I’ve always been curious about the sexual aspect of Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon. Eliot signals from the start that young Will Ladislaw is the appropriate mate for Dorothea’s beauty, eager affections, and moral passion; almost every character who knows Dorothea (except Dorothea) recognizes the wrongness of her marrying the unlovely aging Casaubon. The right match will be made eventually, but in the meantime, she’s married to the old dude for more than a year. So, did they do it, during that time, even once?
I know how crass I sound, but really I do think the question matters, for a number of reasons. Say the marriage was never consummated at all, then it’s odd that that fact never comes up in the ruminations of either Dorothea or Casaubon, each of whom ruminates at length over her/his disappointed marital expectations. On the other hand, if they had a sexually successful honeymoon and thereafter a reasonable frequency of gratification (just apply your own standards here) for the duration of the marriage, then that’s significant, as contrasting starkly with their emotional disharmony otherwise. If their sex life began satisfactorily and went awry later, who snubbed whom, or whose desire petered out, or who withdrew first? If he wanted sex more than she did, or vice versa, or the sex drive of one of them was positively disgusting to the other, any of those things have characterization consequences, and Eliot is sidestepping the consequences of every possible sexual permutation.
The fact is, Eliot has a tough row to hoe, because she wants Dorothea to be completely blameless with respect to Casaubon. She can’t be mercenary, so her initial desire for Casaubon himself (not his money or position) has to be genuine if ill-founded; on the other hand she can’t be such a ninny that she never wakes up to having overrated the man at first; she can’t be selfish in her disappointment; she can neither withhold affection nor become demanding of attentions and treats as Rosamund Vincy would do; no, she has to try her level best to achieve her own rather lofty ideal of wifely loyalty; she can’t be unfaithful even to the extent of flirtation or fantasy; finally, she can’t be frigid, not least because she will need to bring a healthy sex drive later to her union with Will. To meet all these standards simultaneously, Dorothea has to have no discernible sexual traits at all, not even asexuality. Eliot left this part of the picture blank, on purpose, presumably feeling it was the best she could do.
Since Dorothea can’t be chilly, Eliot has her actively desire to shower physical affection on Casaubon in the form of hand-holding and the “childlike caresses” that are the “bent of every sweet woman” who has practiced love since girlhood, kissing the “hard pate of her bald doll.” She calls Casaubon “dear,” and rushes to his side when he’s physically distressed. In terms of all G-rated caresses, it’s Casaubon who drops the ball, but we are not really ever invited to assume that analogous initiatives and rejections are occurring behind the closed doors of the boudoir. This is not merely a matter of 19th-century propriety. Eliot could, if she wanted, have led us to make the correct inferences. Just a few years later, in A Modern Instance, William Dean Howells makes his heroine’s sexual enthusiasm very clear to all savvy readers without any overt indelicacy, and Eliot’s skills are surely equal to Howells’s.
What do I want from her, why can’t I just drop it? I can’t, though. Did Dorothea ever feel attracted to Casaubon erotically, on the basis of her misplaced intellectual crush? We shouldn’t rule it out. Dorothea is a person of bodily passion: she enjoys horseback riding, for instance, in what she considers a “pagan, sensuous way.” And it so happens I have reason to know that a woman of 19 can indeed be filled with intense physical lust toward an admired professor in his fifties.
And Casaubon’s erotic response? There’s a suggestion of impotence. Courting Dorothea, ready to “abandon himself to the stream of feeling,” he finds it “an exceedingly shallow rill” in his case:
As in droughty regions baptism by immersion could only be performed symbolically, so Mr. Casaubon found that sprinkling was the utmost approach to a plunge which his stream would afford him; and he concluded that the poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine passion.
Still, even a “sprinkling” of moisture is more than zero. Even if Casaubon’s foremost motive was “to secure… female tendance for his declining years,” he had made a conquest of a woman that everyone in the county regarded as a major babe. Surely he would have at least tried to enjoy sexual relations with his brand new wife, at least on the honeymoon.
I don’t really hold it against Eliot that she felt she couldn’t go there. If you want a beautiful, explicit evocation of a realistic, near-miss sexual misfiring between two characters, virgins up until their historically situated wedding day, each individually sympathetic in his/her own way, go read Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. McEwan will give you full satisfaction.
I love Middlemarch, and Eliot, and Dorothea very much. But I still wish for a bit more. I could have felt closer to both the Casaubons. The question of whose fault their lousy marriage was didn’t have to be played as such a zero-sum game. I would have cherished a slightly less saintly Dorothea just as much and believed in her more. And I have always, always—should I admit this?—identified strongly with underachieving, fearful, intellectually vain Casaubon. Even when I was 19 and like Dorothea wishing for a mentoring-marriage that would naturally lift me up to a higher plane.
