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Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand in hand with her still smaller brother to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea, until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles and turned them back
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Dorothea recalls St. Theresa of Avila but she also prefigures St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who only a few years after the publication of "Middlemarch" wrote the following passages, dealing directly with the issue of heroic-or-small deeds:
"I will seek out a means of getting to Heaven by a little way– very short and very straight little way that is wholly new. We live in an age of inventions; nowadays the rich need not trouble to climb the stairs, they have lifts instead. Well, I mean to try and find a lift by which I may be raised unto God, for I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection ... Thine Arms, then, O Jesus, are the lift which must raise me up even unto Heaven. To get there I need not grow. On the contrary, I must remain little, I must become still less....
"Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love."
This is "The Little Way" of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social
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The first of many thematic if not literal appearances of Don Quixote de la Mancha -- a man striving to act out great deeds as they were done in times past but out of place in the modern world
She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common sense.
Celia is more sensible in this sense; but she is Sensibility, too, maybe not as passionate as Jane Austen's Marianne Dashwood but certainly given to sensation (the physical senses).
Dorothea does not have Eleanor Dashwood's common sense, mainly because she shares with Marianne great idealism, even romanticism, though expressed and channeled much differently.
Everyday things with us would mean the greatest things.
Eden
He talked of what he was interested in, or else he was silent and bowed with sad civility. To Dorothea this was adorable genuineness and religious abstinence from that artificiality which uses up the soul in the efforts of pretence.
"soulful"
“It would be a great honour to anyone to be his companion,” said Dorothea energetically. “You like him, eh?” said Mr. Brooke without showing any surprise or other emotion. “Well, now, I’ve known Casaubon ten years, ever since he came to Lowick. But I never got anything out of him—any ideas, you know. However, he is a tiptop man and may be a bishop—that kind of thing, you know, if Peel stays in. And he has a very high opinion of you, my dear.”
From Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth":
"He [Professor Otto Lidenbrock] was an egotistical scholar, a deep well of scientific knowledge whose pulley screeched when you tried to draw something out of it. In a word, he was a miser."
From JRR Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers":
"There was a time when he [Saruman] was always walking about my woods. He was polite in those days, always asking my leave (at least when he met me); and always eager to listen. I told him many things that he would never have found out by himself; but he never repaid me in like kind."
“Oh, Mrs. Cadwallader, I don’t think it can be nice to marry a man with a great soul.”
Celia has the best lines
“He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James. “No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.
“Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains.
Don Quixote
he was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.
Dorothea will have the same effect when she helps Lydgate, who puts it this way: "She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before—a fountain of friendship towards men, a man can make a friend of her."
Dorothea, on the contrary, found the house and grounds all that she could wish: the dark bookshelves in the long library, the carpets and curtains with colours subdued by time, the curious old maps and bird’s-eye views on the walls of the corridor, with here and there an old vase below, had no oppression for her
Seriously and not-so-seriously, THIS is why I relate to Dorothea and always will
But at present this caution against a too hasty judgement interests me more in relation to Mr. Casaubon than to his young cousin. If to Dorothea Mr. Casaubon had been the mere occasion which had set alight the fine inflammable material of her youthful illusions, does it follow that he was fairly represented in the minds of those less impassioned personages who have hitherto delivered their judgements concerning him? I protest against any absolute conclusion, any prejudice derived from Mrs. Cadwallader’s contempt for a neighbouring clergyman’s alleged greatness of soul,
not my villain, she is saying
Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world; if he was liable to think that others were providentially made for him,
soul mate or related idea
Please to explain.”
I still talk this way. Little wonder I love this book.
Such was Lydgate’s plan of his future: to do good small work for Middlemarch and great work for the world.
small work - St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes. To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome
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Dorothea experiences a number of contrasts, jarring or baffling, in Rome. The art of the Eternal City amid real life and poverty. The contrasts of historical ages. The mix of artistic styles and ideas. Etc. She experiences the city as a jumble of masques.
Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.
When first reading this novel in 1994 I found this passage one of the most entrancing things I'd ever read, without even fully understanding the basic sense. I practically skipped over the sense because that was the least interesting thing about it. It's the language that hooked me; and I still admire it; but back then it was thrilling because it was so new to me.
She had not yet listened patiently to his heartbeats, but only felt that her own was beating violently.
GOAT line
she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own. We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: 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 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
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great passage, ends with a GOAT line
It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight—in art or in anything else.
a little shocking on reread, to hear Will arguing like this, against sympathy
I should be quite willing to enjoy the art here, but there is so much that I don’t know the reason of, so much that seems to me a consecration of ugliness rather than beauty. The painting and sculpture may be wonderful, but the feeling is often low and brutal and sometimes even ridiculous.
hear here!
Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best. “The theatre of all my actions is fallen,” said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best.
This is a big theme in "Middlemarch": we crave to see others ideally and to be seen ideally; we suffer when we over-estimate, but also when we under-estimate.
Fred craves for Mary to believe in him.
Dorothea believes both in Ladislaw and in Lydgate when each man is disprized by others, and it means the world to both of them.
Ladislaw finds life-energies and real purpose in valuing Dorothea not only justifiably as the good woman she is but as the very ideal of woman. Dante’s love for Beatrice is subtly compared to this.
Dorothea's esteem of Ladislaw does the same for her. The misunderstanding caused by Rosamond devastates her by destroying her belief in him; and he feels equally devastated that she no longer can cherish him as good.
Dorothea's admiration of Casaubon is the most extended and famous of these
idealizations. It is a tragic over-estimation, and notably, unlike all the other instances of believing in someone, it does nothing positive for Casaubon; it does not lift him or bring out his best.
Casaubon, of course, idealizes Dorothea, but in a decidedly limiting manner, needing her to be nothing more than a compliant wife with whom he will share nothing. For Dorothea this is a living death.
Similarly, the mutual illusions held by Lydgate and Rosamond come crashing down without unlocking potential or energies, in fact by doing quite the opposite.
he was resolute in being a man of honour according to the code; he would be unimpeachable by any recognized opinion. In conduct these ends had been attained; but the difficulty of making his Key to All Mythologies unimpeachable weighed like lead upon his mind,
being a good man, in this sense, is hindering him from being a good writer/author
The right word is always a power and communicates its definiteness to our action.
goat line
“I remember them all,” said Will with the unspeakable content in his soul of feeling that he was in the presence of a creature worthy to be perfectly loved. I think his own feelings at that moment were perfect, for we mortals have our divine moments when love is satisfied in the completeness of the beloved object.
He really is Dante right now.
Dorothea is implicitly Beatrice in the "Divine Comedy", but Eliot has cast her also, of course, as St. Teresa; and she gives her echoes of Eve (both the Biblical Eve and Milton's).
she sat listening, frightened, wretched—with a dumb inward cry for help to bear this nightmare of a life in which every energy was arrested by dread. But nothing else happened except that they both remained a long while sleepless, without speaking again.
This might be the most gripping scene in the novel, and it's just a conversation in the dark
“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the Divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
goat line
There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young lady as he could have obtained for a wife, but a young lady turned out to be something more troublesome than he had conceived.
This is as old as Adam
Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life—a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them?
The last idea echoes the Book of Job. But in that book, the waters that nourish lands where no man lives are, of course, a good thing. So this introduces the idea that Casaubon's work is not for naught even if nobody sees it?
Mr. Casaubon kept his hands behind him and allowed her pliant arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm. There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her. This is a strong word, but not too strong: it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made and say the earth bears no harvest of sweetness—calling their denial knowledge.
Little acts. This is the converse of the little acts of goodness performed by the Teresas of the world.
He distrusted her affection, and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
and it's a mutual loneliness
And I am more and more convinced that it will be possible to demonstrate the homogeneous origin of all the tissues. Raspail and others are on the same track, and I have been losing time.”
a kind of Key To All Living Tissues
The way in which he made a sort of happiness for himself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this.
He's Dante again, and in a way, Don Quixote
And what else could he do for Dorothea? What was his devotion worth to her? It was impossible to tell. He would not go out of her reach. He saw no creature among her friends to whom he could believe that she spoke with the same simple confidence as to him. She had once said that she would like him to stay, and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss around her. This had always been the conclusion of Will’s hesitations. But he was not without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own resolve. He had often got irritated, as he was on this particular night, by some
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many parallels here with Don Quixote and Dulcinea
She was always trying to be what her husband wished and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.
goat line
now it appeared that she was to live more and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labour producing what would never see the light.
goat line
And now she pictured to herself the days, and months, and years which she must spend in sorting what might be called shattered mummies and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins—sorting them as food for a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child.
goat line, perverse and wild
But Mr. Casaubon’s theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries; it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound, until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible; it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog; it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together.
It was untestable, is what I think she means.
She is definitely saying that it was a sort of effort in finding superficial parallels. Connections were made that were insubstantial, not made by hard evidence.
But the silence in her husband’s ear was never more to be broken.
Featherstone and Casaubon each has died the day after asking a young woman to do something that would compromise her future, each man receiving a resistant reply.
I don't recall ever noticing this before.
I wonder if Eliot was criticized for linking these two characters with a parallel that can seem unrealistic or clumsy.
But I find it to be neither, and I'd rather have this parallel than have strict realism. This similarity in two deaths does not feel like a cheap coincidence.
she locked up again the desks and drawers—all empty of personal words for her, empty of any sign that in her husband’s lonely brooding his heart had gone out to her in excuse or explanation; and she went back to Freshitt with the sense that around his last hard demand and his last injurious assertion of his power the silence was unbroken.
even this he leaves unpublished
But you don’t put Fred Vincy on so low a level as that?” “No indeed; he has plenty of sense, but I think he would not show it as a clergyman. He would be a piece of professional affectation.”
another great phrase
The memory has as many moods as the temper and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
Eliot ahead of her time here
But I shall not give up my liberty for a dirty annuity.
Bulstrode has given Raffles the same "get out of Middlemarch" treatment that Casaubon laid on Ladislaw. The reply in each case is essentially "Go to hell", though the exchange between Ladislaw and Casaubon is far more formal and polite.
he suddenly slapped his knee and exclaimed, “Ladislaw!”
The first parallel with Ladislaw -- being told to get lost -- was good, because it's a widely shared circumstance. This one -- an actual relation between them -- is a strained coincidence.
Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy.
goat line, even if the sense is a little unclear
I should like to take a great deal of land, and drain it, and make a little colony where everybody should work, and all the work should be done well.
Dorothea would have worked on a kibbutz
intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past.
This is part of the trauma of PTSD, I would think.
It's why ignorance and forgetfulness are both bliss.
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present; it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life; it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.
goat line
Someone highly susceptible to the contemplation of a fine act has said that it produces a sort of regenerating shudder through the frame and makes one feel ready to begin a new life.
I believe Christ said this first (goat line)
His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent.
goat line
