George Loved The Evolution Of Eliot's Views On Marriage

As a controversial female writer of the Victorian Age, George Eliot's view on marriage remains as a much-criticized concern to many literary critics and feminists. What attitude does Eliot take towards marriage? Is she a feminist? Starting with analyzing the living state and marriage of that time, and then paying a close attention to the romance and marriages of Maggie and Dorothea in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, this thesis tends to point out:(l) Eliot's unique view on marriage is greatly influenced by Comte's positivism, Feuerbach's Christianity and Spinoza's oneness; (2) Eliot's view on marriage undergoes an evolution in these two novels. It can be divided into 4 stages:First, one's helping the other side out at the expense of his/her unconditional sacrifice within the marriage. It is fully presented by Maggie's self-sacrificing love to Philip in The Mill on the Floss.Second, one's achieving his/her ambition by sacrificing other people. Maggie's love affair with her cousin Lucy's fiance in The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea's egoistic motivation of marrying Casaubon in Middlemarch are just two typical examples.Third, one's treating the other side as an equivalent center of self in a large web-society. It is conveyed to readers by Dorothea's taking a new attitude towards her husband Casaubon in the later part of Middlemarch.Fourth, Eliot puts her understanding in marriage to a higher level. She claims it is wise for women to enjoy freedom and realize their own value outside family after marriage. Both Will (Dorothea's second husband) and Dorothea take active parts invarious kinds of community activities after they get married and are greatly rewarded..The essence of George Eliot's view on marriage is to set up a stable family and society, which answers that Eliot is but a wanderer on the edge of feminism. As a writer, she could not transcend the age she lived in and her view on marriage was thus inevitably stamped with the brand of time, but some concepts such as "do one's own duty", "equally treats each other" and "interactive function within an organic system" are still of great importance to the marriage, family and the whole society today.