In Defence of Edward Casaubon
Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons
It is now almost axiomatic, in some circles, to hold up Middlemarch as ‘the best British novel of all time’. George Eliot’s tome, adored by Virginia Woolf and Michael Gove alike, would have a sturdier claim to that accolade were it not for the fact that its most interesting and engaging character drops dead half-way through. Edward Casaubon is killed off at the end of the book that Eliot fittingly named ‘Waiting for Death’. After that point, for the remaining five books, Middlemarch meekly meanders like an epic without a hero.
Rembrandt s Lucretia
Fitzwilliam Darcy, Mr. Knightley, Dr. Lydgate, Edward Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, and Daniel Deronda are excellent examples of well-rounded and believable male literary inventions with a variety of qualities of character. Portia, Beatrice, Miranda, and Viola are excellent examples of brave, intelligent, and virtuous women, while Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril are equally good examples of wicked women with the added factor, in the case of Lady Macbeth, that she is even regarded with a degree of human sympathy in her wickedness. Shakespeare also wrote a poem treating the story of the rape of Lucretia, the wife of a Roman aristocrat, by the King’s son. Rembrandt, an artist famous for his paintings of marital intimacy, especially with his own wives, produced two paintings of the victim. Seldom (especially in the second version, painted in 1666) have the anguish and shame of a rape victim been more tenderly evoked or better understood. The remarkable thing about the