Dorothea's Longing for Education Leads her to Marry the Self-important Pedant Casaubon who quickly Reveals his Impotence--Sexually and Intellectually

Dorothea's Longing for Education Leads her to Marry the Self-important Pedant Casaubon who quickly Reveals his Impotence--Sexually and Intellectually 

Mr. Casaubon is the pedantic theological scholar, whose impressive knowledge of history and religious piety appeals to Dorothea (23). Dorothea yearns for serious scholarship; yet, as a woman, she is not taken seriously, nor does she have teachers. She considers that Casaubon’s work is of such importance that any assistance to this great man would satisfy her longings for purposeful education. She contemplates:  “To reconstruct a past world, doubtless with a view to the highest purposes of truth—what a work to be in any way present at, to assist in, though only as a lamp-holder!” (13).  

Georg Friedrich Kersting's Man Reading at Lamplight 

     Her choice in marrying Casaubon has much to do with the hopes of becoming educated. She expresses that “it was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek” (56). Dorothea views Casaubon as an medium for learning; she imagines that her assistance to his scholarship will result in her receiving a liberal education. In expressing her yearning for knowledge, she relates: “And since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge? Surely learned men kept-the only oil; and who more learned than Mr. Casaubon?” (77) Not only will she “learn everything” as his wife, she imagines that he will be a spiritual light to illuminate her spiritual journey (23).

On their honeymoon, Dorothea realizes that she is tragically mistaken in her veneration of Casaubon, for he is an utter failure in scholarship. Eliot demonstrates how the approaches to learning adopted by Casaubon (and some British scholars of her day) are vain, and that they result in barrenness. What is most unproductive is his insistence on working in isolation. This insularity, then, renders him suspicious and narcissistic; moreover it leads to his aridity in scholarship. Casaubon fails to engage in an academic community on almost every level: he does not meet with fellow scholars, nor does he read their work.  According to Newman, fecundity is to be found within a community of scholars: 

When a multitude of young men, keen, open-hearted, sympathetic, and observant, as young men are, come together and freely mix with each other, they are sure to learn one from another, even if there be no one to teach them; the conversation of all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain for themselves new ideas and views, fresh matter of thought, and distinct principles for judging and acting, day by day (147).

Casaubon engages in no dialogue with any scholarly community; yet when he publishes his pamphlets he longs for approval from Brasenose and from the Archdeacon, whom he suspects of not having even read the pamphlets (255). He suffers tremendous melancholy because of one “depreciatory recension which was kept locked in a small drawer of [his] desk, and also in a dark closet of his verbal memory” (255). Casaubon’s paranoia that people are discounting his work extends to Dorothea whom he suspects of mocking him. In addition, he is consumed with jealousy of his “scholarly compeers” (192). Yet, it is his refusal to explore outside of his insular studies which reinforces his self-doubts.  

Unlike the liberal education embraced by Brook, Casaubon’s research is limited to a restricted range of texts, i.e., Latin and Greek treatises (190). He looks to no one but “the dead” for guidance in his ambitious work (13). In his efforts to create a single, all-inclusive work, he becomes utterly lost. Dorothea, who desires to assist him, looks for “any wide opening” in which she can follow his theory; however we soon learn:

Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was also lost among small closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists’ ill-considered parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labours. With his taper struck before him he forgot the absence of windows (181). 

Imagine poor Casaubon with his meagre compass trying to find his way out of these woods

He loses all clarity in the midst of his erudition. Again, Eliot extends the metaphor of blindness to describe Casaubon’s scholarly pursuits. Ladislaw laughs at Casaubon calling him an “elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in the vendor’s back chamber” (187). He equates Casaubon’s (and other British) scholarship to “results which are got by groping about in the woods with a pocket-compass while [others] have made good roads” (190). Casaubon’s refusal to consider an array of texts has led to his disorientation. Newman describes “a truly great intellect . . .  [as] one which takes a connected view of old and new, past and present, far and near, and which has an insight into the influence of all these one on another; without which there is no whole, and no centre. It possesses the knowledge, not only of things, but also of their mutual and true relations” (135). Casaubon’s work has no centre, no focus, because he attempts to build a philosophy only on ancient Latin and Greek texts. He wants to create a totalizing work, a key under which he brings together all mythologies; however, he is building his philosophy on too narrow of a range of texts.  That is to say that Casaubon has failed “to look at the subject from various points of view,” and this failure, according to Eliot, makes him “a narrow mind” (58).

Casaubon’s myopia renders him blind to the needs of the community; consequently, he provides no social good. Brooke tells Mrs. Cadwallader that “[Casaubon] doesn’t care much about the philanthropic side of things . . . He only cares about church questions” (46). His church questions, and subsequently his intellect, are wrapped around his thesis, which is aimed at reconciling all mythologies under one central theology. Lisa Baltazar maintains that Eliot’s “relentless critique of [Casaubon’s] ‘Key to all Mythologies’” demonstrates the repugnance Eliot has for “Anglican scholars in support of the doctrine of biblical infallibilism” (40). Baltazar examines Casaubon’s work against biblical scholarship contemporary with Eliot’s writing of the novel, and she establishes that Casaubon’s “Key to all Mythologies” is an attempt to uphold the infallibilist position held by most nineteenth-century theologians in Great Britain and to reject the new critical position accepted by most Continental theologians, and by Eliot, herself (41). Baltazar’s assertions about British theologians emphasize their resistance to progression. While Brooke is reluctant to embrace scientific and social advancements regarding social housing, so Casaubon is unwilling to embrace theological and mythological advancements regarding scholarship.  He is mistrusting of any thought not derived from the classics. He confesses: “I live too much with the dead. My mind is like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes” (13). Indeed, Casaubon cannot comprehend social change for he inhabits a space that is no longer relevant and which has also been exhaustively explored in previous scholarship. Any attempts he has of bettering society with his scholarly contributions are already undermined because he is not engaging within the discourse that has already been established. All the hopes for education that Dorothea had placed on her marriage to Casaubon have dissolved under the reality of the obscurity and futility of his scholarly project. Dorothea realizes her error in looking to Casaubon as the fount of knowledge. The narrator recounts: that “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” (193). Casaubon has not been her fount of knowledge; furthermore, his egoism has forced her to question her motives and to question her beliefs. In this way, then, Casaubon has played a vital role in her education, for he has shattered much of her naïve idealism. In her vulnerability as an unloved bride, Dorothea is awakened passionately and intellectually by Casaubon’s younger cousin, Will Ladislaw. 

Works Cited

Baltazar, Lisa. “The Critique of Anglican Biblical Scholarship in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.” Literature and Theology 15.1 (2001): 40-60. Oxford Journals. Web. 27 November 2010.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1872. Toronto: Bantam, 1992. Print.

Newman, Cardinal John Henry. The Idea of a University. New York: Longmans Green. 1907. http://www.newmanreader.org. Web. 27 November 2010.