Fragmentary Reading in a Male-Dominated Culture: The Fate of George Eliot’s Precocious Female Sage

This study argues that Victorian female characters like George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860), denied the classical education their more practical male counterparts enjoy, attempt to create stories around their readings, anticipate plot developments, and finally come to realize the deficiencies of male worldly wisdom. As a result, they turn to out-of-this-world masculine wisdom, the Word of God, practice submission and self-renunciation, and ultimately escape their own plots in a heroic gesture, announcing, as it were, that heroines of the stamp of a Saint Theresa can no longer emerge from a Victorian society that systematically fails to educate its women. Maggie Tulliver is neither the first nor the last female character who struggles to combine a literary discourse of the past with newer forms of narrative discourse, yet she is perhaps the most vibrant example of the nineteenth-century passive-aggressive reader. George Eliot’s precocious female sage is at a crossroads historically, culturally, as well as ideologically, emblematically enacting the shift in reading practices that characterized the nineteenth century, when the Victorian reader became part of a larger cultural movement transitioning from homogenous, selective reading to a heterogenous, scanning type of reading. Eliot’s novels seem to be pivoting on this shift, allowing their readers to practice non-sequential reading of characters who themselves are readers of parts. This fragmentariness, as Eliot seems to say, defines the very psychology of nineteenth-century print culture.

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