Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• KIND, LEAH A.

Titel

"ARMING HERSELF IN LEADEN STUPOR: JANET'S REPENTANCE" AND THE ROLE OF FEMALE ALCOHOLISM

Ist Teil von

• George Eliot-George Henry Lewes studies, 2013-10 (64/65), p.72-89

Ort / Verlag

DeKalb: Northern Illionois University

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• While Surridge is correct in demonstrating the importance of the community, her position that the story "...shows the community as responsible in its highest duty for the acceptance, healing, and integration of the battered woman" (130 emphasis mine) ignores the fact that the community only rallies to Janet's cause after the series of cataclysmic events which alter the course of the story: the final confrontation between Janet and Robert in which he drunkenly throws her from the house, her wholehearted acceptance of Mr. Tryan and his evangelical ministrations, Dempster's accident and subsequent demise, and Janet's final wresting free of the torments of alcoholism. Janet's mother also carefully regulates her interactions with Robert, and, while she willingly accompanies Janet to her home, these are calculated trips: "She had evidence enough of it in Janet's visits to her; and, though her own visits to her daughter so timed that she saw little of Dempster personally..." Because of the infamous nature of Robert's behavior and the fear it has caused the women of Milby who might have extended greater friendship to Janet, the domestic home is a tightly controlled and closed space: [...]it challenges the sentimentalization of the passive wife, since Eliot portrays Janet's passivity as caused by a drunken stupor rather than by elevated feelings of marital loyalty" (110). The very fact that Janet has the possibility, the capability, to achieve some sort of necessary connection with nature, marks her as different. [...]not only is Janet set apart by her beauty, her education, her intellect, but also by her communion with the natural world.