How Middlemarch drew on Don Quixote
A documented line of influence: George Eliot demonstrably engaged Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1605
RenaissanceThe influenced
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1872
The Age of the NovelRelevance
7/10
On Middlemarch’s page
- The epigraph to Chapter 2 is pure Cervantes — the Don and Sancho arguing over Mambrino's helmet, dropped in just as Dorothea meets Casaubon
- Read Dorothea as Don Quixote's heir: a noble, idealizing imagination that mistakes Casaubon's dry pedantry for greatness, with a pragmatic Sancho-like Celia at her side
- Don Quixote is the template Eliot is consciously continuing — idealism, then reality's correction
On Don Quixote’s page
- Eliot took up Cervantes's project consciously — idealism corrected by reality, the dreamer measured against the world
- She opens Chapter 2 of Middlemarch, where Dorothea first meets Casaubon, with a Don Quixote epigraph: the Mambrino's-helmet exchange between the Don and Sancho
- Dorothea is Quixote's heir — her lofty vision of marriage to a great scholar is exactly the kind of grand delusion Cervantes anatomized first