Overall, these two chapters offer comedy. I often think the quality of a writer can be measured by the intensity of their minor characters. George Eliot, we have seen, complicates Forster’s theory; she doesn’t really write flat characters. Consider Mrs. Cadwallader. After our two young heroines, anticipating the novel’s first social introduction, try on their late mother’s jewelry, with at least a portion of the giddiness of young women everywhere, in any era, adorning themselves en route to a party, however provincial, we meet another neighbor, a middle-aged woman, whose love story had long-ago unspooled.
Mrs. Cadwallader married for love, we assume; she’s highborn, with an aristocratic accent, and she married a poor curate. Her family and friends opposed the match—there could have been no motivation other than love and she has a warm manner with her husband still.
She’s posh, stylish, and fun, a “high-colored, dark-eyed lady, with the clearest chiseled utterance,” and she bargains with one of Mr. Brooke’s tenants for hens, reminding the farmer to consider the fowl half paid-for already by Mr. Cadwallader’s sermon.
Busybody that she is, Mrs. Cadwallader had encouraged Sir James to court Dorothea, so she’s upset to learn about her impending marriage to Casaubon and dreads having to break the news to Sir James.
There’s some comedy with Celia, who reports that her sister thinks Casaubon has a great soul:
“I don’t think it can be nice to marry a man with a great soul.”
“Well, my dear, take warning. You know the look of one now; when the next comes and wants to marry you, don’t you accept him.”
Her sharp tongue is all well and good as long as Mrs. Cadwallader is talking about the perils of marrying Mr. Casaubon, but, much as one likes her, we find she has her prejudices. “She believed as unquestioningly in birth and no-birth as she did in game and vermin.” She hates the nouveaux riches, goes so far as to think that they “were no part of God’s design in making the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears.”
As much as she considers the engagement a disaster, Mrs. Cadwallader delays going to tell Sir James the terrible news until she has achieved the point of her errand. “By the by, before I go, my dear, I must speak to your Mrs. Carter about pastry. I want to send my young cook to learn of her. Poor people with four children, like us, you know, can’t afford to keep a good cook. I have no doubt Mrs. Carter will oblige me. Sir James’s cook is a perfect dragon.”
We also learn from Mrs. Cadwallader that Mr. Brooke bought some land for the purpose of leasing it to Catholics and now feels “persecuted for not persecuting.” This insight, added to the sadness he shared with Dorothea about his inability to obtain a stay of execution for a sheep-stealer, gives us a sense of Mr. Brooke’s liberality, his decency, even if he is rambling, contradictory, and equivocating.
So Eliot’s minor characters are nuanced. Mr. Brooke for all his repetitions and variations on the theme of famous people he’s dined with, “that sort of thing,” and “going too far,” has genuine empathy, and Mrs. Cadwallader, for all her fun and frankness, is truly a snob.
As we suspected Casaubon looks forward to his wedding, because he’s finding courtship to be more arduous than he anticipated, and less delightful.
“… he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was. As in droughty regions baptism by immersion could only be performed symbolically, so Mr. Casaubon found that sprinkling was the utmost approach to a plunge which his stream would afford him; and he concluded that the poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine passion.”
We, too, wonder about the force of Casaubon’s masculine passion.
Even Mrs. Cadwallader, who has to admit that the putative groom fulfills the necessary requirements of money and status for eligibility, thinks “this marriage to Casaubon is as good as going to a nunnery.”
Meanwhile, Dorothea is chomping at the bit. Her sexual energy, her intensity, must threaten him:
“It was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appeared to conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory?...And she had not reached that point of renunciation at which she would have been satisfied with having a wise husband: she wished, poor child, to be wise herself.”
We sense that Mr. Casaubon may already find Dorothea to be a handful.
During a discussion of music, during which Mr. Casaubon makes the distinction between popular songs and “the grander forms of music, worthy to accompany solemn celebrations, and even to serve as an educating influence,” 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.”
Mr. Brooke remarks, ‘That kind of thing is not healthy, my dear … Casaubon, she will be in your hands now: you must teach my niece to take things more quietly, eh, Dorothea?”
“He ended with a smile, not wishing to hurt his niece, but really thinking that it was perhaps better for her to be early married to so sober a fellow as Casaubon, since she would not hear of Chettam.”
He seems to need to keep talking himself into the idea.
“‘It is wonderful, though,’ he said to himself as he shuffled out of the room—‘it is wonderful that she should have liked him. However, the match is good. I should have been travelling out of my brief to have hindered it, let Mrs. Cadwallader say what she will. He is pretty certain to be a bishop, is Casaubon … a deanery at least. They owe him a deanery.”
George Eliot then makes the kind of epigrammatic statement beloved by kindle underliners:
“To think with pleasure of his niece’s husband having a large ecclesiastical income was one thing—to make a Liberal speech was another thing; and it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
Yet all this comedy perhaps obscures a startling matter of pacing. We’ve only finished seven chapters, 150 pages into an eight-hundred-page novel and the central character appears to be hurtling towards her wedding.
What does this mean for the marriage plot?
No sooner has the proposal been accepted than Eliot diverts us with a chorus of riffs on its unsuitability.
Is it possible that this novel will defy the convention and actually break the engagement?
To settle this and other questions, let’s go ahead and read chapters 8, 9 and 10 for next time, through the end of Book 1.
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Mona Simpson is the author of seven novels, most recently Commitment, which appeared this spring.
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I keep thinking that what would have suited Dorothea so much better than marriage to Casaubon or anybody else would have been to go to a top-rate liberal arts university, anytime from, say 1975 to now. She was hungry to learn, she was eager to study. Philosophy! Literature! Ethics! She was born in the wrong time.
Sorry, I commented on Ch. 8 earlier .. I thought 6-8 included 8. But I see it's 8, 9, and 10 for next time.
I would love to hear what others think is the quality of the humor in Middlemarch. I like these quotes from Mrs. Cadwallader:
"I set a bad example - married a poor clergyman, and made myself a pitiable object among the De Bracys - obliged to get my coals by stratagem, and pray to heaven for my salad oil."
and
"... what can one do with a husband who attends so little to the decencies? I hide it as well as I can by abusing everybody myself."