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Article: Resisting Gwendolen's "subjection": 'Daniel Deronda's proto-feminism. (novel by George Eliot)
- Article from:
- Studies in the Novel
- Article date:
- December 22, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 University of North Texas. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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George Eliot's feminism, as readers and critics regularly observe, is not untrammelled. While her novels readily reveal, to the late twentieth-century reader, the painful consequences for women of a patriarchy that denies them any desire beyond that which is sanctioned, her women characters' ability to recognize this patriarchy and so transcend their victimization is always compromised by their dependency on male affection or male power. Hers are not, in other words, novels that unambiguously chart the possibility of female heroes. Her novels may teach us contemporary readers about how the patriarchy works to deprive women of the ability to act, its ability to subject ...