The effect of dysfunctional family relationships on women in George Eliot's fiction

Abstract

George Eliot assumed that to successfully speak for her gender she would need to desex herself. As Eliot hid behind her sexual androgyny, her women took on aberrant masculine traits but then reverted to female submissiveness. Eliot either rewarded her heroines for their emotional growth with an appropriate marriage or placed women just passed menarche within the structure of a dysfunctional union. Her novels illustrated the interdependent nature of an increasingly departmentalized family in which men and women took on gender-assigned roles. Narcissistic mothers created equally self-absorbed daughters (who never reached the Electra phase); fathers who sought to sexually or intellectually confine their daughters sculpted women who replaced the mother and spent the rest of their lives trying to appease or find an appropriate father-figure. While Eliot's women were anachronistically pathetic, for the most part, their aberrations served as a normal response for their confined circumstances. Eliot's original voice--as the ugly, emotionally insecure, and often ignored adolescent--surfaced in her autobiographically-based works. The physically unattractive Eliot took care, however, to place her beautiful female characters in very submissive positions to dominant males. Rebellious unmarried women found themselves punished by community and nature, as Eliot chronicled the adolescent girl's sexual desire in a restrictive culture. Eliot's women could either take on too angry and aggressive traits, or they could model themselves too severely in the passive female role. While patriarchal society deemed the self-sacrificing and altruistic woman the most emotional adaptive and appropriate female, she too suffered in comparison with the typically more assertive male, as Eliot explored female hysteria, masochism, narcissism, and perfection within the confines of an emotionally-interdependent family structure.