LOOKING BACK to an earlier moment in its own cultural history, no Victorian novel works harder than Middlemarch at the integration of art and life, in terms of both the issues it addresses and its method of composition. Central to this effort is the art-related sequence (chapters 19–21) in which Will Ladislaw encounters the newly married Casaubons on their honeymoon in Rome. In the Belvedere Gallery of the Vatican with a painter friend, Will discovers Dorothea standing lost in thought near a famous Hellenistic sculpture of a sleeping, bare-breasted woman. Struck by the congruity of poses in two such different figures, Will's friend Naumann is on fire to paint Dorothea, and a few days later, rather in spite of himself, Will brings the Casaubons to Naumann's studio. Here, in one of the most broadly comic scenes in the novel, the painter persuades Casaubon to pose as Thomas Aquinas for a historical portrait, slyly securing his sketch of Dorothea during breaks in the sitting. Throughout the sequence, Will engages in aesthetic discourse first with Naumann, then with Dorothea, introducing her to the hugeness of art and, incidentally, to the smallness of her husband.

Commentators on this sequence tend to regard it primarily in terms of George Eliot's own education in and views about art. The self-contained series of dialogues encourages the view that this is basically a philosophical interlude, which reflects upon and perhaps enhances the plot, but remains ultimately detached from it, rather like a stint at a university. The remoteness of Rome from Lowick Manor likewise suggests that the erotic and intellectual consciousness of fine art is foreign, if not downright hostile, to the moral and social commitments that preoccupy Dorothea and the novel in general. But this theoretical approach overlooks the complex significance of portraits and personal likeness, both in Dorothea and Will's story and in the larger context of Victorian fiction. The making and viewing of portraits fulfilled a wide range of narrative and dramatic functions in nineteenth-century novels, evolving over the course of the century with developments in the genre. In Middlemarch an unusually broad range of these devices are at work, integrating the aesthetic principles that confront the characters in Rome with the fabric of their fictional lives.

NEAR THE VERY BEGINNING of the novel (in chapter 2), we find Dorothea loftily comparing Casaubon to a well-known portrait of Locke (42; ch. 2), a likeness surely as misbegotten as that of Aquinas. Hugh Witemeyer notes the connection, citing Dorothea's comparison as an example of the failure of the kind of historical idealization advanced by Naumann.¹

But in Middlemarch portraits are agents not of idealization but of imagination, of a capacity for visual enrichment that partakes as much of quotidian reality as of elevated thought. What makes this early likeness to Locke resonate with the later image of Aquinas has less to do with the theory behind Naumann's portrait than with its function in the scene as a sop to Casaubon's vanity, a maneuver to allow the artist access to Dorothea. The effect of backhanded revelation glosses the earlier reference: Dorothea's likening Casaubon to the image of a great humanist tells us more about her than about him. As it turns out, all three characters in the central marriage triangle of Middlemarch are likened to works of art while other characters are not, as if their pictorial potential indicated the Romantic potential of their story. Appearing and reappearing at crucial moments in the plot, these likenesses actually seem to generate development, both in relationships among the characters and in the way those relationships register for the reader. As we will see, Dorothea and Will each find in the other's likeness something to go on with, a more realistic and robust view of how to be in the world, while Casaubon, in being made the literal subject of a portrait, reveals the poverty and vulnerability of his place in it.

The series begins in chapter 9, when Miss Brooke is taken through the house of her intended husband, accompanied by her family. After paying her respects to a portrait of Mr. Casaubon's mother, whose boudoir will soon become her own, she notices another picture in the same group of miniatures, which, as Mr. Casaubon explains, portrays his mother's elder sister. Celia remarks that she is pretty, but Dorothea's initial reaction is only puzzled curiosity:

The information that Mr. Casaubon does not proffer, but that the reader has learned in the previous chapter, is that Aunt Julia was entirely disowned by the family, and that her younger sister's son has benefited considerably as a consequence. Immediately following the above exchange, Celia looks out the window and spots a young man walking on the grounds; when they go downstairs and into the garden, Casaubon identifies the stranger as his second cousin,² “the grandson, in fact,” he adds, “of the lady whose portrait you have been noticing, my aunt Julia.” Will Ladislaw's sudden appearance immediately following the discussion of his grandmother's portrait is a very deliberate allusion to a convention, common in Gothic frame narratives, of using a portrait literally as a pretext–a way of pointing to a hidden story that needs to be revealed in order to be resolved.³ In the older scheme a portrait brought personalities and events of frame and core story into alignment, defining an imaginative space in which the meaning or moral value of the tale could unfold for the reader. In later nineteenth-century fiction this kind of encounter with a portrait, which had once served simply to precipitate a narrative, became a means for opening up an unforeseen or undiscussed dimension within a narrative: a new perspective on the characters which could affect the reader and characters alike–though not always in the same way.

Virtually an answer to Dorothea's unspoken questions about the portrait upstairs, Will Ladislaw's alien beauty and latent claim on his cousin's estate will irrevocably affect Dorothea's consciousness and provide the substance of Middlemarch's central plot. The ensuing scene reveals more personal conflicts between the two cousins, which appear at first to consist merely of Will's discomfort at having a benefactor that he doesn't respect and Casaubon's disapproval of his cousin's continental course of study. But during their Roman encounter, their hostility acquires a new locus in Dorothea herself when Will finds himself falling first reluctantly, then fervently, in love with her. The effect of the new setting is to shift the balance of power in the relations between the cousins. At Lowick, the family seat, artistic Will is a stranger, virtually a foreigner. His dependent status makes him an interloper but not yet a threat. In Rome, it is Casaubon who is out of place, painfully and even laughably insensitive to the aesthetic treasures of antiquity, and quite inadequate to instruct his young wife in their value. It is in this context that Will begins to recognize a claim that will usurp Casaubon's proprietorship–not of the family fortune, but of the far more precious asset of Dorothea's esteem and confidence, which Casaubon undervalues with the rest. The upshot is that he gives up his artistic ambitions, eventually returning to Middlemarch to try his luck as a political journalist.

Back in England, the portrait of Aunt Julia becomes a point of reference for tracking the development of Dorothea's feelings about the two men connected with it, reappearing three more times: In chapter 28, immediately after her return from her honeymoon, she identifies for the first time with the image of a troubled woman; next, in chapter 37, after Will tells Dorothea his family history, the face of the aunt prompts her to ask Casaubon to restore part of the lost legacy to the nephew; and finally, in chapters 54–55, right after Casaubon's death, when Will takes his leave of Dorothea for what they both think will be the last time, she actually presses the miniature to her cheek in a forlorn embrace. In the end, Dorothea closes the circle by forfeiting Casaubon's legacy to marry Will, thus re-enacting Aunt Julia's original relation to the family.

This metamorphosis of Aunt Julia's portrait from family document to erotic talisman partakes of another, Romantic tradition for literary representations of the arts, in which a portrait may activate and enhance the gazer's self-consciousness in the very process of recognizing the truth about someone else. Unlike those in the Gothic tradition, which links the portrait with its explanatory text, Romantic portraits underscore the difference between verbal and visual experience, the silence of the image figuring the elusiveness, the fixity, or the totality of the truth which the narrative can only gradually unfold. The significance of a portrait in this case is not so much behind it as in front of it, in that the experience of the gazer, and by implication the reader, is shaped more by the penetrating vision of art itself than by the character or circumstances of the subject.

It is to develop this vision that the story must shift to Rome. At the opening of chapter 19, we are reminded that in the early 1830s

Eliot is setting period here, but her invocation of Romanticism also explains what the aesthetically overcharged air of the ancient continental capital might contribute to a story line otherwise taken up with English country life. In fact, Middlemarch's shift of setting reflects a shift in mid-nineteenth-century fiction, when English attitudes toward art began to soften for the first time. Aside from classical sculpture, the English literary tradition had never embraced visual art. The Romantic artist, an embodiment of emotional or spiritual truth, was essentially a poet, the antithesis of the kind of social sensibility that sustained the English novel and provided its primary subject matter. By contrast, painters were likely to be portrayed in early nineteenth-century fiction either as cheap hacks, dancing attendance on the upper classes to secure commissions, or benign buffoons, relying on the good offices and superior judgement of more solid citizens. The work they produced seldom figured significantly in novels at all. Gradually, educated by the increased circulation of engravings, the exhortations of Ruskin, and the example of French and American fiction, English readers began to regard painting with greater respect and interest, albeit tinctured with the suspicion attending anything to do with the Continent.

During the 1850s and 60s, novels that otherwise had little to do with art or aesthetic life began to include set pieces in which several characters would react to or opine about a work of art, usually a painting, in a context that emphasized either the public status of the image–a gallery –or intimacy with the process of making it–the studio. Their dialogue, often laced with chic theoretical buzzwords, would either help establish their characters or, more commonly, illustrate the potential for a critical shift in their attitudes or relationships. Presiding over these scenes was usually an art-identified personage who revised both the characters' and the reader's perspectives on the larger scheme of the novel, without actually appearing elsewhere. Whether cast as an elite aesthete who articulates and refines unformed perceptions, or a vulgar pragmatist who undermines Romantic aspirations, this presence was always morally unsettling. Artist or model, connoisseur or clown, he or she served as a conduit for the subversive ambivalence that must attend all genuine artistic experience, however benign or controlled. In Middlemarch this function is wonderfully fulfilled by Will's artist friend Naumann, a clever amalgam of aesthetic authority and comic relief under whose aegis Dorothea and Will begin to respond to artistic resonances in each other. By the 1890s this figure was verging on cliché: everywhere from Wilde's aestheticist fables and James's artistic tales to DuMaurier's overwhelmingly popular melodrama we find a charismatic personage whose claims–on us, on art, on the other characters–appear at once inexorable and dubious.

Catalytic and influential though this figure generally was, however, what lay at the heart of such aesthetic scenes was not a single personality but rather a dialectical encounter between person and picture–often multiple persons with the same picture–which had its roots in Gothic narrative. The spectacle of a picture, unlike the behavior of a character, necessarily punctuates the action of a story, simultaneously effecting both change in, and commentary on, its procedure. Although in theory any genre of visual art might serve this function–landscape, history, interior, or the classical statuary favored by Romantic poetry– the portrait was already a well-established device for shifting and enhancing narrative perspectives. Transported to the aesthetic context, portraits took on a new dimension, carrying literary as well as psychological freight. The modern and pointedly amoral atmosphere of the artistic showplace allowed the older convention of the telling likeness to shed some of its quaintly Gothic aura. At the same time, the moral self-consciousness associated with contemplating a portrait tended to raise the stakes of aesthetic experience, to deepen the import of pictorial images themselves. The studio in particular provided a forum in which various aspects of portraiture–social, moral, aesthetic, and commercial–could be given voice and made to interact. In its professionally aesthetic light, the evocative portrait appeared as an emblem of the potent intersection of imagination and fact that realistic fiction had itself become.

Many works of this period, especially in the rising genre of detective fiction, make use of the familiar device of an encounter with a portrait to reflect simultaneously on the procedure of the narrative and the motivations of its characters. The foremost example of this device is, of course, Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1854), whose overwhelming array of relationships between persons and likenesses dramatize not only the characters' moral difficulties, but the narrative tensions between the parabolic mode of romance and the specificity of modern narrative that trouble its author. In Middlemarch, written in 1870, we find the likenesses arranged in a uniquely comprehensive spectrum, charting transformations both in the consciousnesses of its characters and in the reader's perspective on them. Looking at them closely allows us to see how a great achievement of literary mimesis explores its own mythologies of art.

ONE IMPORTANT FEATURE of the portrait miniature, the sculpted woman, and the Aquinas portrait is that they each entail a mistake, a false conception of the relationship between the image and the model that to one extent or another misleads the participating characters, and of which the reader is aware. Dorothea does not know how Aunt Julia's disinheritance has affected Will's life; Will and Naumann do not know that the sculpture of Cleopatra actually represents Ariadne; and Casaubon does not know that Naumann only wants to paint his portrait in order to gain access to Dorothea as a model. In each case the reader's understanding of the error both fulfills an acute narrative function, and in doing so actually contributes to a process of transformation in the consciousnesses of the participating characters.

When the portrait first appears, Dorothea hears Aunt Julia's story, but the reader has already learned it chapter 8, when Mr. Cadwallader, gossiping with Sir James, makes it clear that the portrait represents a claim on the estate: “His mother's sister made a bad match–a Pole, I think–lost herself–at any rate was disowned by her family. If it had not been for that, Casaubon would not have had so much money by half. I believe he went himself to find out his cousins, and see what he could do for them” (94; ch. 8). In learning that Casaubon's Aunt Julia was his mother's older sister and only sibling, then, Dorothea has actually received the information necessary to understand this situation, but she will not grasp it until chapter 37, when Will explains about his grandparents, and exactly what Casaubon has done for him: “They both died rather early….my father…made himself known to Mr. Casaubon, and that was my last hungry day” (401; ch. 37). It turns out then that Mr. Cadwallader is wrong about Casaubon's having sought out his disinherited cousins. Will himself is struck by the implications of what he has said: “In his inmost soul Will was conscious of wishing to tell Dorothea what was rather new even in his own construction of things–namely, that Mr. Casaubon had never done more than pay a debt towards him” (401; ch. 37). Dorothea meanwhile “did not feel that her husband's conduct was depreciated; but this notion of what justice had required in his relations with Will Ladislaw took strong hold of her mind.” Though they do not declare it directly to each other, they each have shared with the reader a change of heart about their relations with Casaubon. After this scene Dorothea carries her new knowledge back to her boudoir, where the portrait miniature “concentrate[s] her feelings” so that she resolves to persuade her husband to redistribute some of her own share of his wealth to Will (406–08; ch. 37). Under Dorothea's gaze, the portrait transforms her understanding in ways to which we will return later; here I want to observe that the link between Aunt Julia's story and the revised relations of Dorothea and Will with Causabon is reinforced by the reader's own sense of the story's having been enhanced and corrected: the portrait's significance has broadened to include our own shift of perspective.

This capacity of images to offer a point of convergence for different points of view not only between characters but also between character and reader is the primary subject of the Roman sequence. Here Will is compelled to see Dorothea in the context of a work of art, much as he first appeared to her. Here, too, the reader is made privy to an untold story, only this time the story is mythical, not personal, and its implications are far subtler. At the same time, the method of clueing the reader in at the expense of the characters is much more direct. Having “just turned his back on the Belvedere Torso,” Will encounters Naumann, who beckons him to come quickly and look at someone. A passage teeming with mythological reference describes how they

The spectacle gives both the long-haired German and the youth of the other nation the opportunity to flex their Romantic theory muscles, though not without some resistance on the latter's part. Naumann, who doesn't know Dorothea, calls the juxtaposition a “fine bit of antithesis” and, much to Will's consternation, fantasizes about painting her. Will explains his relationship with the Casaubons, and the artist urges him to help secure a portrait sitting. When Will objects to this casual breach of good manners, Naumann teases him, calling his scruples “dilettantish and amateurish. If you were an artist, you would think of Mistress Second-Cousin as antique form animated by Christian sentiment–a sort of Christian Antigone–sensuous force controlled by spiritual passion.” Thus rebuked, Will further inflects his objections with a whiff of chauvinism: “English ladies are not at everybody's service as models.” But he is sufficiently mollified to abandon his earlier irritability and play his friend's game, assuming now the stance of a confident aesthete in a rival medium: Here Will invokes the traditional competition between poetry and painting known as the paragone, to invert a familiar Victorian association between feminine sexuality and the overwhelming appeal of visual art: instead of divining an opaque woman's true character from a revealing painted image, he blames painting for reducing the image of a woman to its opaque elements, and claims greater depth for literary representation. But when, having thus reached Lessing's finest heights, Will plummets into the absurdity of challenging Naumann to reproduce her voice, the painter immediately divines Will's motives and, abandoning all aesthetic pretense, mockingly parries Lessing with Schiller: “I see, I see. You are jealous. No man must presume to think that he can paint your ideal. This is serious, my friend! Your great-aunt! ‘Der Neffe als Onkel’ in a tragic sense– ungeheuer!” The chapter ends with Will's own discomfited recognition that the artist is right: The implications of associating Dorothea with the sculpture are plainly sexual: that is why Will is so embarrassed and offended.⁴ The final lines are meant to underscore the futility of Will's arousal, but more importantly they indicate that the relation between the moral and aesthetic dimensions of that impression is still unresolved: the susceptibilities in question remain unspecified, and the “innocently quiet” object against which they clash is still an oblique amalgam of the English lady, the voluptuous Cleopatra, the projected image of a Christian Antigone.

That the sculpture in front of him actually represents the entirely different figure of Ariadne makes the rivalry of word and image more than just a metaphorical cloak for Will's desire. In the mistaken identity of the statue, the more obvious differences between the impact of verbal and visual impressions are complicated by the difference between historical epochs. The result is a very sophisticated example of what James A. W. Heffernan has called “representational friction, which occurs wherever the dynamic pressure of verbal narrative meets the fixed forms of visual representation and acknowledges them as such” or “when…language registers the difference between the medium of visual representation and its referent” (Heffernan 19). That Will and Naumann see the sculpture as Cleopatra is made all the more acute by what (thanks to popular engraving) Eliot could rely on to be the reader's own visual impression of Ariadne. It is not simply that we can consciously register the myth of abandonment (and potential rescue) where they can see only voluptuous paganism,⁵

but that in doing so we see Dorothea in precisely the opposite relation to the work of art: their “Christian Antigone” contrasts with Cleopatra; but we know that, as an abandoned wife, Dorothea resembles Ariadne.

That such an effect could only be produced verbally contributes to the case of language over image, but more interesting is the parallel between the corrected attribution behind (literally, beneath) the sculpture and the corrected account of Will's financial relationship to Casaubon behind Aunt Julia's portrait. Both mistakes reveal the powerful interplay between the fixity of visual impressions and the slipperiness of verbal formations that purport to account for them. This mode of narrative ekphrasis is entirely opposed to the Romantic version of the paragone established by Lessing and invoked by Will.⁶

Instead the gradual integration of a depicted character with a presiding myth resembles the allegorical process whereby the narrative unfolds the experience and implications of an enigmatic image set forth at the beginning. Many of Hawthorne's stories do this, and Eliot herself explores this kind of ekphrastic relation very fully in Romola, where an image based on the same myth is used to provide an ironic gloss for the heroine's marriage to Tito Melema. At their engagement Tito offers himself to Romola as Bacchus, presenting her with an ornamental casket decorated with the rescue of Ariadne; but the story proves him to be a treacherous Theseus after all. In Middlemarch, by contrast, the myth of sexual abandonment and rescue registers in the reader's consciousness first, and Will must catch up with us. Dorothea and Casaubon may be cast in the roles of Ariadne and Theseus unwittingly, but the parallel to make any sense at all, for Will must deliberately undertake to play Bacchus and rescue Dorothea.

At this point, however, what has been stimulated in Will is only a condition of watchful passivity. He has been struck not just by Dorothea's posture but also by the aestheticizing disposition of the artist who calls attention to it. Ideologically speaking, Naumann represents one standard of Romanticism –the Nazarene movement, with its non-Ruskinian precepts—⁷

much as Mrs. Cadwallader represents the standard of genteel intrigue and the prejudices of the high-born in Middlemarch. But in dramatic terms Naumann functions to establish certain key contrasts–first with Will's character, and later with Casaubon's–that highlight the importance of both effective action and relaxed sexuality in art. In casting a responsive eye on Dorothea, Naumann stimulates Will's imagination; but while Will is paralyzed by Dorothea's image, Naumann is moved not only to imagine a picture but to take immediate steps to secure the opportunity to paint it: “Ah! it is no use looking after her–there she goes! Let's follow her home!” (220; ch. 19). As an artist, he is both immune to the constraints of respectable morality, and particularly bent on doing something with, rather than simply watching, Dorothea. The linking of creative and professional opportunism with sexual pursuit implied by “following her home” upsets Will, but it is clearly central to his enhanced consciousness of her effect on him. This consciousness, complete with erotic discomfiture, will eventually become a major preoccupation for Henry James's high-minded young men, who indeed struggle much more profoundly with ineffectualness than Will does. It is largely because of James's later amplifications of this theme that we see Naumann's matter-of-fact readiness to exploit whatever sanctities fall to hand as a rebuke to Will's aesthetic mawkishness. Naumann's opaque, dispassionate model-artist is, in this sense, one of the most modern figures in the book.

Similarly Jamesian is Will's spirited but agitated defense of the “finer medium” of language–“all the better for being vague”–over the shallowness of “coloured superficies.” For all its eloquence, the speech betrays a discomfort with the directness of images, so readily linked in the Victorian mind with the elemental impact of sex. There is, in short, a great deal of ambivalence lurking here. When Will avers that “Language is a finer medium” and Naumann interrupts “Yes, for those who can't paint…. I did not recommend you to paint, my friend,” Eliot underlines this disruption of Will's argument even as she steers him over it: “The amiable artist carried his sting, but Ladislaw did not choose to appear stung. He went on as if he hadn't heard” (222; ch. 19). The sting is aimed not simply at the meagerness of Will's own artistic talent, but also at the futility of a theoretical competition which is, to a practical artist like Naumann, quite beside the point. What their exchanges suggest is not that literature is more or less creditable or effective than painting, but that it is somehow posterior to it, relying more on the possibility of a comparative relationship between them.

Sure enough it is for Will, who does not paint, that the rivalry between art and literature retains its significance, not as an aesthetic theory so much as a paradigm for the more pertinent conflict between his own rootless aestheticism and a committed course of conduct. Having sailed onto the Lowick scene in full Romantic rig, complete with sketchbook, brown curls, and displaced circumstances, Will ends up launching a career in journalism, documenting and promoting the Reform Bill of 1832, living in London, and eventually standing for Parliament, an “ardent, public man” (894; finale), uplifted by the leaven of Romanticism but matured beyond its vague artistic ambitions, and is thus a worthy mate for Dorothea. But while Will's preference for Language over Plastik may thus be dignified in the end, here his perorations in favor of literature indicate not so much a higher plane of sensibility as a loss of emotional control, in part because of how they are linked to erotic disturbance. In Will's abrupt segue from hot bourgeois embarrassment to the paragone, we see literature rather awkwardly allied with philistinism; and that very capacity for unsettlement reveals a subtler relation between language and vision than either combatant as yet can register.

In the ensuing chapters, Will has two encounters with Dorothea in her hotel. In the first, he is tongue-tied with embarrassed desire, and she is only just recovering from the aesthetic shell shock so famously described at the opening of chapter 21. Although they begin by speaking of Dorothea's ignorance of art, the primary emphasis of this interview is on Will's yet-to-be-chosen career. Here he confides his recent decision not to be a painter: “It is too one-sided a life…. I should not like to get into their way of looking at the world entirely from the studio point of view” (239; ch. 21). Having hinted at Will's artistic listlessness, Dorothea goes on to extol her husband's industry, and the irritated Will makes his own jab at Casaubon's ignorance of German language and research. He is moved by Dorothea's distress at the thought of being unable to help her husband, and so registers the aestheticizing impulse in terms far less irritating to English reticence than the bare-breasted marble of the earlier sequence:

A modern reader will discern the resonances of Wilde's Lord Henry Wotton rubbing his hands together at the sight of the perfectly innocent Dorian Gray and be reminded that this type of aestheticizing impulse, however infused with moral uplift it may be here, is still passive. Unlike the painter, Will wants to watch, not to make, things happen to Dorothea.

It is evidently in this quasi-Paterian spirit⁸

that Will, dining with the Casaubons two days later, casually suggests that they visit some studios, and thus secures an opportunity for Naumann to take Dorothea's portrait. Having disparaged Casaubon's scholarship also renews Will's appetite for aesthetic rivalry, and en route to his friend's studio he takes to mocking Naumann's excessively allegorical tendencies, but here the competition from the earlier scene is inverted, and Will speaks as a painter: In her first encounter with Will at Lowick, Dorothea had professed her ignorance of art in terms of language, and in doing so alluded to Casaubon's wider knowledge, in which she still had firm faith: “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” (105; ch. 9). Here, however, her mild jesting about her husband's knowledge being exhausted by Will's projected canvas indicates that Casaubon's very verbal exertions are beginning to lose ground to Will's fanciful, pictorial ones, a shift of balance not lost on the scholar, who “blinked furtively at Will. He had a suspicion that he was being laughed at. But it was not possible to include Dorothea in the suspicion” (246; ch. 22).

With this new whiff of competition in the air, the three reach the studio, where another sort of suitor instructs Dorothea's uneducated but sensitive eye in the rudiments of iconography.

Throughout this scene it is made clear that Will's role in the lesson is more ancillary than authoritative.¹⁰ It should be clear from what has already occurred that Naumann's authority is more executive than interpretive: what he makes of Dorothea is of less importance than that he can make anything of her at all.

While Naumann's earlier sparring stimulated aesthetic consciousness in Will, here Dorothea registers the implicit comparison between Naumann's iconographic bent and Casaubon's scholarship, both of which she respects more than Will's grand daydreaming. Thus she remarks to Will that Naumann's concrete images are easier to understand than “yours with the very wide meaning.” On his own turf Naumann is not above a little paragone-mongering himself, especially when it ingratiates a potential patron:

Following up on this advantage, Naumann asks Casaubon to pose for the figure of St. Thomas Aquinas in a picture he has been working on. Completing a first sketch, the clever painter cajoles Casaubon into sitting again after a half-hour interval, to allow it to settle, and proposes that he fill up the time by sketching Dorothea. He is careful to ask the favor from her husband, who graciously puts her at the painter's disposal. The painter sets her up in what is clearly a recapitulation of her unconscious pose in the Vatican Museum–“leaning so, with your cheek against you” hand–so–looking at the stool, please, so!”

This literal enactment of what has been suggested in the earlier scenes is too much for Will, who at this point starts oscillating between indignant outrage and interested collusion.

When, after their departure, Naumann crows over the vanity of the husband and the beauty of the wife, Will curtly insists once again that “Mrs. Casaubon is not to be talked of as if she were a model.” Yet it is precisely as a model that Dorothea is naturally gifted. Naumann's aesthetic seduction of Dorothea serves as a demonstration of what Will, as a rescuing Bacchus, must eventually do as Casaubon's rival, precisely by bringing out an aspect of Dorothea that had previously only been suggested–her capacity to engage actively in the aestheticizing process and thus to dignify it. She is entirely at ease with that interested gaze which Will is so reluctant to cast on her. Here her ripeness to be painted is perfectly balanced by her invulnerable virtue, enacting that blend of spiritual passion and sensual force that Naumann had recognized in the earlier scene. Impervious to any hint of desecration or betrayal, this new, conscious modelhood suggests a good deal more than mere passive availability to vision. Her unconscious pose in the Vatican may be regarded as having innocently (or passively) been subjected to desecration (or appropriation) by the aestheticizing (or male) gaze, but her readiness to be placed in a similar attitude in the atelier signals a responsive participation in the aesthetic project that Will sees, but is not yet able to accept:

In the leap of one word Will reverses his earlier claim of the inadequacy of Plastik–now it is language that fails to do her justice. The oddly parenthetical aside that follows suggests another, broader distinction, not simply between image and word, or sacred and profane appreciation, but between different cognitive universes: it is not just Middlemarchers, but Middlemarch itself, that is unable to cope with Dorothea's singular, and signally important beauty (the subject of the novel's opening sentence). Any serious consideration of the effects of Dorothea's beauty–not just for Will, but for Dorothea herself, requires an alien setting.

In the Belvedere Gallery scene the genuine Ariadne underlying the speciously identified Cleopatra, and the availability of Lessing's arguments, have been allowed to amplify the terms for viewing Dorothea's beauty. Each provided a gloss–the Ariadne myth to the reader, the paragone to Will –for the imminent competition between Will's and Casaubon's claims on her. In the private space of the studio, however, these mythic and intellectual resonances, though not exactly lost, are configured in the more elemental terms of seduction, deception, and adultery–an effect largely due to the grotesque joke of an aestheticized Casaubon, whose vain impersonation of the great scholar renders him more innocuous than anywhere else in the book. Will, for his part, is doubly identified with Naumann the aesthetic seducer and with Casaubon the cuckold. His attacks on Casaubon have already recast the latter's diligence as impotence, his scholarly humility as pretension; but these are mere words: as Will well knows, his cousin still holds the purse-strings. It is Naumann's dispassionate, aestheticizing eye that thoroughly undermines Casaubon's authority both as a husband and as a patron, without his victim's even being aware of it.

After another day's sitting, Casaubon agrees to buy the picture of himself as Aquinas, but Naumann retains the sketch of Dorothea, refusing to commit himself to a completed canvas (249; ch. 22). That this is the last we hear of the Santa Clara might suggest equally that Naumann has, so to speak, had his way with her, or, conversely, that his efforts have so utterly failed to grasp her that they are never again permitted to surface. In the end the distinction hardly matters: the portrait need not appear because it is Dorothea's potentiality for being imaged that matters most, her sexuality simultaneously evoked and suppressed in tension between the Medusan moment of bafflement and the Andromedan scenario of rescue.

THUS IT IS CASAUBON'S PORTRAIT, not Dorothea's, that carries narrative freight back to the precincts of Middlemarch. In chapter 29, Casaubon receives a letter from Will expressing his intention to return to Lowick and offering to oversee the shipping of the completed Aquinas portrait on the way. The news of Will's return precipitates an argument between husband and wife, which leads to Casaubon's collapse in the library (315–17; ch. 29). Here again is a small but tellingly inverted example of deferred explanation: we only learn that Will intends to bring the portrait back when Dorothea reads the letter herself, after Lydgate has informed her that Casaubon's condition is terminal. For us, then, as for her, the portrait appears as a harbinger–or perhaps a guarantor–of its subject's death (324–25; ch. 30). Mr. Brooke also alludes to the portrait, immediately on the Casaubons' return, in connection with Casaubon's sickly looks: “A little English beef and mutton will soon make a difference. It was all very well to look pale, sitting for the portrait of Aquinas, you know…. But Aquinas, now–he was a little too subtle, wasn't he? Does anybody read Aquinas?” (309; ch. 28). In light of this pointed allusion, Casaubon's painted image is conspicuously absent from the exegesis that appears just a few pages later, when it is observed that “no sonneteer had insisted on Mr. Casaubon's leaving a copy of himself; moreover, he had not yet succeeded in issuing copies of his mythological key” (312; ch. 29). This suppression even of an ironic allusion to the portrait in connection to children is still more pointed when we consider that Dorothea's capacity to inspire a picture and Will's resemblance to the portrait have been signs of their emotional and imaginative fecundity. Casaubon's sterility undercuts any immortality that might be incurred in preserving his likeness. The emblematic connection between representation and reproduction is thus a function of the personality of the subject, rather than an index of it.

It is this fertile possibility, too, that distinguishes Will's Romantic uselessness from Casaubon's ineffectual scholasticism. Though Will is initially paralyzed by the spectacle of Dorothea, upon leaving the studio he is inspired to do precisely what Casaubon's literal image cannot manage– to leave behind a copy of himself in the eyes of someone else.

This desire to direct his conduct by how he will appear in Dorothea's eyes remains his motive to the end of the novel, a reversal of and antidote to the paralyzing awe and ambivalence triggered earlier by looking at her. Will's faith in the unique power of Language to do justice to a woman's loveliness, though never properly tested, becomes a kind of talisman for the effectiveness of this inversion of seeing and being seen. When he returns to the hotel to talk to her again, he is full of confident resolve. No longer moved to attack Casaubon–it is only when Dorothea asks him about it that he reiterates his earlier criticism–he instead argues his creed of pleasure against what he calls Dorothea's “fanaticism of sympathy” (252; ch. 22). When, alluding to his earlier plans to be an artist, she suggests the alternative of poetry, Will again invokes a favorite Romantic sage, this time the more reliable Goethe: In the gallery Will has claimed that visual art is inadequate to Woman out of sheer terror at falling in love with Dorothea. By the time he calls her a poem, he has clearly understood that falling in love with her constitutes an epoch in the development of his character. As usual Eliot chuckles indulgently at Will's breathlessness, but the point is made that however callow Will's passion for Dorothea may be, it is committed and no longer troubled by any paralyzing associations between her image and profane Plastik. Although, lacking practical employment, he may still “leave out the poems” (he never does manage any poetic homage to her), he is sufficiently inspired to pursue a career in journalism on his return to Middlemarch, and thus imaginatively ready to fulfill his role as Dorothea's rescuer.

What has happened to Dorothea, on the other hand, is far less conclusive. She too has learned to appreciate the effectiveness of art–the ability to do things in an inferior but more concrete medium rather than merely aspiring to them in a finer, vaguer one. For her, however, the main conflict has been between aesthetic (represented always as visual) pleasure and duty to one's fellow human beings. In the gallery her suggestive relation to the statue has revealed her potential for aesthetic and erotic rescue; in the studio her responsiveness to Naumann's aesthetic energy has similarly indicated an openness to pleasure for its own sake, unencumbered by obligation or self-sacrifice. But in the end the problem of reconciling her own desires with the needs of others remains rooted in the domestic scene (252; ch. 22). At the apex of the marital triangle, Dorothea's visual sensibilities and erotic consciousness must register in a plane of their own, beyond the reach of the theoretical jousting of the gallery and the shabby conjectures of the studio.

RETURNED TO HOME TO LOWICK, Dorothea is again in her boudoir, her hopes that her husband's neediness might sustain her dedication to him now quite crushed. In a passage that recalls the famous description of aesthetic overload she has felt in Rome, we follow Dorothea, chilled by her sense of imprisonment among meaningless objects, as she looks around the room that had been the scene of her earlier marital aspirations:

The sense of time–that revelation of “movement and tone” which Will Ladislaw has indicated is so crucial to the contemplation of a woman, and which he rather fatuously declares makes portraiture useless–is here activated by and in the portrait. The face whose oddness struck Dorothea before is now an occasion for empathy. Dorothea for the first time knowingly projects her own feelings onto something outside herself without illusion or rationalization. She has found a clearly defined and responsive object toward which to direct her feelings, with which she can naturally and directly identify. But further movements are now in store. The passage continues without a break: Here is a sort of reverse recapitulation of her initial experience of identifying Will by his resemblance to the portrait, which in a sense resolves the mystery of Aunt Julia's failure to resemble Casaubon's family. In bringing the resemblance around the other way, Dorothea registers her developing love for Will–which makes his face not only dominate over that of Casaubon's aunt, but makes the difference between those faces–the larger mouth and chin– also register as pleasant and flattering rather than having, as it had before, a “threatening aspect.”

But again, this phase lasts only for a moment, and transformation continues:

With this final modulation from a visual fantasy to an aural, and specifically verbal, one, Dorothea's encounter with the portrait becomes an inversion of Will's experience of Dorothea in Rome, whereby the identification of Dorothea's looks with a work of art is transmuted from the unsettlingly erotic and profane associations of Naumann's Plastik into the “finer medium” of literature, making Dorothea a poem instead of Naumann's Christian Antigone. Here, on the contrary, the transformation of Dorothea's visual hallucination of Will into an imagined (or remembered) conversation with him makes it turn for the worse. We can only assume that the cruel speech remembered in her reverie is Will's disparagement of Casaubon's work, especially since it prompts her immediately to go impulsively in search of her husband, “and inquire if there was anything she could do for him…. She felt as if all her morning's gloom would vanish if she could see her husband glad because of her presence” (309; ch. 28). Note that what Dorothea seeks is visual reassurance of her value to her husband in the form of his gladdened face. What she actually discovers, in finding him with her uncle downstairs, is that Casaubon's looks are worse than she herself has been able to see at close quarters: he is ill, and within a few chapters will suffer a heart attack.

Dorothea has quite evidently assimilated the lessons learned in Naumann's studio, whereby the grotesque images can come to seem natural: the once “peculiar” image of Aunt Julia becomes empathetic; and then, in a transformation that might otherwise sound grotesque and horrifying, the adoring face of her lover. More directly, the transformation itself recalls a moment in Rome when Will's Apollonian good looks are compared to those of the “dimmer and more faded” Casaubon:

It is Will's image, more than his talk, that helps her to compose the oppressive aesthetic chaos and fragmentation she has experienced in the great clutter of artifacts in Rome. While his words have had the unsettling tendency to make her doubt her husband, his radiant looks and quick responsiveness (always identified as a single attribute in the novel) tend to be a source of comfort. Just as the image of the Vatican statue amalgamated with Dorothea has triggered Will's erotic interest in her, the portrait's recollection of Will's beauty here opens up Dorothea's eyes to both the possibilities of both empathy and pleasure.

The final shift in the portrait passage from delightful love to discomfiting verbal conflict prefigures the tensions that ensue upon Will's arrival in Middlemarch and come to a head in chapter 37, when the editorship of Mr. Brooke's paper becomes a pivotal element in the relation between Will and Casaubon. Here Will informs Dorothea of his intention to take the post, incidentally apprising her of his grandmother's disinheritance. Sensing Casaubon's jealousy, Will wants to keep the news from Casaubon, who in turn has correctly divined that Will wants to stay in the neighborhood to be close to Dorothea. The chapter deals mostly with the complications of motive on either side: Dorothea's role in aggravating their more deeply rooted antagonisms is underlined by the fact that it is she who transmits the news of Will's employment to Casaubon after Will leaves. An exchange of letters ensues, in which Casaubon forbids Will to come to Lowick if he pursues the editorship, and Will refuses to back down. Dorothea, however, remains ignorant of the dispute, and her own complications develop in relation not to Will's journalistic career but to the meaning of his family history, which she puzzles out in her boudoir, with its inevitable focus:

Now that she is in possession of Will's story, the image propels Dorothea into the realm of law and word. Brooding on Aunt Julia's wrongs and the principles of primogeniture, she conceives her plan to ask Casaubon to revise his will in Ladislaw's favor, thus sealing her husband's hostility toward his cousin.

Remarkably, once her thoughts have shifted from the claims of the Ladislaws to the burden of the Casaubon fortune, Dorothea's visual susceptibility turns on its ear, so to speak, and becomes, in the ironic voice of the narrator, blindness:

This reference to Celia's earlier warnings is an allusion to Dorothea's myopia–an affliction never mentioned in conjunction with art or images, but always invoked metaphorically, as here, with reference to moral or practical vision, and quite absent from any but the earliest scenes in the novel. Here, indeed, the physical element of Dorothea's blindness, long since submerged in its moral gloss, is meant to be understood in contrast to the moment of emotional vision that Dorothea has just experienced in conjunction with the portrait. The ad hoc nature of Dorothea's myopia serves to demarcate the crucial, but often neglected distinction between two of the many kinds of visual trope explored in the novel: the language of moral insight, whose dominant metaphor is the light of understanding, and that of aesthetic, and finally erotic susceptibility, whose chief metaphor is the contemplated likeness between real and depicted person.¹¹ Both are enlisted in the novel to illustrate the constant synthesizing of different perspectives necessary to grasp reality; but though they must balance each other, the metaphors of perceptual and imaginative vision represent aspects of understanding that are by no means interchangeable.

THE PORTRAIT MAKES its last appearance after Casaubon's death, when Will takes leave of Dorothea before he has learned of the nasty codicil to Casaubon's will that cuts Dorothea off from his fortune if she marries him. The word, unread and unspoken, still stands between them, and the two have a tense scene, full of undeclared emotion, which is eventually abruptly ended by the physical intrusion of Sir James. The visually evoked sympathy that motivates Dorothea's attachment to Will is thwarted by the entanglements of words–the words that bind legal documents, that convey facts and intentions, and that must be both uttered and interpreted in order to communicate properly. Here we find the portrait discussed but not actually present, functioning as a misinterpreted sign: when Dorothea somewhat lamely offers it to Will, she is thinking of the inheritance she has no power to restore to him; but Will is chafing under the supposition that Dorothea is entirely aware of how much he loves her, and doesn't care enough to keep his image:

Here Will expresses the same kind of readiness to be a model indicated by Dorothea's easy compliance in Naumann's studio, a clear signal of his erotic availability. After his departure, she returns to her boudoir to luxuriate in what she believes to be the inevitable and tragic finality of his parting from her by cradling the portrait in her palm against her cheek, as a cherished reminder of him. This description of the cheek-in-palm attitude recalls her memorable pose in the Belvedere Gallery. There Will's amorous feelings toward Dorothea were stimulated by the juxtaposition of Dorothea with an image that resembled but did not represent her; here the same posture now incorporates a similarly unlike likeness of Will.¹² Once the portrait is fully charged with eros, however, it paradoxically loses all its force as an object of vision: coming down from the wall, it becomes exclusively one of emotion and touch –and, of course, of literature too, evoking the very myth once dismissed by her late husband as “the romantic invention of a literary period” (229; ch. 20): In the earlier scenes with the portrait, Dorothea's desire is made luminous and beatific by her pity and sense of justice; here the transmutation of imaged likeness to tactile object has the reverse effect of making Dorothea's tender feelings for Will look genuinely voluptuous for the first time. The sympathies associated with the contemplation of the image are here eroticized not only by touch, but by the doubly objectified (and transgendered) figure that results from the gesture.

Appropriately, this conflation of Dorothea's pose in the Gallery with the androgynous image of the portrait is the last reference in the book to these images that have been so central to the story of Dorothea's marriage. In the drama that ensues, the identification of Will and Dorothea with works of art has become more or less internalized, recurring more as a leitmotif than as a serious evocation of romance.¹³

Though they turn to marble looking at each other several times, and the pretext of Will's sketches remains a device for bringing them into the same room in their eventual love scene, the need for art is past, because the work of uniting the lovers entails something other than the recognition of their own feelings. Instead they must sort out the claims of family and community and society–“what everything costs” (870; ch. 83): Will must endure the revelation of the secret of yet another runaway grandmother, and the unprecedented ordeal of looking bad in a purely social sense; Dorothea in her turn must suffer the jealousy and doubt incurred by the spectacle of Will in (interestingly musical) dalliance with another woman–and renounce the benefits her husband's legacy would allow her to confer on others–in order to claim her own happiness.

FROM WHAT WE HAVE SEEN HERE, the experience of persons as pictures plays a far more complex role in the moral universe of Eliot's novel than either the aestheticizing aura of the gallery or the blunter dramaturgy of the studio can account for. It is as models for pictures that the lovers mutate in each other's vision, each mutation itself reflecting the larger transitions implied by setting. Linked to the image of the stunning Cleopatra (and the stranded Ariadne), Dorothea appears to Will in Rome in a Medusan guise, a feminine image that paralyzes and transfixes. By calling her a poem, Will becomes Perseus/Bacchus, translating her from erotic baffler into sublime inspiration, and so from an object of vision and observation into a monitor, someone to whose vision and observation he is subject, and in whose eyes he wishes to shine. The desire in turn transforms him from a passionate, critical, but ineffectual Romantic into a responsible and active Victorian.

In Dorothea's eyes, on the other hand, Will functions as a Romantic muse, whose shape-shifting and transitional image tracks the metamorphosis of her own knowledge and feeling once she has returned to her ordinary life. Inspired by the portrait image that she identifies with both self and other, pleasure and duty, past wrongs and future reparations, Dorothea's sensibilities go to work on themselves, encouraging her to act in a manner increasingly disciplined by attentiveness to the powers and limitations of concrete, material things (art, sex, scholarship, money), which cannot be defined or rationalized as worthy or unworthy in themselves but which must rather be enjoined to good or bad effect. In short, she must become Modern in the true Victorian sense. That she is a woman who must submerge her spiritual ambitions to serve the practical ends of her husband only underscores the historical significance of her transformation.

The inversion also functions in terms of looks and language. While Will casts off his profane artistic aspirations in favor of a finer, more reverent, and feasible literary mode, Dorothea on the contrary discovers her own destiny as a Realistic heroine by abandoning her linguistic idolatry in favor of a more sensually and emotionally attuned visual element. In rapport with the portrait she registers not only own feelings, but a fuller grasp of worldly impositions and obligations–of the institutional mechanisms of marriage and inheritance, in particular, which will enable her not only to marry Ladislaw, and to help Lydgate and Farebrother. That this newly activated sensibility in Dorothea undermines itself, strengthening her husband's enmity and resistance, and consequently her own guilt at having betrayed him, is one of the book's many thematic ironies, which participates in the larger circumstances of Dorothea's submersion into oblivion. But it also indicates some very rich ambivalences regarding the power of aesthetic experience, in a manner very much in keeping with the novel's overarching theme of the uneasy encroachment of modernity on early Victorian life.

Equally remarkable is how the tension between the frames of reference established by the different settings ensures both a continuity of texture and a distinctness of atmosphere. The Roman sequence, with its presiding artistic Daemon in the form of Naumann, tells us how to see the characters in relation to each other, but those types have to sustain further development in a domesticated setting, in circumstances more amenable both to Victorian life and to the realistic narrative that goes with it. Will's unmanageable Romantic excesses, which are helpless in Rome to accomplish anything better than swinging between equally self-absorbed expressions of ardor and savage jealousy, are shaped on domestic ground into the career of political action and private honor that can reveal both the heroic stuff Will is made of and the compromises that reality, at its Victorian best, imposes. As an object of vision, Dorothea's sexuality is established in relation to the voluptuous antiquities in the Vatican and quaint Christian allegories of Naumann's studio; but it is in her native and cherished community that it can emerge and prove itself in suitably restrained ways, her own blurry but generous vision serving as a channel for the admixture of sensuality and sympathy that her exposure to Will has released. And it is among the compromises and restraints of that community that Casaubon's desiccated intelligence, so effectively and thoroughly mocked in the execution of the Aquinas portrait, becomes a force to be reckoned with, as much a catalyst to Will and Dorothea's affinity as an obstacle to their union.

The same dual valence can be applied to the agenda of the novel as a whole. One could argue on one hand that aesthetic Italy and the canny observations of the imperturbable Naumann offer the novelist the freedom to dramatize the erotic dynamics of the situation, to activate those elements of character that enable the story to proceed for appropriately high stakes. On the other hand the rubrics of art and the continent, by imposing such primitive schemes on the motivations of complicated people, might also be felt as exerting a rather coarse and brutal pressure on the story itself, so that it is the atmosphere of Middlemarch–provincial, Protestant, and visually reserved, that allows Eliot to develop the subtleties of her web. Either way, the chief agents of Romanticism's “spreading movement” that infiltrates the story turn out to be not aesthetic wonders but evocative likenesses. With their uniquely fluid transpositions of seer and seen, word and image, past and present, these semblances generate rhetorical and narrative bridges that span the chasm between aesthetic sensibility and social responsibility, and allow mere stories to become meaningful fictions.