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Questioning Motherhood: Figures of Domesticity and Emancipation in George Eliot's Fiction
Ist Teil von
Etudes anglaises, 2020-01, Vol.73 (1), p.84-122
Ort / Verlag
Paris: Éditions Klincksieck
Erscheinungsjahr
2020
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Literature Online (LION)
Beschreibungen/Notizen
This article aims at exploring the tensions inherent in the representation of motherhood in George Eliot’s fiction, in which admirable mothers prove relatively scarce while young heroines conspicuously break away from the normative structuring model of Victorian society, undermining a system that sets women up (daughter, wife and above all mother) as paragons of virtue and morality. Indeed Eliot seems to be torn between her conservative belief in the maternal mission of women and her intuition that some women should explore new nonconformist paths. Eliot’s uneasy position on the subject reflects her qualms as to her own very ambiguous position as a woman and as an artist, she who was not completely a wife and not completely a mother, but decidedly a very unconventional “Mutter,” as her stepsons called her.