The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Monday, December 31, 2018

Not a moment too soon, but maybe not soon enough

About halfway through Middlemarch, Casaubon dies.

Just in time to not issue personal orders to control the rest of wife Dorothea's life after his own death, as he intended, but not soon enough to predate a codicil to his will disinheriting her utterly if she ever marries Will Ladislaw, his young cousin to whom marriage would very likely make her happy.

Oh, what will she do, this sympathetic and brilliant but nevertheless absurdly self-sacrificing young woman, so unaccountably accepting of political, social, and even sexual male dominance in ways and to a degree that our author, George Eliot, was not?

Eh?

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