyond the human realm), as Casaubon does, but their ability to exercise religious faith is delimited by the scale of their faith in human capabilities. Dorothea's loss of faith in Casaubon is perhaps a necessary prelude to discovery of faith in herself, which will enable religious faith.
I've always thought perhaps something undefined happened: a fumble, mistakes, perhaps even mutual humiliation.
An interesting point. I can’t think of an example now but I can recall stories from the past about couples stumbling along until one day they just “get” it. Then things really get interesting. (Think FDR and Eleanor or even Victoria and Albert.)
I'd love to read about Eleanor and FDR's romantic history. I've read bios of Eleanor that really don't say much about it!
I remember being told about Victoria and Albert. A happy story.
A secret history!
I hope it will begin to speak to you.
Thanks for a truly insightful account of these chapters. The only thing I would add, from the point of view of psychology, and I don't know what to make of it, is how very important anger is in Chapter 20, where Dorothea and Casaubon get in their fight. It isn't only, as you say, that Dorothea is eager and ardent (unless we take ardent in its literal sense of burning) and then disappointed. She is surprised to find herself angry ("...her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger...") even before they have their fight, simply being in Rome. And then, after she speaks of the notes becoming a book, "Casaubon's face had a quick, angry flush upon it." Finally, we are told they are both shocked "...that each should have betrayed anger toward the other." Anger is an emotion that can accompany real insight, according to some philosophers. It may also be an index of their intense involvement with one another, despite Casaubon's prim physical distancing you describe so well.
This is a great point. The anger seems surprisingly deep, considering how measured and polite they've both always been to each other up until now.
I think the power of the anger suggests an unfortunate scene in the bedroom that Eliot leaves to our imagination.
This seems very true to me. The stifled humiliation/resentment of that. You see it also in these dawning glints of revulsion (her "inward fits of anger and repulsion"; his coming to "affect her with a sort of mental shiver")
There is something quasi-sexual maybe about "And all your notes...all those rows of volumes-will you not now do..." It's as if Casaubon has invested all his libidinal energy in his notebooks, which are imagined as something physical Dorothea wishes to cooperatively seize, but is denied, and after his reply, Eliot writes "[his speech] rushed out like the round grains from a fruit when sudden heat cracks it."
Thanks, glad you agree!
That is such an interesting point. This anger felt so real to me, and their disturbance that it "seemed like a catastrophe" that it should surface on their honeymoon. Once again there is the emphasis on Casaubon's innocence, "he never having been on a wedding journey before." I wonder how much behind it is their sense that it is an aberration not to have consummated the union—if not literally, emotionally. How much does Eliot expect us to be wondering about this? Casaubon at least must know what even religion expects marriage to deliver (so to speak).
Good question! Along those lines, I wonder if, say, from a Freudian perspective, their anger can be seen as repressed sexual energy (or even a death drive) needing to find an outlet. It is a real engagement, however painful, and will resurface. Would it be too weird (ungeheuer, to quote Naumann) and creepy to call their anger itself a consummation, a diverted sex scene? Greek tragedy treats outbursts of rage in this way...
p.s. I realize you are referring to the biblical injunction to "be fruitful and multiply," but not all Christian authorities would have endorsed this idea. Perhaps Casaubon could comfort himself with assurances that a Christian married couple can be spiritual help-mates without the need of progeny.
Perhaps I am projecting backward in time, but I was thinking more about the way Christianity has only countenanced procreative sex: for so long all sorts of other ways of finding sexual pleasure were forbidden.
Marriage and sexuality and religion in Victorian England is such a can of worms. I am not sure what to say. Eliot avoids the question but it's in the air. No one, i think, in the book raises the question of their having kids, even though that would be a normal thing to say? Because it is just being assumed that they are like this studious couple devoted to higher things, but perhaps Victorian propriety is also playing a role? I highly recommend this book Dead From the Waist Down by A. D. Nuttall if you don't know it. It's incredibly funny and learned and a great read and all about Casaubon (!). Rebecca Mead draws on it in her Middlemarch book. He has a page or two about John Ruskin's marriage to Effie Chalmers Gray (divorce with attendant publicity 1854). Their marriage remained unconsummated and details about their non-sex-life came to public attention.
I'm rushing to order Dead From the Waist Down right now!
Not mincing words there with the title…
I have always assumed that Casaubon and Dorothea did not consummate the marriage. That may not have even been on the agenda. She seems so idealistic with her head in the clouds (although that doesn’t necessarily mean anything), while he seems so frail, retiring, and kind of disembodied.
I found the lines that Mona quoted though about her thwarted impulse toward affection so convincing though. She may not have known quite what to expect, but she seems to have expected something. Perhaps her orphanhood also left her with a need to be touched and held. I was also struck by this passage, adjoining Mona's quote: "These characteristics … might have longer remained unfelt by Dorothea if she had been encouraged to pour forth her girlish and womanly feeling—if he would have held her hands between his and listened with the delight of tenderness and understanding to all the little histories which made up her experience, and would have given her the same sort of intimacy in return, so that the past life of each could be included in their mutual knowledge and affection—or if she could have fed her affection with those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll."
Duly noted! Definitely more going on there. Hadn’t processed this previously.
That is a very interesting thing to think about, Eliot's fear about her own work. It does throw more sympathy on Casaubon to see it that way. I like how Eliot lets Will say horrible things about Casaubon because it satisfies an itch, for the reader too. It is wearying to be so broad-minded and sympathetic all the time. Not that I am! But I think the narrator is. Which is one of the great things about the book, to have both kinds of commentary going on.
I am glad to see Dorothea again, but I do find the descriptions of her still a little annoying. All the perfect beauty and quivering young sensitivity. I almost feel more sorry for Casaubon in a way! I can't believe I'm saying that .. but he is set in his ways and while he may get some unpleasant shocks he is not going to change course or suddenly become a different guy. Exploring his character has its limits though if anyone can make him multi-faceted it's Eliot.
Will fell very quickly in love ... like everyone else in this book!
There are a few slower, more measured loves in the book. We should be sure to pay them due attention, too, if nothing else to compare.
So true! It does sometimes seem like Eliot is pushing us to admire Dorothea, sensing that we might share her neighbors' skepticism. At the same time you remind me of another passage that aligns Casaubon and Eliot, when Dorothea seems to him "the personification of that shallow world which surrounds the ill-appreciated or desponding author" and brings out of him a long-gestating speech in defense of his methods. It's as though all these characters are situated around the work of writing a novel and regarding it through their own needs and limitations. She is empathizing, serially, with those who would dismiss or caricature her work.
I like Mona Simpson‘s point about the Rome chapters hiding Eliot’s own insecurities regarding the reception of her novel. But I also sense something else going on, something that Eliot, even a sometimes insecure and doubting Eliot, must have felt. Eliot is contrasting a novel of ideas, her own, that still is fully embedded in “real life” and a project of the mind, Mr. C’s, with its “small closets and winding stairs,” that is going nowhere and thus can’t make its way back to the ‘big picture’ and to people’s hearts (the necessary ingredient of inspiration). Eliot is a strong writer and the flourishes she allows her narrator (the metaphors, the period realia presented in different scenes, the stylistic registers capturing different ‘voice zones’ of the people) do not suggest a retiring or hesitant mind. Did she have her insecurities? Yes. Did they prevent her from putting herself out there? No. For me the main difference between Eliot’s ‘project’ and Mr. C’s: the former convincingly ‘models life’ (we are so taken in we believe what we are reading), the latter does not.
Yes! I think there are things she says about science--about its embrace of the particulars--that apply to her, a contrast with Casaubon's project of reducing everything to shared abstractions.
With regard to feeling sympathy for Casaubon, it would help if his scholarly project could emerge in clearer outline. It seems like he’s collecting and collecting and collecting, but we’re never allowed to see how he proposes to get from point A to point B and turn that progress into a story. The reason for this, which we’re only gradually beginning to find out, is in Casaubon himself: his insecurity, his intellectual timidity, his inability to separate the forest from the trees. Everything is kept rather vague, which is presumably intentional, as it shows the hesitancy of Casaubon‘s mind in all matters except propriety. Also, it’s in Rome where Dorothea begins to inwardly challenge Casaubon because, while he tries to make things interesting for her (a good thing) by pointing out which antiquities are cited by the cognoscenti, he refuses to say--indeed is incapable of saying, what truly moves him. Where I do feel sympathy for Casaubon is in the way he feels trapped: he wanted a helpmeet scribe who would copy but never judge. That’s what he thought he was getting. But in these chapters Dorothea begins to sense that the “big picture” is not there, that the project is possibly a fraud, and this causes him to want to retreat back into his shell or, when confronted, to act defensively and unkindly. In these situations, I feel some sympathy for Casaubon. But not much, to be honest. He is too frail physically and fragile psychologically, too fearful of criticism and closed to other perspectives, too blindly focused on what is not going anywhere. His “life of the mind” is not the kind that survives.
Yes. Dorothea is too good and is never going to hate Casaubon, only find ways of pitying him. On the honeymoon that is supposed to bring them together she is instead forced to see their separateness from each other, and even more, Casaubon's independence from her in moral terms. Near end of Ch 21 "... she had felt the waking of a consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own." This is about as far as sympathy can travel and where empathy may begin.
Casaubon is not a caricature, unfortunately.
I've even wondered if all his professed labor has become no more than a fictional screen between him and other people and if he is just going off for a snooze somewhere when he's supposed to be in the library ... perhaps there is more to his failure than meets the eye?
Maybe we don't see how he proposes to get from A to B because he can't even try, and as for turning it into a story, that's for the Eliots of the world to do. Small wonder then? she - Eliot- can afford to be generous?
“if he is just going off for a snooze somewhere when he's supposed to be in the library ...”
I know a few senior scholars who fall into this category!
And I love your line: “This is about as far as sympathy can travel and where empathy may begin.” Any close relationship that has reached such a state is likely in a death spiral
And I loved your line that “C is not a caricature, unfortunately.” We know these people; they bring out pity and annoyance in me. Neither a delightful quality.
This is such a thoughtful response from Mona. Thank you.
I was reminded of the glacial sense of history inscribed in the landscapes of Canada in Alice Munro's stories. Some lakes look like claw scratches in the rocks. In Rome, among ruins of a great civilization, we see a quick marriage's facade already crack. Vanitas. We see this in the portraits, one of Casaubon as a dead man, and one of the living Dorothea, which her new husband shuns.
Yes! It makes sense that landscape and portraiture should come into play now that we are in a world of painters (comparing painting to writing). I was noticing how Dorothea's inner world is often described as a landscape, and Casaubon's as a warren of small rooms, though which he passes with his taper.
This is an astute insight. Thank you.
I'm with you all in thinking that the bedroom anger is a deliberate hint by Eliot of sexual frustration, at least on Dorothea's part.
Meanwhile, I just want to draw attention to Chapter 17, I love the description of Rev Farebrother's 'den'...'nothing but pickled vermin and drawers full of bluebottles and moths with no carpet on the floor.' In the early 1830s, it was the Reverend Farebrothers everywhere who were pioneering scientific studies of botany and anatomy that within the next fifty years would revolutionise our understanding of science and evolution. Charles Darwin had just finished his degree at Cambridge and was setting off on the Beagle. For many of these proto-scientists, their studies would come at the cost of their beliefs - or leave them torn and in denial (such as Philip Gosse, as portrayed in Father and Son by his son Edmund.)
Finally, wince with me when Lydgate says, about moving out of London to the country, 'one makes less bad blood, and can follow one's own course more quietly.' He is about to find out that one is never safe from the dangers of picking the wrong side!
Oh what an interesting observation! The whole play of faith and science here, and how science seems to have sympathy with the novelist's work—seeing things as they are rather than as they "should" be, trusting observation and not abstractions—I find so suggestive. And the awareness of the openness and adventurousness of these pursuits before they were professionalized. Pure curiosity and interest.
Great question. Although Lydgate is kind and caring to his patients and helps them in concrete ways (cf. D’s charitable projects), my sense is Dorothea is more in sync psychologically/spiritually with Ladislaw. That could also just be me being influenced by what I already know. But it is touching how her initial reactions are always to show kindness and put people at ease.
Thanks for the reminder! Fred and Mary? Pretty darn slow that's true. I feel like Eliot maybe put a lot of herself in Mary.
Absolutely! That’s why she gets such high marks for presenting the “beautiful” female characters, Dorothea here and Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda, with such psychological penetration and empathy.
By the way, Amanda, I am loving the audible book -The Warden. Thanks for the suggestion. Fabulous!
The Warden is one of my faves too. Trollope is not quite Eliot, but he’s great fun.
Hi Janice, I have never read The Warden or listened to it so maybe it was another Amanda?
I have never read any Trollope, tsk tsk!
Woops. I’ll have to go back and figure out who recommended it. It’s great!
I think this is where Trollope entered the building! https://books.substack.com/p/middlemarch-chapters-812/comment/18365823
Casaubon’s feelings toward Will: “There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire:it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.” Casaubon does have feelings but they’re hidden so deeply there’s no spark, just sadness and a simmering anger.
All these so-effective metaphors around Casaubon of enclosure, airlessnesses, verging toward illness and mobidity, lifelessness.
There are so many good and right things said about this latest reading. There is no way I could have imagined them all without Mona's in-depth, insightful commentary and the comments that followed (and I have read all of them). Thanks to everyone, especially Mona, for taking the time to contribute intellectually to this thread, which I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated. A posthumous thanks, too, to Mary Ann Evans, who clearly had more in mind than "cashing in" when she wrote Middlemarch.
I must confess that I found many passages in this past week's readings to be troubling and difficult to follow. Were it not for knowing of the light to eventually be cast upon them at week end by the learned folks assembled here, I would have cast this book aside and never lifted the cover again. I loved Dickinson's brief sentences gorged with meaning, whereas Elliot spins paragraph after paragraph from every direction, page after page probing choice situations, which at times I found cumbersome and tiring. I am also starting to find the continuous references to classic literature at the beginning of each chapter, and historical references peppered throughout the text, as a bit "over the top" in my mind. In some instances the inferences and citations work, but many times, I was scratching my head and consulting notes to the text before moving on. Perhaps in Victorian times people had more time to ponder "why?" or the references were more in the popular domain than they are now. Or is Eliot trying just a bit too hard to impress us? Perhaps all of these things.
Troubling, too, because I never thought as deeply about some of these subjects as Eliot has done. I love Rome and have spent months there. It never occurred to me that gallery after gallery in the Vatican was anything but amazing, but the observations of their sameness are not undeserved. Troubling that, yes, we all make self interested choices and blind ourselves to our less-than-noble rationales. Troubling because we all tend to look with less than a gracious eye at times upon our own benefactors, whether they be parents, friends, bosses and yes, even the government with so many folks collecting with one hand and critical of the actions that don't benefit us personally on the other.
By no means am I another Will Ladislaw making dispersions upon Mr Casaubon, muddying what is clearly a masterpiece work. Nor would I expect anyone to be as impressionable as young Dorothea, allowing my observations to colour their own opinions in a negative way. I wouldn't even bring this up if the scenes and actions committed to the paper didn't work and form an image in my mind that we all can relate to, and the work products we are experiencing weren't worth some small thoughtful contribution and reaction on my part, as well.
Perhaps it is unwise to speak one's mind in any critical way here about an author, especially when I don't have a deep appreciation for the times and circumstances during which the work was written. But maybe I am the elephant in the room and a speaker for our times, too, an aspiring writer who has come to believe, in much the same way Dorothea is starting to worry about her new husband's possible contributions (or lack of them), that all of our work eventually becomes "soil" for new and better artwork to feed upon, like our own ashes that eventually form the soil which produces the food consumed by the pregnant mother and her fetus, all marching towards the day when our galaxy is sucked into a black hole and our race catapults to another sphere or is vanquished.
I also offer these remarks as further elaboration of remarks made previously about my appreciation for being led into this novel by Ms. Simpson, a work I would have tossed to the side after the last 50 pages. I am thankful for being spoon-fed and babied along to make it to the eventual finish line.
And now I am starting to mimic Eliot, going on and on looking at a point from every which way. So let me say I am troubled by reading my own comments, too. It is time to stop, hit "post" and walk away. Nothing produced by mankind is perfect and never will be. There is a big crack running through it all. Emerson said it so well.
Read you all next week!
Please do go ahead and speak your mind! That is what you are here for, and I don’t think Eliot herself would have wanted us just to accept her authority and not be true to our own reactions! I hope that, having been encouraged to stick with it, you’ll feel it was well worth it in the end!
I do think, as some have said here, that we are meant to see Dororthea’s indifference to what she finds in Rome to be a register of the state of her inner development more than a mark against Rome. As for the epigraphs, I have started to think of them as sort of a joke. I learned from the footnotes in my edition that some of them are made up by her, and it strikes me that they are sometimes meant to sound a little faux-pompous, or to sort of parody the didactic tone of such things. I’ve taken to going back and reading them again when I finish the chapters and I often find them to be, and I think this is intentional, wryly off kilter.
I am trying to catch up with everybody!!! Visualize woman hunched over reading w great earnestness, a la someone in a spin class (only took one in my life so have no idea what I’m talking about there). I am liking; I am admiring; I am curious and determined to read the whole of Middlemarch - these are my issues, female identity/societal expectations- but, so far, I am not loving Middlemarch. At about p. 157. Still reading.
Oh I hope you persevere! Where are you finding your resistances? Sometimes I feel slowed down by the level of detail, but then she suprises me with her humor.
The long passages of exposition. I want more in scene. Her observations are brilliant and really gob-smackingly so, thinking about when she was writing this, but it’s too dense (for me). One sentence distilling a really developed, thoughtful observation about the way society really works, as opposed to the surface, after another. Some, or many, sparking reactions that take time. I need more breathing space and other balancing elements. In a way it’s like really rich bread pudding without a little milk (non-dairy for me, please!).
It's interesting. It's reminding me of Henry James a little, at this point, these long intervals to describe minutely subtle and even internally contradictory states of mind. I find it hard as a modern person to settle into this pace of thought... We're so trained to move on.
Just came across this quote in the new book by Clare Carlisle: Eliot's partner George Lewes is complaining about the detailed descriptive passages in Goethe's "Elective Affinities," and Eliot disagrees, saying they "are artistic devices for impressing the reader with a sense of the slow movement of life."
Perfect!
That’s awesome!! So much to think about with that.
Also, I’m almost caught up, and that lessens a sense of pressure. And I got into the after-effects from Fred’s SELFISH and STUPID behavior and actions w money. How amazing was it that Eliot spent that time showing us Mrs. Garth’s life and personhood. I felt the pain of the consequences of Fred’s SELFISH and STUPID actions so much more than if she had taken a shorter path to the point of that scene. Then Mary!! Wow, I loved her emotional reactions and Eliot’s keeping us so close as we saw this horrible news fall on her, then her strength and connectedness to her family and core of who she was in the dialogue b/w her and Fred.
I think in addition to the long exposition sections, my enjoyment had been negatively impacted by the length of time that we are away from the central characters. Like pages and pages of distance.
Anyway I shall not quit on this book or this really wonderful read-along led by you and Mona and peopled by so many other passionate avid readers!
This beautiful write-up reminds me that Eliot does such a deft job of showing the link between Dorothea's hero workshop/self-abnegation and the early loss of her mother. Just as Dorothea isn't conscious of this wounding, the reader might only be barely conscious of it.
Another question I have is about the Roman setting. What use is Eliot making of Rome in these chapters? There is one great paragraph about Dorothea's response to Rome that would be worth discussing. It might seem that her response to Rome is unrelated to her changing feelings about her marriage, more a matter of her Quakerish predisposition, but towards the end of this paragraph we realize that she is projecting her feelings of disappointment onto the martyrdoms, etc. frescoed around her. No wonder they affect her so powerfully. Paradoxically, she seems to have a more authentic, vital response to Rome, though a sorrowful one, than a great critic like Ruskin whoever, who projects his energy outward. Similarly, when Naumann discovers her, he finds her more alive than the Ariadne she dreamily ignores.
Great point. For this reader, her sexuality is always there, never simply sublimated or intellectualized outward. Maybe this is simply my projection, but it seems Eliot is trying to capture something that is alive and thinking at the same time, so that the cognitive and the emotional/affective/physical are not separated out. That’s what I think the “male” gaze of Naumann is seeing and kidding Ladislaw about: the attraction for the artist of the obvious undividedness.
I feel like with the Rome thing too we are seeing a bit of Eliot's insecurities in her youth. She grew up in this cloistered, small-town environment with aspirations of her own and probably encountered some of these confusions when she ventured into the bigger European world. The corporality, vividness, drama of Catholicism also: intentionally isolated from puritannical English culture. I think perhaps we more worldly readers are a little disappointed and surprised that Dorothea doesn't find more of what she is looking for in Rome, but Eliot is reminding us that she still needs to learn and grow. She was misled by Casaubon because she doesn't really *know* what she is looking for.
Great point about Eliot’s own small-town, cloistered, sternly Protestant England and Dorothea’s “culture shock “ experience of vivid, corporeal, Catholic Rome. And of course Mr. C. is not a good guide for the latter. Will L. would have been better but the timing is off.
I find it touching how open she is with Will and yet meeting him doesn't seem to startle her especially. Perhaps we are trained to look for a better match for her. Does Eliot predict expect us to think this way? Is Dorothea's almost comradely response to Will (and her lack of interest in Lydgate) an intentional bucking of our expectations?
See I actually think Dorothea does perceive an awful lot in Rome. Her perceptions are subjective and determined by her situation but that makes them more interesting than the tourist perspective. On another, hegelian level, Rome is a "world-city" and whatever happens there has "world-historical significance." Thus Naumann can synthesize pagan and christian perspectives in his aesthetics of Dorothea. Who knows, maybe Dorothea Casaubon nee Brooke, in Rome, is a "world-historical figure"! This is only half a joke. Eliot was so deep in German thought and lit after doing those translations, I think she almost thinks in german, and the passages in Rome are especially Hegelian.
I beg you all to reread the paragraph beginning "To those who have looked at Rome..." near the beginning of Chapter 20. It may be one of the best things Eliot ever wrote. Nuttall thinks so. It's so layered with irony and implication, so bold! An especially interesting move is "But let them perceive one more historical contrast..." That's where she (subtly but audaciously) demands what I am calling "world-historical" status for her heroine, which isn't to take away from the here-and-now elements we've been focusing on...
Ann, it's also close to Henry Adams in style. I know you're a fan.
"Like a disease of the retina," so strong. I spent years making an academy in Rome and thinking about that tradition, even taking it for granted (didn't work out exactly on a couple of levels, but that's another story). Dorothea's antipathy is so startling, but it also opens up something about the ways she is unrealized and what her latent possibilities are. It does make you think again about how rough it must have been before it was sanitized by tourism. I happened to have been reading Henry Adams just before starting this adventure, just at the early point where he gives up on Germany and succumbs to Italy almost in spite of himself.
There are so many good and right things said about this latest reading. There is no way I could have imagined them all without Mona's in-depth, insightful commentary and the comments that followed (and I have read all of them). Thanks to everyone, especially Mona, for taking the time to contribute intellectually to this thread, which I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated. A posthumous thanks, too, to Mary Ann Evans, who clearly had more in mind than "cashing in" when she wrote Middlemarch.
I must confess that I found many passages in this past week's readings to be troubling and difficult to follow. Were it not for knowing of the light to eventually be cast upon them at week end by the learned folks assembled here, I would have cast this book aside and never lifted the cover again. I loved Dickinson's brief sentences gorged with meaning, whereas Elliot spins paragraph after paragraph from every direction, page after page probing choice situations, which at times I found cumbersome and tiring. I am also starting to find the continuous references to classic literature at the beginning of each chapter, and historical references peppered throughout the text, as a bit "over the top" in my mind. In some instances the inferences and citations work, but many times, I was scratching my head and consulting notes to the text before moving on. Perhaps in Victorian times people had more time to ponder "why?" or the references were more in the popular domain than they are now. Or is Eliot trying just a bit too hard to impress us? Perhaps all of these things.
Troubling, too, because I never thought as deeply about some of these subjects as Eliot has done. I love Rome and have spent months there. It never occurred to me that gallery after gallery in the Vatican was anything but amazing, but the observations of their sameness are not undeserved. Troubling that, yes, we all make self interested choices and blind ourselves to our less-than-noble rationales. Troubling because we all tend to look with less than a gracious eye at times upon our own benefactors, whether they be parents, friends, bosses and yes, even the government with so many folks collecting with one hand and critical of the actions that don't benefit us personally on the other.
By no means am I another Will Ladislaw making dispersions upon Mr Casaubon, muddying what is clearly a masterpiece work. Nor would I expect anyone to be as impressionable as young Dorothea, allowing my observations to colour their own opinions in a negative way. I wouldn't even bring this up if the scenes and actions committed to the paper didn't work and form an image in my mind that we all can relate to, and the work products we are experiencing weren't worth some small thoughtful contribution and reaction on my part, as well.
Perhaps it is unwise to speak one's mind in any critical way here about an author, especially when I don't have a deep appreciation for the times and circumstances during which the work was written. But maybe I am the elephant in the room and a speaker for our times, too, an aspiring writer who has come to believe, in much the same way Dorothea is starting to worry about her new husband's possible contributions (or lack of them), that all of our work eventually becomes "soil" for new and better artwork to feed upon, like our own ashes that eventually form the soil which produces the food consumed by the pregnant mother and her fetus, all marching towards the day when our galaxy is sucked into a black hole and our race catapults to another sphere or is vanquished.
I also offer these remarks as further elaboration of remarks made previously about my appreciation for being led into this novel by Ms. Simpson, a work I would have tossed to the side after the last 50 pages. I am thankful for being spoon-fed and babied along to make it to the eventual finish line.
And now I am starting to mimic Eliot, going on and on looking at a point from every which way. So let me say I am troubled by reading my own comments, too. It is time to stop, hit "post" and walk away. Nothing produced by mankind is perfect and never will be. There is a big crack running through it all. Emerson said it so well.
Read you all next week!
There are so many parallels in play. Waiting for death, of course, refers primarily to Featherstone, but Book Four opens with Featherstone's funeral and Dorothea, Casaubon, Celia,Sir James, Mr Brooke and Mrs. Cadwallader watching from above, in Lowick Manor. By now, Mr. Casaubon also seems nearer to death. Dorothea is trying to summon back her faith, her love, her hopefulness, though it now feels in such different tones.
Lovely thought, about the changing sense of time. It would be so interesting to try to track that. Such an expansive notion also of faith: Dorothea rests too much faith in this man because she does not have enough faith in herself to live fully at the level at which she wants to. She recognizes her own calling as religious (faith beyond the human realm), as Casaubon does, but their ability to exercise religious faith is delimited by the scale of their faith in human capabilities. Dorothea's loss of faith in Casaubon is perhaps a necessary prelude to discovery of faith in herself, which will enable religious faith.