Dorothea in Rome: Romanticism, Misreading, and the Sunlight of Awakening
- Kirk Barbera
- 20 minutes ago
- 11 min read
When we first meet Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, George Eliot frames her like a figure from a Renaissance painting. It’s tempting to take that image as a final judgment—she is a Madonna, pure and austere, set apart from ordinary life. But Eliot is only beginning to sketch her heroine, and if we settle too quickly on this first impression, we risk missing the complexity that unfolds. Middlemarch warns us from the start: judging by appearances alone is always to our detriment.
Eliot returns to this problem with heightened force in Chapter 19. Now Dorothea is in Rome, newly married to Edward Casaubon—a much older, emotionally withholding scholar at work on a grand-sounding (but fatally misguided) project called The Key to All Mythologies. Casaubon has promised a life of purpose; Dorothea has imagined herself his partner in great work. In Rome, that ideal begins to crack. Eliot places Dorothea amid a gallery of classical statues and lets two artistic onlookers—Will Ladislaw (young, impressionable, English) and Naumann (an animated German painter)—project their visions onto her. The scene becomes a test: can anyone see Dorothea as she is?
Dante’s Epigraph and the Danger of Heavy Judgments
Eliot prefaces the Rome chapter with a Dante tag from Purgatorio:
“L’altra vedete ch’ha fatto alla guanciaDella sua palma, sospirando, letto.” — Purgatorio, vii “See the other, who has made her cheek a bed for her hand, sighing.”
Dante’s moral taxonomy is firm: the posture—cheek propped on hand, sighing—signals spiritual failure (sloth). Eliot borrows the image but revises the judgment. In a world trained to read behavior through inherited classical-Christian categories (think: the “right” label for every pose), Eliot asks us to pause. A woman with “hand to cheek” might be indolent—or she might be thinking hard, sorrowing, or awakening. Classicists (and the Italianate tradition they revere) often produce crisp labels; Eliot’s realism prefers patient comprehension. She won’t let a single gesture carry a whole verdict.
“Romanticism… had not yet penetrated the times with its leaven”
Eliot, writing in 1870, also frames the cultural weather of 1829:
“When George the Fourth was still reigning… Mrs. Casaubon, born Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome. In those days the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil by forty years than it is at present. 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. Romanticism, which has helped to fill some dull blanks with love and knowledge, had not yet penetrated the times with its leaven… it was fermenting still as a distinguishable vigorous enthusiasm in certain long-haired German artists at Rome…”
Two things are happening. First, a gentle satire of misreaders of art—tourists and critics alike. Second, a placement of Romanticism as an energizing ferment (love! knowledge!) that still tends to prioritize idealized surfaces and heightened feeling. Eliot appreciates Romanticism’s warmth but wants more: inner life rendered with sober, psychological clarity. Rome, then, becomes a lab—where Romantic projections meet the resistant fact of a living person.
The Vatican Scene: Dorothea “as if” a statue—and something more
Eliot’s descriptive core is worth reading whole:
“One fine morning a young man whose hair was not immoderately long, but abundant and curly, and who was otherwise English in his equipment, had just turned his back on the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican and was looking out on the magnificent view of the mountains from the adjoining round vestibule. He was sufficiently absorbed not to notice the approach of a dark-eyed, animated German who came up to him and placing a hand on his shoulder, said with a strong accent, “Come here, quick! else she will have changed her pose.” Quickness was ready at the call, and the two figures passed lightly along by the Meleager, towards the hall where the reclining Ariadne, then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and tenderness. 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.”
Eliot’s descriptive core in Chapter 19 of Middlemarch deserves to be read in its entirety, because it exemplifies her method of framing Dorothea through art while at the same time resisting the limits of that frame. The scene opens with the tourist’s eye: “Quickness was ready at the call, and the two figures passed lightly along by the Meleager, towards the hall where the reclining Ariadne, then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and tenderness.” Even before Dorothea appears, Eliot stresses the act of looking, of rushing to catch a “pose” before it is lost. The Ariadne itself is introduced under a false name—“then called the Cleopatra”—and this misidentification becomes a metaphor for the scene as a whole. Cleopatra evokes languid sensuality and erotic self-possession; Ariadne is the abandoned woman, left desolate after Theseus’s betrayal. Which name one uses changes the entire story. Eliot’s reminder that the statue was misread in her day signals how easily viewers impose categories on what they see. Dorothea, too, is about to be misread.
When Dorothea enters the frame, Eliot stages a striking antithesis: “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…” Against the “marble voluptuousness” of stone, Dorothea is described as “breathing” and “blooming.” The sculpture is flawless but fixed; Dorothea is alive, fresh, unidealized, and yet “not shamed” by the comparison. That phrase is crucial: Eliot refuses to concede that Dorothea’s Christian plainness is somehow lesser than classical sensuality. Dorothea can stand beside Ariadne, not as a rival beauty but as an alternative kind of presence—one rooted in moral seriousness rather than voluptuous ease.
The clothing description underscores this presence. Dorothea is wrapped in “Quakerish gray drapery,” her “long cloak, fastened at the neck, thrown backward from her arms.” These details suggest austerity, simplicity, even severity. Yet Eliot adds that the bonnet, pushed back by Dorothea’s hand, made “a sort of halo to her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair.” The phrase “a sort of halo” is wonderfully ambivalent. It recalls the Madonna imagery from the novel’s opening chapter, but stripped of supernatural radiance. Dorothea’s halo is a quirk of dress and light, not a mark of sanctity. Eliot thus multiplies iconographic signals—plain garments, a halo effect, Quaker gray—while quietly undermining the very process of turning Dorothea into an icon. She is “like” a Madonna, but also resolutely not one.
The most delicate touch comes with the hand. Eliot writes: “one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet.” This gesture ties the scene back to Dante’s epigraph from Purgatorio, in which the slothful soul rests cheek upon hand, sighing in idleness. But here the same pose carries different meaning. Dorothea is not slothful. She is pensive, weary after a quarrel with Casaubon, her thoughts drifting inward. Eliot collapses visual traditions—sculpture, Renaissance Madonna, Dante’s moral categories—and transfigures them into a single, plausible moment of human posture. A woman standing in a gallery, resting her head on her hand: art, literature, and lived life intersect, but they do not coincide.
Then comes the sentence that reverses all the artistic framing: “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.” After so much care describing Dorothea as if she were another statue in the gallery, Eliot abruptly shifts the gaze. Dorothea herself ignores the Ariadne/Cleopatra entirely. She is not absorbed in antiquity, nor in Romantic enthusiasm for art. Her mind is elsewhere, fixed on light. The word “dreamily” conveys her semi-conscious state—lost in thought, not in art. The “streak of sunlight” is thin, fleeting, ordinary, nothing like the marble grandeur surrounding her. But in that ordinariness lies its force: it represents a slant of recognition, a dawning awareness. Dorothea is beginning to see, however dimly, the truth of her marriage—that Casaubon is not the man she imagined, that her grand hope of shared intellectual labor has already soured.
The sunlight cuts across the marble floor as reality cuts across Dorothea’s idealism. Cleopatra or Ariadne might serve as emblems, but they remain emblems. The sunlight, by contrast, is not symbolic in the same way. It is simply there: a streak of natural illumination catching her eye, an external correlate to the internal illumination beginning to dawn. Eliot sets up every cultural frame—Renaissance Madonna, Gothic nun, antique marble, Dantean soul—and then lets Dorothea step out of them, turning not to art but to light. In this way the passage dramatizes Eliot’s rejection of Romantic projection and her commitment to psychological realism. Dorothea is not a statue or a symbol; she is a woman, momentarily dream-bound, slowly awakening to error.
Naumann’s Gothic Nun: seeing “more”—but still a projection
Naumann, thrilled by the tableau, starts interpreting:
“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. However, she is married; I saw her wedding-ring on that wonderful left hand…”
He does intuit something Casaubon never will: there’s more behind the plainness. But look at the mold into which he pours that insight: Gothic. The nun image, in 19th-century visual culture, carries an erotic charge—piety edged with repressed passion, a “holy exterior” shadowed by inner fires. Naumann’s “nun” is a romanticized paradox. It’s clever, even half-true—Dorothea does conceal a passionate moral energy—but it is still a trope. He wants to “dress” her, to costume her—turning a person into a picture.
Notice how Eliot sneaks in the wedding ring: Naumann sees the “wonderful left hand.” He registers marriage only as a detail in a composition, not as the event currently breaking Dorothea’s heart. The Gothic “nun” and the classical Cleopatra/Ariadne are both frames; Dorothea is more than either.
Will’s Protest—and his Romantic susceptibility
Will, by contrast, resists the painter’s appropriation. Later he fires the question:
“And what is a portrait of a woman?—Your painting and Plastik are poor stuff after all. They perturb and dull conceptions instead of raising them.”
He’s right to suspect the flattening impulse in art—that urge to turn a person into a consumable image. He’s also, transparently, falling in love. Will senses Dorothea’s sadness and moral depth; he sees she isn’t merely a “nun” to be painted. But Eliot is evenhanded: Will, too, projects. He “understands” better than Naumann, but he is still romancing a vision. What neither man can see is the specific content of Dorothea’s interior at this instant: the shock of quarreling with Casaubon and the first, thin clarity that she has made a serious mistake.
Cleopatra vs. Ariadne: the ethics of naming
Eliot’s parenthetical “then called the Cleopatra” is a masterstroke. The wrong name controls the story you tell yourself about a body: Cleopatra suggests languor, mastery, seduction; Ariadne implies betrayal, abandonment, and (eventually) unexpected rescue. Dorothea—the “Quakerish” English bride—can be read Cleopatra-wise (exoticizing her difference), nun-wise (Gothic repression), or Ariadne-wise (a wronged heart beginning to wake). Eliot forces us to weigh the ethics of reading: Which name best honors the truth?
And note the sly cultural irony: Casaubon’s fatal scholarly blind spot is that he ignores German philology—the very scholarship that could have made his Key to All Mythologies real. Meanwhile, in Rome, German artists are wildly alive to symbolism and style. All around Dorothea, people are misreading—tourists, critics, husbands. The misnamed statue is a mirror.
The Sunlight: Eliot’s counter-image to Romantic surfaces
Everything tightens on the clause: “her large eyes were fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the floor.” Why sunlight?
Because a thin bar of real light is the precise counter-image to a plush ideal. Cleopatra is sumptuous; Ariadne, a marble dream. Sunlight is plain, cold, true. It lands where it lands; it exposes without flattering. It is also a figure for knowledge—but not the thunderclap of revelation, rather the slender dawn of recognition: I have been wrong; the world I inhabit is not the world I imagined. Dorothea’s marriage has already produced an argument; now it begins to produce understanding. The aestheticists want a pose; Eliot gives us a mind in motion.
This is where Eliot outgrows Romanticism. She accepts its conviction that art matters—hence all the statues, the Dante echo, the painter on the prowl. But she refuses to let art’s surfaces dominate human truth. The psychology leads the image, not the other way around.
Casaubon, plainly
For readers who haven’t opened Middlemarch in a while (or ever): Edward Casaubon is Dorothea’s new husband—older, pedantic, chilly, grooming a scholarly quest to synthesize all mythologies. The quest is hollow: his methods are outdated, his temperament ungenerous, and his need for control suffocating. He treats Dorothea less as a partner than as a devotional accessory—someone to copy, fetch, defer. The Rome chapters are where Dorothea begins to see that the destiny she dreamed is, in fact, a mistake.
What Eliot is doing—stylishly
Pull back and you can see Eliot’s method in miniature:
Ekphrasis with a twist. She writes Dorothea as if the heroine were another artwork—cloth, halo, hand to cheek—then cracks the frame by revealing an inner event the “art” can’t hold (the marital quarrel; the sudden attention to light).
Cultural lenses. Dante’s epigraph, the Vatican collection, Romantic “long-haired Germans,” Gothic nun fantasies—Eliot layers lenses that almost explain Dorothea, then shows where each lens distorts.
The ethics of attention. Naumann pays attention to form; Will, to feeling; Casaubon, to utility. Eliot trains us to attend to consciousness—to why someone is looking at what they are looking at. That’s the real portrait.
A final look at the passage—line by line, briefly revisited
“else she will have changed her pose”: the painter’s fear—the image might escape before it’s captured. Eliot’s irony: the moment is not a “pose” at all, but an unposed human being thinking through pain.
“passed… by the Meleager”: a hunter of myth; a man who kills the Calydonian boar. This hunting corridor ends in the pursuit of a woman’s image. The verbs “passed lightly… quickness was ready” keep it airy—yet the hunt is on.
“the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease”: marble simulates softness. Eliot admires the sculpture’s genius—but then counters with the living softness of “a breathing blooming girl.”
“a sort of halo to her face”: Eliot’s subtlety—sort of. She refuses the full saint-icon; Dorothea is not an allegory. She is a person standing under a bonnet in a museum.
“fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight”: the essay’s heart. If you read Rome through art, you miss Dorothea. If you read Rome through light, you find her.
Conclusion: From image to person
In Rome, everyone reads Dorothea through an image: Cleopatra, Ariadne, nun, Madonna, muse. Eliot lets them try. Then she tilts the light so we can see what the images hide: a young woman, hand to cheek, not gazing at art but at a slant of sunlight, beginning to understand her own error. This is Eliot’s signature move. She honors the cultural richness of images, but refuses their tyranny over human reality. The chapter asks us to practice a better way of seeing: to read beneath the labels, past the poses, into the living mind. If we learn that habit here, we’re ready for the rest of Middlemarch—a novel that will never let a single name, a single statue, a single “pose” stand in for a soul.
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