Since Middlemarch, George Eliot's best novel, was published in 1871-72, its 800-page bulk owes nothing to sex scenes. I trust, however, that I am not the only reader who wonders about the sex life of Dorothea Brooke and her husband, Edward Casaubon. Though the novel is panoramic, many-peopled, and multi-themed, with diverse interlocking plots, Dorothea qualifies as "the central character." As the novel opens, she is 20, not yet a legal adult, and, as her parents are both deceased, she lives with a paternal uncle who is also her guardian. Almost the first thing we learn from the omniscient narrator is that Dorothea was "open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring." She has a sister, Celia, who is somewhat more conventional: the first chapter reveals that Celia is very much more interested than her sister in what becomes of the jewelry that had belonged to their mother. Sir James Chettam, a neighbor of the same social status as their uncle, is a frequent visitor. It's obvious that he's paying court to Dorothea, who is so revulsed by him as to be in a state of denial about his intentions. The revulsion seems to be mainly physical. When, for example, they are sitting at table, Chettam directing idle but flattering small talk in Dorothea's direction, she notices "his dimpled hands" and finds them "quite disagreeable." On page 37 of my edition, Celia takes Dorothea aside and spells out to her that Chettam wants to marry her, will soon propose, expects to be accepted, and that she'll have to answer. Then:
The revulsion was so strong and painful in Dorothea's mind that the tears welled up and flowed abundantly. All her dear plans were embittered, and she thought with disgust of Sir James's conceiving that she recogonized him as her lover.
This statement is about as close to a frankly sexual passage as you will find in Middlemarch. The phrase "her lover" makes possibly its only appearance in order to register the heroine's aversion to Sir James Chettam, who is soon engaged—to Celia.
Chettam, however, has an acquaintance:
This was the Reverend Edward Casaubon, noted in the county as a man of profound learning, understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history. . . .
Dorothea looks forward to his visit with "venerating expectation," for she knows what he's noted for in the county, and she reveres the life of the mind—the more so when applied to religious topics. When he appears in the Brooke household Celia, in a detail probably meant to be considered alongside Chettam's dimpled hands, absents herself: she "did not like the company of Mr Casaubon's moles and sallowness." Dorothea, however, is favorably impressed by the scholar. To each her own! You can see where this is headed. Casaubon proposes in a letter containing such sentences as
I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life has arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you
and
In return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted, and the faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, you will find records such as might cause you bitterness or shame
Well, you shall know them by their prose styles, and you can't blame a fellow for taking care with the phrasing in an epistolary proposal. I believe that Casaubon, who's in his mid-40s, is saying in that last specimen that he's a virgin. A perfect match for an "ardent" 20-year-old! But, as the narrator coolly informs, "Dorothea knew of no one who thought as she did about life and its best objects." Her uncle tries to dissuade her, but she believes she'll be a partner, a helpmate, in the achievement of her brilliant husband's great work, to be entitled enticingly Key to All Mythologies.
Are you wondering about the reaction of Sir James Chettam upon hearing the news that Dorothea has accepted a marriage proposal from Casaubon?
"Good God! It is horrible! He is no better than a mummy!" (The point of view has to be allowed for, as that of a blooming and disappointed rival.)
Despite her parenthetic instruction, the omniscient narrator drops more than enough details to confirm the justness of Chettam's spontaneous exclamation. We have for example the entire text of the marriage proposal, and she periodically imports a character, Mrs Cadwallader, whose name I suspect is supposed to make you think "caterwauler," to shout observations the narrator is too tactful to make directly, including:
"He has got no 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.
At about this point, the story of an unusual match is interrupted by a long stretch concerning another of this immense book's plot lines, the one concerning the Vincy and Farebrother families, and we next see Dorothea on her Roman honeymoon looking pensive in a museum and, later the same day, alone in her hotel room, weeping. The explanation is supplied in one of those passages of acute commentary that make you love the author:
Nor can I suppose that when Mrs Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
The life Dorothea had imagined recedes farther as it slowly dawns on her that her new husband, who has brought her to Rome so that he can collect material for Key to All Mythologies, is just gathering and shuffling notes. The book will never be written. He isn't up to it. (His young relative, Ladislaw, lets drop that one circumstance inhibiting Casaubon's researches is that he can't read German—kind of a fun detail considering that Eliot had taught herself German in order to pursue her theological interests, and that her first book was a translation of Das Leben Jesu, The Life of Jesus, a groundbreaking work of biblical scholarship by the German theologian David Friedrich Strauss.) And so Dorothea allows herself to be led uselessly through museums while her husband toils uselessly in libraries, their mutual disenchantment swelling on their honeymoon. The novel is many things and one of them is a desolating portrait of a bad marriage.
Meanwhile, back in Warwickshire, Celia and Sir James Chettam are new parents within a year of their marriage. By such plot developments, together with mention of repellent moles and dimples, and wedding journeys infused with disappointment, did George Eliot signal readers regarding the sex lives of Middlemarchers.
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