同理心的轉變:喬治艾略特以及亨利詹姆斯小說中的女性人物

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系碩. 士. 論. 文. Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 同理心的轉變: 喬治艾略特以及亨利詹姆斯小說中的女性人物. Sympathy in Transition: Female Characters in the Novels of George Eliot and Henry James. 指導教授：高瑪麗 Advisor: Dr. Goodwin 研究生：蘇俞文. 中華民國一零五年一月 January 2016.

(2) Su 1 摘要本篇論文探討維多莉亞時期的兩部小說，喬治˙艾略特《弗洛斯河上的磨坊》以及亨利˙詹姆斯《一位女士的畫像》裡面的女主人翁受十八世紀思想家對於同理心的影響。藉由追尋十八世紀的感傷主義以及浪漫主義，筆者採取亞當˙史密斯學派對於同理心的詮釋，認為同理心是一有目的、道德性的認知行為且想像力是不可或缺的。筆者以個案分析的形式探討這兩部小說，試著論證同理心的思考模式對兩位女主人翁的發展有決定性的影響。筆者認為異於艾略特小說中的女主角自我放棄式的浸淫，詹姆斯小說中開放式的的敘事方式更貼近史密斯學派的同理心。關鍵字：喬治˙艾略特、亨利˙詹姆斯、亞當˙史密斯、同理心、感傷主義、浪漫主義、想像力.

(3) Su 2 Abstract This thesis will discuss how Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Isabel Archer in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady are closely influenced by a sympathetic understanding of the eighteenth century philosophers.. Adapting a. Smithian sympathetic perspective in reading those two Victorian novels, I will identify sympathy as an intentional and ethical cognitive exercise, where imagination is necessary and is associated with aesthetic experiences.. By tracing back to the. eighteenth century sentimentalism and Romanticism, I will argue that moving from Maggie's self-renouncing absorption, Isabel achieves a Smithian sympathy as James's narrator allows her future to be unknown in ambivalence.. Inheriting the values of. morality in sentimentalism, Romantic literature shows a more pessimistic attitude that is manifested in the Romantic spirit’s sense of loss.. I will indicate how this sense of. loss is presented in the romantic tendencies in Maggie and Isabel, who are both depicted as sentimental and imaginative women, though their destinies work out differently.. Interpreting the lives of those protagonists as two case studies, I will. point out how a sympathetic-thinking determines Maggie’s failures and Isabel’s successes in reconciling with herself and in relations to others through rethinking her past and imagining her future. Whereas Eliot’s narration in The Mill is closer to the conventional sympathetic type, James further breaks through the convention with a Smithian abstraction. Keywords: James, Eliot, sympathy, Adam Smith, sentimentalism, Romanticism, imagination.

(4) Su 3 Table of Contents Chapter One Introduction. 5. Chapter Two Maggie’s Unfulfilled Past. 18. Chapter Three Isabel’s Sympathetic Reconciliation. 34. Chapter Four A Comparison between Eliot and James’s Narrations. 50. Conclusion. 64. Works Cited. 69.

(5) Su 4 Acknowledgement I would like to first acknowledge my thesis advisor, Professor Goodwin, for her kindness and patience to consistently steer me in the right direction, but allowed this thesis to be my own work at the same time. Next, I must express my profound gratitude to my parents, friends and boyfriend, who supported me with their continuous encouragement and prayers and by putting their faith in me. Finally, I want to give my wholehearted appreciation to my Heavenly Father, who provided His words and angels to guide, support and strengthen me whenever I called out for help. I felt so blessed to have all the back-up throughout the process of writing this thesis. Love you all..

(6) Su 5 Chapter I Introduction In this thesis, through an investigation on the trajectory of eighteenth century Sentimentalism and Romanticism, I want to show their traces and the legacies on Victorian fictions in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and James’s The Portrait of a Lady. I want to reread the works of George Eliot and Henry James in relation to changes characterizing the eighteenth century to the Victorian period.. I will use the theme of. sympathy, considered the “tool” to show the protagonists’ characters and worth as people, to analyze Maggie Tulliver and Isabel Archer, who are transitional characters under the historical transformation.. By looking into the characters’ situations,. motives and definitive modes of expression, I want to analyze the causes and effects of their sympathy that leads to defining oneself in relation to others. My thesis will deal with four main issues: first, how sympathy functions in a romantic relationship or in a marriage in fictions; second, how sympathy is developed in a character and later compels the heroines to take certain actions; third, how various levels of power relationships are produced by the interrelationships between individual and society as seen in a novel’s characters, plot, and form of narrative; fourth, I want to examine the nature and degree of pathos in these novels, and its effect on its fictive readers. Following Rae Greiner’s reading on Adam Smith, I identify sympathy as an intentional and ethical cognitive exercise, where imagination is necessary and is associated with aesthetic experiences.. In this thesis, my goal is to explore how. aesthetic feeling, including the protagonists’ imaginations, and how interrelationships with others affect those heroines in cultivating their sympathy. Through exploring the lives of those protagonists, I want to make it clear that sympathy plays a major role in the development of those transitional women in the nineteenth century. observe that Eliot and James have different models of narrative sympathy.. I.

(7) Su 6 Compared with James’ Portrait, Eliot’s formation of the protagonist and plot in The Mill is closer to the typical nineteenth century understanding of the conventional sympathetic narration in relation to pity and compassion.. While Eliot’s narration. tires to arouse the readers’ sympathy through an Humean identifying type, James’ is more of a Smithian abstraction—an abstraction for Isabel to rethink her past in imagination and to allow her future to be unknown—unknown even to herself. Both Maggie and Isabel have romantic tendencies, but they turn out differently.. By. comparing and contrasting Isabel Archer with Maggie Tulliver, I want to ask how sympathy constructs or influences the story-line by focusing on how sympathy works in their romantic relationships. I select works of James and Eliot because they are in the mid-Victorian period, a transitional stage with the rise of the “problem” novels, between Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and the early twentieth century.. After his first meeting with Eliot,. whom he had revered for long, the young James noted the description in a letter to his father: I was immensely impressed, interested and pleased. To begin with she is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous…Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her. (35) Regardless of her looks, young James was deeply impressed by the beauty in her mind.. Since James reads Eliot and appreciates her works, I expect to probe into the. influences and differences regarding sympathy in the works of James and Eliot. James scholars, such as Richard Poirier, F. R. Leavis, and Leon Edel emphasize the significance that Eliot had on James.. Leon Edel boldly indicates that the greatest. homage that James paid to Eliot’s genius was in his writing The Portrait of a Lady,.

(8) Su 7 which can be viewed as a “George Eliot novel,” “written by James in the way he believed she should have written” (Conquest 371).. Similarly, F. R. Leavis claims. that James so admired Eliot, “testifying to his admiration with The Portrait of a Lady...” (xxii) in his introduction to Daniel Deronda.. Both James and Eliot are. concerned about the decision-makings of their characters who are common people, made great in their characters. Compared with the early Victorian novels, the midVictorian novels, transcending from the romantic to a more realistic from, are more matured in the characters’ psychological analysis, where human relations and characters are concerned.. Characters are struggling to make choices while their. decisions are complicated by the people they are related to.. I want to focus on the. circumstances that are tumultuous for those heroines in making choices of their own. To look into their transitional status and characters, I want to use qualities of sympathy as coordinates to trace the psychological development of their characters. In the Introduction, I will examine the historical transition of sympathy as I provide my own definition and outline the selected novels basically with theoretical themes. To begin with, I want to explain why I choose sympathy rather than empathy or other affects to analyze the texts.. There are two main reasons.. One, as. Greiner points out in her essay, “1909: The Introduction of the Word ‘Empathy’ into English”, she suggests that although there are “similarities between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of sympathy and a fin de siècle empathy bearing the undeniable stamp of its post-Darwinian making,” “after 1909 (if not before it), sympathy seemed to belong to the Victorians, empathy to us,” for “empathy necessarily involved a cognitive component, though how strong, and how dominant, varied” (n.pag).. Since empathy is often easily confused with sympathy, I want to. make a distinction by pointing out their differences with Suzanne Keen’s “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.”. Marked as a shift and transformation of the long.

(9) Su 8 development of sympathy, empathy emerged as a new concept in the more recent years. Sympathy and empathy are two types of concepts that generate different responses of people. Since empathy suggests a more complete immersing of oneself in the others’ feelings and experiences, empathy closes more completely the distance between oneself and the other. Keen suggests that rather than judging objectively from the outside, with empathy, people feel what they believe to be the emotions of others. With empathy, the distance between one and the other dissipates; instead, there is a more chaotic fusion which disturbs the characters from one and the other. That is, the characters gradually lose themselves as they become more and more immersed in the others’ thought.. On the other hand, Greiner poses that sympathy. allows a greater possibility of understanding the thinking of another with whom one does not agree (159). The other reason is that the moral implication of sympathy, applied by the eighteenth century English philosophers when aestheticism and moralities are mingled together, continues to influence the Victorian writers like Eliot and James along with their works.. In this light, it is imperative to further explain the. relation between the Victorian society and the eighteenth century’s moral sentiment. Thus, I turn now to examine the concatenation of eighteenth century sentimentalism, Romanticism and the Victorian characters, Maggie and Isabel, in Eliot’s and James’s fictions. I want to pin the definition of sympathy down in novelistic critical forms.. My. definition of sympathy is based on the foundation of Greiner, Pond and Ablow’s works and expands an intentional and ethical cognitive exercise, which requires imagination in forming connections with others, with aesthetic experiences. Through its complicated and dynamic dimension, sympathy is more of a medium or platform to make bridges for other affects or emotions to communicate between one and the other, than considered as a feeling or emotion in this thesis. That is, rather.

(10) Su 9 than blending in, sympathy constitutes other emotions or affects, such as anger, disgust, love. More, not only keeping a proper distance with others is indispensable for sympathy, as Pond argued, but sympathy requiring a distance of space, a period of time to digest aesthetic experiences and to re-create in tranquility.. Seeing sympathy. plays a major role in the development of those transitional women, I will evaluate their actions with close reading.. From their thoughts, actions, relationship with. others, I will explore how their lives fulfill the desire to form a belief, an image, or a judgment through their sympathetic imagination. Based on “similarity rather than difference” (Narayan 33), a Humean sympathizer like Maggie in Eliot’s narration, I want to point out, ultimately leads to a pathological disaster.. On the other hand, I perceive Isabel as more of a disengaged. Smithian spectator, who coolly analyzes her situation in James’ s narration.. Along. with critics like Thomas Laquer, Kristen Pond points out that the “common understanding” of sympathy in nineteenth century Victorian England—“the ability to show compassion for the other by understanding the experiences of the other”— is a continuation of the eighteenth century’s understanding of sympathy, which is closely connected with “notions of virtue and even national identity” (21).. In The Marriage. of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot, Rachel Ablow observes that eighteenth century moral philosophers, such as Lord Shaftesbury, David Hume, Adam Smith1, considered sympathy a way to “entering into another’s feeling” (2) and to “counter selfishness and consolidate community” (2).. Similarly, Steintrager. indicates that those philosophers “emphasize pity, compassion, fellow feeling, and sympathy, broadly construed, as the steering mechanism of individual interaction” Adam Smith, widely known as the father of modern economics, is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiment, a book that indicates the sense of morality and justice were made by imagining ourselves in the others’place (Stafford 23). The Theory of Moral Sentiment significantly proffered the ethical, philosophical, psychological, and methodological underpinnings that influenced the nineteenth-century English fictions. 1.

(11) Su 10 (xiii).. The origin and definition of sympathy have been widely debated by scholars. for long.. In the Introduction of Rethinking Empathy Through Literature, the author. points out that “[a]lthough many accounts of the conceptual history of fellow-feeling begin in eighteenth-century Britain, the idea of sympathy stretches back to the Ancient Greeks, who gave us the names of “suffering together” (2). This definition of “suffering together” enriches sympathy with the meaning of interrelationships, mutual dependencies to connect with each other.. Offering a distinct comparison. between Hume and Smith, Narayan shows that compared with Smith’s intact spectator, for Hume, the sympathizer’s identification to the object he/she sympathizes with is crucial—“the operation of sympathy is closely allied with a strong and undivided self-identity” (33).. In Narayan’s words, Humean “sympathy is strongest. when resemblance is greatest” (33), as Hume suggests that the nature has preserv’d a greater resemblance that preserves itself amidst all their variety; and this resemblance must very much contribute to make us enter into the sentiments of others, and embrace them with facility and pleasure. (33) However, grounded on physiology, Humean sympathy, as Greiner indicates, is “contagious,” yet impossible and undesirable, for “feeling can transfer directly from one person to another” without bypassing cognition (17). Following Greiner’s direction, I perceive that in the narrative of James, for Isabel, she breaks through a pathological narcissistic identification and develops a sympathetic thinking in rethinking her past and reforming relationships while Maggie is stuck in an emotive identification with her familial past in Eliot’s narration of a eighteenth century moral depiction.. Greiner explains that sympathy “could be. analyzed irrespective of whatever emotions were (or were not) produced or shared” (1).. In Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, taking Smith’s.

(12) Su 11 philosophy of sympathy as her coordinates, Rae Greiner draws a distinct line between sympathy and self-identification. Greiner regards sympathy as an imaginative undertaking that does not necessary engage feeling.. Greiner sees that sympathy is a. way of thinking along with others, rather than identifying with them: [S]ympathy is a way of thinking about others, not an embodiment of their emotions, and not reserved for sorrow. […] The conditions of sympathy are overwhelmingly imaginative: one “bring[s] the case home” by imagining the other’s feelings, reconstructed in “the thought of his situation.” And though Smith refers to a “sufferer,” sympathy pertains to the full range of theory of human sentiments, experienced in “analogous” ways. (3-4) Greiner argues that Smith’s emphasis on imaginative reﬂections rather than spontaneous emotions allows for the cultivation of “fellow-feeling,” which Greiner calls ‘‘an affective, social mode of understanding” (4). That is, Smith’s insight that sympathy deals with representations-imagined constructions of others’ situations—leads to imagined feelings. Greiner claims that “sympathy produces realism” (9) in its imaginative process through exploring nineteenth-century realistic novelists, who render sympathy as a large part in their novel, share the same thought with Smith that “sympathetic processes of thought were central to the narrative they crafted” in imaginative relationships with others (4). Resonating with Greiner, Rachel Ablow asserts that sympathy is less a feeling than as “the encounter between minds,” an intentional willingness to relate by “entering imaginatively into another’s thoughts or feelings” (8).. Rather than conforming to others with self-annihilation,. sympathy creates a platform for two different mindsets together. I want to argue that the Romantic spirit and its sense of loss in the Romantic period influence Victorian writers like Eliot and James as they depicted it in the.

(13) Su 12 romantic tendencies in Maggie and Isabel.. While Maggie’s sense of loss comes. from her lack of family love, Isabel’s resulted from the disillusion of an ideal self that she projected on Osmond. However, compared with Maggie, Isabel develops a sympathetic thinking and overcomes her idealistic fantasies with a more mellow character after her disillusions in marriage. Whereas sentimentalism focuses on the characters’ superior ability to sympathize with others that resulted from their moral power, driven more by the feelings of overwhelming power and awe that is sometimes supernatural, Romanticism was a closely related trend along with sentimentalism.. With the. advance of industrialization, some of the conservatives find escape in nostalgia, “at the upper end of society, for an idealized medievalism” (402-403).. In the chapter of. “The Romantic Artist” in his influential work, Culture and Society, Raymond Williams states that “the Poet, the Artist, is by nature indifferent to the crude worldliness and materialism of politics and social affairs; he is devoted, rather, to the more substantial spheres of natural beauty and personal feeling” (30). Although James appreciates the sense of freedom of the Romantics, Daugherty writes, James suggests that “Romantic conception of genius was ultimately too passive and undisciplined to satisfy the analytical critic” (62).. I contend that James’s narration. corresponds to his opposition towards this idealism for a comprehension of this incompatibility that he satirized in the narration of Isabel’s inflated romantic fantasies. Closely related to the social inequality in the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, when Industrial Revolution and commercial prosperity were brought into focus, this unsatisfied spirit reflected the fact that only the few groups of people benefits from the status quo.. Thus, the call for liberation of all kinds of. restraints in the Romantic period was high as it rebels against the decorum and orthodox of the neoclassical period.. Spirit and passion overflowed in the works of.

(14) Su 13 the Romantic poets as S. G. Checkland portraits in The Rise of Industrial Society in England that the Romantics “[lauded] the principle of free expression of the personality” (393).. The Romantic poets urged for rebellion against social injustice. of the inequality of society that neglected individual’s rights.. However, Romantic. poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge renounce radical ideals after they lost heart in the French Revolution for the violence it jeopardized the society (401). Christopher Nagle contends that rather than simply preceding sentimentalism, Romanticism, as its reformulation, prioritizes its ideology, such as individual solitude over community, and outlives it— “Sensibility provides…the discursive infrastructure of Romanticism itself” (4).. R. F. Brissenden suggests that the French Revolution resulted in. “reaction against sentimentalism” for “a general dissatisfaction with those optimistic elements in man’s vision of himself and the world which had prevailed during the eighteenth century” (65).. Although the literature of Romanticism succeeded in the. value of morality in the novel of sensibility, it did not share sentimentalism’s optimism. Along with moral philosophers in the eighteenth century, the Romantic poets recognize sympathy as pity and compassion and as a source of identification to the others.. Sarah Zimmerman deems that the value system created by the eighteenth. century moral philosophers is beneficial for assisting the Romantic poets to focus less on the poet himself/herself, than on the people (28-29). For example, Smith suggests that the most virtuous man is “defined almost entirely through his sympathy with and his desire for sympathy from other members of his community” (Ablow 3). Raymond Williams designates this sympathetic identification is illuminated in Wordsworth’s wish for a poet “to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time, perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs” (60)..

(15) Su 14 “Like the faculty of memory,” Zimmerman argues, “the capacity for sympathetic identification has long been associated with the Romantic poet's introspectiveness” (28) in Romanticism, Lyricism, and History. Pointing out that both the Romantic poets, Samuel Coleridge and William Hazlitt highly appraised the genius of Shakespeare because of his “ability to identify with his characters” (29), Zimmerman takes this as an example to illuminate the ideal imagination that appropriates sympathy— “sympathy is relevant to Romantic lyricism because it becomes an ideal for the imagination” (60).. Similarly, in the chapter of “The Pleasures of Poetry,”. Fiona Stafford contends that for the Romantic poet, Percy Shelley, followed the moral philosophers’ arguments in deeming that by cultivating the people’s sympathy through imaginative literature can strongly influence the progress of society (24). For instance, Shelley argued that “poetry ‘awakens and enlarges the mind itself,’ so that poetry is “central to moral action because of its association with the imagination” (23).. In his work, A Defence of Poetry, Shelley points out that A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination—and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.. (24). From Shelley’s essay, it is clear that he, along with the other Romantic poets, perceives that “goodness depends on sympathy and the related ability to identify with the feelings of others” (23). Conflicts, however, show up when the seemingly altruistic Romantics try to assimilate the others with their sympathy that is based on identification. I perceive the sense of loss that is pervasive in Romanticism results from a Humean sympathizer—the violence of unethical assimilation.. In “The Impulse to.

(16) Su 15 Tell and to Know: The Rhetoric and Ethics of Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel,” Kristen Pond examines how some nineteenth-century British novels performed sympathy in a way that a distance between self and the other is still retained: A more ethical practice of sympathy abandons the premise that sympathy must bridge difference and instead preserves the distance between self and other in order to maintain, rather than erase, difference. Sympathy must be re-imagined as a mode of engagement and a way of approaching the other, not as a moment of understanding (usually predicated on sameness). (8) Pond suggests that a more ethical encounter will be preserving the distance to retain the difference between self and the other with the exchange of sympathy, for “a willingness to have one’s assumptions challenged by difference rather than simply covering that difference” (8-9).. In the nineteenth century, as Pond points out,. England tried to expand her territory by governing many colonies, in literature, sympathy was treated as a tool to assimilate “the others” (7), those who are different from oneself by writers to “ameliorate social differences with assurances of mutual feeling and universal humanity” (6). Pond argues that tension emerges when “identification is posited as a solution for the division between self and other” through “erasing the other’s subject position in order to create identification” (9).. Pond takes. the Romantic poet, William Wordsworth’s “The Cumberland Beggar” to illustrate how “sympathy extended toward the poor, then, was based on a distorted understanding of this group of ‘others’ (7): “[Wordsworth] represents confidence in the ability to know the other by subsuming him or her under a common ideal, erasing the possible differences of the other and thereby encouraging sympathy for an ideal rather than for an individual” (8). The failure to assimilate those who are different.

(17) Su 16 from oneself leads to disillusion and self-isolation.. It is actually an egoistic reaction. that results in the sense of loss in the Romantic period. Till now, I have presented an overview from sentimentalism to Romanticism, and tried to explain how those periods are influenced by the sympathetic understanding of the eighteenth century philosophers, including Adam Smith, which is imperative before I apply a sympathetic reading to those female characters, Maggie and Isabel in the Victorian fictions in later chapters.. I turn now to chapter layout. with a brief outline of the novels with their theoretical themes.. In chapter two, I will. show a failing example of Smithian sympathy with Maggie’s Tulliver’s life.. I. suggest that due to the lack of sympathetic recognition from her family, Maggie cannot separate from her familial past, which result in her repetitive suffering. This lack of recognition, standing as an obstacle every time there appears a chance for her to form a new relationship, overpowers her natural passion.. It is not until her final. death that paradoxically reunifies her with her familial memory does her suffering come to an end.. Compared with Maggie’s unsuccessful case, in chapter three, I will. argue that it is through Isabel’s sympathetic development, a concatenation of admitting her faults, rethinking her past and imagining her future, does she reconcile with the others, and then herself. With her romantic and unrealistic imagination, Isabel Archer is entrapped in her idealism as she struggles to prove her liberty in the choice of her romantic relationship.. After the failed attempt, Isabel retreats into. self-alienation. At last, Isabel achieves self-reconciliation through developing a sympathetic thinking when she rethinks her past relationships and imagines the possible future. Chapter four will be a comparison between those two works and their narrative styles.. I will begin with a discussion of the endings of the two works and question. Eliot and James’ narrative methodologies in ending their novels.. By presenting an.

(18) Su 17 overview of the historical trajectory from the eighteenth century sentimental novels to the Romanticism, I will try to show how Victorian novelists, Eliot and James are influenced by the previous literary genres. With their distinctive models of sympathy, Eliot and James treat their protagonists differently—while Maggie is closer to the typical sentimental prototype of the conventional sympathetic narration in relation to pity and compassion, Isabel further breaks through with James’s abstracted narration.. As for the final chapter, I will try to conclude the outcomes in my reading. of The Mill on the Floss and The Portrait of a Lady with the perspective of a Smithian sympathy, and suggest future prospects..

(19) Su 18 Chapter II Maggie’s Unfulfilled Past In the second chapter, although Maggie distinguishes herself from the social norms of nineteenth century women with her unconventionalities, I want to argue that under a sympathetic evaluation, Maggie is entrapped in the lack of her familial recognition.. I will show that this unfulfilled self also resulted in the failures of her. romantic relationships.. Maggie falsely projects her unfulfilled self on her lovers as. she acts out the pattern in her familial relations.. In order to attain her family. recognition, Maggie first tries to renounce all her desires that contradict to the family expectation, including her romantic relationships.. Later, she escapes into a state of. languidness, giving up her autonomy by absorbing in an absent-mindedness that takes her back to her familial memory.. Nevertheless, after all her attempts come to a dead. end, Maggie ultimately proceeds to her final death. As unconventional women in the Victorian society, Maggie and Isabel are struggling in a dilemma between conforming to the conventional angel of the house and fulfilling their individuality.. “[D]epressed by a dull, wearisome life” (373),. Maggie indulges herself in a rigid ascetic system that she builds up to benumb her natural passion that makes her restless to “think a great deal about the world” (335). Compared with “the conventional women around her” (429), unfortunately, Maggie is constantly harassed by social convention due to Maggie’s unconventional traits. Maggie’s uniqueness is manifested in her unconformity; for instance, in her childhood, when her mother demands her to do the “patchwork, like a little lady,” little Maggie replies it is “a foolish work” for “tearing things to pieces to sew’em together again” (14). Maggie’s another unconventional trait is her boldness.. Criticized by her. aunts for her fluffy dark hair, out of a strong impulse, little Maggie seeks her revenge by cutting off her hair in the attic (63).. In her teens, with “eyes flashing like the eyes.

(20) Su 19 of a young lioness” (215), Maggie reproaches her aunts and uncles to their face for not helping her father to pay off his debts.. Besides her cleverness and boldness,. Maggie’s most potent characteristic is having a wild imagination; the narrator describes that Maggie often “make[s] stories to the pictures out of [her] own head” (19). Even in her renunciation, Maggie “threw some exaggeration and willfulness, some pride and impetuosity” as the narrator depicts that [Maggie’s] own life was still a drama for her, in which she demanded of herself that her part should be played with intensity.. And so it came to. pass that she often lost the spirit of humility by being excessive in the outward act; she often strove after too high a flight, and came down with her poor little half-fledged wings dabbled in the mud. (292) This unrestrained and vigorous style that brims with talent sometimes leads her into chaotic exaggerations.. Throughout her life, unfortunately, Maggie does not have. many chances to make choices of her own since half of her life has to weather the storm with her family. The inner conflict, as a matter of fact, keeps Maggie in a dilemma—pursuing and renouncing pleasure—as she struggles to conform to familial responsibilities for familial love and acceptance.. Williams points out that in the nineteenth century,. interestingly, intellectual women novelists, such as George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, held a more conservative stance on women’s role, compared with the more active feminists who called for women’s political rights at that time. Williams shows that the struggle to prove a woman’s own worth and the worth to the more important side, for Charlotte and Eliot, is their familial responsibilities: Perhaps it is significant that the four really great women novelists of the nineteenth century—Jane Austen, the two Bronte and George Eliot—were all childless and married late or not at all. But all of them felt.

(21) Su 20 responsible as daughters for helping in the family home… As in their novels, so in their personal lives we finds the conviction that a woman cannot think first of herself. (15-16) Since women at that time are closely connected to their family, women work to support their family, not for their own value: “that an ‘honest woman’ was ‘never separated from her family,” because “she owed a duty to her family, particularly the men in it, which meant that she deserved no respect if she put her own wishes before theirs” (24).. To lessen the family burden, therefore, this kind of emphasis on. familial responsibility turns to the marriage issue, for middle class women cannot support themselves and is therefore a burden to the family men.. Williams concisely. describes as “the basis for one of the great central themes in the nineteenth century novel, that of marriage for money versus marriage for love” (3). For the social opinion took women’s working as “a misfortune and a disgrace,” (9) Tom claims that he will manage the family debts in his own way, as he reproves Maggie for taking the work of plain sewing to help the family debts—“I don’t like my sister to do such things” (293). Tom wishes Maggie to be a lady and a proper lady shall not “lower” herself in taking works (392). When Maggie protests that, compared with her limitedness, as a man, Tom has the “power” to “do something in the world” (347), Tom succinctly told Maggie to “submit to those [men] that can” (347).. Along with. the other nineteenth century men, Tom asks for his family women’s absolute obedience as way of showing their contribution and devotion. Maggie’s guilt of leaving her family to pursue her own pleasure while they are in troubles keeps Maggie in an on-going suffering since her youth.. The burden of. guilt prolongs and aggravates after Mr. Tulliver’s death, for Tom inherits his father’s feud with Lawyer Wakem, whose son, Phillip develops a romantic relationship with Maggie.. During the time of the family’s bankruptcy, Maggie makes a way out to.

(22) Su 21 benumb her own passion that she regards as selfish (335) by insisting on a martyrlike philosophy of self-renunciation after reading The Imitation of Christ, written by Thomas A. Kempis.. The narrator explains how Maggie’s past and memory carved. deep in Maggie’s life: “Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood” (66). Astonished and ashamed of herself for becoming “weary of [her] father and mother,” Maggie determines it is better for her to stick to the belief of an ascetic life by renouncing all her desires. Although this self-effacing renunciation, indeed, provides Maggie a temporary escape and a sense of tranquility by benumbing her desires, this renunciation is, in fact, the result of Maggie’s unfulfilled longing for family approval as Elizabeth Ermarth describes, by internalizing crippling norms, by learning to rely on approval, to fear ridicule and to avoid conflict, Maggie grows up fatally weak.. In place of. a habit of self-actualization she has learned a habit of self-denial which Philip rightly calls a “long suicide.” (587) Without hope, there will be no disappointment.. Szirotny suggests that Eliot tries to. discover “the relative importance to her [Maggie’s] self-fulfillment and of the acceptance that comes only by self-denial, rather than the relative good that fulfillment and denial do to others” (194). Maggie’s habitual evasion, for instance, is presented in her experience of reading. Maggie’s reluctance to continue her reading of a novel because she could not make out a happy ending (306) further illuminates her habitual self-denial. Whenever Maggie encounters any incident that goes against her family’s approval, she automatically shuts herself down in a stupefied absorption.. However, rather setting her free from all temptations,. Maggie’s ascetic life style makes her susceptibility even more sensitive to anything that shall arouse her passionate nature, as if a withering flower longing for drops of.

(23) Su 22 rain during a drought. Surely enough, with the temptation coming in the form of Stephen’s singing, it is plain that Maggie has little power to resist. While Maggie makes great effort to benumb herself through stupefaction, unconsciously, her lack of love makes her weak when encountering possible temptations. A deeper layer beneath this self-renunciation is the rejection of Maggie’s familial recognition.. With the continual disapproval expressed by her mother and. aunts, Maggie passionate nature and active imagination have not been appreciated since her childhood.. Maggie “had been so often told she was like a gipsy,” who is. “half wild” (104). Although Maggie’s beloved father, Jeremy Tulliver favors her more than anybody else in the house, he holds a superstitious belief of a gloomy prediction for a girl who is “too clever” as he meditated on Maggie: “a woman’s no business wi’being so clever” (17) and “un over-’cute women’s no better nor a long-tailed sheep—she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that” (12). Tom does not encourage Maggie’s cleverness.. Like his father,. In their childhood, while Maggie. expresses her wish to live happily ever after with him, Tom thinks to dominate Maggie—he “meant to make her his housekeeper, and punish her when she did wrong” (40). With Greiner’s reading of Smith’s sympathy, I want to show that Maggie’s unfulfilled desire of her familial recognition results from their rejections to sympathize with her.. Greiner constructs a model of sympathy that makes more room. for rational thought and imagination.. For Smith, she argues, sympathy leads to an. imagined feeling which Smith termed as “fellow-feeling,” and what Greiner calls “an affective, social mode of understanding” (4).. Greiner points out that Smith’s. “insistence that sympathy in which thinking of others thinking of us, and the reverse, is the psychological mechanism enabling the sense of self” (22).. Since there is no. one to approbate and credit Maggie’s “sense of self” in her family, there remains a lack in her familial recognition that urges her to keep returning to her past memory to.

(24) Su 23 fill in the lack as Smith argues that “[o]ne’s passion matter…only insofar as others credit them; others confirm us to ourselves by returning (some version of) our sentiments to us” (22).. I agree with Szirotny’s opinion that “what chains Maggie to. her family is not worshipful love, but the rejection that kept her…from separating from her family” (193).. Along with the social convention, the family’s expectation. often contradicts with Maggie’s passionate nature. Szirotny contends that Maggie sacrifice is confusing but not confused due to “her main concern is not the good of self-realization through love and culture, versus the good of renunciation, but the importance of doing good versus that of securing acceptance” (179). To “do good” is to be obedient to her family, regardless of her own wants.. Placing the “joy of love”. as the antithesis of “calmer affection” (477), Maggie considers her passionate nature inferior to the tranquil memory of past.. Contending that too much of her natural self. deserves no love, Maggie is resolved to self-renunciation. Asserting that “[faithfulness and constancy] mean renouncing whatever is opposed to the reliance others have in us,” “besides doing what is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves” (475), Maggie holds onto the value that self-renunciation is inevitable for family love and devotion, for her family’s miseries create a strong tie that remains unbreakable and exclusive between Maggie and her family.. In How. Novels Think, Nancy Armstrong suggests that the renunciation for a better social good establishes a Victorian woman’s individuality: “[t]he protagonist of Victorian fiction does not become an individual on the basis of what and how intensely he or she desires; individuality depends on how he or she chooses to displace what is a fundamentally asocial desire onto a socially appropriate object” (8).. Armstrong. deﬁnes modern subjectivity as a tissue of contradictions, sustainable only if unfolded through a particular narrative of desire in which an unhappy subject makes a better place for itself by becoming both more self-contained and more socially worthy..

(25) Su 24 Resonating with Armstrong, Merryn Williams indicates that the prototype of an ideal nineteenth century woman involves qualities of being “[y]oung and lovely, religious, submissive and dependent, confiding and sensitive and chaste, accepting without question the destiny of marriage” (34), and is illustrated by novelists as their heroines in novels and periodicals in Women in the English Novel 1800-1900. Tom’s school teacher, Mr. Stelling shows a general opinion of a woman’s cleverness in the nineteenth century. When Maggie asks Mr. Stelling of her capability for taking Tom’s lessons, condescendingly, Mr. Stelling replies that girls “are quick and shallow” for, “they can pick up a little of everything,” and “a great deal of superficial cleverness: but they couldn’t go far into anything” (Eliot 150). Mr. Tulliver marries his wife for Mrs. Tulliver is “a good-looking woman,” who “come[s] of a rare family for managing” and “was a bit weak” (19). That is, a woman’s look, the family that she belongs to, and her weakness to assure her husband’s authority are the standards of an admirable Victorian wife.. Except Maggie, who is portrayed as a clever and. passionate, yet emotional vulnerable woman, female characters are either depicted as angles of the house, such as Maggie’s cousin, Lucy Deane, or as dull-witted and shallow, like Maggie’s mother and most of the women in the novel.. In Maggie’s life,. compared with the family women, Maggie’s family men play a greater role in her life. Although Maggie’s family men have a significant influence on her, they do not render Maggie sympathy.. Szirotny suggests that “miserable and bereft of. sympathetic support,” Maggie “would all the more cling to her habitual association of self-abnegation with others’ acceptance of her, however destructive of herself and others” (191).. After losing the lawsuit with Lawyer Wakem, Mr. Tulliver, who. “always defended and excused her” (205), when Maggie was a little girl, no longer shows his tenderness and is gradually consumed in his bitterness.. Tom, whom. Maggie is emotionally dependent on, profoundly affects her marital decisions and.

(26) Su 25 later her death.. Regardless of others’ disapproval, it is Tom’s opinion that Maggie. cares about most.. While Tom’s persistence in “[holding] him bound to his father’s. memory, and by every manly feeling, never to consent to any relation with Wakems” (456-457) made it impossible for Maggie to marry Philip Wakem, at the fatal ending, it is because of saving Tom, Maggie roars her boat back into the flood, where they are drowned together. with Maggie.. Insisting on his own judgment, Tom is unwilling to think along. Following Greiner’s argument, imagination has the most direct way to. sympathy, for fellow thinking is the ability to think along with others through imagining others’ situation. However, rather than leading to sympathy, an imposed judgment forbids sympathetic-thinking and only generates egoism. Tom’s self-righteousness makes him incapable of thinking along with Maggie’s “mental needs which were often the source of the wrong-doing or absurdity that made her life a planless riddle to him” (393).. In a similar vein, Ablow is concerned that “the. ability to imagine” may not help one to be more compassionate or sympathetic, for “to imagine others’ suffering all too easily leads not to compassion or a sense of responsibility, but instead to a form of selfishness (81). When Maggie desperately protests how her passion and imagination overwhelm her—“You don’t know how differently things affect me from what they do you” (393)—all Tom understands is her uncontrollable behavior as being “disobeying and deceiving,” the “ridiculous flights first into one extreme and then into another” (347).. Because of Tom’s. “unimaginative, unsympathetic minds,” Maggie finds “[i]t was no use to make Tom feel that she was near to him” (393). Thus, Maggie keeps pain as the substitute of her family’s unreturning compassion, for the other side of affection is not hatred, but total indifference that isolates one and the other. Suffering becomes the theme of Maggie’s life; it repetitively appears and has the decisive power to influence Maggie’s decisions. Although Tom often hurts.

(27) Su 26 Maggie with his rigid standard of fairness and stubborn self-righteousness, their common past binds them tightly together, as Maggie declares to Stephen that she “desire[s] no future that will break the ties of the past,” for the “tie to my brother is one of the strongest” and she “can do nothing willingly that divide me always with him [Tom]” (444). The relationship with Tom has “its root deeper than all change” in Maggie’s life, as her wish to “have no cloud between herself and Tom was still a perpetual yearning in her” (454). Elizabeth Ermarth indicates that due to Maggie’s need for love that “overthrows her integrity,” she is pitiably dependent upon her family men’s acceptance (594). Both Isabel and Maggie are depicted as passionate and impetuous, but Maggie is especially delineated as emotionally vulnerable. Through the narrator’s words, the readers are told that since her childhood Maggie is dominated by “the need of being loved, the strongest need in poor Maggie’s nature” (37). Surely enough, this strong need that will “always subdue her” comes uppermost at the appeal for “the bother’s goodness” (392). Maggie’s longing is a natural one—the need to love and to be loved— that every human being longs for, but not everyone is fortunate enough to obtain. This unfulfilled desire, therefore, propels Maggie to cling to pain since pain is a shared experience that connects with her family.. “The most sacred ties,” Maggie. suggests, is the past that binds one and the other together as she questions: “If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie” (475)?. Shuttleworth indicates Maggie’s. question directs to the “central moral issue of the novel” To ignore the past, to act only according to the promptings of egoism, would be to disrupt both organic social harmony and historical continuity. The question assumes, however, a unified history and a unified self: that the past is a linear continuum and the self a united and coherent whole. Both these premises are questioned in The Mill. The novel portrays not.

(28) Su 27 only a society divided by conflict, but also an individual similarly torn. (52) Along with Shuttleworth, Raymond Williams points out that Eliot considers that social relationships are inextricably interwoven as a “network”: “a ‘tangled skein”; a ‘tangled web’…For it tends to represent social –and indeed directly personal— relationships as passive; acted upon rather than acting” (108). While for Maggie, the past, memory, and duty are interwoven together, pain is the common memory that relates Maggie with her family. At Mr. Tulliver’s death bed, “[Tom and Maggie] forgot everything else in the sense that they had one father and one sorrow” (205). Maggie and Tom’s joint suffering blends them into a “tangled skein” with one collective memory that makes them inseparable. Since the recognition that enables the sense of self is denied in her family, Maggie imposes her unfulfilled self on her romantic relationships with Philip and Stephen.. Maggie’s sacrificial affection for Philip is a projection of her brother,. Tom’s unreturning recognition.. If not the enmity between their fathers, it is likely. that Maggie should marry Philip Wakem, a lame and sensitive young man, who adores her since their childhood, for Maggie “care[s] the most about the unhappy people” and “always take[s] the side of the rejected loved in the stories” (333): [Maggie] had rather a tenderness for deformed things; she preferred the wry-necked lambs, because it seemed to her that the lambs which were quite strong and well-made wouldn’t mind so much about being petted; and she was especially fond of petting objects that would think it very delightful to be petted by her. (177) For the unfulfilled desire to be loved and appreciated in her family, Maggie has the tendency to take side and pity those, like Philip, who are comparatively inferior in relationships like her.. During their secret meetings in the woods, Maggie “had a.

(29) Su 28 moment of real happiness then—a moment of belief that, if there were sacrifices in this love, it was all the richer and more satisfying” when Philip pleaded for her love with his “pale face that was full of pleading, timid love—like a women’s” (337).. In. their relationship, as if the figure of Tom, Philip plays the roles of a “brother and teacher” (329), who chides Maggie as she returns with “childish contrition” (413). Philip admits to his father that “the thought of his being her [Maggie’s] lover had never entered her mind” (331), Maggie agrees to meet him due to his relation with Tom in the past: She liked me at King’s Lorton, when she was a little girl, because I used to sit with her bother a great deal when he had hurt his foot. She had kept that in her memory, and thought of me as a friend of a long while ago. She didn’t think me as a lover, when she met me. (427) Maggie is absorbed in the fantasy in the drama of a sacrificial love. When their self-satisfying relationship comes to an end in the interference of Tom’s discovery, Maggie’s feeling of “a certain dim background of relief in the forced separation from Philip” (348) insinuates the truth that her love for Philip is less as romantic passion than as self-projection fused with condescending pity.. In contrast to Maggie’s. relationship with Philip, a substitute for Tom’s brotherly figure, Maggie is strongly attracted by Stephen by an unexplainable force with the charm of his singing. Taking Maggie back to the childhood memory, Stephen’s music serves as an emotional access for Maggie to return to her childhood. Because a child is not responsible for his own behavior, the child is thus free to express his own ego. Stephen’s music, thus, provides Maggie a temporary escape from her superego as she relapses into an absent-minded languidness.. The narrator explains Maggie’s natural. passionate self is presented in her fondness of music: her sensibility to the supreme excitement of music was only one form of.

(30) Su 29 that passionate sensibility which belonged to her whole nature, and made her faults and virtues all merge in each other—made her affections sometimes an impatient demand. (401) Stephen’s singing, to some extent, releases Maggie’s affectionate self that is long suppressed by her ascetic self-control.. Upon the thought that “Stephen knew how. much she cared for his singing” (416), Maggie tries her very effort to resist, but overwhelmingly the absorbing music has its hold on Maggie, she loses all her self-control “by the inexorable power of sound” (416): “all her intentions were lost in the vague state of emotion produced by the inspiring duet—emotion that seemed to make her at once strong and weak: strong for all enjoyment, weak for all resistance” (416). Under the charm of music, Maggie “cease[s] to think, with her eager prefiguring imagination, of her future lot” (402).. Ablow points out that “Maggie’s. love for Stephen is utterly ungovernable and irrational” since however hard she struggles, again and again Maggie loses the battle of controlling herself to “remain aloof and unaffected in Stephen’s presence” (76).. Having its “predominance” on her,. “[Stephen’s singing] was a way speaking to Maggie,” that “deepen[s] the hold on her” (459). Other than music, they often mutely exchange long gaze, “a long look’ (450). The attraction between Maggie and Stephen is unexplainable, perhaps all love is, but little did they achieve mutual understanding of each other, as Ablow writes, “Eliot makes no suggestions that Maggie understands Stephen or has any particular access to his thoughts or feelings” (76).. Like a child, Maggie allows herself to dwell in an. absent thinking of “absorb[ing] in the direct, immediate experience, without any energy left for taking account of it and reasoning about it” (403). As she plunges into absentmindedness, Maggie indulges herself by renouncing her autonomy. The charm of Stephen’s music is that it brings Maggie back to her familial past in childhood, when she is free from taking responsibilities.. Throughout her life,.

(31) Su 30 however, tragedies recurrently occur while Maggie is absorbed in unconscious absorption.. In Maggie’s childhood, she easily falls into a state of dreaming and. wondering that cause her in troubles. For instance, once she goes fishing with Tom, “she had forgotten all about the fish, and was looking dreamily at the glassy water” (40). Another time she is “lost to almost everything but a vague sense of jam and idleness” (46), without noticing Tom’s dissatisfaction for her eating the larger half of the puff. Years later, in the fatal boating with Stephen, the narrator observes that Maggie’s “yielding is attended with a less vivid consciousness than resistance; it is the partial sleep of thought; it is the submergence of our personality by another” (467). The moments of absorption in Maggie’s absent-mindedness, as Ablow demonstrates, “involves a kind of absorption or self-loss that compromises Maggie’s ability to function as the responsible, self-conscious agent of her own actions” (84).. Stephen. comes as a catalogue to reactivate Maggie’s childhood passions that she has long struggle to suppress. Despite Stephen’s strong attraction, Maggie’s incapability of responding to her lovers, both Stephen and Philip, threatens her to separate herself from the familial past because romantic love forms a new relation with an outsider of the family. Reasoning with Stephen in her rejection of his proposal, Maggie expresses that such [romantic] feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us—the ties that have made others dependent on us…if life did not make duties for us before love comes, love would be a sign that two people ought to belong to each other. (449) Szirotny identifies that the passage conveys “the primacy of ties that all our former life has made for us’ as the primacy of first romance” (186-187).. For Maggie, love. cannot be complete if it is separated from memory, pity and faithfulness (450). Since romantic relationship often leads to marriage in the Victorian century, to love is.

(32) Su 31 to marry.. To marry, in the Biblical sense that serves as a moral standard at that time,. is to leave one’s original family, a former relation, and enter another one that ties one and the other together, for one becomes a union with one’s husband or wife: “a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Eph. 5.31).. Incapable of leaving her familial memory, Maggie denies the. possible merits in a romantic relationship as she tells Philip that “there can never come much happiness to me from [romantic] loving: I have always had so much pain mingled with it” (413).. Maggie is unable to begin a new relationship with her. unfulfilled self, for the familial lack forces her to stick to her past.. What makes her. situation even more complicated is Maggie’s perplexing tendency to insist on taking responsibilities for the pains of Stephen and Philip due to her false self-identification. Maggie’s imposed self-identifications on her lovers resulted from the situations that correspond to the unreturning love and misjudgments of her beloved brother, Tom. Whereas Maggie identifies herself with Philip’s suffering, for they both share the pain of an unreturning love, for Stephen, he reminds Maggie of her pain when he charges her of her misjudgment (446,466).. Maggie’s relationship with Stephen corresponds. to her relationship with Tom as Stephen pleads for her pity and consideration while charging her of the cause of his suffering (514).. Ablow points out that it is. confusing of Maggie’s eagerness to share Stephen’s “guilt in relation to Philip and Lucy” by “put[ting] herself in the wrong in relation to Stephen” (85) as Maggie returns alone to St Ogg and unmarried after their elopement.. Szirotny ironically. points out that “Maggie’s masochistic conscience will not let her profit from others’ suffering…she has never been averse to letting her lovers suffer, seeing them as extensions of herself, rather than as those others whose claims she insists on”(186). It is narrated that Stephen is “like the added self [of Maggie]” (464) when he assists Maggie to sit on the boat that takes them toward their fatal elopement.. Seeing her.

(33) Su 32 lovers as extensions of her unfulfilled self, unconsciously, Maggie projects her painful self on Philip and Stephen. This projection, however, carries Maggie to a contradiction—allowing her lovers to have claims on her, yet declining it at the same time. This contradiction reaches its climax when Maggie refuses to marry Stephen half-way on their elopement, which has been widely debated by critics. Drawing on this “unreadability,” while Joan Bennett criticizes Eliot “is hampered by current moral assumptions that all self-sacrifice is good” (129), Jonathan Loesberg poses that “Eliot constructs a sympathy for Maggie that grows out of our awareness that her elopement and return cannot be read in any narratively satisfactory manner” (139).. Along with. Loesberg and Bennett, Sally Shuttleworth contends that “a central contradiction” in the novel is the “ambivalence towards unconscious absorption— whether it indicates uncontrollable, and thus socially disruptive, passion, or the ultimate possibility of organic union” (70).. As the two sides of the same coin, on the one hand, Maggie’s. unconscious submersion results in her mysterious elopement; on the other, Shuttleworth suggests that it indicates to her death, the “final reunification with Tom” (69) as a “sole way of obtaining the desired unity” (77).. Insisting that she “can’t set. out on a fresh life, and forget [her past],” Maggie tells Stephen that she has to “go back to it, and cling to it” or she would “feel as if there were nothing firm beneath [her] feet” (478). Maggie’s resolution to suffer (474) solidifies her to confront the difficult task of parting with Stephen, for suffering relates herself once again to her past memories, in which “no passion could long quench” (515). Maggie’s death, thus, is inevitable, for to unite with her memorable past only comes through the unity of her death.. The last and defining sentence of the novel is the epitaph, written on. their tomb: “In their death they [Maggie and Tom] were not divided” (522).. When. Maggie and Tom are drowned in each other’s embrace that will “never be parted,” the.

(34) Su 33 earliest memory since Maggie could remember reappears in the narration of her final death—“living through again in one supreme moment the days when they [Maggie and Tom] had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together” (521). Through death, Maggie finally reunifies and will never be parted with her familial past, for death freezes memory in an eternal stagnation. In this chapter, I have suggested that due to the lack of sympathetic recognition from her family, Maggie cannot separate from her familial past, for she is tied up in an unending suffering that binds her with her childhood memory. Maggie’s lack of recognition from her family, standing as an obstacle every time there appears a chance for her to form a new relationship, overpowers her natural passion and results in her final death, either physically or socially..

(35) Su 34 Chapter III Isabel’s Sympathetic Reconciliation With her romantic and unrealistic imagination, Isabel Archer is entrapped in her idealism as she struggles to prove her liberty in the choice of her romantic relationship. However, after the failed attempt, Isabel retreats into self-alienation.. In this chapter. I will argue that it is only through Isabel’s sympathetic development, a concatenation of admitting her faults, rethinking her past and imagining her future, does she reconcile with others, and then herself. Isabel entraps herself in an imaginary world as she romanticizes things around her and consolidates it with her idealistic theories.. The readers are told that Isabel’s. “mind was a good deal of vagabond” that she had to make effort to train it since her imagination “was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window” (41).. Caramello points out that “James might have intended first to. compare Isabel Archer…as a romancer and then as a novelist” (7).. As if a Romantic. reader, experiencing her life like reading a novel, Isabel is “devoted to the romantic effects” (87); she exclaims with enthusiasm when Ralph introduces Lord Warburton to her: “I hoped there would be a lord; it’s just like a novel” (31).. Surely enough, in. The Portrait, Isabel is first introduced as a reader, reading in the house of Albany.. In. Daugherty’s words, Isabel is “‘floated’ by her own romantic spirit and by the ‘current of …rapid curiosity’” (67).. Perceiving Isabel as though a novel that cannot be. simply understood, Isabel’s cousin-in-law observes that “she’s written in a foreign tongue” (47).. Isabel’s imaginative character that directs to her idealistic projection. can be traced back to her childhood, when she is both “spoiled and neglected” by her remarkably handsome, yet somewhat irresponsible father, who wishes his daughters… to see as much the world as possible” (50).. Without parental supervision and formal. education, after their mother dies, Isabel and her sisters are left to a nursemaid while.

(36) Su 35 her father travels around the world alone.. As the daughter of a literary father, Isabel. is surrounded by “the London Spectator, the latest publications, the music of Gounod the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot” (51) since her youth. Significantly influenced by her unconventional childhood, Isabel, claiming herself to be a person who “like[s] [her] liberty too much,” (182) takes great value in her independence.. Robert Weisbuch describes Isabel in “Henry James and the Idea of. Evil” as “an Emerson on the road, a young woman who reads German Idealist philosophy in the locked office at Albany that occludes a view of the street; an overly theoretic, though wonderfully fresh and earnest self-realizer” (112). With her vivid imagination, Isabel “has an immense curiosity about life and was constantly staring and wondering” (51).. Although she came to Europe for the wish to learn from. experience in true society rather than the literary world, Isabel carries a great amount of imagination into her life experiment.. In “The Prison of Womanhood,” Elizabeth. Sabiston clearly illustrates Isabel’s self-contradiction: [Isabel] is the victim not only of the conflict between herself and the external world, but also of a tension between opposites in her own character: an idealism uninformed by knowledge of reality...a thirst for experience coupled with fastidiousness and a tendency to surrender to outside forces. (336) As a voracious reader, having a “great desire for knowledge,” Isabel, however, “preferred almost any source of information to the printed page” (51).. Isabel’s. imaginative arbitrariness can be perceived back in the early years of her grandmother’s house at Albany, where there is a door that was bolted; Isabel “had no wish to look out, for this interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side” (41). Building her knowledge on literature, “a source of interest and even of instruction,” Isabel sticks to a belief that “the unpleasant had been.

(37) Su 36 even too absent from her knowledge” (49)— a danger manifested in her later actions. Isabel turns a blind eye to whatever collides with her over-optimistic and imaginative theories, originated from her metaphysical learning of literature, fused with her fantasies. Without real life experiences but a wild imagination directed by her own theoretic idealisms, Isabel’s naivety generates egoism and leads to chaotic exaggerations. The one, yet fatal decision that Isabel turns her theory into practice is to marry herself to Gilbert Osmond. Although Isabel seems to fall in a social framework through entering a conventional marriage like the other Victorian women, her different undertakings, however a false one, of her marital decision reveals her unconventionality.. Unlike. the ordinary Victorian women, along with Maggie, Isabel is struggling to constrain her unconventional traits that go against the social norms.. Isabel is in a dilemma in. pursuing her own individuality and to make sacrifices to obey social conventions.. In. The Portrait, “Isabel’s originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions of her own,” while “[m]ost women did nothing with themselves at all; they waited in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come their way and furnish them with a destiny” (87). Through the reflections of the narrator, the readers are told that in early years, when suitors came to see Isabel’s sister, they “were afraid of her[Isabel]” since “they had a belief that some special preparation was required for talking with her” (51). Self-consciously, Isabel distinguishes herself distinctly from the conventional Victorian women, whom she thinks to be “horribly ignorant” (62). With her unconventional traits, Isabel’s mistake of choosing Osmond as her husband has been severely criticized. Along with Sarah Daugherty, who complains Isabel’s “banality of her thoughts on marriage” (68), Sandra Fischer contends that Isabel is “a repressed and rather mundane person” (48), who chooses enclosure rather than liberty in her life. With a similar perspective, in “Isabel Archer.

(38) Su 37 and Victorian Manners,” Mary Schriber concludes that “the rebellious Isabel who protests she will perhaps never marry represents a pose drawn from novels, and that the conventional Isabel is the real one,” since Isabel clings to the belief that “marriage is the framework of her destiny” (449).. However, Schriber indicates a more. dynamic character of Isabel in which “at least a full half of her soul, Isabel wants to be a Victorian ‘lady,’ to fill in a conventional role.. Schriber describes a Victorian. lady holds the power of the social proprieties versus the rebelliousness of the heroines… Isabel toys with the norm of “lady,” dramatizing herself by now conforming to it, now departing from it heightening her own and others’ sense of her mystery and individuality—much as James draws attention throughout The Portrait to the conventional woman in order to dramatize Isabel’s situation. (442) Schriber goes on that Isabel is “responsible for her fate because…Isabel accepts with a certain pleasure the forces surrounding her, makes them her own, and lives by them” (444).. In this light, departing from Schriber and the above critics’ point of view, I. contend that marriage is a compromise that Isabel undertakes to “play a part” in the conventional framework of Victorian society, where her potentials and self-fulfillments are constricted. That is, Isabel actually takes marriage as an expediency to work out her limited power. Lord Warburton’s and Caspar Goodwood’s expressive powers, thus, impede Isabel’s in actualizing her self-fulfillment and result in the failures of their proposals. Commenting that she likes Lord Warburton “well enough,” (133) Isabel refuses his proposal for the reason that he is “too perfect” and that “irritates” her (169).. Under. this statement is Isabel’s rejection, as Millicent Bell explains, to sacrifice “her personal ideal of a selfhood unbounded by cultural categories” by entering Lord.

(39) Su 38 Warburton’s “conventional” system of his personage (771).. Lord Warburton’s. personage, “a territorial, [a] political, [and] social magnet” threatens to “[draw] her into the system in which he rather invidiously lived and moved” (122).. Isabel. proudly remarks her refusal to Lord Warburton’s proposal that “many girls would have accepted,” (179) as a sign to make evidence of her own independence by turning away from his “big bribe” (135). Compared with Lord Warburton’s personage, Caspar Goodwood’s unyielding persistence, a “disagreeably strong push, a kind of hardness of presence” (134) also intimidates Isabel’s liberty, for Goodwood’s expressive energy has its power on her and the fact “deprive[s] her of the sense of freedom” (135).. Isabel shows her discontent by declaring to Goodwood that she can. find a way to live by herself without being taught by a clever man (179).. On the. other hand, Gilbert Osmond’s expressive weakness, being “poor and lonely” (459), thus, has its charm on her and lures Isabel to “invest” not only her money, but herself on him: “[s]he would launch his boat for him; she would be his providence; it would be a good thing to love him” (458). Having the power of becoming a contributor who “[comes] with charged hands,” to assist a noble, yet “helpless and ineffectual” (458) widower, thus, Isabel is driven by the strong desire that excited her to exercise her independence. By projecting her idealisms on Osmond, “[t]he finest…manly organism she had ever know had become her property” (459), Isabel contents herself to fulfill her self-actualization through participating in Osmond’s idiosyncrasy: “besides herself enjoying it, she should publish it to the world without his having any of the trouble” (331).. Isabel’s “ideal of intimacy,” Southward points out, is “that of the thinker and. metaphysician,” an unrealistic idealism that contributed to her disastrous marital decision: Isabel hold herself aloof from a reality more happily by her own.