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Foil
Explanation and Analysis—Casaubon and Will:
As Dorothea’s two love interests, Casaubon and Will act as foils for each other. Will is young, romantic, and idealistic—like Dorothea, he cares about progressive politics and wants to make a difference in the world. Casaubon, on the other hand, is old, stuck in his ways, and focused on his esoteric book—The Key to All Mythologies—that, ultimately, he is unable to finish before his death.
Like Dorothea, Will is external-facing—he wants to engage deeply with the world—while Casaubon is internal-facing—focusing on his studies and quite literally going to and from the library every day during their honeymoon in Rome. Will reflects on this quality of Casaubon’s after running into Dorothea in Rome, highlighting the differences between the two men:
[T]he idea of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor's back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)—this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse to burst into scornful invective.
Will’s description of Casaubon as a “dried-up pedant […] groping after his mouldy futilites” who fills him with disgust highlights all that Will does not want to be. Additionally, Will’s impulse to use hyperbole in his characterization of Casaubon (as the narrator notes) also captures something important about Will’s character as opposed to Casaubon’s—he has a certain intensity and vitality that Casaubon does not.
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