How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; […] all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. (2.20.5)
Dorothea has a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. She can't understand Rome's entire history because she just sees all the component parts – "basilicas, palaces, and colossi" and the "sordid present" of dirty streets and soot from coal-burning factories. She can't synthesize what she sees into a harmonious whole, so everything is a "confused" mix that she finds "jarr[ing]."
Quote #8
[…] the gentlewoman's oppressive liberty. (3.28.4)
Part of Dorothea's sense of dissatisfaction comes from her position as an upper-class woman: she has a ton of passionate energy, but nothing to do. Her servants do everything for her. Even though she's technically at "liberty" to do what she likes with her time, she finds the liberty "oppressive" because of the limits placed on it by social expectations.
Quote #9
Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colourless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight. (3.28.4)
Dorothea's sense of "oppression" gets worse. She feels "imprison[ed]" by her life. Even the "furniture" seems "shrunken" and the "landscape" is "narrowed." Her interior state makes her project her feelings on the exterior world. This is what a Victorian writer named John Ruskin called the "pathetic fallacy" – the assumption that your own interior state of mind could be projected on the world around you.