乔治艾略特《弗洛斯磨坊》中的女性主义分析(2)

菜单

3.1 Women Should Have a Formal Marriage 10

3.2 Marriage Cannot Be Permanent Without True Love 13

Conclusion 14

Work Cited 16

An Analysis of George Eliot’s Feminism in The Mill on the Floss

Introduction

Mary Ann Evans(1819-1880), widely known by her pen name George Eliot, was one of the most important women novelists in Victorian Britain, having the great fame along with Bronte sisters and Mrs. Gaskell. She was able to go deep into the inner world of the characters and had a sharp intuition to analyze “the female problems” in literature. In reality, she was also a woman incompatible with the time. D. H. Lawrence once considered that “It is George Eliot that she really began to pay attention to the female and put it into practice.”

As a realist writer, George Eliot made a large amount of faithful description and research on the social life in Victorian Britain. Considering its appalling social conditions, the status of women in Victorian Britain is often seen as an illustration of the striking discrepancy between the national power and wealth. During the era, women should be “pure” and “clean” and the average upper-class women were to maintain children and the house and please their husbands. Upper-class professional women faced great discrimination in employment beyond the role of children’s teacher. Education was specialized by gender. Women were provided with the opportunity to study refined subjects such as history, geography and general literature which could have them learn for fun but noncontroversial topics for discussion, and they were rarely given the opportunity to attend university.

“The feminism literary theory deriving from the late 1960s and early 1970s in the west is still in development and exploration” (Bao 65). The basic strategy and theme of the feminist criticism is to inveigh and deconstruct the literature centering around male text and experience, in which women were often characterized as either angle or devil, and advance and enrich the female texts by scrutinizing it from a new angle—the female perspective and value. Many female writers, such as Sylvia Plath, Alice Walker and Joyce Carol Oates insist that the female character should be reshaped and they emphasize that women should be provided relief from the pressure of male value, aiming to make the real equality between the sexes and the emancipation of women come true.

The novel under discussion is one of George Eliot’s early works, different from others in its highly autobiographical fiction. The novel depicts the life of a provincial girl named Maggie. The thesis is to reveal the feminism in The Mill on the Floss by analysis. Maggie’s repressive life, especially her strong desire to be educated well, independence in job and dignity, and faith in love. However, the contradiction between her desire and the moral of patriarchal society finally lead to her death. All of what she suffered veritably reveals the women problem in that era, which George Eliot may want to show the public and arouse public attention. In others words, Maggie is a symbolic epitome of the women in that period. And this thesis is to disclose George Eliot’s subversion of the patriarchal discourse in opposition to the common conception that The Mill on the Floss is merely a semi-autobiographical novel of the traditional Victorian provincial life composed by a female novelist.

Chapter One George Eliot’s View of Female Education

In the early Victorian era, the average level of female education was quite low, and the traditional “women education” was set for the women in the leisure class, which intended to bring up the female as the fair lady, the future ideal wife or mother. The contents that they did learn were nothing but etiquette, dancing, singing, painting and other talents aiming to please men. Although some of them may study foreign language, history, reading, writing and grammar, undemanding, they just needed to have some common knowledge. There was not a university open to the female in England until 1857. Generally speaking, the women could only study in the boarding school.