from Mona Simpson. “I think we can all agree that the phrase of Casaubon‘s proposal, 'to which I have but now referred,’ should never appear in a love letter…“
Did anyone else take a sharp intake of breath when Dorothea, after reading that passionless, cold letter of proposal, replies ' I am very grateful to you for loving me...'? The one word he never used, the one emotion he never claimed! I flinched for her, what a perfect illustration of the extent to which she is fooling herself. And don't we all remember (or just me?!) the times we have made fools of ourselves by building castles in the clouds, and wasting emotion on people who did not reciprocate!
Not just you! In many ways Dorothea seems like a typical young person in her inexperience but surety of opinions. And it has been reminding me of certain times in my own life. Maybe it is not only a youthful mistake but one that can persist .. I think that Eliot could have made a Dorothea without using any religious imagery or language .. I guess that begs the question why she wanted to use it. To emphasize the self-sacrificing part?
Then there is the other part, about wanting to live some kind of idealized exalted life.
From Ch. 5: "All Dorothea's passion was transfused through a mind struggling towards an ideal life; the radiance of her transfigured girlhood fell on the first object that came within its level. The impetus with which inclination became resolution was heightened by those little events of the day which had roused her discontent with the actual conditions of her life."
I am intrigued by the phrase "those little events of the day" - what are they? We know she feels hampered and unhappy ... has a feeling her life can't start ...
When I read that I imagined, but perhaps I was projecting, disappointment with the banality of the people around her and the crampedness of the expectations of her life. She is expected to care about clothes, decor, society, the household in a way that she does not. I do wonder how much religion supplies the language of he ambition because it was the only vector of intellectual advancement on offer. Even Casaubon, the one challenging person to show up, has to be a pastor. Perhaps this was already different by the time of Eliot and her milieu? A woman could imagine a secular intellectual metier? But even Eliot is very concerned with the moral life, how to configure it absent a scriptural frame of reference. Later in the book medicine shows up as a way of advancing humanity based in science rather than faith …
“The impetus with which inclination became resolution was heightened by those little events of the day which had roused her discontent with the actual conditions of her life." I think guilt and embarrassment is playing a part here. Dorothea is freaked out that she had led on Sir James. She feels trapped. This engagement is a perfect escape.
It also makes me think about how counter-suggestible my own teenage daughters were! There would have been no point anyone trying to change her mind, she would just have dug her heels in!
What struck me most this time around was how Dorothea’s idealistic “intensity” was so reckless and yet susceptible to mood swings and local triggers (her antipathy to Chettam, her words with Celia). Just because the language is that of one of the greats of 19th-century fiction, we should not lose sight of the fact that Dorothea can come across as a kind of modern sheltered teenager. Eliot’s irony about this fact is not always gentle; her editorializing is (for me) completely on the mark, i.e. justified, just as it is in “Daniel Deronda” when Gwendolen, another headstrong beauty, talks herself foolishly into marrying the villainous Grandcourt. And I like Dorothea! I just think Eliot is more down to earth, more explicit, about how distasteful this “transaction” really is. Celia certainly gets it! Note, for example, Eliot’s irony in this passage toward the end of chapter 5: “He [Casaubon] was being unconsciously wrought upon by the charms of a nature which was entirely without hidden calculations either for immediate effects or for remoter ends. It was this which made Dorothea so childlike, and, according to some judges, so stupid, with all her repeated cleverness; as, for example, in the present case of throwing herself, metaphorically speaking, at Mr. Casaubon‘s feet, and kissing his unfashionable shoe-ties, as if he were a Protestant Pope. She was not in the least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough for her, but merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good enough for Mr. Casaubon.”
It must be so interesting, when teaching this, to draw attention for teenagers to how young Dorothea really is. The differences of culture and language, the emphasis on religion and marriage, seem remote to the 21st C teen probably, and yet the passion and uncertainty about life are eternal to the age.
Such a great comment. “The one word he never used”! What a difference between the two letters, his so overwrought, latinate and convoluted, hers to the point if deluded. Is there anything we can salvage at all from casaubon’s letter? Does he love her at all despite failure to say so? Does he indeed offer her anything at all? It seems like many of us are agreed this is a flawed beginning and bodes pretty horribly. However, the one thing Casaubon offers maybe just maybe is a sincere esteem of Dorothea’s higher qualities. “I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and capability of devotedness.” No one else in her life has discerned that, and so it may help her take a baby step forward in life to be esteemed by this desiccated scholar. Whether such esteem constitutes love I couldn’t really say...I dare not opine...
I can so see how his discerning this would be enough to sweep her away. Maybe it is a sign of women's abjection that this need to be noticed remains such a powerful tether for us. But from his side I cannot but feel that if he truly had any sympathy for her talent and character he would hesitate to bind her to his cramped existence. He is not sure that she will accept this life, but he does not seem to suspect that it is actually bad for her.
Thanks for this! You are probably right on both counts. Casaubon should have known better! Nevertheless, there is to me something touching about their initial rapport. It seems I am a bit of an outlier here, but I am still kind of rooting for their marriage to at least lead somewhere away from the stuffiness of Convention. If Casaubon could only live up to his promise of an intellectual companionship that would be something to cling to.
I think you bring up a really good point: there are definitely warning signs about Casaubon. “Latinate,” “convoluted,” snug in his verbal shell. But as far as we know all his actions at this point are sincere, not calculated (except that he sees Dorothea as a helper in the future), not manipulative. He is cold, but he’s not malicious. Thus is their relationship a disaster waiting to happen. Her idealism is too intense, his worldview too closed and brittle (despite his interest in originary myths).
Just came across this from the end of Chapter 5, which I think was lodged in my mind but forgotten: "She was not in the least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough for her, but merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good enough for Mr. Casaubon." Point being: it did not occur to him to question whether he was good enough for her.
"I know that I must expect trials, uncle. Marriage is a state of higher duties. I never thought of it as mere personal ease," said poor Dorothea.
If there is not a whole word of authorial comment and control in that one little word, 'poor'! And does it not contrast her sharply with Austen? Why is Eliot not afraid to make these judgments in our presence?
In Ch. 4 we see Dorothea in the round, as Forster and Mona might say. I can't see that Eliot holds anything back from us. She seems to have found a channel wherein instead of creating tension by withholding information she can reach easily at any part of her story by means of hiding nothing.
Dorothea is like a train running on an alternate track that can't be diverted. Celia and their uncle try and Eliot shows us exactly how they try. What if Brooke had a complete meltdown or refused to let the marriage go forward? What if Celia .. but not only would it be out of character for them, it would all be for naught. By the end of Ch. 4 we know there is no one and nothing that can change Dorothea's mind.
And then the hammer blow of Ch. 5, where we see exactly what the deal is going to be.
Casaubon: "The great charm of your sex is its capability of ardent self-sacrificing affection and herein we see its fitness to round and complete the existence of our own."
Eh? And, yikes!
Narrator: "She was not in the least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough for her, but merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good enough for him."
And we also learn at the end of that chapter that it's the curate who does "all the duty" and Casaubon only preaches the morning sermon. Is he a fake in more ways than one? Or is he an open book for those who have eyes to see?
How do we get eyes that see?
Mr. Brooke: " ... for there is no knowing how anything may turn out."
What I see in "poor" is Eliot lamenting (even though she put it there!) Dorothea's participation, even agency, in her own erasure. She does have a choice (in an earlier time she might not have) but she does not know how to use it. In a milieu that romanticizes (perhaps cynically) self-sacrifice, her yearning for transcendence becomes the mirror image of her subjection…
"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." So true!
Always coming back to Austen, I can't help but compare Mr. Causubon's proposal to Mr. Collins's in PP. The note of plangency is decidedly lacking there.
Speaking of Eliot sometimes making her round characters flat, I note that the word "childlike" is used three times in chapter 5 to describe Dorothea: once from the narrator's perspective ("she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining, in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own"), once from Causubon's ("Mr. Casaubon was touched with an unknown delight [what man would not have been?] at this childlike unrestrained ardor"), and once from a perspective that seems shared ("He was being unconsciously wrought upon by the charms of a nature which was entirely without hidden calculations either for immediate effects or for remoter ends. It was this which made Dorothea so childlike, and, according to some judges, so stupid, with all her reputed cleverness; as, for example, in the present case of throwing herself, metaphorically speaking, at Mr. Casaubon’s feet, and kissing his unfashionable shoe-ties as if he were a Protestant Pope").
I found the lap a somewhat uncomfortable metaphor, and the second instance also sounds the note of the age difference a little. The "stupid" in the third rings hard, and there is again an uncomfortable physicality in kissing the feet and the shoe-ties. "Childlike" does not seem a very pristine state, hazardous more like.
This is the second time I started a book Mona suggested (the first being "To The Lighthouse") -- a book I would never have picked up in my lifetime, a book that did not appeal to me after the first two chapters -- only to find that Mona's comments and the stories themselves have sucked me in by the fourth or fifth chapter and I can't wait to finish them. Thanks to Mona and everyone who is contributing here with additional insights and perspectives. Now, on to chapters six and seven!
I was walking the dog yesterday while listening to these two chapters. What struck me was the playful way Eliot poked fun at Dorothea. I’m assuming this will gradually fade into a genial and genuine empathy (but maybe I’ll be wrong!).
It reminds me of why and when do we feel the need to “like” the characters in a work of fiction. As much as I say we shouldn’t worry about that I don’t follow my own strictures all the time.
So true! You can see in a lot of the comments on here how differently people respond to Dorothea's eccentricities, Eliot makes room for different reactions. Maybe gently inviting us to look inside why we like some people and not others is part of the point!
Thank you, Ann Kjellberg, for making me read this novel again. Carefully, and with sympathetic fellows.
Without the character of Dorothea to begin this journey, the novel would be something quite different. Did you (or anyone) know of some rumor that George Eliot appended "Miss Brooke" to several other chapters much later, almost as an improvised afterthought? I believe that's true, and I was amazed to discover it. It could only be Dorothea who pulls me into the drama by way of this marriage proposal, but -- of course -- not just any marriage proposal. It has landed on the mind of a young person with such vivid intense feeling, and the feeling is taken seriously. It's not flighty, or materialistic, or clouded by having read romances. Immediately I recognize all this ardor ... with no place earthly to go. When I was younger I went to divinity school and lived at a seminary for three years. There was a certain strain of romanticism among several of the seminarians there, a kind of flickering alertness to some other, more Platonic visions of what life could be, should be. It turns you into something of an alien. As if the values, and daily concerns, or silly entanglements of people your own age propel you into a quest for something truly ineffable, but greater, more weighty (for some reason), more purposeful. Like looking for a structure in thin air. Of course a lifetime of reading books about cosmology, the origins and ultimate fate of humans, well, that doesn't help alleviate any of the Romance.
At seminary (by coincidence) I read George Eliot's translations into English of the hugely important and influential German theologians -- Strauss, Feuerbach. (They were assigned; we could read any translation; I chose Eliot because she was so obviously the best writer.) These were the towering intellectual titans of their day. They dwelled in a world above. So to wish oneself in their company, to be able to see the world the way they do, or speak of them with people who share a similar worldview, it always struck me as the heart of Dorothea's ardor. It's so very different to feel your way with a character who wants something more layered than simple companionship, or even romance. She wants to touch the stars, and to be worthy of it. That's the tragedy of choosing Casaubon -- she seems to think he will be the one to provide the wished-for benediction. And of course it's mixed up with being twenty, and being orphaned, and wishing you had someone wise to talk to about these things. But her glorious longing -- it's so specific, so complex, and poignant.
I feel I'm in the hands of a writer who happens to be wiser than Casaubon, wiser by a mile, about those very ineffable and unearthly things that Dorothea wants to seek, with both head and heart.
Paul, an afterthought. In a few weeks I'll have a piece in Book Post by Ed Mendelson on Bible translation, and he reviews a book by Michael Edwards called Bible and Poetry that I think might speak to you. It's all about how Biblical language actually creates exalted experience, to oversimplify a bit.
I've been reading the Oxford edition that I link to on Book Post, and I chose it for us mostly because it has a great, detailed introduction that spells all this out. I believe she actually started a different section first (I should check this when I get home), and then wrote some Dorothea chapters as a separate project, and only realized after a while that she wanted to weave them together. Which is interesting because, as I remember it, there is a connection that you expect that never quite happens: the two pieces remain a bit distinct, like two different tunes that harmonize. But as to the second part of your comment--so great to have you with us here--because many of our modern readers find it hard to sympathize with the way in which Dorothea's aspirations express themselves in religion. This does still happen in modern times--it happens to me a bit--but it is more rare. Wonderful to have your perspective.
I found the source I was looking for! It was actually some notes that Mona shared with me from her class. She has that "In 1869, she begins Middlemarch (the first version, with the Garths, the Vincys and Lydgate), but breaks off. It’s rough slow going.
Her stepson dies in her arms, after returning from a hard life working on a farm in Natal.
In 1870, November, she begins Miss Brooke. It flows quickly. Between November and March, she writes 236 pages, which she amalgamates with the first Middlemarch and in December, the eight part publication begins." So she was working on a novel with the themes raised by the Lydgate story, but it was only when she conceived Dorothea that it came alive for her.
Yes, I also found fascinating your account of reading Eliot’s translations while at theological seminary. Maybe you can help us understand the influence of Feuerbach!
To address Dan’s generous comment above: Feuerbach 101 would go like thjs.
The heavens, and He or She or It who dwells there, is all just a massive wish-fulfillment. Human hearts all straining together, in a projection of idealism and hope up into some vast and empty space. Eliot esteemed Feuerbach for his psychological insights, quite frank for the tjme -- it’s apt that he shows up in the thoughts of the preacher in Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” as well. A heady blend of doubt and faith at once.
But take away a deity, and replace it with the object of one’s affection. What could be more Romantic-capital-R than that? It’s what Emma Bovary did. It’s part of the Bennett sisters’ prejudice. Only Dorothea seems to take that impulse as part of the highest most inspiring moral duty, apparently inherited from her serious faith. She blends the two, romance and religion. It’s admittedly a weird mix.
But not much of a leap to love of a husband like a “sort of father” ... who could teach you Hebrew, if he liked?
Thank you! Learning and approaching the divine are so intertwined in Dorothea's mind, hence the conflation of the pastor and the teacher. The promise of realizing her own capacities through learning and religion has its mirror image the teacher/pastor/lover fiigure: a partner who truly teaches and truly ministers can only be loving in the most intimate, sublime sense.
My understanding is that Eliot wrote the opening chapters about Dorothea but didn’t know what to do with them. Her breakthrough came when she realized she could weave the Miss Brooke material into a greater narrative involving other plots and characters. The novel as we have it was launched.
I’m basing this on The Transferred Life of George Eliot by Philip Davis. There is a chapter on the genesis of the novel. (There happened to be a copy at the Brooklyn Public Library.)
For fun this morning skimmed through the first chapters looking for references to Dorothea's and Celia's education. One thing I'd missed - Dorothea is 19 - not even 20 yet! Since age of 12 she and Celia educated by an English family and then a Swiss one. Apparently Dorothea had something going for a Monsieur Liret, a former school teacher from Lausanne, "also ugly and learned" according to Celia.
Elsewhere there are a few brief scathing references to the quality of education Dorothea and Celia received. "the shallows of ladies-school literature." "a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse" "a small kind of tinkling" (Celia's piano playing) and again, "a small tinkling and smearing" re "domestic music and feminine fine art"
"smearing" supposedly referring to painting - !
And yet Dorothea says, "When we were coming home from Lausanne my uncle took us to hear the great organ at Freiberg, and it made me sob." A sentiment that neither Casaubon nor Mr. Brooke can understand.
Dorothea is credited with an "hereditary strain of Puritan energy."
Eliot emphasizes her nature and her personality over any explicit training though she also drops names like Pascal, Hooker, Milton, Augustine, to say that Dorothea is familiar with their work and is using them as models for what she imagines as portals to an exalted, fulfilling, puposeful life.
And yet the first line of Ch. 1 is about how beautiful Dorothea is!
Her beauty seems an intrinsic and in some ways a disappointing part of all this ...
So interesting. Thanks for gathering all this! The mention of Liret interested me, too. I’m interested in the way education for women in Eliot’s world is associated with France. As with the French speaking Belgian for Brontë. In Felix Holt, both of the main women characters have read French literature in their youth and adopted sort of transgressive aesthetics in their English world. In Melville’s Pierre there is a similar figure, a lost French sister who breaks open Pierre’s stodgy world. I dunno if it’s a trope? But it also reflects the way France and Germany were ahead of England in advocating for women’s education and rights. Did anyone see that piece about Wollstonecraft in the TLS?
Had a rotten time, as I recall. But learned to enjoy Beethoven in a beer-hall. Yeah, I don’t know how widespread that assumption was, about Germany for education. George Ticknor was a pioneer. Coleridge’s visit in his twenties must have been one of the biggies. He brought back intellectual treasures, but I still feel like Germany remained off the map for lots of folks, compared to Italy and France.
I have been enlightened by everyone’s comments and analysis for these chapters. I was intrigued by Eliot’s ability to show such contradictions and complements .
I also started a list comparing Celia to Dorothea and thinking about Dorothea’s being.
Celia is conventional and Dorothea is unconventional.
Dorothea shows contradictions by being naive but assured of her positions, she is confident but filled with self doubt
Self righteous but worried about being on the wrong path
She is quick to anger but forgiving
Feels constrained by customs but can be quite customary
Stubborn in her ways
Pg 34 “She was getting away from Tipton And Freshitt, and her own sad liability to tread in the wrong places on her way to the New Jerusalem “ seems to sun it all up right there and sends us all on a cautionary tale by Eliot. She lets us know from the beginning that road is going to be difficult for Dorothea
Yes, absolutely and that is Eliot’s genius. Dorothea is complicated and a tumble right now but she has the capacity as you suggest to sort it all out. Just painful to get there
Thanks for calling attention to the strange turn Casaubon’s letter takes towards the end, and to the oddness of his calling himself “young” in this way. He also speaks of “anxiety.” He would like to relieve his anxiety by plunging into work, but he is unable to do so. This may be an ominous sign of inner conflict. He will be caught between his devotion to his work and his desire for companionship. It may be only a matter of time before he does plunge into his work, escaping the anxieties caused by Dorothea, and then what.
“I await the expression of your sentiments with an anxiety which it would be the better part of wisdom (we’re it possible) to divert by a more arduous labor than usual.”
I love this articulation of "emotionally intelligent" versus "intense." I also love (what feels to me like) Eliot's mix of concern for and admiration for the less balanced woman. Austen certainly shares this to some degree.
Another wonderful observation in this post: Eliot's generous, insightful way of rounding out flat characters and flattening round ones.
Yes! I love this about “concern for and admiration for the less balanced woman.” Fiction does not have to be one thing or another, it can weigh competing feelings
Thanks, Amanda. Embarrassed to have spoken knowingly of Wollstonecraft whom I haven’t read. Mr Brooke lives on in me. This review by Showalter told about her life first supporting herself by translating from the French, then in France writing Vindication and meeting this American guy who basically abandoned her and then she traveled in Scandinavia and wrote those letters. There is also a good summary of her life and achievement in Joanna Biggs book. But I will give you this quote from Felix Holt, though, which casts an interesting light on Dorothea’s education: “when she (Mrs transome) was very young she had been thought wonderfully clever and...had picked out for private reading the lighter parts of dangerous French authors...she always thought the dangerous French writers were wicked, and that her reading of them was a sin; but many sinful things were highly agreeable to her...”
Dorothea seems to "warm" to Casaubon more as an imagined teacher than a religious mentor .. do you think? School teachers being an alternate to church men as objects of misplaced desire?
However think of C. Brontë's Villette. School teachers can be sexy somehow in ways church men cannot.
I wonder what sort of teachers Dorothea would have had! All situations of father-figures, the yearning to win the recognition of the men who are in charge. Maybe this thing that is being read as "desire" is just the wish to exist as an equal, or begin as an equal, or to claim one's own agency, a precondition for satisfying desire...?
I think in a meta way Eliot is performing this desire and engagement with the epigrams that head each chapter. She is putting her work in direct dialogue with these thinkers and writers and inserting Middlemarch into this tradition!
Yes, I agree with that completely. I do think Dorothea wants to be an equal. She thinks it has to be an exalted (in her eyes) person otherwise she is not living her ideal life.
Maybe Eliot wrote Dorothea so that they young us would be indulgent toward Dorothea and her decisions—and sympathetically drawn along with her misjudgments—and the older us would be able to reflect on how we had been shaped by such needs. Remember how Susan Sontag recalled that she burst into tears first reading Middlemarch because she had just married Mr. Casaubon.
Yes, that’s a great comparison. Unlike Casaubon, Monsieur Paul is a disciplined teacher, lives sleeps breathes it, and that school work provides a framework for their gradual falling in love.
Not sure I agree that projection is necessarily involved. He loves her (though he fails to say the word) for her elevation and devotion, qualities which we have every reason to believe she actually possesses. Therefore, in some sense their communication is perfect. If we accept the reality of their love and communication we will be all the more in a position to appreciate the disaster that looms for them.
Maybe we can return to this question when Eliot issues her famous plea for Casaubon (if I’m right to call it that), I.e. not to judge him too harshly, as I seem to recall...
Jun 30, 2023·edited Jun 30, 2023Liked by Ann Kjellberg
Thinking of Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” - Loving others at close range without instrumentalizing them is, truthfully, often challenging even for well-intentioned people.
Mona hits the mark, again. This is more like a business proposal. I don't think he mentions the word "love," and yet, in her response, she thanks him for his love of her. How much those in love read into the cryptic communications of the beloved.
Yes, I never thought of that, I think you are right! Two suitors at the same time, she feels pressured by one and escapes to the other .. no wonder Eliot put her in the middle and turned the screws!
Did anyone else take a sharp intake of breath when Dorothea, after reading that passionless, cold letter of proposal, replies ' I am very grateful to you for loving me...'? The one word he never used, the one emotion he never claimed! I flinched for her, what a perfect illustration of the extent to which she is fooling herself. And don't we all remember (or just me?!) the times we have made fools of ourselves by building castles in the clouds, and wasting emotion on people who did not reciprocate!
Not just you! In many ways Dorothea seems like a typical young person in her inexperience but surety of opinions. And it has been reminding me of certain times in my own life. Maybe it is not only a youthful mistake but one that can persist .. I think that Eliot could have made a Dorothea without using any religious imagery or language .. I guess that begs the question why she wanted to use it. To emphasize the self-sacrificing part?
Then there is the other part, about wanting to live some kind of idealized exalted life.
From Ch. 5: "All Dorothea's passion was transfused through a mind struggling towards an ideal life; the radiance of her transfigured girlhood fell on the first object that came within its level. The impetus with which inclination became resolution was heightened by those little events of the day which had roused her discontent with the actual conditions of her life."
I am intrigued by the phrase "those little events of the day" - what are they? We know she feels hampered and unhappy ... has a feeling her life can't start ...
When I read that I imagined, but perhaps I was projecting, disappointment with the banality of the people around her and the crampedness of the expectations of her life. She is expected to care about clothes, decor, society, the household in a way that she does not. I do wonder how much religion supplies the language of he ambition because it was the only vector of intellectual advancement on offer. Even Casaubon, the one challenging person to show up, has to be a pastor. Perhaps this was already different by the time of Eliot and her milieu? A woman could imagine a secular intellectual metier? But even Eliot is very concerned with the moral life, how to configure it absent a scriptural frame of reference. Later in the book medicine shows up as a way of advancing humanity based in science rather than faith …
“The impetus with which inclination became resolution was heightened by those little events of the day which had roused her discontent with the actual conditions of her life." I think guilt and embarrassment is playing a part here. Dorothea is freaked out that she had led on Sir James. She feels trapped. This engagement is a perfect escape.
It also makes me think about how counter-suggestible my own teenage daughters were! There would have been no point anyone trying to change her mind, she would just have dug her heels in!
So true. It's heartbreaking.
What struck me most this time around was how Dorothea’s idealistic “intensity” was so reckless and yet susceptible to mood swings and local triggers (her antipathy to Chettam, her words with Celia). Just because the language is that of one of the greats of 19th-century fiction, we should not lose sight of the fact that Dorothea can come across as a kind of modern sheltered teenager. Eliot’s irony about this fact is not always gentle; her editorializing is (for me) completely on the mark, i.e. justified, just as it is in “Daniel Deronda” when Gwendolen, another headstrong beauty, talks herself foolishly into marrying the villainous Grandcourt. And I like Dorothea! I just think Eliot is more down to earth, more explicit, about how distasteful this “transaction” really is. Celia certainly gets it! Note, for example, Eliot’s irony in this passage toward the end of chapter 5: “He [Casaubon] was being unconsciously wrought upon by the charms of a nature which was entirely without hidden calculations either for immediate effects or for remoter ends. It was this which made Dorothea so childlike, and, according to some judges, so stupid, with all her repeated cleverness; as, for example, in the present case of throwing herself, metaphorically speaking, at Mr. Casaubon‘s feet, and kissing his unfashionable shoe-ties, as if he were a Protestant Pope. She was not in the least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough for her, but merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good enough for Mr. Casaubon.”
Yes! She is exactly that -- a sheltered teenager. Ironically, Chettam sees this, even aside from his own feelings for her.
It must be so interesting, when teaching this, to draw attention for teenagers to how young Dorothea really is. The differences of culture and language, the emphasis on religion and marriage, seem remote to the 21st C teen probably, and yet the passion and uncertainty about life are eternal to the age.
Such a great comment. “The one word he never used”! What a difference between the two letters, his so overwrought, latinate and convoluted, hers to the point if deluded. Is there anything we can salvage at all from casaubon’s letter? Does he love her at all despite failure to say so? Does he indeed offer her anything at all? It seems like many of us are agreed this is a flawed beginning and bodes pretty horribly. However, the one thing Casaubon offers maybe just maybe is a sincere esteem of Dorothea’s higher qualities. “I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and capability of devotedness.” No one else in her life has discerned that, and so it may help her take a baby step forward in life to be esteemed by this desiccated scholar. Whether such esteem constitutes love I couldn’t really say...I dare not opine...
I can so see how his discerning this would be enough to sweep her away. Maybe it is a sign of women's abjection that this need to be noticed remains such a powerful tether for us. But from his side I cannot but feel that if he truly had any sympathy for her talent and character he would hesitate to bind her to his cramped existence. He is not sure that she will accept this life, but he does not seem to suspect that it is actually bad for her.
Thanks for this! You are probably right on both counts. Casaubon should have known better! Nevertheless, there is to me something touching about their initial rapport. It seems I am a bit of an outlier here, but I am still kind of rooting for their marriage to at least lead somewhere away from the stuffiness of Convention. If Casaubon could only live up to his promise of an intellectual companionship that would be something to cling to.
I think I felt this the first time, and now come to it with protective feelings toward D!
I think you bring up a really good point: there are definitely warning signs about Casaubon. “Latinate,” “convoluted,” snug in his verbal shell. But as far as we know all his actions at this point are sincere, not calculated (except that he sees Dorothea as a helper in the future), not manipulative. He is cold, but he’s not malicious. Thus is their relationship a disaster waiting to happen. Her idealism is too intense, his worldview too closed and brittle (despite his interest in originary myths).
Just came across this from the end of Chapter 5, which I think was lodged in my mind but forgotten: "She was not in the least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough for her, but merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good enough for Mr. Casaubon." Point being: it did not occur to him to question whether he was good enough for her.
"I know that I must expect trials, uncle. Marriage is a state of higher duties. I never thought of it as mere personal ease," said poor Dorothea.
If there is not a whole word of authorial comment and control in that one little word, 'poor'! And does it not contrast her sharply with Austen? Why is Eliot not afraid to make these judgments in our presence?
In Ch. 4 we see Dorothea in the round, as Forster and Mona might say. I can't see that Eliot holds anything back from us. She seems to have found a channel wherein instead of creating tension by withholding information she can reach easily at any part of her story by means of hiding nothing.
Dorothea is like a train running on an alternate track that can't be diverted. Celia and their uncle try and Eliot shows us exactly how they try. What if Brooke had a complete meltdown or refused to let the marriage go forward? What if Celia .. but not only would it be out of character for them, it would all be for naught. By the end of Ch. 4 we know there is no one and nothing that can change Dorothea's mind.
And then the hammer blow of Ch. 5, where we see exactly what the deal is going to be.
Casaubon: "The great charm of your sex is its capability of ardent self-sacrificing affection and herein we see its fitness to round and complete the existence of our own."
Eh? And, yikes!
Narrator: "She was not in the least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough for her, but merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good enough for him."
And we also learn at the end of that chapter that it's the curate who does "all the duty" and Casaubon only preaches the morning sermon. Is he a fake in more ways than one? Or is he an open book for those who have eyes to see?
How do we get eyes that see?
Mr. Brooke: " ... for there is no knowing how anything may turn out."
Is there not?
What a great insight. Eliot has been hiding the moral of this story in plain sight.
I have been focusing on “mere personal ease” and all that might mean.
What I see in "poor" is Eliot lamenting (even though she put it there!) Dorothea's participation, even agency, in her own erasure. She does have a choice (in an earlier time she might not have) but she does not know how to use it. In a milieu that romanticizes (perhaps cynically) self-sacrifice, her yearning for transcendence becomes the mirror image of her subjection…
"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." So true!
Always coming back to Austen, I can't help but compare Mr. Causubon's proposal to Mr. Collins's in PP. The note of plangency is decidedly lacking there.
Speaking of Eliot sometimes making her round characters flat, I note that the word "childlike" is used three times in chapter 5 to describe Dorothea: once from the narrator's perspective ("she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining, in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own"), once from Causubon's ("Mr. Casaubon was touched with an unknown delight [what man would not have been?] at this childlike unrestrained ardor"), and once from a perspective that seems shared ("He was being unconsciously wrought upon by the charms of a nature which was entirely without hidden calculations either for immediate effects or for remoter ends. It was this which made Dorothea so childlike, and, according to some judges, so stupid, with all her reputed cleverness; as, for example, in the present case of throwing herself, metaphorically speaking, at Mr. Casaubon’s feet, and kissing his unfashionable shoe-ties as if he were a Protestant Pope").
I found the lap a somewhat uncomfortable metaphor, and the second instance also sounds the note of the age difference a little. The "stupid" in the third rings hard, and there is again an uncomfortable physicality in kissing the feet and the shoe-ties. "Childlike" does not seem a very pristine state, hazardous more like.
Yes, yes, and yes, for your reaction to the three metaphors.
This is the second time I started a book Mona suggested (the first being "To The Lighthouse") -- a book I would never have picked up in my lifetime, a book that did not appeal to me after the first two chapters -- only to find that Mona's comments and the stories themselves have sucked me in by the fourth or fifth chapter and I can't wait to finish them. Thanks to Mona and everyone who is contributing here with additional insights and perspectives. Now, on to chapters six and seven!
This is so wonderful to hear! Exactly the reason for setting this in motion! So glad to have you hear with us and to share your enthusiasm!
I was walking the dog yesterday while listening to these two chapters. What struck me was the playful way Eliot poked fun at Dorothea. I’m assuming this will gradually fade into a genial and genuine empathy (but maybe I’ll be wrong!).
It reminds me of why and when do we feel the need to “like” the characters in a work of fiction. As much as I say we shouldn’t worry about that I don’t follow my own strictures all the time.
So true! You can see in a lot of the comments on here how differently people respond to Dorothea's eccentricities, Eliot makes room for different reactions. Maybe gently inviting us to look inside why we like some people and not others is part of the point!
Thank you, Ann Kjellberg, for making me read this novel again. Carefully, and with sympathetic fellows.
Without the character of Dorothea to begin this journey, the novel would be something quite different. Did you (or anyone) know of some rumor that George Eliot appended "Miss Brooke" to several other chapters much later, almost as an improvised afterthought? I believe that's true, and I was amazed to discover it. It could only be Dorothea who pulls me into the drama by way of this marriage proposal, but -- of course -- not just any marriage proposal. It has landed on the mind of a young person with such vivid intense feeling, and the feeling is taken seriously. It's not flighty, or materialistic, or clouded by having read romances. Immediately I recognize all this ardor ... with no place earthly to go. When I was younger I went to divinity school and lived at a seminary for three years. There was a certain strain of romanticism among several of the seminarians there, a kind of flickering alertness to some other, more Platonic visions of what life could be, should be. It turns you into something of an alien. As if the values, and daily concerns, or silly entanglements of people your own age propel you into a quest for something truly ineffable, but greater, more weighty (for some reason), more purposeful. Like looking for a structure in thin air. Of course a lifetime of reading books about cosmology, the origins and ultimate fate of humans, well, that doesn't help alleviate any of the Romance.
At seminary (by coincidence) I read George Eliot's translations into English of the hugely important and influential German theologians -- Strauss, Feuerbach. (They were assigned; we could read any translation; I chose Eliot because she was so obviously the best writer.) These were the towering intellectual titans of their day. They dwelled in a world above. So to wish oneself in their company, to be able to see the world the way they do, or speak of them with people who share a similar worldview, it always struck me as the heart of Dorothea's ardor. It's so very different to feel your way with a character who wants something more layered than simple companionship, or even romance. She wants to touch the stars, and to be worthy of it. That's the tragedy of choosing Casaubon -- she seems to think he will be the one to provide the wished-for benediction. And of course it's mixed up with being twenty, and being orphaned, and wishing you had someone wise to talk to about these things. But her glorious longing -- it's so specific, so complex, and poignant.
I feel I'm in the hands of a writer who happens to be wiser than Casaubon, wiser by a mile, about those very ineffable and unearthly things that Dorothea wants to seek, with both head and heart.
Paul, an afterthought. In a few weeks I'll have a piece in Book Post by Ed Mendelson on Bible translation, and he reviews a book by Michael Edwards called Bible and Poetry that I think might speak to you. It's all about how Biblical language actually creates exalted experience, to oversimplify a bit.
I've been reading the Oxford edition that I link to on Book Post, and I chose it for us mostly because it has a great, detailed introduction that spells all this out. I believe she actually started a different section first (I should check this when I get home), and then wrote some Dorothea chapters as a separate project, and only realized after a while that she wanted to weave them together. Which is interesting because, as I remember it, there is a connection that you expect that never quite happens: the two pieces remain a bit distinct, like two different tunes that harmonize. But as to the second part of your comment--so great to have you with us here--because many of our modern readers find it hard to sympathize with the way in which Dorothea's aspirations express themselves in religion. This does still happen in modern times--it happens to me a bit--but it is more rare. Wonderful to have your perspective.
I found the source I was looking for! It was actually some notes that Mona shared with me from her class. She has that "In 1869, she begins Middlemarch (the first version, with the Garths, the Vincys and Lydgate), but breaks off. It’s rough slow going.
Her stepson dies in her arms, after returning from a hard life working on a farm in Natal.
In 1870, November, she begins Miss Brooke. It flows quickly. Between November and March, she writes 236 pages, which she amalgamates with the first Middlemarch and in December, the eight part publication begins." So she was working on a novel with the themes raised by the Lydgate story, but it was only when she conceived Dorothea that it came alive for her.
Yes, I also found fascinating your account of reading Eliot’s translations while at theological seminary. Maybe you can help us understand the influence of Feuerbach!
To address Dan’s generous comment above: Feuerbach 101 would go like thjs.
The heavens, and He or She or It who dwells there, is all just a massive wish-fulfillment. Human hearts all straining together, in a projection of idealism and hope up into some vast and empty space. Eliot esteemed Feuerbach for his psychological insights, quite frank for the tjme -- it’s apt that he shows up in the thoughts of the preacher in Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” as well. A heady blend of doubt and faith at once.
But take away a deity, and replace it with the object of one’s affection. What could be more Romantic-capital-R than that? It’s what Emma Bovary did. It’s part of the Bennett sisters’ prejudice. Only Dorothea seems to take that impulse as part of the highest most inspiring moral duty, apparently inherited from her serious faith. She blends the two, romance and religion. It’s admittedly a weird mix.
But not much of a leap to love of a husband like a “sort of father” ... who could teach you Hebrew, if he liked?
Thank you! Learning and approaching the divine are so intertwined in Dorothea's mind, hence the conflation of the pastor and the teacher. The promise of realizing her own capacities through learning and religion has its mirror image the teacher/pastor/lover fiigure: a partner who truly teaches and truly ministers can only be loving in the most intimate, sublime sense.
My understanding is that Eliot wrote the opening chapters about Dorothea but didn’t know what to do with them. Her breakthrough came when she realized she could weave the Miss Brooke material into a greater narrative involving other plots and characters. The novel as we have it was launched.
I’m basing this on The Transferred Life of George Eliot by Philip Davis. There is a chapter on the genesis of the novel. (There happened to be a copy at the Brooklyn Public Library.)
For fun this morning skimmed through the first chapters looking for references to Dorothea's and Celia's education. One thing I'd missed - Dorothea is 19 - not even 20 yet! Since age of 12 she and Celia educated by an English family and then a Swiss one. Apparently Dorothea had something going for a Monsieur Liret, a former school teacher from Lausanne, "also ugly and learned" according to Celia.
Elsewhere there are a few brief scathing references to the quality of education Dorothea and Celia received. "the shallows of ladies-school literature." "a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse" "a small kind of tinkling" (Celia's piano playing) and again, "a small tinkling and smearing" re "domestic music and feminine fine art"
"smearing" supposedly referring to painting - !
And yet Dorothea says, "When we were coming home from Lausanne my uncle took us to hear the great organ at Freiberg, and it made me sob." A sentiment that neither Casaubon nor Mr. Brooke can understand.
Dorothea is credited with an "hereditary strain of Puritan energy."
Eliot emphasizes her nature and her personality over any explicit training though she also drops names like Pascal, Hooker, Milton, Augustine, to say that Dorothea is familiar with their work and is using them as models for what she imagines as portals to an exalted, fulfilling, puposeful life.
And yet the first line of Ch. 1 is about how beautiful Dorothea is!
Her beauty seems an intrinsic and in some ways a disappointing part of all this ...
So interesting. Thanks for gathering all this! The mention of Liret interested me, too. I’m interested in the way education for women in Eliot’s world is associated with France. As with the French speaking Belgian for Brontë. In Felix Holt, both of the main women characters have read French literature in their youth and adopted sort of transgressive aesthetics in their English world. In Melville’s Pierre there is a similar figure, a lost French sister who breaks open Pierre’s stodgy world. I dunno if it’s a trope? But it also reflects the way France and Germany were ahead of England in advocating for women’s education and rights. Did anyone see that piece about Wollstonecraft in the TLS?
Reminds me how Henry Adams went to Germany in the expectation that that was where one needed to go to be educated.
Had a rotten time, as I recall. But learned to enjoy Beethoven in a beer-hall. Yeah, I don’t know how widespread that assumption was, about Germany for education. George Ticknor was a pioneer. Coleridge’s visit in his twenties must have been one of the biggies. He brought back intellectual treasures, but I still feel like Germany remained off the map for lots of folks, compared to Italy and France.
True!
Casaubon lives sleeps and breathes his work too, though it is of a pointless and stultifying nature.
He could never see Dorothea as his equal, only as an extension of his primary interest. I think that is his limitation when push comes to shove.
I have been enlightened by everyone’s comments and analysis for these chapters. I was intrigued by Eliot’s ability to show such contradictions and complements .
I also started a list comparing Celia to Dorothea and thinking about Dorothea’s being.
Celia is conventional and Dorothea is unconventional.
Dorothea shows contradictions by being naive but assured of her positions, she is confident but filled with self doubt
Self righteous but worried about being on the wrong path
She is quick to anger but forgiving
Feels constrained by customs but can be quite customary
Stubborn in her ways
Pg 34 “She was getting away from Tipton And Freshitt, and her own sad liability to tread in the wrong places on her way to the New Jerusalem “ seems to sun it all up right there and sends us all on a cautionary tale by Eliot. She lets us know from the beginning that road is going to be difficult for Dorothea
She creates a person in whom these contradictions are a sign of vitality, not incoherence...
Yes, absolutely and that is Eliot’s genius. Dorothea is complicated and a tumble right now but she has the capacity as you suggest to sort it all out. Just painful to get there
Thanks for calling attention to the strange turn Casaubon’s letter takes towards the end, and to the oddness of his calling himself “young” in this way. He also speaks of “anxiety.” He would like to relieve his anxiety by plunging into work, but he is unable to do so. This may be an ominous sign of inner conflict. He will be caught between his devotion to his work and his desire for companionship. It may be only a matter of time before he does plunge into his work, escaping the anxieties caused by Dorothea, and then what.
“I await the expression of your sentiments with an anxiety which it would be the better part of wisdom (we’re it possible) to divert by a more arduous labor than usual.”
I found this bit ominous--that an experience of emotion is something that he instinctually subordinates in work.
I love this articulation of "emotionally intelligent" versus "intense." I also love (what feels to me like) Eliot's mix of concern for and admiration for the less balanced woman. Austen certainly shares this to some degree.
Another wonderful observation in this post: Eliot's generous, insightful way of rounding out flat characters and flattening round ones.
Yes! I love this about “concern for and admiration for the less balanced woman.” Fiction does not have to be one thing or another, it can weigh competing feelings
Thanks, Amanda. Embarrassed to have spoken knowingly of Wollstonecraft whom I haven’t read. Mr Brooke lives on in me. This review by Showalter told about her life first supporting herself by translating from the French, then in France writing Vindication and meeting this American guy who basically abandoned her and then she traveled in Scandinavia and wrote those letters. There is also a good summary of her life and achievement in Joanna Biggs book. But I will give you this quote from Felix Holt, though, which casts an interesting light on Dorothea’s education: “when she (Mrs transome) was very young she had been thought wonderfully clever and...had picked out for private reading the lighter parts of dangerous French authors...she always thought the dangerous French writers were wicked, and that her reading of them was a sin; but many sinful things were highly agreeable to her...”
Dorothea seems to "warm" to Casaubon more as an imagined teacher than a religious mentor .. do you think? School teachers being an alternate to church men as objects of misplaced desire?
However think of C. Brontë's Villette. School teachers can be sexy somehow in ways church men cannot.
But not here, alas.
I wonder what sort of teachers Dorothea would have had! All situations of father-figures, the yearning to win the recognition of the men who are in charge. Maybe this thing that is being read as "desire" is just the wish to exist as an equal, or begin as an equal, or to claim one's own agency, a precondition for satisfying desire...?
I think in a meta way Eliot is performing this desire and engagement with the epigrams that head each chapter. She is putting her work in direct dialogue with these thinkers and writers and inserting Middlemarch into this tradition!
What a great observation! Some of them seem to be made up by her (?) in imitation of "what people say"—another layer of conversation.
Yes, I agree with that completely. I do think Dorothea wants to be an equal. She thinks it has to be an exalted (in her eyes) person otherwise she is not living her ideal life.
Oh my gosh, yes. I had no idea when I read this book in college how much it speaks the the insecurities that structured my life at the time!
Maybe Eliot wrote Dorothea so that they young us would be indulgent toward Dorothea and her decisions—and sympathetically drawn along with her misjudgments—and the older us would be able to reflect on how we had been shaped by such needs. Remember how Susan Sontag recalled that she burst into tears first reading Middlemarch because she had just married Mr. Casaubon.
I didn’t know that about Sontag!
Yes, you can see how a young Sontag--who had a crush on Thomas Mann--might have been a bit Dorothea-like! I love that!
Yes, that’s a great comparison. Unlike Casaubon, Monsieur Paul is a disciplined teacher, lives sleeps breathes it, and that school work provides a framework for their gradual falling in love.
Not sure I agree that projection is necessarily involved. He loves her (though he fails to say the word) for her elevation and devotion, qualities which we have every reason to believe she actually possesses. Therefore, in some sense their communication is perfect. If we accept the reality of their love and communication we will be all the more in a position to appreciate the disaster that looms for them.
I fear though that he appreciates her elevation only as something instrumental to him
Yes, you are right to fear that.
Maybe we can return to this question when Eliot issues her famous plea for Casaubon (if I’m right to call it that), I.e. not to judge him too harshly, as I seem to recall...
Thinking of Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” - Loving others at close range without instrumentalizing them is, truthfully, often challenging even for well-intentioned people.
Mona hits the mark, again. This is more like a business proposal. I don't think he mentions the word "love," and yet, in her response, she thanks him for his love of her. How much those in love read into the cryptic communications of the beloved.
Ah, I see Sarah noted this before I did! Sorry so slow this week.
Yes, I never thought of that, I think you are right! Two suitors at the same time, she feels pressured by one and escapes to the other .. no wonder Eliot put her in the middle and turned the screws!