A Feminist Narratological Interpretation Of Middlemarch

George Eliot is one of the most influential English female writers and the outstanding representatives of feminist. In such a society which is dominated by male’s narrative authority, to get recognition and acceptance of critics, feminist writers have to take advantage of the strategies which is unique and can represent their own standpoints in their works. As one of the representatives, Eliot’s works have a personal narrative style of her own. Besides, as the influence of family environment background and her own experience, her works are full with thinking of life and human nature. At the same time, being affected by the conceptions of religious and ethic, it has a strong color of religious and ethic in her works.Middlemarch, her sixth long-length novel which is written in 1872, is a controversial novel at the same time. Once it is published, it catches numerous attentions by many critics. In Middlemarch, it involves nearly 150 figures. And each figure which is arranged in the complicated social relationship reflects social style and features of the provincial town---Middlemarch in different extents. Tedious plots of Middlemarch interweave into a complete system and form a "mesh" structure. Overall,it lacks core characters throughout the plot development of the novel.Feminist narratology is a new theoretical mode which is put forward based on the existing disadvantages of feminist literary criticism and classical narratology. It is the combination of feminist literary criticism and the structuralism narratology.Integrating the above two kinds of theories, feminist narratology proposes a new partition methods of the narrative voice thereby provides a new theory and approach for interpreting the feminist works. And this dissertation will adopt narrative voice including authorial voice, personal voice and communal voice, narrative point of view including the feminist protagonist Dorothea’s point of view and the narrator’s point of view(the third-person omniscient perspective), narrative discourse including direct discourse, indirect discourse and free indirect discourse these techniques to analyze the whole novel. Through the systematic analysis based on the feminist narratology theory,it will enrich the research of Middlemarch. At the same time, it enhances the application of feminist narratology.Through the analysis of Middlemarch of George Eliot from the perspective of feminist narratology, the main purpose of this dissertation is to explore how Eliot sets up her own feminist authority by her unique narrative techniques and encourage women to establish their own feminist authorities through their own efforts. Besides,this dissertation aims to show that only by breaking through the layer upon layer’s social gender restrictions, undertaking self-reflections constantly and confirming their common needs and objective of the struggle, women who live under the oppression from patriarchal society can get social respects and recognitions eventually.