Middlemarch Ch. 78: When Illusions Shatter

George Eliot

When Illusions Shatter Completely

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Summary

After Dorothea leaves the Lydgate drawing-room, Rosamond and Will stand frozen while she feels more gratification than annoyance at what her petty magic has done. She touches his sleeve; he recoils with Don't touch me and unleashes fury at the cost to a woman: Dorothea will value no word of his at more than a dirty feather.

Will says he never had a preference for her any more than for breathing, would rather touch Dorothea's dead hand than any other woman's living, and that Rosamond has drawn down fatality on him. She collapses into tearless dismay; he feels no pity, foresees life enslaved by her helplessness, yet asks if he may see Lydgate and goes out unseen by Martha.

Rosamond faints, is helped upstairs, and lies in torpor; Lydgate finds her ill, soothes hysterical sobbing for an hour, and imagines Mrs. Casaubon's visit agitated her without knowing Will was there. Husband tends wife while the scene that broke Dorothea stays hidden from him.

Eliot stages collateral damage: Rosamond's vanity provokes Will's cruelty and Dorothea's flight, yet Lydgate receives only a fainting wife and more mystery. Dorothy should read LXXVIII as fatality drawn down by petty magic, and Will's honour spoken in rage that Rosamond will not understand.

In this chapter:Terms Characters Key Quotes Modern Story

Why This Matters

Reading Rage as Clarifying

Manipulation often survives until someone refuses the performance of comfort. Rosamond touches Will's sleeve after Dorothea leaves; he says do not touch me and tells her no other woman exists beside the widow while she faints from a pain she has never felt.

When a reaction is explosively out of scale, ask what illusion just broke before you try to soothe your way back to control.

This chapter

Inside the Mind: Will Ladislaw

He recoils when she touches his sleeve. Don't touch me is panic at the picture Dorothea cannot now unsee, not only anger at a flirtation. He can endure being misread by the town. He cannot endure being the instrument of a small magic that costs the one person whose faith he still needs.

Continue this thoughtLives That Do Not Become Monuments

Coming Up in Chapter 79

Will will sit with Lydgate that evening while both men hide what hurts, and Rosamond's secret morning will stay untold until scandal and reticence deepen the slough After anodyne quiet, Lydgate finds Dorothea's letter on the table and learns she called herself. Will arrives; Lydgate is surprised, cites Rosamond's nervous shock, and calls himself an unlucky devil on a worse ledge of purgatory without.

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Original text

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Chapter 78

When Illusions Shatter Completely

CHAPTER LXXVIII. “Would it were yesterday and I i’ the grave, With her sweet faith above for monument.” Rosamond and Will stood motionless—they did not know how long—he looking towards the spot where Dorothea had stood, and she looking towards him with doubt. It seemed an endless time to Rosamond, in whose inmost soul there was hardly so much annoyance as gratification from what had just happened. Shallow natures dream of an easy sway over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty magic to turn the deepest streams, and confident, by pretty gestures and remarks, of making…

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When Illusions Shatter Completely

Summary

Why This Matters