"Dark smiles": Race and desire in the works of George Eliot.
Item
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Title
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"Dark smiles": Race and desire in the works of George Eliot.
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Identifier
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AAI9521255
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identifier
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9521255
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Creator
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Carroll, Alicia Jane.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Fred Kaplan
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Date
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1995
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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In Victorian fiction prior to George Eliot, the self and the desirous "other" are often divided into English and non-English pairs: Emily Bronte's Catherine and her alter ego, the gypsy Heathcliff; Dickens' dream of blonde virtue, Oliver Twist, and his nightmare of dark acquisitive evil, the Jew Fagin; Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and her biting, "dark double," Bertha Mason. Exploring a theory of racial "fusion," George Eliot's writing is more likely to combine self and other in one figure. Her conflation of racial, cultural, and ethnic identities makes a complex challenge to historical literary representations of otherness. If the nineteenth-century novel is, as Edward Said or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues, an agent of political power in general, of imperialism in particular, Eliot's contribution to the form, her "representation of England to the English" introduces a criticism of the status quo's separation of self and other, subject and native. Especially subverting stereotypes of "white" innocence and "dark" desire, Eliot's multicultural characters like the dark "gypsy," Maggie Tulliver, or the Jewish-English gentleman, Daniel Deronda, struggle to voice the desires which other Victorian novels seek to silence.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
