Chapters 4 & 5

Chapter 4

The story moves quickly. Dorothea wants to marry the Reverend. She lets it be known, and they are engaged.

Celia criticizes Dorothea’s interest in drawing sketches of small cottages that could be built for poor workers. Dorothea reacts with angry thoughts—which include a new word for me: nullifidian.

…and Celia was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the Pilgrim’s Progress.

Nullifidian: a person without faith; an unbeliever.

Mr. Brooke gives Dorothea a letter from Reverend Casaubon—an offer of marriage.

Chapter 5

Dorothea’s reaction to Casaubon’s letter of proposal includes this phrase: “she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining, in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own.” (39) Eliot again is describing a mystical concept—that our human consciousness is part of a larger divine Consciousness. And the image of “reclining in the lap” gives me the picture of a mother’s lap, which portrays the divine as a Mother God. I wonder if that is what Eliot intended.

Dorothea writes a letter of acceptance.

Casaubon comes to supper at the Brooke’s house and says to Dorothea, “This is a happiness greater than I had ever imagined to be in reserve for me. That I should ever meet with a mind and person so rich in the mingled graces which could render marriage desirable…The great charm of your sex is its capability of an ardent self-sacrificing affection.” I’ll bet Eliot put mind before person in that sentence on purpose. And the glaring phrase “ardent self-sacrificing” points to the comfort patriarchal systems derive from the inferior status of women.