How Middlemarch drew on Pensées
A documented line of influence: George Eliot demonstrably engaged Blaise Pascal’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Pensées
Blaise Pascal · 1670
EnlightenmentThe influenced
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1872
The Age of the NovelRelevance
7/10
On Middlemarch’s page
- Dorothea Brooke's ardent, austere intelligence is cut from Pascal's cloth
- Middlemarch tells us she 'knew many passages of Pascal's Pensées by heart' and that marrying Casaubon 'would be like marrying Pascal' — read the Pensées and you understand both her longing and her mistake
- Pascal stands behind two of Eliot's chapter epigraphs too; he's the moral and intellectual key to Dorothea's whole arc
On Pensées’s page
- Eliot built Dorothea's mind on Pascal
- In Middlemarch, Dorothea 'knew many passages of Pascal's Pensées by heart' and imagines that marrying the scholar Casaubon 'would be like marrying Pascal' — the Pensées are the measure of her hunger for a great intellect
- Pascal also supplies the epigraphs to two of Eliot's chapters; the book Eliot read avidly from a young age is woven into the novel's bones