Novels By George Eliot: A Mirror Of The Woman Question In The Victorian Age

There appeared a group of excellent women novelists in the British literature of the nineteenth century, such as Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot. Among them George Eliot is listed by the contemporary English critic F. R. Leavis as one of the four "great English novelists", for her serious discussion of morality, and her broad mind towards human experience.Among the novelists of the nineteenth century, undoubtedly George Eliot is one who shouldn't be ignored. However, she has been treated coldly so far in the foreign literature field in China. The reason is perhaps the complexity of her works. George Eliot is "a thinker of the novelists". She translated David Friedrich Strauss' monumental three volumes Life of Jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity; and wrote many articles for the Westminster Review. which had a popular effect of its time. Her qualities of critic and thinker infiltrate in her works, which makes her works lack fluency in reading and hard to understand. As a realist novelist, with an aim of writing for "the faithful representing of commonplace thing", George Eliot researched and described the social life of the Victorian Age in diverse aspects. There were social, political and economic reform; development of science; crisis of religious belief. George Eliot described the provincial life and the relationship of man and society in such backgrounds. In this thesis, the author is to discuss George Eliot's greatness, viewing from a feminist point of view the relationship between women and the society, that is, the Woman Question of the Victorian Age. This paper will develop in the following aspects:First, since the female figures are in one or another way related with George Eliot, or they are the reflection of George Eliot, we should know about George Eliot's life and its influence on her writing. George Eliot took an active part in social activities; supported some active female writers for their struggling for women's right of education and employment opportunities. In private life, George Eliot had the courage to defy an almost unanimous social disapproval to live illegally with a married man George Henry Lewes. With such an action as departing from the established practices, George Eliot was isolated by her friends and relatives. Furthermore, she suffered from a social ostracism by the upper class society for more than twenty years. But all these were nothing to George Eliot. For it was because of Lewes's encouragement and help that she began her writing and experienced the bias towards women. Her experience furthered her impression on women's status and situation of that time, which impelled her to reveal the suppression of women in the aspects of occupation, education and marriage.Then, from the fates of the heroines in her three novels, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch, we see women's dilemma and frustration in occupation, educationIVand marriage. Moreover, we can see George Eliot's attitude towards Woman Question.In Adam Bede, Dinah is an Angel created by George Eliot. She is pure, kind and enduring; she has her vocation ?a Methodist and preacher. She is the first female figure who has a vocation in the British literature, which is different from "the Angel of the house" in the patriarchal society. Her preaching breaks the "silence" and "absence" of women. According to Foucault's theory about discourse and power, those who have controlled discourse will have the power. It is against The Bible for women to preach. So women's right of speaking is deprived of soon. From the Church's prohibition on women's preaching and Dinah's asceticism, we see the suppression of women in religious aspect. Dinah chooses Adam between the obedience to God and the yield to her own emotion. Dinah gets rid of the control of God but falls into the master}' by another man. She has to give up her vocation for marriage, which is seen as a failure of George Eliot in the feminist point of view. What's more, she has no "sexual awareness" when preachin...