Sympathy as Redemption – a Reading of "Middlemarch"

Abstract

George Eliot’s "Middlemarch" explores the lives of the middle-class inhabitants of Middlemarch, among whom Dorothea Brooke is singled out at the beginning as a modern “Saint Theresa” as for ambitions and wishes. She is eager “to know the truths of life” and to “learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by”. Count Pierre Bezuchov, crucial character in Tolstoy’s "War and Peace", has no lesser aspirations than Dorothea, nurturing youthful dreams of greatness and underestimating the importance of everyday social pressures. In this dissertation, I argue that Dorothea Brooke deals with her inner turmoils stemming from idealistic aspirations by means of fellow feeling, and that Pierre Bezuchov follows a similar path of development. Starting from Eliot’s and Tolstoy’s shared conviction that the artist has a crucial mission, that goes far beyond the surface of mere entertainment, this dissertation focuses particularly on Dorothea Brooke’s inner journey from the beginning of the novel, when she cherishes lofty dreams and a naïve vision of the world, to the point when she suffers through an inner crisis and has to reconsider her aspirations. Pierre Bezuchov’s own deep inner crises and transformations will accompany the description of Miss Brooke’s development, in the attempt to describe a similar ethical journey in which the true winners are those who achieve, to use George Eliot’s words in "Middlemarch", “a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life”.