| Launching from the springboard of web imagery in the cyber-sphere, I begin an examination of textiles in a few of George Eliot's novels. In Silas Marner, Eliot sets up textile-weaving as an arena in which to reappropriate women's traditional trope of creative expression. In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot utilizes a particular facet of textiles--fashion--in her effort to construct a vision of Gemeinschaft and social history. In Middlemarch, Eliot rehabilitates an obsolete textile metaphor, demonstrating the importance of tradition in the history and development of language.;In our reading of the web in Eliot's work, textiles become more than a facet of Eliot's content; they come to provide the overarching metaphor for her authorial process. In transforming patriarchal myths, obsolete biological models and petty fashion-details into the "stuff" of effective narrative in Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch, Eliot herself becomes a weaver, deftly joining strands of gender, genre, time, and the body to form a narrative web which draws the reader into her world. |
