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The Silent Voice

Author: ZhangZuo
Tutor: MaHaiLiang
School: Shanxi University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: Victorian femininity dilemma "religion of humanity" conciliation
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Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2004
Downloads: 393
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Abstract


England had gone through a lot of changes in the 19th century, and the novels written in this period are very significant in the study of English literature. George Eliot, no wonder, is one of the most important novelists of this period, who received many criticisms in all ages. But only some twenty years ago did critics begin to study George Eliot and her works from a feminist view. What’s more, the feminists can never give her an adequate definition in respect that her novels, just as herself, are so complicated and ambivalent.The Mill on the Floss is one of George Eliot’s most excellent novels, and it is also the most autobiographical of her. Thus there are a great many criticisms on this novel from home and abroad, especially on the ending of the novel. In this thesis, the author tries to have a feminist reading of The Mill on the Floss and its ending-the death of Maggie with her’most beloved brother Tom in a flood. And the author holds that the choice of Maggie to give up her life is not her compromise to patriarchy, but her opposition to it. We can draw out the silent voice of George Eliot from the thought-provoking ending of the novel: only by the changing of both men and women can human society reach to harmony, can the feminist sport get real success; otherwise, it will be no ending but men and women drown together in the never . resting Floss, for men and women have the same blood in their bodies, and they have only one river to be fed.The author of the thesis first expatiates upon the female experience of George Eliot and the criticisms of The Mill on the Floss. George Eliot was utterly against her age. In the fieid of morality, she never ceased her doubts and contemplation on religion. What’s more, she openly lived with Lewes-a married man, thus was excluded from her family and society. In the field of occupation, she had struggled through the hardship of writing as a female, and finally became the famous novelist of her time, which was an almost impossible honor for women at that time. As to The Mill on the Floss, it-has received many different kinds of criticisms from all aspects, whether internal or external. But the common conclusion is that the ending of this novel is too negative, even in some sense unrealistic. In this thesis, the author explains the inevitability of its ending from the feminist point of view.Then, the author discusses the Victorian femininity in Maggie. The Victorian England was characterized for its contradiction of tradition and modernity. Democratization, industrialization, and the triumph of ration and science all added to the modernity of the old England. But what paralleled were the un-overthrown religion and the conservative ideas of morality. Maggie was just born and grows up in such a conflicting age. Although women had gotten their abecedarian equality to menin law, suffrage was still a dream for them. What unchanged too was women’s subordination to men, which was manifest in such fields as religion, spirit, economy, vocation, marriage, family, and education.It is just the complicated society which perplexes Maggie, who is an intelligent girl longing for knowledge and equality between women and men. Being held in bondage and troubled by patriarchy, she wobbles between the two selves-one rebellious and the other conformative-and doomedly chooses death. This inner conflict of Maggie is primarily at work when she forms relationship with three important persons in her life: her elder brother Tom, the son of her father’s personal enemy Philip, and her cousin Lucy’s lover Stephen.Just as Maggie, George Eliot stands for rebellion and modernity on one hand, while conformance and conservation on the other. These together work in the forming of her morality and female consciousness. George Eliot tries to find conciliation between the two aspects of the contradiction, thus forms her unique morality and female consciousness: religion of humanity and the female consciousness of conciliation. Though Eliot’s female consciousness still carries the ambivalent natur

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