When Dorothea falls in love with Casaubon, she doesn't fall in love with him, the man. She falls in love with the potential he brings-- potential for her own personal growth beyond what has been made available to her up until this point. "The union which attracted her," we read, "was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path."
So it shouldn't be altogether surprising to Dorothea that there isn't any substantial amount of tenderness or affection in her marriage; it wasn't what she was looking for in the first place. Throughout the first few books, I've been finding myself comparing Casaubon to Sir James Chettham and wondering how Dorothea could in her right mind choose someone who seems so dull and cold in comparison (he brought her a puppy!). But when I think about her motives, it really does make sense. Marrying a man who would listen to all of her suggestions, who would build cottages that she plans even if those plans aren't particularly well informed, isn't going to "deliver her" into enlightenment. Dorothea, like Rosamond, isn't content with the normal ways of Middlemarch; the two women are just looking for different ways to escape what they perceive as that province's mediocrity.
Dorothea sees her own education as a way to get away from what she feels are the trivialities of her day-to-day existence. In the absence of an opportunity to perform charitable deeds or come up with lofty plans for more cottages, she wants to work to make a difference in the world around her. The fact that Casaubon leaves her to make footnotes (and later, that he is unable to work and leaves her without anything meaningful to do) takes away exactly what she thought would be gratifying about her marriage. She and Casaubon wanted different things from the get-go: where he wanted someone to fill his empty rooms and take over the domestic portion of his life that he had ignored for so long, she earnestly wanted to improve herself.
In Chapter 3, we see Dorothea go to the library to better prepare herself to talk with her new potential suitor; we see her amazed that in his mind she sees "reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought." After reading through more of the book and looking back at this chapter, I really sympathized with her (reading uncritically, I know): she wasn't really thinking about the man in front of her, but she was using the potential for a relationship to consider all of the possibilities that she hoped would come about in her life. Dorothea had never before come across someone who she thought could show her the intellectual world she didn't know how to be a part of. She was looking for a teacher, and she found one in the man whose life experience was "a lake compared with [her] little pool!"
Dorothea's engagement to Casaubon seemed unconventional to me at first. The courtship didn't appear to be like any other I had seen before; it seemed so dispassionate. But I realized that I shouldn't have been looking at Dorothea's interactions with Casaubon to find the excitement that is usually present between new lovers. Dorothea fell in love with the idea of what the future could hold for her-- she was finally going to be able to rise above the restrictions put upon her by her position in society and her gender, and that idea was more romantic than the gestures of affection that Sir James Chettam could offer her. It's sad to think about how those aspirations don't come to be when thinking about her honeymoon and the months that follow, but looking back at this chapter at least gave me a better idea of how she got there.
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