In the first minutes when Dorothea looked out she felt nothing but the dreary oppression; then came a keen remembrance, and turning away from the window she walked round the room. 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, till her wandering gaze came to the group of miniatures, and there at last she saw something which had gathered new breath and meaning: it was the miniature of Mr. Casaubon’s aunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate marriage—of Will Ladislaw’s grandmother. Dorothea could fancy that it was alive now—the delicate woman’s face which yet had a headstrong look, a peculiarity difficult to interpret. Was it only her friends who thought her marriage unfortunate? or did she herself find it out to be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in the merciful silence of the night? What breadths of experience Dorothea seemed to have passed over since she first looked at this miniature! She felt a new companionship with it, as if it had an ear for her and could see how she was looking at it. Here was a woman who had known some difficulty about marriage. Nay, the colors deepened, the lips and chin seemed to get larger, the hair and eyes seemed to be sending out light, the face was masculine and beamed on her with that full gaze which tells her on whom it falls that she is too interesting for the slightest movement of her eyelid to pass unnoticed and uninterpreted. The vivid presentation came like a pleasant glow to Dorothea: she felt herself smiling, and turning from the miniature sat down and looked up as if she were again talking to a figure in front of her. But the smile disappeared as she went on meditating, and at last she said aloud—
“Oh, it was cruel to speak so! How sad—how dreadful!”
Throughout Middlemarch, the narrator, who often provides incredibly detailed descriptions of what a character is thinking or uses free indirect discourse to directly reveal the character’s thoughts, creates the general impression that the narrator has a clear idea of her characters’ thoughts, sometimes understanding them better than even the characters themselves: this expectation the narrator confirms almost immediately after Dorothea turns her focus to Julia’s miniature. The sentence “Was it only her friends who thought her marriage unfortunate? or did she herself find it out to be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in the merciful silence of the night?” with its question marks and lack of third person pronouns referring to Dorothea suggests that the narrator uses free indirect discourse here to directly reveal to the reader Dorothea’s thinking in her own voice while she regards the miniature. The free indirect discourse forces readers to be in an almost uncomfortably close proximity to Dorothea’s thoughts, to essentially peer into the workings of her head, so that they sympathize not only with Julia but also Dorothea herself, since the questions she empathetically asks regarding Julia also apply to her own marriage to Mr. Casaubon, which does turn out to be “a mistake,” like the prediction of her “friends.” The narrator’s free indirect discourse looking closely into Dorothea’s thought process vividly suggests how she is projecting the troubling thoughts about her own marriage’s failure, which she is perhaps too afraid to directly ask of herself using first-person pronouns, onto an object exterior to herself, Julia’s miniature, which she can refer to with third-person pronouns “her” and “herself,” which may give her a sense of safe distance distance in her thinking.
Therefore, readers also expect that the narrator will maintain this clarity about Dorothea’s thought process throughout the passage, through free indirect discourse and other, similarly intimate descriptions of her thoughts. But the narrator actually defies this expectation. When the narrator describes Dorothea “smiling, turning from the miniature” and then “[sitting] down and [looking] up as if she were again talking to a figure in front of her,” the expectation is that simile involving “as,” which suggests a likeness not full equivalence, creates a sense of ambiguity about whether Dorothea actually was directly “talking to a figure [Julia] in front of her.” Dorothea looks like she is in the proper position to talk to Julia, but if she actually did engage in this kind of communication, the reader’s expectation is that the all-knowing narrator would relate the actual content of the conversation through detailed description or with free indirect discourse like before. Since the narrator does not do this, the reader likely believes no conversation actually took place and that the simile is essentially just a stage direction, though the ambiguity the narrator creates with “as” still remains. Only Dorothea speaking “aloud” clearly in her own voice through dialogue with the exclamations ““‘Oh, it was cruel to speak so! How sad—how dreadful!,’” breaking through the long, preceding paragraph of narration clarifies that she was, in fact, “[speaking] so” with Julia’s miniature. Dorothea herself clarifies the ambiguity of “as,” while the seemingly all-knowing narrator, who sometimes even understands Dorothea’s thoughts better than herself, as suggested by the free indirect discourse earlier in the passage, is unable to do so, having retreated away from Dorothea’s thinking so that the reader only realizes the occurrence of conversation through Dorothea, a character stuck within her own present and experiences who certainly knows a lot less the the narrator who can jump across time, space, and plotlines.
This suggests limitations for how far the powerful narrator can or will delve into characters’ inner lives. Here, if Dorothea does not directly speak aloud, the narrator does not clearly or definitively provide any hint of what is going on in her mind. Does the narrator, after observing Dorothea’s fragile emotional state, in which she asks a portrait of another woman that she relates to questions about her own failed marriage that she cannot bear to ask herself, purposely barr the reader from Dorothea’s thoughts in a compassionate attempt to give her privacy in a moment of intense vulnerability, in which “every object was withering and shrinking away from her,” a process of decay leaving her isolated and in opposition to her earlier, blooming state? Or does the narrator find Dorothea’s conversation with Julia’s miniature somehow disturbing and is, as a result, unwilling to delve much farther into Dorothea’s mind during the talk and shielding the reader from it?
Is Julia perhaps a threat to the narrator’s role in Middlemarch? Dorothea feels the relationship between herself and Julia to be one of “new companionship,” but Julia seems to actually go beyond the bounds of a mere companion. According to the narrator, Julia seems to almost take on a narrator-like role, gaining awareness, consciousness, and the ability to closely observe everything Dorothea does, feels, and thinks, “as if it had an ear for [Dorothea] and could see how she was looking at it.” With Julia in the miniature taking on a narrator-like role, the actual narrator perhaps backs away, unwilling to occupy a place in the novel equivalent to what is in reality an inorganic ornament and piece of decorative art that, at least to Dorthea who “could fancy that [Julia’s miniature] was live now,” has miraculously and spontaneously come back to life, violating the laws of science and the rules of the everyday, occasionally banal world of Middlemarch that the narrator knows so well.
For the characters in Middlemarch, there generally remains a degree of separation between them and the narrators: though the narrator may know their innermost thoughts, the characters do not know they are in a novel and that their thoughts are subject to the close observation of the narrator. But Julia, in her narrator-like role, does not maintain a degree of separation from Dorothea and becomes intimately involved with her. Dorothea starts out as the viewer looking at a portrait but a reversal occurs in which Julia in the miniature takes on Dorothea’s role as a viewer and seems to almost be watching a portrait of Dorothea: Julia’s face “[beams] on [Dorothea] with that full gaze which tells her on whom it falls she is too interesting for the slightest movement of her eyelid to pass unnoticed and uninterpreted.” While Julia’s miniature is a subject of notice and interpretation for Dorothea’s mind, Dorothea, after Julia’s miniature gains consciousness, becomes a subject of notice and interpretation of Julia. The interchangeability of their roles as viewer and artwork combined with the potential similarities of their disastrous marriages, that Dorothea empathetically seems to pick up on, suggests a porous boundary between Julia and Dorothea and the lack of clear separation between an inorganic, dead miniature made of paint strokes on a canvas without inherent emotion and an organic, living human with inherent, intensely passionate feeling. In this moment, the images of Julia and Dorothea become somewhat interchangeable, equally capable of judgement and private communication of each other, while being perhaps also empathetically aware of each other’s pain. In addition to this kind of interchangeability and intimacy also violating the laws of Middlemarch’s provincial, not-at-all fantastic reality that the narrator is well-versed in, the mutual awareness between Dorothea and Julia renders their relationship closer than the one between Dorothea and the narrator, in which only the narrator has access to Dorothea’s thoughts, while Dorothea is not even aware she exists in a world with a narrator. Such an intimate relationship between Dorothea and Julia’s miniature only pushes Middlemarch’s comparatively more distant narrator further away.
Additionally, as much as Dorothea is traumatized by her time in Rome and the art she sees there, with Julia’s miniature, she seems to appropriate the idea of Roman Catholic iconography. To Dorothea looking at the image of Julia, “the colors deepened, the lips and chin seemed to get larger, the hair and eyes seemed to be sending out light.” Julia’s presence seems to come out towards Dorothea and overwhelm her with Julia’s “eyes [seeming] to be sending out light,” a secular version of, for example, an icon of Mary, that does away with the darkness of every “remembered thing in the room” that has become “disenchanted” and “deadened as an unlit transparency.” Julia’s image, to Dorothea also has features, “lips and chin,” that “get larger” and seem to fill out the isolating and lonely space, an effect also not unlike that of iconography, left around Dorothea from “All existence [seeming] to beat with a lower pulse than her own” and “every object … withering and shrinking away from her.” Much like Christian iconography, Julia’s miniature provides Dorothea with a sense of “companionship” and deep understanding from the subject of the image, because to Dorothea, Julia in the miniature, comparable to Mary in Roman Catholic iconography, “had an ear for her and could see how she was looking at it.” With Julia’s miniature, Dorothea has taken what for her is foreign and terrifying Roman Catholic art, and made it familiar, “English,” and knowable to herself. Julia’s miniature becomes a way of understanding the world after her marriage to Mr. Casaubon and their subsequent honeymoon in Rome challenges many of Dorothea’s English, Protestant religious beliefs. The mesmerizing effect of Julia’s presence has a religious quality, though the subject of the miniature itself is certainly not a religious figure. From that perspective, perhaps there is a bit of sacrilegious, idolatrous dimension to Dorothea seeing “new breath and meaning” in Julia’s miniature in which it comes alive from a state of lifelessness and engages in intimate communication with a mesmerized Dorothea, which potentially further contributes to the narrator’s wariness towards delving into Dorothea’s mind at this moment.
Isabella Zhou 
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