Did Dorothea and Casaubon get it on?

[kev67]

I just read this article in The Guardian in which both Martin Amis and Kathryn Hughes write that the marriage between Casaubon and Dorothea was unconsummated. I did wonder if they ever got it on, but apart from them not having any children I could not detect any evidence either way. There was a bit in the book, after they have had a bit of a row, when Dorothea meets Casaubon in a corridor and they go to their bedroom. Interestingly, Martin Amis also talked about Hard Times by Charles Dickens in which a fifty-year-old Mr Bounderby marries a twenty-year-old Louisa Gradgrind. That marriage looks like it may not have been consummated either. In one chapter Louisa is described leaving her bedroom to have a serious talk with her brother. No Mr Bounderby was in her bedroom, and I wonder whether he was just not interested in women.

Come to think of it, I wonder what was really medically wrong with Mr Casaubon. Fifty is no great age. He is not described as overweight. Why is he so weak? The way he is written he seems more like seventy.

[Lykren]

I think we can infer and speculate all we want, but that nothing will come of it. The characters don't have little secret lives in which they do or do not do things we are unaware of. They don't exist outside the text. To try and imagine what characters do when they do things other than what their writer intended them to do seems naive, stemming more from the instinct to write fan-fiction than to enjoy literature.

That's just my take on it.

[kev67]

Well, maybe it is not entirely speculation. Perhaps there are hints for those astute enough to pick up on them. In the article, Martin Amis says:

Dorothea's sexuality is very interesting, as her marriage to Casaubon is clearly unconsummated. When she goes to the art gallery in Italy and someone asks her about it she says she finds the paintings frightening. It is clear that it is the sensuality of the paintings that alarms her – she is about to experience some fulfilment with Ladislaw. Eliot's book came at the time that writers were trying to suggest something about sexuality with a very limited vocabulary.

Kathryn Hughes says

I was not a sufficiently subtle reader to pick up the clues that Casaubon is impotent, so his hands didn't go anywhere at all.

[Lykren]

There is of course description regarding the mood of the marriage, and that mood is not one that we would expect to generate sexual activity in a real-life situation - but again, there is no definite 'hint' regarding sexual activity one way or the other (that I can remember; feel free to provide quotes that contradict what I am saying!), and so Amis's assertion that the marriage is 'clearly' unconsummated is pointless and indefensible.

[kelby_lake]

I'm pretty sure that it was unconsummated. Although saying that, doesn't Causabon feel he should have kids?

[kev67]

I think there was a bit where Casaubon thinks about having children.