Middlemarch: Chapters 4 & 5

Georg Friedrich Kersting, Man at His Desk (1811)(detail), Weimar Schlossmuseum

Let’s start with the proposal. I think we can all agree that the phrase of his proposal, “to which I have but now referred,” should never appear in a love letter. But yet, near the end of the letter Mr. Casaubon writes this plangent, authentic, and frightened line: “But in this order of experience I am still young.”

He is referring to the possibility that Dorothea will refuse him. Knowing, on some level, how others will view this incongruous marriage, he may even sense the possibility of embarrassment and shame before his neighbors.

Should a proposal ever really be a question?

Certainly in the twenty-first century a proposal is an elegant formality, a nod toward tradition, the first step in a celebration of a decision already made. A brief google search into advice manuals from the early 1800s shows that, then as now, a proposal that is a genuine question—without a “yes” being almost certainly indicated in advance—was so rare that the authors didn’t even address the possibility.

Mr. Casaubon proposes so very early in their relationship (and in the book—in Austen it takes a whole novel to reach the heroine’s engagement) we can only presume that this is because he feels himself to be old and lacking the stamina for the gestures demanded by a conventional courtship.

In his famous book about the craft of fiction, Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster distinguishes between “flat” and “round” characters, arguing that novels generally need and employ both. In these two chapters, Eliot’s way of characterizing becomes apparent. She, too, includes “flat” characters, organized around one idea, and uses them for comic purposes, but she surprises us, giving them moments of greater dimension.

Mr. Brooke, for example, despite “his usual tendency to say what he had said before” (Eliot drolly notes that “this fundamental principle of human speech was markedly exhibited in Mr. Brooke”) reveals a running undercurrent of wisdom in his advice to Dorothea about Casaubon’s proposal of marriage.

“He is a little buried in books, you know, Casaubon is.”

“But a man mopes you know … I never moped … but I can see that Casaubon does, you know.”

“You like him, eh? … Well now, I’ve known Casaubon ten years, ever since he came to Lowick. But I never got anything out of him—any ideas, you know.”

“I thought you had more of your own opinion than most girls. I thought you liked your own opinion—liked it, you know.”

“Well, you are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls, dinners, that kind of thing. I can see that Casaubon’s ways might suit you better than Chettam’s.”

“You have not the same tastes as every young lady; and a clergyman and scholar—who may be a bishop—that kind of thing—may suit you better than Chettam. Chettam is a good fellow, a good sound-hearted fellow, you know; but he doesn’t go much into ideas.”

Eliot also sometimes flattens her “round” characters into near-caricatures, revealing deficits even in her two appealing heroines. She sets them up with polarly opposite opinions and lets them bicker over Casaubon and Chettam.

Celia is what the twenty-first century would call “emotionally intelligent,” Dorothea “intense.”

Dorothea thinks that Celia needs no more salvation than a squirrel, implying that her sister’s intelligence is that of a small furry animal’s, and Celia shudders at the thought of Mr. Casaubon at breakfast.

She forces her sister to consider the possibility that Sir James is being so generous about the cottages because he is in love with Dorothea. Dorothea hates knowing this. She defends herself, says that before the cottages, she was barely even polite to him.

Celia further enrages her sister by calling the cottages her favorite “fad.” She is allowed to brattily complain about Mr. Casaubon’s soup-eating and blinking before understanding that her sister has accepted his proposal. Then she becomes pale and quiet.

Mr. Brooke, for all his (repeated) talk about letting Dorothea make her own decision, can’t help but ask (ONE MORE TIME): “Then Chettam has no chance? Has Chettam offended you—offended you, you know? What is it you don’t like in Chettam?’

Which allows her to answer (haughtily): “There is nothing that I like in him.’

A “butler” hands Mr. Brooke a letter from Mr. Casaubon, at luncheon, announcing his impending visit, and “before he left the next day it had been decided that the marriage should take place within six weeks. Why not? Mr. Casaubon’s house was ready. It was not a parsonage, but a considerable mansion, with much land attached to it.”

Even this wealth becomes an odd corner, poking out of the so-far-mostly-flat character of Mr. Casaubon, like his authentic, even touching declaration of inexperience. Whereas Mr. Darcy’s wealth was pure pleasure, amplitude, this wealth seems to loom strangely. Wealth and status are what allow Mr. Brooke, with reservations, to admit Mr. Casaubon as an acceptable husband for his niece. We are as uncomfortable as Mr. Brooke with the union. Yet, we hurtle forward, our heroine engaged by the end of Chapter 5.

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

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