Idealisation of Female Characters in Silas Marner

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-45-9_48How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Idealization; Female; Victorian Literature; George Eliot; Silas Marner

Abstract

In the Victorian period, the role of woman gained more attention from the society than in the past. In the literature creation of this period, the images of women, especially the idealisation of them, were carefully delineated by the authors, which provoked the discussion of what an idealised woman should be like. George Eliot, as an female and one of the most famous authors in the Victorian period, showed her unique understanding about this topic in her works. This paper focuses particularly on one of her greatest works, which is Silas Marner [1], to analyse how Eliot depicted idealisation in her female characters and how this idealisation is influenced by the society background of that period. The analysis integrates various concepts including industrialization, marriage, and determinism to help interpret this practice, as well as social background, description in other literature writings and George Eliot’s private life to further the explanation. It will focus on three characters in Silas Marner: Nancy Lammeter, Dolly Winthrop, and Eppie. At the end of this paper, the discussion comes to the contribution of this idealisation to the literature creation and how it affects the perception to the females from the Victorian period as well as the current society. The paper aims to clarify the characteristics of women and endows more understanding of women to help pursue gender equality.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zile Liu
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/16
TI  - Idealisation of Female Characters in Silas Marner
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 2nd International Conference on Modern Educational Technology and Social Sciences (ICMETSS 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 391
EP  - 398
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-45-9_48
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-45-9_48
ID  - Liu2022
ER  -