![]() ![]() George Eliot's perspective, let me say from the outset, is conservative, but she is no less committed thereby to a fuller life for women, as well as men, than are her current feminist detractors, whose cause she has supposedly betrayed. ![]() For Ibelieve that George Eliot's feminist credentials are strong, and that the considerable amount of conflict between her and her critics stems not from any significant difference of opinion about women's constrained lives or the numerous forces that maintain them, but rather from a different understanding of the processes of change. JEANIE G, THOMAS An Inconvenient Indefiniteness: George Eliot, Middlemarch, and Feminism In Middlemarch, during one of those tender and tense conversations of farewell between Dorothea and Will that take place after Casaubon's death, George Eliot lets her heroine confess, '''I used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things, ," Dorothea admits that she has learned to think differently, having experienced "'the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak."" Some of George Eliot's deepest insights about life are expressed through Dorothea's evolving understanding of limitation, But they are misconstrued by many modern feminist critics who, echoing Dorothea's original bias, despise George Eliot for not allowing her character to shape her life more and do better things, It is this breach between George Eliot and many of her feminist readers that I wish to address, in order to make a gesture towards healing it. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: ![]()
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