Affections Near « The Thinking Housewife

Affections Near

January 22, 2010

bigstockphoto_isabella_with_doll_1360791[1]

Andrea writes:

Several weeks ago you posted a picture of a girl kissing a doll and a wrote about the happy dream of family that is evident in house-play. It was beautiful. And it reminded me of a passage in Middlemarch by George Eliot and prompted me to go back and reread the novel. Here’s the passage:

“These characteristics, fixed and unchangeable as bone in Mr. Casaubon, might have remained longer unfelt by Dorothea if she had been encouraged [by him] to pour forth her girlish and womanly feeling – if he would have held her hands between his and listened with the delight of tenderness and understanding to all the little histories which made up her experience, and would have given her the same same sort of intimacy in return, so that the past life of each could be included in their mutual knowledge and affection – or if she could have fed her affection with those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy soul within that woodeness from the wealth of her own love. That was Dorothea’s bent. With all her yearning to know what was afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardour enough for what was near….” (Chapt. XX)

I’m near the end of the book now. Here is a passage about the husband and wife Dr Lydgate and Rosamond:

“He was really in chill gloom about her at the moment, but he dreaded a future without affection, and was determined to resist the oncoming of division between them. Rosamond obeyed him, and he took her on his knee, but in her secret soul she was utterly aloof from him. The poor thing saw only that the world was not ordered to her liking, and Lydgate was part of that world. But he held her waist with one hand and laid the other gently on both of hers; for this rather abrupt man had much tenderness in his manners towards women, seeming to have always present in his imagination the weakness of their frames and the delicate poise of their health both in body and mind.” (Chapt. LXIV)

Laura writes:

Thank you.

“With all her yearning to know what was afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardour enough for what was near….”

That is beautiful. The world contains many Dorotheas, and always will.

Please follow and like us: