Maggie, Dorothea, Gwendolen: Expectation and Duty in Three Eliot Novels

In Eliot\u27s novels the female suffers more than the male because women are more restricted by society. Yet as Wollstonecraft points out in A Vindication of the Rights of Women, women are ill-equipped to make decisions because of the inequities of society (213). Women, she says, cannot develop their virtues until they are independent of men and men discontinue viewing women solely as objects of beauty (213-214). Wollstonecraft believes that women dependent on husbands are cunning, mean, and selfish and fail in their duty of being good wives and mothers (213). There is no proof that George Eliot read Mary Wollstonecraft \u27s essays, but some of the women in Eliot\u27s novels exemplify Wollstonecraft\u27s position. Gwendolen, in Daniel Deronda, is an example of a woman whose beauty purchased houses, horses, carriages, and position. Grandcourt considers Gwendolen an object of beauty that he can control because she fears poverty. Dorothea, who envisions a life useful to the poor, is trapped by Casaubon\u27s sterility. Maggie, who tries to define herself according to Tom\u27s constraints, discovers that she cannot live by Tom\u27s rules despite her greatest effort. The tension created between characters in George Eliot\u27s novels carries forward her psychological plots