George Eliot: Beyond feminism

The three central conflicts of George Eliot\u27s life--an emotional conflict with male rejection, an intellectual conflict with orthodox Christianity, and a gender conflict with the limitations imposed on women--can be attributed largely to the nineteenth-century feminine ideologies. While Eliot used her nonfiction to criticize the ideas responsible for her conflicts, she used her poetry and fiction to dramatize the conflicts and develop an ideal of humanity. Eliot considered feminism, in Romola, as a resolution to these conflicts, then moved beyond feminism to develop her human ideal. This ideal, which transcends gender ideologies in response to natural and moral law, posits a whole of androgynous female and male, in which each completes and frees the other for development through self-giving love and duty, for a reciprocity of temporal salvation. For Eliot, this whole comprises the human Christ, or divinity, capable of effecting moral and political reform for humanity\u27s greater self-consciousness and unity