Middlemarch: “From such contentment poor Dorothea was shut out.”

From Middlemarch:

Dorothea Brooke, in Middlemarch, is a well-bred young woman, with a nice inheritance … and yet she chooses to live plainly, and involve herself in community projects, and renounce the things which give her pleasure. Her dream of marriage is to yoke herself to a worthy male – someone whom she loves for his IDEAS, and also for what he can teach her, and how he can involve her in his work. She wants to live an important life, a life of the mind and spirit, she wants to have a wide impact on people, like a saint. And so it is very very important that she choose the right husband. I’m oversimplifying here, sorry … but this appears to be the main jist so far. (I haven’t finished the book yet – I’m not even a quarter of the way through.)

Dorothea is quite naive. The other females around her are much more practical. And you get the sense (at least so far) that Dorothea is going to learn some really rough lessons. I don’t think she is going to choose well for a husband either. Something’s not quite right with this girl. Her mind is “theoretical”.

Another excerpt about Dorothea:

It had now entered Dorothea’s mind that Mr. Casaubon might wish to make her his wife, and the idea that he would do so touched her with a sort of reverential gratitude. How good of him — nay, it would be almost as if a winged messenger had suddenly stood beside her path and held out his hand towards her! For a long whilte she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective. What could she do, what ought she to do? — she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse. With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal of “Female Scripture Characters,” unfolding the private experience of Sara, under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under the New, and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir — with a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. From such contentment poor Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature, struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowlege; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path.