조지 엘리어트와 여성문제 -『미들 마치』의 여성인물들을 중심으로 - = George Eliot and Woman's Question-' Women Characters in Middlemarch

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The Woman Question in the nineteenth-century asked what the position of women should be in society. Nineteenth-century economic developments and new industrialization created numerous problems for women. Women were different from men, and in general, inferior to them was a Victorian commonplace. The complex problems of survival for women in a patriarchal society were the most practical issues of that time.
George Eliot’s concern about woman’s nature and role provides a powerful structural and thematic bond for her fiction. This article examines George Eliot’s interest in the woman question from her feminism's point of view, especially how the woman question was embodied in the women characters of the novel, Middlemarch. In the novel, Eliot admits the good points of feminism such as equal rights, autonomy, and self-realization, while still maintaining the feminine characteristics as useful and essential values.
The moral struggle involved in trying to hold fast to personal integrity in a materialistic and mean-spirited society forms the dominant theme of Middlemarch. The main plots of this multilayered work center around two expertly realized characters : Dorothea Brooke, a passionately idealistic woman who traps herself in a loveless marriage ； and Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor who is betrayed by his wife's egoism and his own inner weakness.
Dorothea Brooke’s moral development confirms Eliot’s feminism Dorothea Brooke, heroine of Middlemarch, emdodies the values of femininity which Eliot considered important. The power to enter into the feelings of others and to suspend the judgement of others, are the virtues found in Dorothea's moral viewpoint. By the novel's end, however, she is confronted with moral dilemmas in which her ethic of care or responsibility for others does not work for herself or for others. Dorothea learns that living for others does not always mean being good, nor does living for herself always mean being selfish. The concepts of rights, autonomy, and self-realizatian previously understood by Dorothea to belong only to the masculine realm, are realized as important in her own life as well.
The marriage of Lydgate and Rosamond is presented with a fineness of understanding that transcends a simple moral judgement, Rosamond’s fundamental selfishness and naive belief that other people exist primarily to satisfy her wants being shown not merely as a moral fault to be censured but as a part of an essential childishness that has, in spite of everything, an appeal of its own, which is closely related to the reason why Lydgate married her in the first place.
As to Lydgate, in an unhappy marriage the sexual obligation can become nothing more than an ironical reminder of the savage closeness of a social bond that is nevertheless of the same kind as every other social obligation, voluntary or involuntary. George Eliot tries to be fair to Rosamond, but she shows us that misery can spread from her polite egotism and imperfect education even as she asserts her right as a woman.