Middlemarch

Casaubon spends his life researching a book that he never writes. The Key to All Mythologies is intended to be a groundbreaking text, as Casaubon hopes that it will demonstrate the fundamental similarities between the religious belief systems of the world. In his view, all such spiritual frameworks are essentially the same and that the fundamental Christian beliefs are the keenest, most refined expression of this unified set of ideas.

Casaubon's work gives his life a purpose. He spends little time thinking about his actual work as a priest. He dedicates no time to caring for his parishioners, and he barely thinks about who or when he should marry, other than doing so out of a vague social obligation. Instead, The Key to All Mythologies is the symbol of his direction in life. The writing of the book guides him and his actions, to the point that he organizes his honeymoon around the prospect of visiting the Vatican and studying certain documents in their libraries. Casaubon is a priest without religion and a husband without affection; his life lacks any meaning or purpose, so he invents one by concocting a wild, unproveable theory. Casaubon lacks the self-awareness to diagnose the emptiness in his life, so he invents this theory and promises himself that he will write a groundbreaking book as a way to assuage his fear and guilt.

Dorothea learns about The Key to All Mythologies directly from Casaubon. When she first hears about the book, she is impressed. She wrongly misconstrues the symbolic meaning of the work. To Dorothea, The Key to All Mythologies is a symbol of Casaubon's towering intellect. She is desperate to help him, not only by marrying him but by asking him to teach her Latin and Greek so she can read to him and accelerate the writing of this important work. The more time Dorothea spends working on The Key to All Mythologies, however, the more she comes to realize that she is mistaken. Casaubon's ideas are outdated, unfinished, ill-formed, and—most importantly—uninteresting. The Key to All Mythologies first symbolizes Dorothea's desperate hope to involve herself in something important and then becomes a symbol of the marriage as a whole. Dorothea realizes that she has made a mistake in marrying Casaubon: the man is as dull and uninteresting as his work.

The Key to All Mythologies is never finished, and by the end of the novel, it has faded into obscurity. The onrush of actual romance and events has relegated Casaubon's project to a background detail, just as Casaubon himself has become an irrelevance. No one cares about The Key to All Mythologies and no one cares about its deceased author. The Key to All Mythologies symbolizes the abject failure of Casaubon as a man, a priest, and a writer: He is someone who tricked himself and others into believing that he was far greater, far smarter, and far more worthwhile than he actually was. Rather than change the world, Casaubon barely manages to change Middlemarch. The Key to All Mythologies, like its writer, is a symbol of a squandered life.