Aggression or Regression: A Comparative Study of Heroines in The Mill on the Floss and Pride and Prejudice
Keywords:
Maggie Tulliver, Elizabeth Bennet, ideology, Victorian society, renunciation
Abstract
The basic formula in the English Victorian novel seems to be an individual standing against the world (of the Victorian society). George Eliot‟s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Jane Austen‟s Pride and Prejudice (1833) are two excellent examples of intellectual heroines standing against social expectations. This paper, as a comparative study, shows that in the former written by a romantic and modern novelist, the heroine drowns which signifies her self-renunciation and submission to the expectations of the society as well as her revenge of a body being shaped by Victorian ideologies. In the latter written by a conservative and realist writer, the heroine begins a process of education and transformation just to resolve her conflict in marriage. The paper concludes that in such novels the intellectual woman has to either submit to survive, or is wiped out which implies both the heroine‟s self-destruction of a Victorian body (aggression) or her drowning in the waters of ideology (regression).Downloads
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References
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Bissell, C. T. (1968). Social analysis in the novels of George Eliot. In A. Wright (Ed.), Victorian literature: Modern essays in criticism (pp. 154-171). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Correa, D. D. S. (Ed.). (2000). The nineteenth-century novel: Realisms. London: Routledge.
Dreidre, D. (1994). Maggie Tulliver’s Desire in the Mill on the Floss. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Eagleton, T. (2005). The English novel: An intro-duction. Malden: Blackwood Publishing.
Eliot, G. (1994). The Mill on the Floss. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Ghent, D. V. (1961). The English novel: Form and function. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Gilbert, S. M. and Gubar, S. (2000). The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ingham, P. (1996). The language of gender and class: Transformation in the Victorian novel. London: Routledge.
Levine, G. (1994). Intelligence as deception: The Mill on the Floss. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
New, P. (1985). Fiction and purpose in Utopia, Rasselas, The Mill on the Floss and Women in Love. London: Macmillan.
Stevenson, L. (Ed.). (1966). Victorian fiction: A guide to research. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Tomlinson, T. B. (1978). The English middle class novel. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd.
Published
2014-06-01
How to Cite
Abbasi, P. (2014). Aggression or Regression: A Comparative Study of Heroines in The Mill on the Floss and Pride and Prejudice. K@ta: A Biannual Publication on the Study of Languange and Literature, 16(1), 54-60. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.9744/kata.16.1.54-60
Section
Articles
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License