Power And Submission--A Semiotic Approach To The Mill On The Floss

George Eliot (1819-1880) is renowned for being the "voice of a century", but what this "voice" reveals about the century? Eliot critics have not reached an agreement, and one of the most controversial issues in Eliot criticism concerns her attitude toward women and the way they are treated fictionally. While her novels readily reveal, for women, patriarchal culture that denies them any desire beyond what is sanctioned, her women characters' ability to recognize the nature of this culture and to transcend their victimization is compromised by their moral dilemma, by their fear of disrupting the values of the wider community. The Mill on the Floss demonstrates Eliot's ideological paradox more clearly than the other works of hers. Maggie, the protagonist, has usually been regarded as a character with a high autobiographical content. Critics usually ascribe Maggie's tragedy to her own personality or family background, but few of them interpret the text via a lager social context.A.J Greimas's semiotic square is applied in this paper to analyze the contrary and contrastive relationships between Maggie and other major characters, and the deep structure generated from this analysis reveals both Eliot's perplexity and Maggie's final renunciation as the painful consequence of a patriarchal culture which requires that all women's education is to bring out their "natural" submission to male authority. The novel in question reveals how Victorian patriarchal society works to deprive Victorian women of the ability to act, to make them surrender to the dominant male supremacy. Focusing on Maggie's relations with other figures, I analyze how the dominant patriarchal ideology functions through three agents in the novel: family, sexual love and female community, through which, women's status, role and temperance are defined. Maggie's family, lovers and the whole female community all thrust upon her the traditional expectations of a female behavior; force her to act within the bounds of propriety set forth by Victorian culture. The psychological effect of the enforcement of patriarchal culture is the internalization of the dominant patriarchal ideology, which is an essential factor that contributes to Maggie's final submission. This paper aims to explore the living state of Victorian women through analyzing the submission of the rebellious Victorian woman.