Dorothea”s Lost Dog

Abstract Dorothea Brooke has always irritated me; in fact, she makes my flesh creep. My allergy to this saintly, statuesque heroine, whom everyone else seems to adore, should disqualify me as a lover of Middlemarch, but I hope it won” t: when I first read the novel as a junior in college, its greatness made me shiver, but I shivered at, and with, poor Casaubon, struggling with an intractable book and a hectoring wife, and I do still. After all, Casaubon alone among the novel”s characters is doing something he doesn” t have to do. He has money, land, and a respectable position. Working on the shapeless Key to All Mythologies is a labor of sheer love. He flays himself on with the grotesque obsession that is another face of faith, while Dorothea glorifies herself by flailing about crying “What can I do?” I admit to a quirky bias against this floridly self-mortifying girl. She begins the novel by highhandedly rejecting two things I cherish: her dead mother”s jewels and Sir James Chettam”s offering of “a tiny Maltese puppy” (ch. 3, 28).