Pierre Gascar's "The Season of the Dead": Fairytale Forests

               

      When I read this story, I am awed by the author's depiction of the forest, this space of discarded Jewish corpses and this projection of nightmarish fears. The forest--and the characters' interaction with this space--remind me of forests in fairy tales, which has led me to consider the fairy tale and how it works to, then, gather additional insight into this story. 
      In order to keep impending death at the surface of the story and to continue in the dreamscape mode, Gascar borrows some elements from the fairy tale genre. Echoes of fairytales reverberate throughout the text. He gestures toward this intertextuality when Ernst tells Peter that he has read his books by the German writer, Klemens von Brentano (130), a German author of fairytales. In particular, Gascar incorporates the forest motif, a prominent feature in the Brother Grimms’ fairytales. Jack Vipes considers the role of the forest. He explains: “The heroes of the Grimm’s tales customarily drift into the forest, and are rarely the same people when they leave it. The forest provides them with all they need, if they know how to interpret the signs” (73). Often the heroes enter the forest of enchantment and encounter something mythical which transforms them. Consider the forest looming on the edge of that liminal space in which Peter resides and in which he must enter despite the threat it poses to him. Peter comes to the edge of the forest and he says, “But now the forest was opening up in front of me: that forest which hitherto I had known only in imagination, which had existed for me by virtue not of its copious foliage or its stalwart tree-trunks but of its contrasting gloom, the powerful way it shouldered the horizon and above all its secret contribution to the darkness that weighed me down” (126). He projects his fear onto the forest so that it becomes the embodiment of his nightmare. 

Creepy forest

The forest is a threat to Peter because it encroaches on his beloved graveyard, and its allegiance remains dubious. He notes that “the forest in which, only a minute before, spring flowers had awakened childhood memories, now emerged as though from some Hercynian flexure, darker, and denser, more mysterious and more ominous” (122). We know that the forest contains many secrets, especially discarded corpses. Later, we see Lebovitch’s reluctance to go into the forest, for he is unsure if it is a safe place with the Partisans residing there (138); yet it is in this forest where Lebovitch finds protection when he is hunted by the Germans. In the forest Peter comes upon the Jewish graveyard which in many respects is a confrontation with the supernatural, the transcendent. He is “overwhelmed by the symbolism of [the] graves” (128). He notes the broken branch symbol on the tombstones—an indication that the person died young; most of these tombstones were inscribed with a broken branch. Peter considers “the symbolism of these graves” (128). As Vipes said, he must “interpret the signs” (73).  He believes that he will hear the dead men’s cries even after death and Ernst insists that they will be “sleeping peacefully in the light” (129).

Jewish graves in a forest

Peter rejects this theology: “That’s just to make us feel at peace” (129). Ernst says, “Don’t torture yourself . . . In any case, neither you nor I is to blame” (129). After leaving the forest, he returns to his “pretext”—that is his tending to the graveyard, which as he says is his “badge of innocence” (129). Nevertheless, in the forest he has encountered death in its rawness, and he is forced out of his delusion that his graveyard adornments somehow soften the reality of death. The fairy tale elements—especially the enchanted forest—of the novella enhance the dreamscape mode which keeps the precipice of death at the edge of the text.      Another feature of the fairy tale is the significance of and the personification assigned to nature. Peter refers to “the lady-bird’s carapace and the red umbrella of the toadstool”

Toadstool

which were a part of his childhood spring (121), plants that certainly belong to the world of fairy tale. His description of the pond also resonates with a fairy talesque rendering of nature: “There, the radiance of the sky reflected in the water enfolded us so vividly, lit up both our faces so clearly” (121). Often Peter romanticizes nature, languishing in its idyllic bosom. He recites a taxonomy of flowers, whose symbolism does not go unnoticed; the “dwarf forget-me-nots” are a kind of admonition not to forget, but they are dwarfed, hardly sufficient enough for this task. Peter’s graveyard is just as tenuous, despite the tremendous care he applies to it; it is inadequate for the task of memorializing the dead. While Peter’s illusions of nature lull him into a reverie, it is also the bleakness of nature which abruptly shatters his dream and jars him back into reality. He explains:

Sometimes the sun hid. But we could not stir, for we had fallen out of our dream to such a depth that our task—watering a few clumps of wood-sorrel in a remote corner of Volynia—appeared absurd to the point of unreality, like some Purgatorial penance where the victims, expiating their own guilt or original sin, were forced to draw unending pails of water from a bottomless well, in a green landscape, tending Death like a dwarf tree—just as we were doing here (121).

Peter and his companions attempt to beautify the graveyard to create an aesthetic and lush memorial space for the dead they are forced to bury. At times, like when “the sun hid” they realize the futility of their situation: they cannot redeem the “original sin” of the Nazis. Their perceptions are influenced by their natural environment: clouds, forests, and so on.

Zipes, Jack. “The Enchanted Forest of the Brothers Grimm: New Modes of Approaching the Grimms' Fairy Tales.” Germanic Review 62:2 (1987): 66-73. Web. 12. Dec. 2009.

Pierre Gascar's "The Season of the Dead": The Pastoral and the Sublime

In my last post I introduced Gascar's lengthy short story "The Season of the Dead" and I noted how Gascar uses a range of rhetorical devices to mediate the historical events of the Holocaust--the mass genocide gripping a nation and the personal and generational trauma tormenting survivors and their families--and through his text opening up a space for the Holocaust dead to be memorialized. It is a beautiful text, really. I mentioned how he creates a dreamscape mode throughout the story, so that the characters seem only half-conscious, a reasonable response to dealing with the immensity of their trauma. Not only are these characters operating in an illusive dream space, their graveyard recalls the Pastoral. Against this Pastoral, Gascar juxtaposes scenes of  murdered babies and dead children--scenes that arouse the sublime.

Gascar’s rhetorical devices include his diction which one would associate with a nature scene from the Pastoral. For example, Peter and Cordonat “linger . . . gazing at [their] surroundings” (121) as though they exist in a time of leisure and beauty. Peter imagines himself as a mythical being found in a painting of the idyllic: “A man sitting beside a clump of anemones, another cutting grass with a scythe; water, and somebody lying flat on his belly drinking, and somebody else with his eyes turned skyward, drawing water in a yellow jug . . . the water was for me and Cordonat” (121). Gascar is revealing Peter’s psychological detachment from the reality of his situation, which emphasizes the dreamscape mode of the text. It also suggests the hallucinating effect dehydration and malnutrition might have on the victims in the concentration camp, causing the delirium that makes him believe he is being offered a jug of water. The text, which is not interested in mimesis, conveys a compelling psychological rendering of the concentration camp experience.

Cole Thomas The Course of Empire 

            It is absurd that Peter can imagine his situation as idyllic; yet the artistry of the graveyard is equally bizarre, considering the context of the concentration camp. Gascar foregrounds the artistic quality of the graveyard, emphasizing the purity of its aesthetic makeup. That is to say that it has been fashioned entirely from the natural world and not from human structures and monuments. This distinction is highly important to Peter (and to Gascar). When the Germans have culled the tombstones from the Jewish grave, Peter is adamant that they will not occupy his graveyard. He describes the aesthetic quality of the graveyard: “With its ever green turf, its flowerbeds, its carefully sanded paths edged with small black fir-trees which we had transplanted, with its rustic fence of birch-boughs, against the dark background of the forest verge, our graveyard seemed an ‘idyllic’ place as the Germans put it” (149). 

Beautiful greenspace, perhaps what Peter sees

He says that they came out to photograph it and that its fame was “like that which carries crowds to gaze at certain baroque works of art or at others which, devoid of art, are yet prodigies of patience and time” (149).  While Peter is wary of the ethical implications of setting up the Jewish stones, he is most insistent on maintaining the purity of the graveyard’s construction. It possesses a sacred quality like the Hebrews brought to the construction of the Ark of the Covenant on which no tool was to be used.  Gascar is gesturing to the reader to consider the integrity of his own aesthetic representation of the Holocaust, whose construction offers a beautiful memorial in honour of the dead, a beauty which is always tempered by the horrors contained within its prose.

Gascar recognizes the literary constraints of representing the Holocaust, which causes him to assess narrative strategies and discursive practices. Peter considers the magnitude of suffering experienced by Lebovitch and the Jews:

They took you into a universe which perhaps had always existed behind the solid rampart of the dead, and of which the metaphors of traditional rhetoric only gave you superficial glimpses; where the bread was literally snatched form one’s mouth, where one could not keep body and soul together, where one really was bled white and died like a dog (138).

Metaphor breaks down when it tries to represent the Holocaust. Language which was once full of hyperbole has become a reality for the Jews.  Peter demonstrates how words, mere signifiers, are loaded with such power because of Nazi rhetoric that they actually swallow them up in their meaning. Peter explains: “Like novice sorcerers inexpert in the magic of words, we now beheld the essential realities of hell, escaping from the dry husks of their formulae, come crowding toward us and over us: the black death of the plague, the bread of affliction, the pride of a louse” (138). Gascar illuminates how words are subject to cultural meaning; these quaint idioms he quotes contain hellish reality. Certainly, Gascar’s attention to discursive practices is an indictment against Nazi propaganda which uses words to deceive and control, but it also reveals his own reticence at narrating this piece of Holocaust fiction.

In the midst of Peter’s idyllic graveyard, Gascar infuses elements of the sublime as a way to foreground the singularity of death against the backdrop of mass killings. By employing the sublime he retains the veracity of representation. Peter is always aware of the overwhelming horrors unfolding in the camp and at the train docks; yet he mostly pushes these aside and occupies himself with weeding and transplanting. However he can’t always avoid horrific confrontations. When he comes upon the mass grave, these hastily buried corpses pit the extraordinary truth of death against his abstractions of death. Here he confronts the abject:

I was overwhelmed by the sombre horror of it and the truth it revealed—these liquefying muscles, this half-eaten eye, those teeth like a dead sheep’s; death, no longer decked with grasses, no longer ensconced in the coolness of a vault, no longer sepulchred in stone, but sprawling in a bog full of bones, wrapped in a drowned man’s clothes, with its hair caught in the earth (142). 

He can’t dress up death here. Gascar provides another subliminal departure from the dreamscape of Peter’s sensibility when he focuses in on the train dock: the German guards toss dead children on to the roofs of the vans. This train scene breaks up the dreamscape again and Peter zeroes in on the singular experience of a woman. He recounts:

High up in the wall of the van, a little to the left in the narrow opening, there was a face; it seemed not living, but painted—painted white, with yellow hair, with a mouth that moved feebly and eyes that did not move at all: the face of a woman whose dead child was lying above her head (145).

This face, this countenance, makes an impression on Peter and he confesses: “Death can never appease this pain; this stream of black grief will flow forever” (145). Peter realizes that the burials, the funerals, all his efforts to honour the dead will never remove the pain, the grief, the memory of a monstrous history. Gascar’s instances of the sublime force Peter, and the reader, to confront the abominable reality of the Holocaust. Just when he lulls Peter back into his dreamscape, he erupts the text with the sublime.             Gascar depicts the agonizing experiences of those forced to dig graves, of those forced to bury the dead, of those forced to witness travesty. Through diction and syntax and rhetoric, he creates a dreamscape mode that he, then, disrupts with the sublime. And, it is uncomfortable, but reading about the Holocaust isn't about being comfortable. It's about never forgetting. 

    In my next post, I'm going to discuss the way that Gascar incorporates fairy tale generic conventions into his story. 

Memorialisation and the Holocaust: A Textual Graveyard in Pierre Gascar’s “The Season of the Dead” Part One

     I have recently reread a number of stories from When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories. This collection considers the ethical position of those writing the Holocaust. What captivates me again is the forty-six page story (novella?) called "The Season of the Dead," by Pierre Gascar. This story serves as a memorial structure, 

in which the Holocaust dead are given a formal burial ground. Gascar provides a comprehensive description of the narrator, Peter, his methodical construction of the graveyard. Throughout the narrative, Gascar details grave positions, flower arrangements, boundaries, and so on. These excessive descriptions are signposts to the reader, which point out the narrative strategies Gascar employs to construct his textual graveyard. The character Ernst draws the comparison between the literal and the textual graveyard: “I mean that this ancient, traditional burial-ground, close by your own fresh and improvised one, is rather like the upper shelf in a library” (128). Gascar’s novella is a composite of many of the literary conventions one might locate on that library shelf. Indeed, Gascar employs elements from the film framing technique Dreamscape, from the fairy tale, from religious texts. He incorporates the abject and the sublime and he infuses the text with characteristics of Surrealism. Gascar uses very specific rhetorical devices to mediate the historical event in such a way that the dead are always at the surface and the text becomes their textual graveyard.   

I have taken three grad courses that were explicitly Holocaust literature courses or dealt significantly with Holocaust literature. We extensively discussed the ethical implications involved in writing about the Holocaust. Indeed, many scholars have considered ethical and historical considerations of representing the Holocaust. In addition, some scholars have considered artistic representations of the Holocaust; however, few have delineated any substantial set of narrative and rhetorical strategies employed by Holocaust writers. They may have identified pervasive modes of narration; yet they have not identified the techniques used to convey these modes. I am not suggesting that there is a formula or a single set of conventions for writing about the Holocaust. What I am suggesting is that the focus of critical inquiry into Holocaust literature has been dominated by the ethics of representing the Holocaust—as important as that is—and has been deficient in considering how the aesthetic work’s construction mediates the historical events. I am interested in how a text, such as Gascar’s "The Season of the Dead, attempts to memorialize the dead primarily on a textual level.  

In constructing a memorial site for the dead, Gascar is attentive to features of a memorial. James E. Young explores the function and successes of many Holocaust memorials, explaining that “the raison d’être for Holocaust monuments is ‘to never forget’” (173).  This dictum is in direct defiance to the intention of the Final Solution, which would have obliterated Jews from history and memory. Young Jeemphasizes that memorials are not, themselves, the memory; rather, it is in the “reflective space” the memorials occupy and open up that we remember (189). Peter opens up a graveyard in the narrative, which also opens up a textual space for us to remember. Not only does the text contain a physical graveyard, it maintains a graveyard-like atmosphere. That is to say that death is either at the surface or just beneath the surface of the text. Peter exists in a liminal space which creates a feeling of tentativeness throughout the narrative. We are always aware of death’s immanence for any of the individuals in the story. Even at Peter’s commission to construct the graveyard, the N.C.O. says, “There is to be a graveyard here . . . your own” (116). This designation hovers over the text and over all that Peter does.  Gascar keeps the temporality of the text right at the precipice of death, which is certainly commensurate with the feelings of those in the concentration camp. He describes the Jewish people, motionless, “driven there by some somnambulism of fear,” caught up in a nightmare from which they cannot awake:

“To Jews . . . going and staying were equally intolerable fates, and they would advance timidly towards the edge of the road or the barbed wire, take one step back and move a little to one side, as though seeking some state intermediary between departure and immobility.  They would stand on the verge of imagined flight, and in their thoughts would dig illusory tunnels through time (130). 

Gascar attempts to recreate the feeling of the Jews in their state of indecision, when they imagine they have choices. Gascar suggests that the victims escape through acts of the imagination; in other words, they psychologically distance themselves from the reality before them. Gascar’s narrative makes the same kinds of departures from realism in its rendering of the historical event. It gets caught up in a Kafkaesque world with disorientations and surreal distortions. 

Peter imagines himself as an ethereal figure in the surreal and bizarre space he is forced to occupy. He explains: “We belonged to another world, we were a team of ghosts returning every morning to a green, peaceful place, we were workers in death’s garden, characters in a long preparatory dream” (120-1). Peter describes his experience as a dream. In his dream world he does not have to assimilate the horrors occurring in his reality.  While the entire text has a dream-like quality to it, Gascar shifts between dream spheres. After tending the graveyard for so long Peter relates this impression: “our continual contact with death was beginning to open for us a sort of wicket-gate into its domain” (155). Through the persistent vis-à-vis with death, the text takes on a transcendent quality which resembles a kind of dreamscape one might encounter in a film. The dreamscape technique offers a way for Gascar to mediate the disjointed spaces—the stark and brutal world of the concentration camp and the peaceful and lush world of the graveyard—occupying the narrative. Gascar uses the dreamscape technique to convey Peter’s “reverie” (154). He continually reminds us of the surreal nature of the text with references to “mirages” (122) and illusory images (122). An example of the way in which Gascar emphasizes the dreamscape quality of the text is his metaphorical description of the landscape. He explains that the landscape is “deprived of radiance by the subdued quality of light; but it exuded a kind of stupor. At first, you noticed nothing” (122). In addition to the hazy sky—a result of smoke from the gas chambers?—he is also describing the inassimilable reality of life in the concentration camp. His description parallels with the deprivations imposed by the Nazis in order to stun the prisoners into complicity. Mass killings, hunger, thirst, and cruelty shadowed their understanding of their reality, so that they find themselves in “a kind of stupor.”  Peter is caught up in this disorienting reality.  

Anemones in the graveyard they dig.

In part, Gascar creates the dreamscape through purposeful rhetorical strategies, with the underlying intention, always, of memorializing the dead. He gestures toward such rhetoric in the opening of the narrative, when he describes the dead: “Theirs is not the only memory involved; they enter into a seasonal cycle, with an unfamiliar rhythm—ternary perhaps, slow in any case, with widely spaced oscillations and pauses; [emphasis added] they hang for a while nailed to a great wheel, sinking and rising by turns” (114). Indeed his writing contains “an unfamiliar rhythm,” unfamiliar because it is not always conducive to the mood one would experience in a concentration camp. He creates long, multi-phrased sentences with lulling rhythms, as in this abridged sentence: “Sometimes the earth, dried by the early spring sunshine, was blown so high by the wind that the horizon was darkened by a brown cloud, a storm-cloud which would break up into impalpable dust, and under which the sunflowers glowed luminously” (117).Throughout the text he recreates these undulations in syntax, often by using a cumulative sentence structure, its succession of phrase and clauses creating swells that soothe the reader. For example, in describing the phenomenon of fear, he creates this long sentence:

Fear shared their lives, and when we walked past with our sentries beside us it was Fear, that tireless companion, that began in a burst of lunatic lucidity, to count the pebbles dropping into the hole in the pavement, trees along the road, or the days dividing that instant from some past event or other—the fête at Tarnopol or Easter 1933, or the day little Chaim passed his exam: some other spring day, dateless day, some distant day that seemed to collect and hold all the happiness in life (123).

His syntax echoes back to the “oscillations” of memory (114) with its “bursts” and “[drops].” Not only is he attentive to the “oscillations” of memory, he is also conscientious about the “pauses” of memory.  He devises such pauses with his single-sentence paragraphs, such as “It was not until much later that somebody died” (119). By isolating the sentence, he gives more weight to its subject—the dead individual. Another example is the sentence, “I did not understand,” again causing the reader to consider the weight of these words. Gascar’s syntactical constructions catch the rhythm of Peter’s moods in his camp experience.

     In my next post, I will discuss the sublime and the way that the story borrows from the fairytale genre. 

Middlemarch: Will Ladislaw Illuminates Dorothea's Metaphorical Blindness

Will Ladislaw Shakes out his Brilliance onto Dorothea     

     Will Ladislaw has benefited from a liberal education and his attitudes toward learning and knowledge resonate with those of Cardinal Newman (The Idea of a University). Casaubon explains some of Ladislaw’s education philosophy: “On leaving Rugby he declined to go to an English university . . . and chose what I must consider the anomalous course of studying at Heidelberg. And now he wants to go abroad again, without any special object, save the vague purpose of what he calls culture, preparation for he knows not what. He declines to choose a profession” (72). Casaubon mocks Ladislaw for declining to choose a profession (73); however, Ladislaw is conscious that by extensive travel and education, he is receiving a liberal education, which Newman explains will “be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession” (xix). Rather than fixing himself on one profession and restricting all his learning to that one field, Ladislaw opts for Newman’s concept of liberal education. He exposes himself to many branches of knowledge and to much scholarship, in part to assure that his own knowledge and scholarship is not thrown away “for want of knowing what is being done by the rest of the world” (190). Consequently, he considers a pluralistic and broad education to be the cornerstone to knowledge. 

What Newman's liberal arts program may have looked like

 As a result he, unlike Casaubon, gains synthesis and clarity in his mind. He explains to Casaubon and Dorothea that “Rome had given him quite a new sense of history as a whole: the fragments stimulated his imagination and made him constructive” (194). He experiences that phenomenon Newman attributes to a liberal education:  “[The] true enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence” (137-8). Ladislaw’s methods of learning have brought together many pieces of knowledge and formulated them into a coherent understanding of life. And his conception of the purpose of knowledge “[consists] neither in self-conceit nor in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in particular” (74). He, like Dorothea, desires to contribute to society.

               Ladislaw’s instruction and friendship to Dorothea is central to her intellectual growth.  His broad knowledge challenges her narrow philosophy. Her blindness to aesthetics, in particular, impairs her entire intellectual vision.  The metaphors of vision pervading the novel are often paralleled with aesthetics, to emphasize the relationship between epistemology and aesthetics.

Metaphorical blindness; failure to grasp aesthetics

In the first part of the novel, Dorothea is described as one who lacks vision, residing under a shadow of ignorance, which is largely due to her rigid Puritanical roots. She explains to him: “I am seeing so much at once and not understanding half of it. That always makes one feel stupid. It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine—something like being blind, while people talk of seeing the sky” (188). Ladislaw releases her from metaphorical blindness by illuminating to her the language of art (189). Eliot gives Ladislaw Apollo-like attributes, which resonate with his role of bestowing light onto Dorothea’s shadowy mind. The narrator describes Ladislaw: “The first impression on seeing Will was one of sunny brightness, which added to the uncertainty of his changing expression . . . When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in his coruscation” (191). Joseph Wiesenfarth suggests that, metaphorically, Ladislaw shakes out the light of understanding onto Dorothea’s ignorance (365).

Apollo, the Sun God

    The narrator indicates that people in Dorothea's time are generally deficient in their understanding and knowledge of art: "Travellers did not often carry full information on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets; and even the most brilliant English critic of the day mistook the flower-flushed tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase due to the painter's fancy" (172).  Dorothea’s ignorance toward art is amplified as a result of her Puritanism which has, not only denied her access to aesthetics, but has made her uneasy with art. Wiesenfarth states that “Puritans consider art to be more or less a misrepresentation of truth” (365). Given Dorothea’s Puritan education, she has difficulty endowing art with any value. She explains: “I should like to make life beautiful—I mean everybody’s life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside of life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think people are shut out from it” (201). She maintains that art must better the world, meaning it must improve the quality of one’s life. She cannot conceive that art enhances life because it stimulates thought and sensuousness. It is wicked to her that she enjoy art while others endure squander. Thus, it is, on the one hand, religious piety which accounts for her disinterest in art; on the other hand, it is her ignorance.  She simply does not know how to enjoy art; she does not speak the language of art: “I cannot help believing in glorious things in a blind sort of way. I should be quite willing to enjoy the art here, but there is so much that I don't know the reason of “(201).  

Hall of Statues, in the Vatican, where Dorothea is spotted by Ladislaw

Sitting in the Vatican, the narrator asks the reader to consider Dorothea “who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meager Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain” (176). Wiesenfarth explains that, as a Puritan, Dorothea has “the right moral impulse . . . [but] is cut off from the deeper truths of nature and history and culture because she does not know the language of art” (365).  She confesses to her uncle: “I never see the beauty of those pictures which you say are so much praised. They are a language I do not understand. I suppose there is some relation between pictures and nature which I am too ignorant to feel—just as you see what a Greek sentence stands for which means nothing to me” (70). She has no epistemology for viewing or appraising art.

    On her honeymoon in Rome, she is left on her own while Casaubon devotes his time to conducting research for his Key to all Mythologies. On one occasion, Ladislaw and his German artist mentor Naumann spot her: 

Ariadne

They were just in time to see another figure standing against a pedestal near the reclining marble: a breathing blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish gray drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backward from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair. She was not looking at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the floor. But she became conscious of the two strangers who suddenly paused as if to contemplate the Cleopatra, and, without looking at them, immediately turned away (172).

Unlike the narrator who frames this very scene with a kind of condescension, Naumann describes Dorothea within an aesthetic discourse: "What do you think of that for a fine bit of antithesis? . . . There lies antique beauty, not corpse-like even in death, but arrested in the complete contentment of its sensuous perfection: and here stands beauty in its breathing life, with the consciousness of Christian centuries in its bosom. But she should be dressed as a nun; I think she looks almost what you call a Quaker; I would dress her as a nun in my picture" (173). Dorothea's contact with Ladislaw and his artist mentor profoundly change how she views art and how she begins to view herself. 

               Ladislaw guides her through the troubling relationship between aesthetics and social responsibility. He instructs her to enjoy life, for “enjoyment radiates” (201).  In this way, he guides her so that she can declare that “some things which had seemed monstrous to her were gathering intelligibility and even a natural meaning ; but all this was apparently a branch of knowledge in which Mr. Casaubon had not interested himself” (196). Her exposure to new branches of knowledge facilitates her liberal education. It is significant that it is outside of Middlemarch, outside of narrow opinions (47), that Dorothea is educated. Rome, “the city of visible history,” challenges her epistemology (176). Not only is she overwhelmed by the majestic beauty and profound history and philosophy embodied in this city, she is wrought with the emotion of a young bride neglected by her husband. And in this vulnerability, “Dorothea’s ideas and resolves seemed like melting ice floating and lost in the warm flood of which they had been but another form” (181).  

      We note the changes in her epistemology when she returns to Lowick (after her honeymoon). When she first visited Lowick she “found the house and the grounds all that she could wish for” and she “walked around the house with delightful emotion. Everything seemed hallowed to her” (65). After her time in Rome, she finds Lowick “nothing but dreary oppression” (250). When she walks into her boudoir, it is obvious that she has changed:

               The ideas and hopes which were living in her mind when she first saw this room nearly three months before were present now only as memories: she judged them as we judge transient and departed things. All existence seemed to beat with a lower pulse than her own, and her religious faith was a solitary cry, the struggle out of a nightmare in which every object was withering and shrinking away from her. Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency (250)

Dorothea is no longer looking through the lens of religious dogma and idealism. Her veneration of Casaubon has been snuffed out. Prior to her marriage, her idealism magnified Lowick Manor: the furniture became grander; the textiles became more colourful; the ceilings seemed higher. All was seen through her hopeful vision. When she returned, she notes: “The very furniture in the room seemed to have shrunk . . . the stag in the tapestry looked more like a ghost . . . the polite literature in the bookcases looked more like immovable imitations of books” (248). Her vision has altered significantly since Ladislaw guided her learning in Rome. At home in Middlemarch, Ladislaw continues to educate Dorothea. Unlike her uncle or her husband, Ladislaw is interested in what she has to say and “[he] always seemed to see more in what she said than she herself saw” (328). He continues to be that source of illumination and joy. She describes her feeling of seeing Will which is “like a lunette opened in the wall of her prison, giving her a glimpse of the sunny air” (328).

               Upon returning to Middlemarch, Dorothea, whose education acquired abroad has ameliorated her character, is in a position to extend the philanthropic gesture she so fervently desires. The character qualities she has gained from her education resonate with Newman’s vision that the well-educated possess “good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self-command, and steadiness of view . . .  In some it will have developed habits of business, power of influencing others, and sagacity. In others it will elicit the talent of philosophical speculation, and lead the mind forward to eminence in this or that intellectual department” (xix). Indeed Dorothea begins to demonstrate good sense and these other qualities as she is given opportunity. We see evidence of these characteristics especially in her relationship with Mr. Lydgate. As such, we need to explore briefly his education experiences to demonstrate his shortcomings and to understand how Dorothea functions as a Saint Theresa to him. 

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1872. Toronto: Bantam, 1992. Print.

Newman, Cardinal John Henry. The Idea of a University. New York: Longmans Green. 1907. http://www.newmanreader.org. Web. 27 November 2010.

Wiesenfarth, Joseph. “Middlemarch: The Language of Art.” Modern Language Association 97.3 (1982): 363-77. JSTOR. Web. 16 November 2010.