Empowerment through choreographed self-presentation : a new historicist reading of George Eliot

Abstract

No man is an island. Each individual, whether consciously or not, interacts with the society he or she lives in. George Eliot, living under the reign of Victoria, manages to live a life which is akin to that of many women today whereby she manages to have an independent, professional life that is not associated with the way she chose to behave in her personal life. This in itself is a tremendous achievement for a woman living in an age where one small misdemeanour by a female often jeopardised not only the honour of the particular individual herself but also that of anybody related to her by blood or association. Notwithstanding, George Eliot not only manages to do this, but she also ends her literary career as the moral voice of her generation. This reading of George Eliot keeps this riddle in the forefront and argues that George Eliot empowered herself through a very careful and studied form of self presentation using the image of the actress as a template. Chapter One thus gives a very general overview of the theory of reading in a New Historicist manner which is generally applied throughout this reading, while Chapter Two points to the critical heritage of George Eliot and attempts to show how literary criticism itself interacts with the age in which it is written. Chapter Three points to the strategies that George Eliot developed over the years in an attempt to protect both herself and more importantly, her art from her reputation as an erring woman. Accepting the argument that George Eliot uses the semiotics of the actress as a means of empowering herself, Chapter Four is an attempt at a general historical view of how the theatre, and more specifically, the image of the actress, was perceived by the Victorian middle classes.