Middlemarch

CHAPITRE XX.

Chapter XX centers on Dorothea’s emotional crisis during her honeymoon in Rome, where the collision between the city’s overwhelming historic grandeur and her Puritan upbringing intensifies her growing disillusionment with Mr. Casaubon. The chapter opens with an epigraph of a forsaken child seeking loving eyes and follows Dorothea through private weeping, philosophical reflection on marital disappointment, sightseeing routines, and a strained pre-departure breakfast exchange. Throughout, Eliot contrasts Dorothea’s yearning for emotional intimacy with Casaubon’s dry, academic demeanor, exploring the universal tragedy of ordinary disillusionment in early marriage.

Forsaken Child Opening Verse

The chapter opens with a four-line verse depicting a forsaken child who wakes suddenly afraid, gazes about at all things round, and sees only that it cannot see the meeting eyes of love. This image of longing for absent affection frames Dorothea’s emotional state in the scenes that follow.

Dorothea’s Sobbing in the Via Sistina Boudoir

Two hours after the opening verse, Dorothea is seated alone in an inner boudoir of a handsome apartment in the Via Sistina, sobbing bitterly with the complete abandonment that a woman controlled by pride and thoughtfulness for others permits herself only when securely alone. Mr. Casaubon is certain to remain away at the Vatican for some time.

Dorothea’s Self-Blame for Marital Desolation

Dorothea has no distinctly shaped grievance she could state, but amid her confused thought and passion, the mental act struggling into clearness is a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation is the fault of her own spiritual poverty. She had married the man of her choice, had contemplated marriage as the beginning of new duties, and had thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so far above her own that his studies must often exclude her.

Societal Dismissal of Ordinary Marital Disillusionment

The narrator reflects that Dorothea’s inward amazement is not exceptional, for many young souls are tumbled out among incongruities and left to find their feet. Society will likely not regard Mrs. Casaubon’s weeping six weeks after her wedding as tragic, since some discouragement at the new real future replacing the imaginary is not unusual. The narrator suggests that the tragic element in such frequency has not yet entered mankind’s coarse emotion, comparing it to the unbearable roar that lies on the other side of silence.

Dorothea’s Unmet Need for Emotional Intimacy

Had she been encouraged to pour forth her girlish and womanly feeling, Dorothea would have wanted her husband to hold her hands and listen with tender understanding to all her little histories, giving her reciprocal intimacy so that each past life could be included in their mutual affection. She had ardor enough for what was near to have kissed Mr. Casaubon’s coat-sleeve or caressed his shoe-latchet, if he had made any sign of acceptance beyond pronouncing her affectionately feminine while reaching her a chair in his stiff, clerical manner.

Dorothea’s Early Roman Sightseeing Routines

Dorothea had now been five weeks in Rome, and during kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go hand in hand, she had driven about at first with Mr. Casaubon but of late chiefly with Tantripp and their experienced courier. She had been led through the best galleries, taken to chief points of view, shown grandest ruins and most glorious churches, and had ended by oftenest choosing to drive to the Campagna where she could feel alone with earth and sky.

Rome’s Grandeur Clashing with Dorothea’s Puritan Upbringing

The narrator asks readers to conceive the gigantic broken revelations of Imperial and Papal Rome thrust abruptly on a girl brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and art chiefly of the hand-screen sort. This girl, whose ardent nature turned her small allowance of knowledge into principles and gave abstract things the quality of pleasure or pain, has lately become a wife and finds herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.

Dorothea’s Overwhelmed Response to Rome’s Historic Weight

Rome may be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world to those with quickening knowledge, but its stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike strangeness of Dorothea’s bridal life. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi set amid a sordid present, the dim eager Titanic life on walls and ceilings, and long vistas of white marble forms first jarred her as with an electric shock, then urged themselves on her with the ache of confused ideas. Forms both pale and glowing fixed themselves in her memory, and all her life she would continue to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, and the red drapery hung for Christmas spreading like a disease of the retina.