The chapter you want to focus on is Chapter Twelve in Book
the Second, entitled "Down." This of course details the way in which Louisa has sunk to
her lowest point and is completely unsure about which way to go. She feels some passion
in her heart for the coldly manipulative Harthouse, but at the same time feels deeply
confused. The method of education which has been strictly used to bring Louisa up,
focusing on facts alone, has not served her at all well, and she herself says to her
father that she "curses" the hour that resulted in her life being the way that it is.
Note the emotive language she uses in describing to her father what he has done to her
through his fact-based educational philosophy:
"How could you give me life, and take from me
all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are
the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O
father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great
wilderness here!"
She struck herself with both her hands
upon her bosom.
Thus we can
see that Louisa experiences an emotional breakdown at this stage of the novel precisely
because she realises how woefully unprepared she is to face life through the impact of
her father's teaching upon her. She describes her life, that has had every emotion and
natural fancy carefully and callously bred out of it, as a "state of conscious death."
She has no "graces" of her soul, nor "sentiments" of her heart. Carefully tended, her
soul and heart should have been a blooming and beautiful "garden," but thanks to her
father, it is only a "great wilderness." It is this realisation, triggered by the
advances of Harthouse and her own mixed feelings, that have initiated her own breakdown.
She is a character to be pitied tremendously.
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