Home epics, home economics: George Eliot reads Milton

In this dissertation, I examine how John Milton and George Eliot understand and represent in their texts the separation of public and private spheres, and how these representations inform their accounts of gendered subjectivity. While arguing for the historical specificity of each author's work, I also seek to trace how Milton's texts established paradigms of gender, marriage, and work, to which Eliot responds.;Milton's texts participate in the major ideological projects of early capitalism, including the restructuring of labor and the social construction of bourgeois marriage. I read Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes against the backdrop of contemporary debates over female political agency to show that the stance Milton took towards the issues of work and gender was neither inevitable nor uncontroversial.;George Eliot revises Miltonic paradigms of gender, marriage, and work. In Felix Holt, Eliot suggests the private sphere may provide women with a base for a privileged, protected subjectivity. But Eliot cannot dismiss her suspicions about how much power her privatized heroines will be able to wield in a society structured by gender, class and capital. Eliot expresses her continuing ambivalence over the role women are given to play in the nineteenth century when she offers in Middlemarch her most sustained rewriting of Paradise Lost. Eliot first openly addresses what she sees as the power imbalances inscribed in Milton's account of marriage; yet she then covertly works to salvage what she sees as its promise of mutuality. She begins, but cannot finally sustain, her critique of Milton and his paradigms of bourgeois marriage.;By demonstrating the centrality of the changing ideology of separate spheres to Milton and produced within a particular historical moment. By reading Eliot reading Milton, I further argue that women authors may take a stance within their culture which is neither entirely resisting nor entirely complicitous, which is delineated not so much by their anxiety of influence as by their social and political analysis.