My Life in Middlemarch (19 page)

The presence of a young new wife would have made quite a change in Pattison’s established way of life, and it could not have
been entirely an easy adjustment for him. Francis was a beauty, with red-golden hair and a taste for flowing dresses worn without crinolines; she smoked cigarettes, a rarity among women at the time, and was lively and sociable. She must have been a vivid presence in an institution populated almost entirely by unmarried men.

Pattison’s manner was very different from hers. In a memoir that was published posthumously in 1885, he characterized himself as prone to morbid depression, and wrote of how he needed to be alone to work. He recounted a telling incident from his youth, when a friend was visiting for the summer. Pattison described the “serious inconvenience” this genial young man caused by entering Pattison’s bedroom, book in hand, while Pattison was trying to study. “Solitude was necessary to me; I had not—I have never had—the power of commanding my attention properly in the presence of another,” Pattison wrote of this unhappy situation. Pattison was “morose and disagreeable,” and eventually the young man got the message and retired to the guest bedroom. “I had gained my point, but, as so often since, with the uncomfortable consciousness of having done so in a wrong way,” Pattison wrote, adding, “I mention this trifling incident because it is typical of my way of doing things all my life.”

It does not seem to have been a contented marriage. Apart from the obvious differences in manners and personality, Francis would later complain of their sexual incompatibility. “You cannot forget that from the first I expressed the strongest aversion to that side of the common life,” she wrote to the rector, after fifteen years of marriage. While plenty of nineteenth-century marriages did not conform to modern-day expectations of sexual harmony—as,
for that matter, plenty of modern-day marriages also do not—that failure of compatibility seems eventually to have led both husband and wife to feel aggrieved and disappointed in other dimensions, too. If their marriage was outwardly harmonious when Eliot and Lewes came to visit, in 1870, within a very few years a rift was evident. Francis started spending a great deal of time abroad, with the fragility of her health as justification, and she rekindled her friendship with Sir Charles Wentworth, her former fellow art student. She came to feel put-upon by the demands of her gloomy, disappointed husband. In a letter sent in 1875 from a German spa, she wrote, “It distresses me to find that you are so depressed, and grieves me to think of you all alone, you must pluck up your courage and give me a little.… Do trust me a little! I’m not perhaps the sort of person you quite approve, but I have
some
feelings and
some
sense of duty.”

For his part Pattison felt excruciatingly lonely, and considered himself wronged and abandoned. In the latter years of his life he found some consolation in the company of a young woman named Meta Bradley. She was the niece of the master of University College, and formed with Pattison what historians think was probably not a sexual but was certainly an emotionally intense relationship, serving as a comfort and a confidante to him, in the stead of his often-absent wife. He once told Bradley that the date of his wedding was “an anniversary which depresses me to the lowest depths of misery.”

I
N
the Casaubons, George Eliot portrayed one of the most inharmonious marriages ever concluded. The nature of their incompatibility
is first suggested by the contrast between Casaubon’s arid proposal letter, in which he outlines Dorothea’s fitness “to supply aid in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant hours,” and Dorothea’s full-hearted response to the proposal, in which she thanks him for his love—a declaration of which, the reader cannot but notice, he has failed to make.

Things only get worse from there. During the short period of their engagement Casaubon discovers that the depths of emotion in which he expected to be immersed seem to have run dry. Having determined to “abandon himself to the stream of feeling,” he has been surprised to discover “what an exceedingly shallow rill it was.” Though he can hardly bear to admit it to himself, Casaubon enters marriage in a state of anxiety about his insufficiency, rather than in pleasurable anticipation of his impending fulfillment.

Dorothea’s disillusionment begins almost immediately after the wedding, while she is still on her disorienting, distressing honeymoon in Rome. She has anticipated that the world will widen for her under her husband’s tutelage; instead, she discovers that she is excluded from his intellectual labors. Worse, it begins to dawn on her that his labors are far pettier than she had imagined when she believed her husband-to-be was another Locke or Milton. A lowering miasma settles upon Dorothea, Eliot writes. “How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?”

Casaubon, for his part, is as unhappy a newlywed as is Dorothea. He shrinks frigidly from her expressions of physical
affection: “Having made his clerical toilette with due care in the morning, he was prepared only for those amenities of life which were suited to the well-adjusted stiff cravat of the period, and to a mind weighted with unpublished matter,” Eliot writes. Casaubon is as rigid as his neckwear, and it is not difficult to imagine the lack of intimate congruity between Dorothea’s affection—“she had ardour enough for what was near, to have kissed Mr. Casaubon’s coat-sleeve, or to have caressed his shoe-latchet”—and her husband’s flinching repulsion.

To members of Dorothea’s circle at Tipton, her attraction to Casaubon makes no sense at all. He is regarded with unapologetic disgust. “No better than a mummy,” is the verdict of Sir James Chettam. Mrs. Cadwallader, the rector’s wife, sardonically jokes that his blood when viewed under a microscope is “all semicolons and parentheses.” Will Ladislaw insists that Casaubon has done Dorothea a grievous wrong in marrying her. “If he chose to grow grey crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business to be luring a girl into his companionship,” Ladislaw thinks.

The reader may feel inclined to agree with these judgments, at least in the earlier stages of the relation between the characters, when Casaubon’s coldness and narcissism are clear to everyone except his hopeful bride. But as the novel progresses, Eliot will not allow the reader easily to dismiss Casaubon. Rather she insists that we also comprehend his frailties and weaknesses, and understand what she calls his “small hungry shivering self.” She spells it out clearly, in the arch, authoritative voice she often assumes as narrator. “Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world,” she writes. “If he was liable to think that others were providentially made for him, and especially to consider them in light of
their fitness for the author of a
Key to All Mythologies,
this trait is not quite alien to us, and, like the other mendicant hopes of mortals, claims some of our pity.”

“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.