Eliot's minor characters are nuanced. No sooner has the marriage proposal been accepted than they divert us with a chorus of riffs on its unsuitability.
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.
Maybe all this "end of the humanities" talk should recall Dorothea—we don't want to go back to a time when one had to go to these lengths to expand one's horizons!
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."
It all just gets better and better. Mrs Cadwallader is a marvellous comic creation ‘Somebody put a drop under a microphone and it was all semicolons and parentheses ‘.. and we laugh with her, not at her. Sir James Chettam letting his whip fall, the perfect snapshot of the stiff upper lipped Englishman dealing with romantic setbacks. Best of all, we get the first hint (Spoiler Alert!) of Ladislaw, unnamed at this stage. We will get several more clues in the next chapters before we finally meet him in Rome.
I missed it! Now flipping back. I found the scene of Chettam and Mr. Cadwallader to be such a tour de force, like she's saying, I can do anything! And I enjoyed with Mrs. Cadwallader that there were all these references that we don't actually need to understand in order to appreciate that she's needling Mr. Brooke. We're almost like him, struggling to keep up and not be bullied!
Thanks for pointing this out. I think Mr. Cadwallader’s statement about Casaubon is interesting in itself. Can we accept it as a positive account of Casaubon’s heart, “[not] the melting sort, but a sound kernel”? Or what are we to make of it? I personally buy it. Dorothea made the better choice between evils. Chettam is intolerable not fully human to me with his focus on legs, and his I don’t like him and his calling casaubon a mummy. Eliot is wiser seeking the truths of the human heart beneath an unpromising exterior.
Perhaps for Eliot it is not a matter so much of yea or nay? Although I don't have too much confidence in Mrs. Cadwallader's insight into Casaubon. Finally Casaubon represents Eliot's world more than the other characters do, and Dorothea the desire to enter it. Eliot is perhaps trying to envision the intellectual life through the least charitable eyes, in order better to understand.
Maybe this is just me, but the thing I love about Eliot is that she is just as hard on the women (their prejudices, their decision-making) as she is on the men. She’s creating a space for women in the intellectual sphere, but she’s always showing the tradeoffs involved: two steps forward, one step back. Brooke’s fecklessness, Dorothea’s drive for the big world of (mostly male) ideas: we want to cut Dorothea slack because we see her about to fall victim to a world not yet ready for her ambitions. I’m not sure Eliot is cutting her the same slack; I think she is sending her into the fray with no protective feelings about her youth and beauty. (Full disclosure: I say this as the father of a daughter raised in present-day culture.) Tolstoy is an explicit moralist: he presents women in their world vividly, with utter verisimilitude, but his narration of them disapproves when their sexuality comes to the fore (say, in AK). What Eliot gives is the same objectivity, depiction-wise, but the moralizing is placed on the back burner and a kind of gentle irony, even playfulness, takes over when gender stereotypes are involved (e.g. Chettam vs. Mrs. C). Eliot’s narration is more thoughtful than Tolstoy’s in this regard. Hence we can point out the “egregious sexism of the Victorian classics” and we would be correct, especially when compared to today, but I wonder what Eliot would say about the intellectual space she was fighting for in its current configuration. How would her honesty and irony express themselves.
My instinct is to feel that she is framing Dorothea to be sympathetic to a contemporary reader (youth, beauty, eligibility = traditional heroine), but setting her up to have a different (more real, Eliotish) set of aspirations. How do these play out given her circumstances? How would they lead her astray? What thwarts her even from understanding her own impulses? One imagines, say, Elizabeth Hardwick in Lexington having a comparable experience. What would be the analogue now? The environment is so ostensibly friendly to female aspiration, and yet.
Thank, Ann! Yes, you’re right to remind us Eliot works from these multiple perspectives, and in a way all perspectives are valid, even Chettam’s, ha ha. Why can’t I stand that guy but I think others have been more tolerant and appreciative. In the chapters we are reading next (can’t wait for Mona’s next post), Eliot will issue a “protest” on Casaubon’s behalf. It may have elements of irony and equivocation but it’s still pretty strongly worded. I’ll be interested in hearing what people have to say about that...as a sort of classicist I am also fascinated by this glimpse into the egregious sexism of Victorian classics. The idea was that women shouldn’t read this stuff mainly because of its frankness about sexuality (Aristophanes, Juvenal, Martial), and also it was a way of maintaining an elite, ruling an empire. Brooke is pretty outrageous with his blanket statements on women’s minds: varium et mutabile semper (from Aeneid book four, a pretty sexist text where Dido is abandoned by Aeneas and commits suicide) is one of the great sexist cliches. Casaubon is by no means free of this sexism, but will at least teach her the Greek alphabet, “a precious permission.” It’s hard to imagine how fiercely these classical things were policed back in those days, so with hesitation I think this might be a positive thing.
It's funny, speaking as a female who has been reading these books all her life, I am so accustomed to these things that I barely notice them. Of course Dorothea was told that women were not equipped for learning! Deep down I probably still hear that in the world and fear it to be true. The way I experience Eliot's avoidance of judgment is that she is setting up a structure: Dorothea's life experience channels her toward a certain avenue of self expression, and Casaubon appears as an expression of all the dangers lurking there. I noticed in ix how hostile D is to Italian culture—surely Eliot sees this as a limitation, imposed by her puritanical milieu. I feel like Casaubon is a kind of tender caricature of the English intellectual—her people, or what they are trying to outgrow.
Yes, I suppose I agree on the larger point. You put that very well. Casaubon is a lurking danger to her self-expression, even if he teaches her Greek letters. This marriage is going to be a kind of ordeal. As for the Italian culture, i don't know. Maybe it's alright for now that she's hostile. Eliot's tone there ("smirking Renaissance Corregiosities") seems to imply that there is a limitation to Brooke's access to Italian culture, that he brought home a superficial impression of the Renaissance, not seeking its deeper energies (as, say Pater and Ruskin would do, or Winckelmann had already done). So in a way she is better off in the quaint Puritanical atmosphere of Lowick than around that kitschy (?) stuff. I could say more because I love the description of Lowick in Chapter P, but I want to wait see what Mona has to say.
I also liked how GE developed the microscope metaphor: because Mrs. Cadwallader was such a force of nature in how she conducted her matchmaking maneuvers, her activities lured others into the ‘flow’ of her plan without their even noticing it. “In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens [i.e. of the microscope] applied to Mrs. Cadwallader’s match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed.” Very clever and sensitive to how social interactions work!
I am so glad that Mona talked about humor today - re-reading today's chapters has only reminded me how delightfully funny they are.
The primary joy of Mrs. Cadwallader is in her language. She is uninhibited in her speech, and sure of her own and others' places in society. With Dorothea she has made an uncharacteristic mistake - that is, a specimen like Dorothea does not fit in Mrs. Cadwallader's ecological view of her pond - Eliot's metaphors of telescopes, microscopes and lenses - Mrs. Cadwallader seen under "a stronger lens" is shown to be feeding on the lives of others, though not in a harmful way, or with bad intent.
Lest we think Mrs. Cadwallader is being too harsh on Casaubon, Ch. 7 reassures us that she is not. He wants Dorothea to take care of him in his old age, he wonders if his own lack of romantic feeling is due to "some deficiency" not in himself but in Dorothea, but, gosh darn it, he can't think of any other woman that will fit the bill as well as she will, so why not ...
Mr. Brooke confirms his view that he "should have been travelling out of my brief to have hindered" the marriage.
We may conjecture that his seemingly mild-mannered low views of women are playing a role in his decision-making, or lack thereof. He can't "see" Dorothea any more than Mrs. Cadwallader can and resorts to his own forms of rationalization.
Freedom of choice has become an interesting option here.
In Ch 8 we see Sir James still wrestling with his discomfort - he has quickly managed to assuage his ego and now is acting out of concern for Dorothea. By the end of the chapter he is enjoying spending time with Dorothea as a person, not a love interest.
There is nothing Mr. Cadwallader says that can be argued with. His wife's laser-sharp comments about Casaubon, and Sir Jame's vague and slightly ridiculous ones, fall in relief to his God-like views.
"His conscience was large and easy, like the rest of him: it did only what it could do without any trouble."
So no one is actually going to go to "any trouble" - not any real trouble - to hinder Dorothea from following her wishes. "SIr James felt with some sadness that she was to have perfect liberty of misjudgment."
Are they all too polite? Too self-interested? Celia is sad, Sir James is sad, Mr. Brooke, it does seem, is sad .. should an impending engagement cause this much sadness? Even with the example of the Cadwallader's supposedly successful marriage? But what we know of that is that they get along and it was only the relations that were wrong, not the couple - here we have a couple who is wrong ..
Chettam does seem possibly right that Brooke could postpone the marriage until Dorothea is of age. Then she could read to Casaubon and study Greek and so forth, and he is probably right that she would figure out that he is not who she believes him to be and it could perhaps be gently broken off. Is it possible that Brooke agrees to the hasty marriage for financial reasons? The hurry seem to have a rather unseemly connection to the size of Casaubon's house …
hmm I wonder! Seems Brooke is secure financially and Dorothea and Celia have an inheritance from their parents. But the money does seem to play a big part in his rationalizing.
Chettam, in his manly belligerence, fails to understand the inevitability of the marriage of two spiritual beings. He is a pretty soulless character, in my opinion. To appreciate Middlemarch in my opinion you have to accept this marriage as a given. There is no sense in imagining a world where Dorothea chooses not to marry him. It’s who she is. Her fate. It sets the real plot in motion. I am afraid the Jane Austen analogy has really led us astray!
You raise a point I have struggled with my whole adult life: when you think someone you care about is on the brink of making a bad choice what is the proper response? Patient silence that waits for an opening or intruding with advice that, if unsolicited, could push everything in the wrong direction? Yes, Brooke could have insisted Dorothea wait until she is of age, although there is nothing about the uncle so far that suggests he has the temperament for that, plus both girls seem very much in charge of their own situations. My sense is GE has created a set of carefully drawn characters and a momentum made up of temperament and event that can't be turned back. It seems virtually inevitable.
Yes that seems right. We *feel* its inevitability, even as we resist it. A friend of mine once said, in a discussion on this point (a novelist, by the way), "You can't convince anyone of anything." He was exaggerating, but also not. You are always present in your advice, your intrusion is felt more than the rightness of your position. One thinks, as a parent, of those times one has taken a hard stand, and the inner uncertainty of that.
The idea of Eliot breaking the engagement hadn't occured to me, and honestly fills me with joy. At least it would relieve the pervading sense of dread!
There might be a typo in the "Yet all this comedy..." paragraph. We're 50 pages in, eh? Not 150.
I love these descriptions of the so-called minor characters. They are sharply drawn and essential to the job of moving the story forward. Talking about themes though, what about the end paragraph of chapter VI? “... pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts-not to hurt others.”
This seems to be a spotlights on it statement of some thing important in the book. As somebody who doesn’t fully know how it comes out, am I on to something?
What a good thought! Gets me thinking that Dorothea, for all her eagerness to abase herself, is actually proud in a generative way—she believes in herself, expects to surpass expectations. Perhaps Eliot is hinting that this religious injunction that she make herself submissive is a disservice to her.
I love the way you put that! "a set of carefully drawn characters and a momentum made up of temperament and event that can't be turned back" The word that stands out to me is 'momentum.' How she is moving through scenes so quickly and yet so thoroughly in a way, taking on objections but not letting anything slow down what is happening .. can't be turned back ...
We see all the objections gently but decisively thwarted, like loose threads woven in—Cadwallader talks Chettam down, Celia is not a strong enough force to counter Dorothea, Brooke questions himself into going along, Mrs. Cadwallader redirects her interference…
The opening of chapter six, with the casual trade of birds reminds me of Auden's poem Musée de Beaux Arts, about the painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, where the quotidian continues while tragedy of Icarus goes unremarked. You have to squint to notice the feathers falling into the water. There’s a comical tint to these petty conversations, as in the everyday gestures in a Bruegel painting.
Eliot, in this novel steeped in religion, has to be thinking of the New Testament passages where Christ "overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves." And the somber echo of this in centurions throwing lots for Christ's robe as he died on the cross.
(The painting is commonly attributed to Bruegel, but there is evidence it was painted after his death.)
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Not sure. I just have been checking the Book Post home page from time to time to look for Mona's latest post. The Book Post insignium gets you to the home page. I wanted to comment on the way Eliot weaves politics into the marriage plot in these chapters. It may have even played a subtle role in Brooke's acceptance of Casaubon, that he, Casaubon is apparently liberal on the Catholic question: "That was a very seasonable tract of his on the Catholic Question," Mr. Brooke tells himself at the end of Chapter Seven. But when Mrs. Cadwallader suspects a liberal conspiracy between Casaubon and Brooke, blushing, he is careful to deny it: "Nothing of the sort. Casaubon and I don't talk politics much." Nevertheless, it has been part of the reason for Brooke's initial invitation to Casaubon to come to his home and a big part of the initial convo in Chapter Two! So I think we are justified at least in suspecting that this is a big part of the secret machinery working in the depths of Middlemarch. I also love the way Mrs. Cadwallader brings up the spectre of Brooke's candidacy to cushion the blow for Sir James. That said, she is not really up on politics. She expects whiggery but these fellows are brewing up some new thing that doesn't have a definite name yet: "liberal, independent, radical," and i don't deny there may be some human decency involved, but there is also a power grab going on, as we see also in Felix Holt, the moment the franchise is expanded the question becomes who will get in, and some very posh people start calling themselves radicals (to Felix's chagrin).
Just to clarify, what I am saying is that behind the pleasant comic facade the gentlemanly Mr. Brooke harbors political ambitions which help determine Dorothea’s fate.
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.
Maybe all this "end of the humanities" talk should recall Dorothea—we don't want to go back to a time when one had to go to these lengths to expand one's horizons!
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."
You're right! I thought we were reading 8 this time too! I'll check with Mona. As to Mrs. C--it does seem to show her rather self-aware!
It all just gets better and better. Mrs Cadwallader is a marvellous comic creation ‘Somebody put a drop under a microphone and it was all semicolons and parentheses ‘.. and we laugh with her, not at her. Sir James Chettam letting his whip fall, the perfect snapshot of the stiff upper lipped Englishman dealing with romantic setbacks. Best of all, we get the first hint (Spoiler Alert!) of Ladislaw, unnamed at this stage. We will get several more clues in the next chapters before we finally meet him in Rome.
I missed it! Now flipping back. I found the scene of Chettam and Mr. Cadwallader to be such a tour de force, like she's saying, I can do anything! And I enjoyed with Mrs. Cadwallader that there were all these references that we don't actually need to understand in order to appreciate that she's needling Mr. Brooke. We're almost like him, struggling to keep up and not be bullied!
Thanks for pointing this out. I think Mr. Cadwallader’s statement about Casaubon is interesting in itself. Can we accept it as a positive account of Casaubon’s heart, “[not] the melting sort, but a sound kernel”? Or what are we to make of it? I personally buy it. Dorothea made the better choice between evils. Chettam is intolerable not fully human to me with his focus on legs, and his I don’t like him and his calling casaubon a mummy. Eliot is wiser seeking the truths of the human heart beneath an unpromising exterior.
Perhaps for Eliot it is not a matter so much of yea or nay? Although I don't have too much confidence in Mrs. Cadwallader's insight into Casaubon. Finally Casaubon represents Eliot's world more than the other characters do, and Dorothea the desire to enter it. Eliot is perhaps trying to envision the intellectual life through the least charitable eyes, in order better to understand.
Maybe this is just me, but the thing I love about Eliot is that she is just as hard on the women (their prejudices, their decision-making) as she is on the men. She’s creating a space for women in the intellectual sphere, but she’s always showing the tradeoffs involved: two steps forward, one step back. Brooke’s fecklessness, Dorothea’s drive for the big world of (mostly male) ideas: we want to cut Dorothea slack because we see her about to fall victim to a world not yet ready for her ambitions. I’m not sure Eliot is cutting her the same slack; I think she is sending her into the fray with no protective feelings about her youth and beauty. (Full disclosure: I say this as the father of a daughter raised in present-day culture.) Tolstoy is an explicit moralist: he presents women in their world vividly, with utter verisimilitude, but his narration of them disapproves when their sexuality comes to the fore (say, in AK). What Eliot gives is the same objectivity, depiction-wise, but the moralizing is placed on the back burner and a kind of gentle irony, even playfulness, takes over when gender stereotypes are involved (e.g. Chettam vs. Mrs. C). Eliot’s narration is more thoughtful than Tolstoy’s in this regard. Hence we can point out the “egregious sexism of the Victorian classics” and we would be correct, especially when compared to today, but I wonder what Eliot would say about the intellectual space she was fighting for in its current configuration. How would her honesty and irony express themselves.
My instinct is to feel that she is framing Dorothea to be sympathetic to a contemporary reader (youth, beauty, eligibility = traditional heroine), but setting her up to have a different (more real, Eliotish) set of aspirations. How do these play out given her circumstances? How would they lead her astray? What thwarts her even from understanding her own impulses? One imagines, say, Elizabeth Hardwick in Lexington having a comparable experience. What would be the analogue now? The environment is so ostensibly friendly to female aspiration, and yet.
Totally agree: “different (more real, Eliotish) set of aspirations”!
Thank, Ann! Yes, you’re right to remind us Eliot works from these multiple perspectives, and in a way all perspectives are valid, even Chettam’s, ha ha. Why can’t I stand that guy but I think others have been more tolerant and appreciative. In the chapters we are reading next (can’t wait for Mona’s next post), Eliot will issue a “protest” on Casaubon’s behalf. It may have elements of irony and equivocation but it’s still pretty strongly worded. I’ll be interested in hearing what people have to say about that...as a sort of classicist I am also fascinated by this glimpse into the egregious sexism of Victorian classics. The idea was that women shouldn’t read this stuff mainly because of its frankness about sexuality (Aristophanes, Juvenal, Martial), and also it was a way of maintaining an elite, ruling an empire. Brooke is pretty outrageous with his blanket statements on women’s minds: varium et mutabile semper (from Aeneid book four, a pretty sexist text where Dido is abandoned by Aeneas and commits suicide) is one of the great sexist cliches. Casaubon is by no means free of this sexism, but will at least teach her the Greek alphabet, “a precious permission.” It’s hard to imagine how fiercely these classical things were policed back in those days, so with hesitation I think this might be a positive thing.
It's funny, speaking as a female who has been reading these books all her life, I am so accustomed to these things that I barely notice them. Of course Dorothea was told that women were not equipped for learning! Deep down I probably still hear that in the world and fear it to be true. The way I experience Eliot's avoidance of judgment is that she is setting up a structure: Dorothea's life experience channels her toward a certain avenue of self expression, and Casaubon appears as an expression of all the dangers lurking there. I noticed in ix how hostile D is to Italian culture—surely Eliot sees this as a limitation, imposed by her puritanical milieu. I feel like Casaubon is a kind of tender caricature of the English intellectual—her people, or what they are trying to outgrow.
Yes, I suppose I agree on the larger point. You put that very well. Casaubon is a lurking danger to her self-expression, even if he teaches her Greek letters. This marriage is going to be a kind of ordeal. As for the Italian culture, i don't know. Maybe it's alright for now that she's hostile. Eliot's tone there ("smirking Renaissance Corregiosities") seems to imply that there is a limitation to Brooke's access to Italian culture, that he brought home a superficial impression of the Renaissance, not seeking its deeper energies (as, say Pater and Ruskin would do, or Winckelmann had already done). So in a way she is better off in the quaint Puritanical atmosphere of Lowick than around that kitschy (?) stuff. I could say more because I love the description of Lowick in Chapter P, but I want to wait see what Mona has to say.
I’ve got to go back to look for the foreshadowing
Bother, microscope not microphone!
I also liked how GE developed the microscope metaphor: because Mrs. Cadwallader was such a force of nature in how she conducted her matchmaking maneuvers, her activities lured others into the ‘flow’ of her plan without their even noticing it. “In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens [i.e. of the microscope] applied to Mrs. Cadwallader’s match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed.” Very clever and sensitive to how social interactions work!
It's almost like the sentence *is* a microscope, disclosing tiny complex forces.
I am so glad that Mona talked about humor today - re-reading today's chapters has only reminded me how delightfully funny they are.
The primary joy of Mrs. Cadwallader is in her language. She is uninhibited in her speech, and sure of her own and others' places in society. With Dorothea she has made an uncharacteristic mistake - that is, a specimen like Dorothea does not fit in Mrs. Cadwallader's ecological view of her pond - Eliot's metaphors of telescopes, microscopes and lenses - Mrs. Cadwallader seen under "a stronger lens" is shown to be feeding on the lives of others, though not in a harmful way, or with bad intent.
Lest we think Mrs. Cadwallader is being too harsh on Casaubon, Ch. 7 reassures us that she is not. He wants Dorothea to take care of him in his old age, he wonders if his own lack of romantic feeling is due to "some deficiency" not in himself but in Dorothea, but, gosh darn it, he can't think of any other woman that will fit the bill as well as she will, so why not ...
Mr. Brooke confirms his view that he "should have been travelling out of my brief to have hindered" the marriage.
We may conjecture that his seemingly mild-mannered low views of women are playing a role in his decision-making, or lack thereof. He can't "see" Dorothea any more than Mrs. Cadwallader can and resorts to his own forms of rationalization.
Freedom of choice has become an interesting option here.
In Ch 8 we see Sir James still wrestling with his discomfort - he has quickly managed to assuage his ego and now is acting out of concern for Dorothea. By the end of the chapter he is enjoying spending time with Dorothea as a person, not a love interest.
There is nothing Mr. Cadwallader says that can be argued with. His wife's laser-sharp comments about Casaubon, and Sir Jame's vague and slightly ridiculous ones, fall in relief to his God-like views.
"His conscience was large and easy, like the rest of him: it did only what it could do without any trouble."
So no one is actually going to go to "any trouble" - not any real trouble - to hinder Dorothea from following her wishes. "SIr James felt with some sadness that she was to have perfect liberty of misjudgment."
Are they all too polite? Too self-interested? Celia is sad, Sir James is sad, Mr. Brooke, it does seem, is sad .. should an impending engagement cause this much sadness? Even with the example of the Cadwallader's supposedly successful marriage? But what we know of that is that they get along and it was only the relations that were wrong, not the couple - here we have a couple who is wrong ..
Chettam does seem possibly right that Brooke could postpone the marriage until Dorothea is of age. Then she could read to Casaubon and study Greek and so forth, and he is probably right that she would figure out that he is not who she believes him to be and it could perhaps be gently broken off. Is it possible that Brooke agrees to the hasty marriage for financial reasons? The hurry seem to have a rather unseemly connection to the size of Casaubon's house …
hmm I wonder! Seems Brooke is secure financially and Dorothea and Celia have an inheritance from their parents. But the money does seem to play a big part in his rationalizing.
He also doesn't seem like a guy to take a stand …
Chettam, in his manly belligerence, fails to understand the inevitability of the marriage of two spiritual beings. He is a pretty soulless character, in my opinion. To appreciate Middlemarch in my opinion you have to accept this marriage as a given. There is no sense in imagining a world where Dorothea chooses not to marry him. It’s who she is. Her fate. It sets the real plot in motion. I am afraid the Jane Austen analogy has really led us astray!
You raise a point I have struggled with my whole adult life: when you think someone you care about is on the brink of making a bad choice what is the proper response? Patient silence that waits for an opening or intruding with advice that, if unsolicited, could push everything in the wrong direction? Yes, Brooke could have insisted Dorothea wait until she is of age, although there is nothing about the uncle so far that suggests he has the temperament for that, plus both girls seem very much in charge of their own situations. My sense is GE has created a set of carefully drawn characters and a momentum made up of temperament and event that can't be turned back. It seems virtually inevitable.
Yes that seems right. We *feel* its inevitability, even as we resist it. A friend of mine once said, in a discussion on this point (a novelist, by the way), "You can't convince anyone of anything." He was exaggerating, but also not. You are always present in your advice, your intrusion is felt more than the rightness of your position. One thinks, as a parent, of those times one has taken a hard stand, and the inner uncertainty of that.
Yes, yes, yes!
The idea of Eliot breaking the engagement hadn't occured to me, and honestly fills me with joy. At least it would relieve the pervading sense of dread!
There might be a typo in the "Yet all this comedy..." paragraph. We're 50 pages in, eh? Not 150.
Right you are! Getting ahead of ourselves.
about 67 pp in my book ...
I love these descriptions of the so-called minor characters. They are sharply drawn and essential to the job of moving the story forward. Talking about themes though, what about the end paragraph of chapter VI? “... pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts-not to hurt others.”
This seems to be a spotlights on it statement of some thing important in the book. As somebody who doesn’t fully know how it comes out, am I on to something?
What a good thought! Gets me thinking that Dorothea, for all her eagerness to abase herself, is actually proud in a generative way—she believes in herself, expects to surpass expectations. Perhaps Eliot is hinting that this religious injunction that she make herself submissive is a disservice to her.
I love the way you put that! "a set of carefully drawn characters and a momentum made up of temperament and event that can't be turned back" The word that stands out to me is 'momentum.' How she is moving through scenes so quickly and yet so thoroughly in a way, taking on objections but not letting anything slow down what is happening .. can't be turned back ...
We see all the objections gently but decisively thwarted, like loose threads woven in—Cadwallader talks Chettam down, Celia is not a strong enough force to counter Dorothea, Brooke questions himself into going along, Mrs. Cadwallader redirects her interference…
The opening of chapter six, with the casual trade of birds reminds me of Auden's poem Musée de Beaux Arts, about the painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, where the quotidian continues while tragedy of Icarus goes unremarked. You have to squint to notice the feathers falling into the water. There’s a comical tint to these petty conversations, as in the everyday gestures in a Bruegel painting.
Eliot, in this novel steeped in religion, has to be thinking of the New Testament passages where Christ "overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves." And the somber echo of this in centurions throwing lots for Christ's robe as he died on the cross.
(The painting is commonly attributed to Bruegel, but there is evidence it was painted after his death.)
What a rich comment! I'm having trouble finding the casual trade of birds. Is it the millet seed quote?
Right at the start of the chapter, the minister's wife discusses trading hens for doves, if I remember correctly.
Oh of course! I was stuck too close to the front. What a subtle point.
Nooooo don’t DO it! Don’t marry Casaubon. Can’t we get another result.
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Thank you, Ann!
Not sure. I just have been checking the Book Post home page from time to time to look for Mona's latest post. The Book Post insignium gets you to the home page. I wanted to comment on the way Eliot weaves politics into the marriage plot in these chapters. It may have even played a subtle role in Brooke's acceptance of Casaubon, that he, Casaubon is apparently liberal on the Catholic question: "That was a very seasonable tract of his on the Catholic Question," Mr. Brooke tells himself at the end of Chapter Seven. But when Mrs. Cadwallader suspects a liberal conspiracy between Casaubon and Brooke, blushing, he is careful to deny it: "Nothing of the sort. Casaubon and I don't talk politics much." Nevertheless, it has been part of the reason for Brooke's initial invitation to Casaubon to come to his home and a big part of the initial convo in Chapter Two! So I think we are justified at least in suspecting that this is a big part of the secret machinery working in the depths of Middlemarch. I also love the way Mrs. Cadwallader brings up the spectre of Brooke's candidacy to cushion the blow for Sir James. That said, she is not really up on politics. She expects whiggery but these fellows are brewing up some new thing that doesn't have a definite name yet: "liberal, independent, radical," and i don't deny there may be some human decency involved, but there is also a power grab going on, as we see also in Felix Holt, the moment the franchise is expanded the question becomes who will get in, and some very posh people start calling themselves radicals (to Felix's chagrin).
Just to clarify, what I am saying is that behind the pleasant comic facade the gentlemanly Mr. Brooke harbors political ambitions which help determine Dorothea’s fate.