Finally Middlemarch #2

A Scott Ketcham Drawing

So already, the honeymoon's over. No, I'm not talking about my romance with reading Middlemarch, which is alive and well; I'm talking about Dorothea Brooke's recognition that Mr. Casaubon, her new husband, is not the man she imagined him to be. And the reality of this is dawning fast: they're still on their honeymoon.

Special emphasis must be placed on the word "imagined." The Casaubon whom Dorothea believed she was marrying was her own invention, the product of her vibrant imagination and her desire to lead a life of moral purpose. Knowing that Casaubon was dedicated to a long-term scholarly project, she invented the rest of his life, its meaning, and her future noble role in it. 

It's almost painful for me to read this part of the book because I so easily recognize the tendencies of my younger self in Dorothea. I too had a talent for "improving" the men I wanted to love and be loved by. And while I was eager to avoid some of the traditional marital narratives--the women's movement was relatively young--I was very (too) good at making up non-traditional happily-ever-after stories. The truth is, any narrative we make up without involving the people whom we want to be part of it is usually doomed.

It was a good thing I didn't get married when I was in my twenties because I would have been divorced by the time I was thirty-two. I even imagined the way I would have left one very wrong man whom I foolishly imagined was very right for me: during the fourth quarter of the Superbowl (which I hate), after putting copious amounts of lasagna, salad, and garlic bread out on the buffet table for him and his friends (whom I hated), I would have walked out of my own house and into the cold January night with one loud hallelujah.

Let's not even talk about my thirties. 

By the time I got married in my late forties, I'd finally learned not to ignore what was troubling and true. I didn't believe that marriage would make my life "come together" (though it did in some ways). Scott and I went out for a long while before we got married, so neither of us discovered on our honeymoon that we'd married someone heart-breakingly different from the person we thought we'd married.

But wait--this is supposed to be a blog post about Middlemarch--and it still is because of the way George Eliot captures the heartbreak of Dorothea, all the more poignant because of her simultaneous commitment to making her new life work and being in touch with her true feelings. Dorothea's walking at the edge of a precipice here: she's seriously considering settling for the grimmest kind of self-erasing half-life because the emotional and spiritual distance between her and her husband is so vast. Unless, of course, she's wrong about how great that distance is.

It's Chapter 20 that spells out the nature of the trouble and the conflict Dorothea feels. As the chapter begins, because Dorothea had "no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even to herself," the first voice of pain she hears is " a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty" (192). She has been in Rome for five weeks, and the city and its omnipresent antiquities oppress rather than inspire her, probably in part because she's seeing them on her own while Casaubon works.

Scott Ketcham Sculpture

As Dorothea wrestles with her dissatisfaction, its sources and solutions, Eliot philosophizes about the difficult transition from courtship to marriage: "The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same" (195).

Different perceptions are to be expected from the new perspective of dailiness and will require adjustment no doubt. For those who have put their beloveds on pedestals, the differences may be even more pronounced--and disappointing. 

But it's not just this transition that's a problem: Dorothea has come to suspect that "the large vistas and wide fresh air she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither" (195). As Eliot explains, "There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature that that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy" (197). Sometimes Dorothea experiences "inward fits of anger or repulsion" rather than depression (196). How can a basically passionate, willing person possibly be satisfied with someone whose thoughts and feelings had "long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge"--especially when they give rise to feelings of disgust, which tend to lead to physical withdrawal (196)?

Still, Eliot doesn't despise Casaubon, even though he's a dull conversationalist and an even duller husband. Like some wise, charitable god who understands human tendencies, limitations, and possibilites, she offers the following:

"We are all born in moral stupidity, . . . : Dorothea had  early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his sense and wisdom, than to conceive . . . that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference" (211).

I was so busy disliking Casaubon and feeling for Dorothea that I hadn't thought about his perspective. In general, great works of fiction help us understand others' perspectives. In real life, it can harder to know when it's best to try hard to understand another's perspective and when it's best to walk away as fast and far as possible.

Thus far, I've encountered a form of the word "stupid" twice in Middlemarch. So far, it seems consequences of stupidity depend on the amount of pride and the type of action that accompany it. I'm wondering if some kinds of Middlemarch stupidity are more natural and therefore acceptable than others--and whether such distinctions even matter. Meanwhile, Will Ladislaw's and Dorothea's conversations about art are fascinating to me: after all, the man I married when I finally figured it out is an artist.

* Eliot, G. (2003). Middlemarch (R. Ashton, Ed.). London: Penguin Books.