What in him wears the aspect of
jealousy is simply and solely self-love, callous irritation, that any one
should--not stand above, but--approach himself in importance with the
woman he has purchased as a kind of superior slave. For long her
guileless innocence and purity, her utter inability to conceive such a
feeling, leaves her only in doubt and perplexity before it; long after it
has first betrayed itself, she reveals this incapability in the fullest
extent, and in the way most intensely irritating to her husband's self-
love--by her simple-hearted proposal that whatever of his property would
devolve on her should be shared with Ladislaw. Then it is that Casaubon
is roused to inflict on her the last long and bitter anguish; to lay on
her for life--had not death intervened--the cold, soul-benumbing, life
contracting clutch of "the Dead Hand." In the innocence of her entire
relations with Ladislaw, not the faintest dawning of thought connects
itself with him in her husband's cold, insistent demand on her blind
obedience to his will. She thinks alone of his thus binding her to a
lifelong task, not only hard and ungenial, but one that shall absorb and
fetter all her energies, restrain all her faculties, impair and frustrate
all her higher and broader aims, make impossible all that better and
purer fulness of life for which she yearns.
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