“No; for some reason or other she preferred staying at Lowick. But her vagrant mind must be reduced to order: there was an art in self-discipline; and she walked round and round the brown library considering by what sort of manoeuvre she could arrest her wandering thoughts. Perhaps a mere task was the best means—something to which she must go doggedly. Was there not the geography of Asia Minor, in which her slackness had often been rebuked by Mr. Casaubon? She went to the cabinet of maps and unrolled one: this morning she might make herself finally sure that Paphlagonia was not on the Levantine coast, and fix her total darkness about the Chalybes firmly on the shores of the Euxine. A map was a fine thing to study when you were disposed to think of something else, being made up of names that would turn into a chime if you went back upon them. Dorothea set earnestly to work, bending close to her map, and uttering the names in an audible, subdued tone, which often got into a chime. She looked amusingly girlish after all her deep experience—nodding her head and marking the names off on her fingers, with a little pursing of her lip, and now and then breaking off to put her hands on each side of her face and say, ‘Oh dear! oh dear!’”
– George Eliot, Middlemarch, Chapter LXXXIII; serialized 1871-1872
commentary: This passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch depicts the novel’s protagonist, Dorothea Casaubon, a young widow, attempting to discipline her under-occupied, overly emotional, feminine mind with cartography. The scene suggests cartography is a form of rational male knowledge, here identified with her late husband, an aged scholar, and so rendered stuffy and irrelevant, rather than superior and valued.
Map images elsewhere in the novel appear as dirty, old, and ineffective at prompting decided action in the present. The impotence of maps before Dorothea’s impulses is treated with gentle humor here; we are meant to like that she cannot be so mastered by them, that she cannot indeed use them to master herself. The foreign sounding names on maps become a kind of music, the sort that turns the “esoteric exotic” to echo Harley (a whimsical dream) — and so an excuse, ironically, for intellectual drift rather than command. This scene sets up a companion, in which Dorothea will finally fail in her attempt at noblely resisting her passion for Will Ladislaw, who is to become her second husband and a man of action (that is, however ironically we might be inclined to take it ourselves, an MP). The implication may be that now Dorothea will be able to travel from Lowick, to live a more active life, too, traveling across England, rather than merely studying maps (and dipping herself in old men’s dust — she is too pretty and passionate for that).
Kelly Searsmith
