Dorothea Brooke is the spiritual heart of this sprawling novel. She dreams of building tidy cottages for the tenant laborers on her uncle’s property, hoping to lift their lives into greater dignity. “For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze,” Eliot writes, “over all her desire to make her life greatly effective.”
With these hidden desires, Dorothea meets an academic more than two decades her senior, named Edward Causabon. To the reader, he is not an entirely sympathetic figure, and he seems a poor match for Dorothea. “Mr. Causabon,” Eliot writes, “was the centre of his own world,” who “was liable to think that others were providentially made for him.” Yet Eliot urges us to view Causabon with some sympathy. His selfish traits, she writes, are “not quite alien to us, and like the other … hopes of mortals, claims some of our pity.”
Mr. Causabon is at work on a book called “The Key to All Mythologies.” In it, he wishes to show “that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were coruptions of a tradition originally revealed.” Despite the project’s mystifying obscurity, Dorothea sees in Causabon’s work a potential pathway for her own ambitions. She wishes to be useful to him—and through assisting in his work, useful to the broader society.
Dorothea does not know her husband very well before they enter into marriage. “Has anyone ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?,” the author asks. And Causabon, while grasping immediately how Dorothea might be beneficial to him, also lacks the self-awareness to consider how beneficial his own life might be to her. “Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy,” Eliot writes, “as he thinks of hers for making him happy.”
Soon after Causabon and Dorothea are married, the illusion that she harbors about her life with him begins to fade like “a dream which the dreamer begins to suspect.” Causabon enacts a final indignity upon her in his will, and Dorothea's life is diverted from her full hopes. She goes on living, and striving, nonetheless.
In the closing passage of Middlemarch, George Eliot compares Dorothea to a strong river that has been cut into shallower, weaker channels. “Her full nature,” Eliot writes, “like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.”
Eliot is referencing the ancient story about the Persian leader Cyrus, who was trying to cross the river Gyndes on his way to wage war against Babylon. One of Cyrus’s “sacred white horses jumped into the water in its friskiness, trying to cross it,” the historian Herodotus wrote. The river swallowed up the horse and carried its body away. Herodotus says that “Cyrus became enraged at the river for such an impertinence,” and ordered his men “to make it shallow enough for women to cross it without wetting their knees.” Cyrus and his men delayed their march to Babylon until the task was accomplished.
Dorothea’s full nature was like a strong river, but the events of her life diverted that energy into narrow channels. Eliot goes on to say that nonetheless, the “effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Eliot illuminates the profound power we have in our everyday, unhistoric actions. One of the great comforts of Middlemarch is that there are still ample reasons to live even a broken life. The quiet expressions of our hidden souls, Eliot writes, still “live on in perpetual echoes.”
—Charles Wilson
