Middlemarch Ch. 10: The Weight of Expectations

Summary

Will Ladislaw never pays Brooke's visit and soon vanishes to the Continent with no destination narrower than Europe. He has tried wine, fasting, and opium as experiments in genius; nothing original results, and the universe has not beckoned. Eliot refuses easy prophecy and asks us to enter Casaubon's consciousness before the neighborhood's small mirrors finish judging him. Milton in a spoon, Eliot reminds us, must submit to a bumpkin's facial angle.

As the wedding nears, Casaubon does not feel his spirits rise. He won a lovely, noble-hearted girl but not delight; his long bachelorhood was supposed to store compound interest of enjoyment. Instead he feels blankness at the Grange and leans on Dorothea's veneration to escape the chilling ideal audience of his unfinished Key. She blends marriage with higher initiation in knowledge and remains joyfully expectant, yearning for action that is rational and ardent, not mere accomplishment worn loose from the nerves that feed action.

Casaubon plans Rome for Vatican manuscripts and says Dorothea will have lonely hours unless she brings a companion; the phrase I should feel more at liberty wounds her though she tries to recover equanimity. She asks herself how she can have a husband so far above her without knowing he needs her less than she needs him, then dresses as serene dignity for the drawing-room. At the last pre-wedding dinner, miscellaneous Middlemarch men appraise her body and coquetry in asides while Mrs. Cadwallader tells Lady Chettam the bridegroom is drying up and predicts hatred within a year. Standish and Chichely prefer flirtation to her severity; Bulstrode calls coquetry the devil's work. Mrs. Renfrew's symptoms supply comic medical talk.

Lydgate appears, impresses Lady Chettam with grave medical tact, and talks cottages with Dorothea before leaving early. Privately he finds her too earnest, always wanting reasons she cannot understand. Miss Brooke is not his style of woman. Bulstrode backs him for the new hospital; Standish fears experiments on patients. Vincy jokes about padding against disease. Soon after that dinner she becomes Mrs. Casaubon and is on her way to Rome, while the town's other plotlines begin to converge.

In this chapter:Terms Characters Key Quotes Modern Story

Why This Matters

Reading Empty Victory

Winning the goal you chased does not guarantee you know how to live inside it. Casaubon gains Dorothea yet feels blankness where delight should be, and uses her admiration to quiet his fear of unfinished work.

Before you assume the next achievement will fix your mood, ask what emotional skills you never practiced along the way.

This chapter

Inside the Mind: Will Ladislaw

He leaves for the Continent after wine, fasting, and opium fail to produce genius, and the universe does not beckon. Restlessness is easier than being measured against Casaubon's library or Brooke's talk. Will's early fear is of being derivative. Departure keeps the fear from having a witness.

Continue this thoughtLives That Do Not Become Monuments

Coming Up in Chapter 11

The novel widens to Middlemarch's other story. Lydgate is already fascinated by Rosamond Vincy, and the Vincy breakfast table will show how provincial comedy and inheritance hunger move in the same small town Lydgate is already fascinated by Rosamond Vincy, though he does not think he has fallen in love. She is grace itself, exquisite music; Dorothea, after one conversation, seems as tiring as.

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Chapter 10

The Weight of Expectations

“He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed.”—FULLER. Young Ladislaw did not pay that visit to which Mr. Brooke had invited him, and only six days afterwards Mr. Casaubon mentioned that his young relative had started for the Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness to waive inquiry. Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise destination than the entire area of Europe. Genius, he held, is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity;…

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The Weight of Expectations

Summary

Why This Matters