The Dangerous Mr Casaubon: Gothic Husband and Gothic Monster in 'Middlemarch'

Abstract

Readers who know of the stereotypical image of the scholar - physically feeble and unattractive, short-sighted, absent-minded and pedantic - will readily recognize the Reverend Edward Casaubon in George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' (1874). Early chapters of the novel show him assiduously conforming to type in his appearance, his approach to human interaction, and his obsession with his "great work," the "Key to All Mythologies." He acknowledges that his preference for ancient narratives is determined by his sense that the modern world is a place of "ruin and confusing change". Yet shortly after making this statement, Mr. Casaubon decides to become part of modern society in the most conventional way possible: by marrying Dorothea Brooke, an eager young heiress with a brain. The result is a disastrous marriage, played out over the course of the novel, in which Casaubon proves not merely to be an ordinarily unpleasant pedant, but a husband so monstrous and selfish that he poses a serious threat to Dorothea's happiness and selfhood, even after his death. In fact, during the course of the novel, the image of Casaubon changes from an unworldly Victorian pedant to a character more at home in the Gothic as Eliot's descriptions move from benign social stereotype to Gothic convention.