The happiest women have no history: Womens Writing of the British Women Writers and George Eliot

The essay presents a recuperative reading of George Eliots The Mill on the Floss, a controversial feminist text for its heroines renunciation buttressed by the authors deterministic outlook. The novels fatalistic drive, the essay discovers, is an illuminating outcome of Eliots complex engagement with the notion of womens place in history. With her strategic appropriation of the comprehensive, indiscriminating, all-encompassing capacity of History, Eliot regards it as a sort of ultimate horizon to which every single life and every single meaning must surrender itself. History requires her female characters to be absorbed eventually into the stream of time, which is poetically metaphorized in the novel through the overwhelming image of the Floss river. The essay begins with a dialogue with Virginia Woolfs thoughtprovoking idea of integrity of womens writing; Woolfs thesis that women writers should transcend their sexuality in order to command artistic control over their writing resonates with Eliots deeply sensitive treatment of distance from female characters she creates. Then the essay analyzes how Eliot formulates realism as an important and enabling principle to embody the vision of History. Eliots devotion to detached and realistic representation of womens lives, a quintessential hallmark of her writing, signifies her desire to position herself as a decent figure of letters distinguished from lady novelists whose writing can be easily branded as simply female writing. And the essay goes on to argue that Eliot, in her stark refusal to write as a woman, explores womens writing that cannot be reduced to some type of gender-specific mode of writing which is customary and definable. To sum up, in The Mill on the Floss, Eliot attempts to place women in History, paradoxically enough, by erasing women from so-called natural history; such a poignant paradox of womens writing is well captured in one of the most impressive quotes from the novel, The happiest women have no history