by Rebecca Mead
“But why always Dorothea?” Eliot famously interjects at one point in Middlemarch. It is central to Eliot’s novelistic intention that the reader understand the unfolding of events from the perspectives of multiple characters, and there is a great deal of technical skill in the way she illustrates the dawning disillusionment of both Dorothea and Casaubon. Repeatedly, Eliot lulls the reader into an emotional complicity with Dorothea, and then subverts that sense of complicity by insisting that the reader also comprehend Casaubon.
Dorothea’s first crisis and confusion in Rome is described in acute, inward detail. If Dorothea had been asked to describe what was going on, Eliot writes, she could not have done so: “To have been driven to be more particular would have been like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows; for that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden dream.” For several pages, Eliot examines Dorothea’s emotions under her microscope, as if she were dissecting her heroine’s brain, the better to understand the course of its electrical flickers. But then she moves quickly and just as deeply into the inward movement of Casaubon’s emotions and sensations. “In Mr. Casaubon’s ear, Dorothea’s voice gave loud emphatic iteration to those muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible to explain as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness,” Eliot writes. “And this cruel outward accuser was there in the shape of a wife—nay, of a young bride, who, instead of observing his abundant pen scratches and amplitude of paper with the uncritical awe of an elegant-minded canary-bird, seemed to present herself as a spy watching everything with a malign power of inference.” The oppressive intimacy implied by Eliot’s choice of metaphors—the ticking watch, the muffled whispers, the scratching pen—suggest a rising, claustrophobic sense of emotional panic. One can imagine how Hitchcock would use the same material to similar psychological effect.
“The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies,” Eliot wrote in 1856, in an essay entitled “The Natural History of German Life.” She went on: “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” The notion of sympathy was a very important one for Eliot, as it had been for the Romantic poets before her. “Sympathy” was a far more resonant term in the Victorian era than it tends to be today, when it is often understood to mean no more than “feeling sorry for.” When Eliot and her peers used the word, they meant by it the experience of feeling with another person: of entering fully, through an exercise of imaginative power, into the experience of another. In a letter Eliot wrote to John Blackwood in early 1857, after completing the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, she gave a very early draft of what would become an artistic manifesto. “My stories always grow out of my psychological conception of the dramatis personae,” she wrote. “My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy.” Generating the experience of sympathy was what her fiction was for.
In Middlemarch, Eliot shows her reader that marital incompatibility is not simply a matter of one person being misunderstood by another—which is certainly how it can feel, when one is aggrieved and resentful—but that incompatibility consists of two people failing each other in their powers of comprehension. To Casaubon, Dorothea’s expressions of solicitude about the progress he is making in his work sound like the most painful of critiques, as if she, no less than the “leading minds of Brasenose,” considers all his efforts to be futile and worthy only of contempt. There’s no doubt that Casaubon treats Dorothea horribly—first he leaves her blundering around the ruins of Rome, overwrought and overwhelmed, while he sequesters himself in the chaste, cold corridors of the Vatican; then he repeats the pattern in miniature when they return to boudoir and library in Lowick. But, Eliot insists, Dorothea has also failed to comprehend him. “She had not yet listened patiently to his heart-beats, but only felt that her own was beating violently.”
This notion—that we each have our own center of gravity, but must come to discover that others weigh the world differently than we do—is one that is constantly repeated in the book. The necessity of growing out of such self-centeredness is the theme of Middlemarch. In one of the most memorable editorial asides in the novel, Eliot elaborates upon this idea of how necessary it is to expand one’s sympathies. “We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves,” she writes. “Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier for her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.”
For Dorothea marriage provides a crash course in emotional sympathy, and by Book Five of Middlemarch, “The Dead Hand,” she has begun to achieve it. She thought she would learn from Casaubon; instead what she learns is to feel with him. It’s a difficult lesson, not least because Casaubon is so resistant to her sympathy. He continues to recoil from her, even when her gestures are ones of compassionate attention rather than affectionate need. In an episode at the end of Book Four, Dorothea approaches Casaubon as he walks along an avenue of somber yew trees, like those one can find in so many English formal gardens. (They always seem to prompt sober contemplation, as the walled flower garden invites lighter distractions.) Casaubon has just met with Lydgate, who has told him that his heart condition may prove fatal at any time. “When the commonplace ‘We all must die’ transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness ‘I must die—and soon’, then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first,” is Eliot’s magnificent summation of that awful, crystallizing realization.
Faced with the prospect of death, Casaubon remains embroiled in his stubbornly mortal obsessions of failure, his prevision of being judged by his academic peers. Dorothea, knowing what Lydgate has told him, attempts to slip her arm through that of her husband; but he keeps his arm rigid, hands clasped behind his back. A more sentimental novelist might have made Casaubon bend his elbow slightly to accommodate her gesture, his confrontation with his own mortality a spur to understanding what comfort Dorothea could give him. Instead, Eliot gives a chilling representation of a deadly, unbridgeable distance in marriage: the absolute failure of sympathy.
Dorothea is outraged at his treatment of her, and spends several hours raging in her boudoir. Eliot writes that another woman in this situation might start to hate. But Dorothea struggles against that impulse and approaches Casaubon again, catching him off guard as he is ascending the staircase, taper in hand, heading for bed. He tells her, “Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.” The “kind quiet melancholy of that speech,” as Eliot calls it, is enough to move Dorothea’s sympathy back to him. In a gesture of resignation and submission, she slips her hand into his, and the reader can imagine the cold inadequacy of his hand’s responding touch.
Casaubon is not without his emotional intuitions—he accurately anticipates the inevitability of Dorothea and Ladislaw falling in love, and attempts through the codicil to his will to manipulate their futures with his dead hand. But his sympathies are never enlarged. He cannot feel with Dorothea—even if the meeting on the stairs does surprise him into a fleeting moment of kindness and reciprocity. (Great art “surprises eve
n the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves,” Eliot writes in “The Natural History of German Life.”)
But if Casaubon is incapable of emotional enlargement the reader of Middlemarch is not, and Eliot sows the seeds of sympathy for Casaubon early on. Ladislaw steams inwardly at his prematurely elderly cousin marrying Dorothea, convinced in his own mind that “a man was bound to know himself better than that.” But Casaubon, crucially, does not know himself better than that, and there is one moment in his proposal letter where pathos breaks through the pomposity. He has outlined the ways in which he considers Dorothea a suitable handmaiden to his labors; he has assured her that there is nothing in his past to cause her bitterness or shame. Then he tells her that if she were to refuse him he cannot help but feel that resignation to solitude will be more difficult now that his hopes have been raised. “But in this order of experience I am still young,” he writes.
Casaubon may be in his midforties, well into middle age, but he is still as inexperienced and fearful as he was as a young man, with the added burden of knowing that all that he expected to have accomplished by this point in his life is still undone. Dorothea fails to see that while Casaubon is by far her senior, he is still beset by the confusions of earlier years. “I mention this trifling incident because it is typical of my way of doing things all my life,” Mark Pattison wrote of his clumsy teenage quest for solitude. Casaubon may have gray hair and a lined face, but when it comes to love, he’s at least as unsophisticated as Dorothea, and maybe more.
At Dorothea’s age it can be very hard to realize that a middle-aged person, who seems so very much older, has not necessarily achieved wisdom and self-mastery. When I was in my twenties it came as a surprise to me to learn that a person a generation older than I was might not feel him- or herself to be the experienced elder that he or she seemed to me, but might still be a green, anxious youth, at least in his or her self-perception. Looking back from the vantage point of forty-five, though, twenty doesn’t look quite so far away. We are still recognizably ourselves, with many of the same confusions, even if experience has abated them, and granted us some self-awareness. We can hope, at best, that growing older has given us some degree of emotional maturity, and a greater understanding of the perspectives and the projections of others. This greater understanding should, ideally, include a comprehension of the errors of the young—precisely what Ladislaw suggests Casaubon lacks when he permits Dorothea to join him crunching bones in a cave. But then again, older men have often found it difficult to turn away idolizing young women.
When I read Middlemarch at Dorothea’s age, and reread it in my early twenties, I did not react against Casaubon as violently as do Ladislaw and the others at Tipton. There was enough of Dorothea in me to understand her initial infatuation with what he represented to her, a person of knowledge and experience who could lead her out of the oppressive narrowness that had characterized her life thus far. Dorothea’s hopes were misplaced, but they did not seem entirely unfounded. As I grew a little older with the book, though, I developed a greater scorn for Casaubon—for his undeserved self-importance and his intellectual pettiness, and for his ungenerous, withholding behavior toward his young wife, who deserves so much better from him. By my thirties, it was easier to look down on Casaubon, to regard him as contemptible and repellent.
But having reached the age of Casaubon, I realize that it would take a great deal of self-regard on my part not to feel a tender sense of kinship with that sad, proud, desiccated man. In middle age, it becomes considerably harder to maintain a superior sense of distance from his preoccupations: his timid fear of professional judgment, hindering him from ever producing the work upon which he has staked his life; his quietly devastating discovery that, having deferred domestic intimacy for so long, he is incapable of entering into it; his perverse conviction that Dorothea’s ardor and submissiveness amount to a cruel, deliberate undermining of all he has aspired to be. Casaubon is crippled by caution and undone by closed-heartedness. He is a frail creature tortured by his own sense of his insufficiencies, whose soul was “too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.” Once Eliot was asked whom she had in mind as the original for Casaubon; in response, she silently tapped her own breast. And as I read Middlemarch in middle age, his failures and fears no longer seem so remote or theoretical to me as they once did, when I was in my Dorothea youth.
THE wife of the Rector of Lincoln met me in the porter’s lodge at the college, wearing a burgundy-colored suit and greeting me with the energetic manner of a Girl Scout leader. Margaret Langford’s husband, Paul Langford, a historian, was appointed to the post in 2000, and while the rector no longer lives in the college’s main quadrangle, a less cramped, more private neo-Georgian residence having been built farther along Turl Street eighty-odd years ago, Mrs. Langford had agreed to show me around the rooms in which the Pattisons had entertained Eliot and Lewes.
First, though, we stopped in the college’s fifteenth-century hall to see a portrait of Mark Pattison that was hanging over the high table, where faculty are seated to dine. In it, Pattison has a reddish beard traced with gray, and deep lines are etched in his melancholy face. He looks down at a book in his lap, though it’s impossible to tell what the book is. Perhaps, Mrs. Langford suggested with a note of conspiracy in her voice, it is one by Isaac Casaubon, the Renaissance scholar, about whom he wrote an influential book in 1875. Or perhaps it is one by John Milton, about whose works and life, including his devastatingly unsatisfying first marriage, Pattison published a volume in 1879. The rector’s wife knew quite a bit about her predecessor, and about the speculation over whether the Pattisons inspired the Casaubons. “I don’t think it was a match made in heaven,” she said, with understatement.
Lord Dilke, Francis Pattison’s second husband, publicly disavowed the identification, and said that his wife had always found the comparison odious. But in the memoir Dilke wrote of Francis after her death, he contradicted himself, claiming that Eliot had in some respects been drawing from life. Dilke wrote that Eliot had been thinking of Francis when she wrote of Dorothea knowing Pascal and Jeremy Taylor by heart, staying up all night to read theological books, and fasting; and he said that Book One of Middlemarch was to some extent drawn from the courtship of the Pattisons. Dorothea’s expectations of marriage, he implied, were like those experienced by Emily Strong, while Casaubon’s hopes for marriage bore a relation to those of Mark Pattison. In unpublished diaries Dilke wrote that he had it on the authority of George Eliot herself that she had based Casaubon’s proposal letter upon the very one that Pattison wrote to Francis, though scholars are skeptical of this claim.
Gordon S. Haight, Eliot’s preeminent biographer and the editor of nine volumes of her letters, thought that the identification was utterly wrong-headed. “There could hardly be greater contrast in moral character between the sophisticated worldly-minded Mrs. Pattison and the serious, naïve Dorothea Casaubon—unless it was that between the foolish pedant of Lowick and the energetic and learned Rector of Lincoln,” is how Haight, who spent more than forty years studying Eliot, dismissed the case in one essay. Haight argued, reasonably enough, that Eliot had no motive to offend the Pattisons by exposing the difficulties of their marriage, and the fact that the friendship continued only makes clearer the absurdity of the identification.
But not everyone who reviewed the evidence agreed with Haight. John Sparrow, the conservative warden of All Souls College for a quarter of a century, provided an alternative version of events in a series of lectures he gave at Trinity College, Cambridge. Sparrow argued that when it came to Francis Pattison and Dorothea Casaubon, “it was only in inessentials that the two women differed.” He acknowledged that, unlike Edward Casaubon, Mark Pattison was a man of true intellectual accomplishment. But he argued that there were nonetheless remarkable similarities between them—�
��the prematurely aged appearance, the stilted utterance, the selfishness about the larger things in life, the meanness about the little ones.” Sparrow suggested that Eliot must have heard of the Pattisons’ marital unhappiness from Francis, and then had chosen to reproduce it. The fact that both Pattisons continued to be on good terms with Eliot after the book was published is evidence of Eliot’s shrewdness, Sparrow argued. “Pattison was not so vain as to be blind to the odious resemblance, but he was too proud to admit by any public gesture that a resemblance existed.”
Sparrow’s essays on Pattison are great fun to read. They have the fluid assurance of a barrister making a well-honed case before a courtroom, as well as a delicious insider’s flavor of Oxford past. But perhaps the most nuanced engagement with the question of the Pattison/Casaubon identification is that of another Oxford scholar, A. D. Nuttall, in a book with the irresistible title Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination. In it, Nuttall makes the persuasive observation that, while it is entirely possible that George Eliot was not intending to describe Francis Pattison in the character of Dorothea Brooke, it is certainly possible that Francis afterward modeled herself upon Dorothea, and came to see her experience of marriage as similar to that of Eliot’s heroine. Nuttall goes on to argue that just as Francis may have identified with Dorothea, Pattison may have seen himself in Casaubon, pointing out that Pattison’s great projected work—a history of scholarship built around the figure of Joseph Scaliger—was never written.
Nuttall bases this contention on his reading of Pattison’s Memoirs, which the rector wrote when he was in his seventies, and close to death. It is a remarkable work. A ruthless, scrupulous self-examination, it reveals Pattison’s insecurities and his sense of his own personal failures—although it ends before he reaches the period of his marriage, so he doesn’t have to examine whatever failures lay there. In it, Pattison told of falling short of his original intellectual goal, to produce “the history of learning from the Renaissance downwards.” As he wrote in the Memoirs, “One’s ambition is always in the inverse proportion of one’s knowledge.” He added, “Of the ambitious plan I had first conceived I have only executed fragments.” These words might well have come from the pen of a more evolved Casaubon—one who has lived long enough to come to some degree of self-knowledge. In the light of the memoir it is difficult to disagree with Nuttall when he asserts that it would be strange “if this scholar, who clearly perceived himself as a failure, could have read all the way through Middlemarch without any uncomfortable twinges from the parts dealing with Mr. Casaubon.”