Ambivalent Attitudes To Feminism

As a woman writer in Victorian England, George Eliot, who comes to us almost uncontested as one of the greatest English writers in the nineteenth century, has aroused great enthusiasm in the literary world to study her from a feminist perspective. However, George Eliot's attitudes towards feminism are quite ambivalent, which makes it hard for feminist critics to classify her as a feminist or an anti-feminist. On the one hand, she supports women in regard of marriage, education and vocation, and protests against the discrimination and inequality against women. On the other hand, she endorsed women's submission, renunciation, self-sacrifice, and devotion. In this dissertation, I try to explore George Eliot's ambivalent attitudes to feminism presented through her second novel, The Mill on the Floss.