A mid-nineteenth century feminist anxious to enlist the support of the illustrious George Eliot in her cause would have found in the novelist a curious blend of progressive and conservative responses to the "woman question." Marian Evans' own struggle for a literary career coupled with the materialistic world view which she adopted from Ludwig Feuer-bach gave her an acute understanding of the oppression women endured under a patriarchal system. But at the same time she felt that women had a distinctive psychological makeup which meant they could exercise a special beneficent moral influence in social life. She would not admit woman's full equality with man because she felt that the complete emancipation of her sex might coarsen the feminine nature. George Eliot's contradictory attitudes to the position of women are reflected in her fictional writing, often marring the unity of her presentation of female characters. In The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda brilliant analysis of the effects of male supremacy turns into blind worship of the Victorian vision of woman as "the angel in the house." My argument is not with the traditional view of woman per se; but that in George Eliot's work it is in direct opposition to a stronger and more aesthetically satisfying radical interpretation. The presence of stereotyped images of women in otherwise brilliant novels reduces complexity to artifice, realism to idealism and hard-edged irony to facile sentiment. In The Mill Maggie Tulliver is clearly struggling for some personal identity other than the strictly "feminine" one her brother Tom insists on. However, by the end of the novel Maggie has apparently found fulfilment in passive submission to Tom's male superiority. Similarly In Middlemarch Dorothea's quest for some greater meaning in her life than the cloistered position of a gentlewoman usually allows for is answered first with an idealized marriage to Will Ladislaw, and second with Vague references to her goddess-like perfection. One of Eliot's greatest achievements as a novelist is her determination to take the bitch seriously. With both Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth she probes the usual stereotype of the evil woman to show that these two are as much victims of a repressive patriarchal society as are the more attractive characters such as Dorothea and Maggie. But she does not carry through her sympathetic understanding of the bitch character. Rosamond is finally declared to be the unregenerate evil woman who "flourishes wonderfully on a murdered man's brains." Gwendolen does change but as is implied by the comparison to Mirah Lapidoth, it is only to be removed from one role, the bitch and placed immediately in another, the good woman. This pattern is repeated in Felix Holt the Radical by measuring Mrs. Transome against Esther Lyon. The ambiguous treatment of the female personality does not arise in George Eliot's other novels because none of the women characters is ever lifted far enough above stereotype for there to be any question of a departure from realism. However Adam Bede, Silas Marner and Romola are briefly discussed with Felix Holt in Chapter IV. Although this thesis dwells largely on certain aesthetic weaknesses in the fictional writing of George Eliot, I am not suggesting that her reversion to traditional images of the feminine character destroys the novels. On the contrary recognizing and exploring these obvious areas of failure dramatically points up the brilliance of the initial feminist perspective (i.e. the recognition that much of what is called the female character is in fact a response to patriarchal values) which George Eliot takes in introducing her women characters. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The present study investigates the grammatical and lexical aspects of Little Gidding in the perspective of the Firth-Halliday model and Halliday's functional theory of language. The primary purpose of the study is to bridge the gap between linguistic analysis and literary criticism; the secondary purpose is to evaluate the usefulness of the model as a stylistic tool. The Firth-Halliday model recognizes three scales and four categories in the description of the grammar of English. The three scales are rank (the hierarchical ordering of grammatical units from the most inclusive to the non-inclusive), delicacy (the scale of increasing detail of analysis); and exponence (the scale of exemplification). The four categories are unit, structure, class and system. Unit accounts for those stretches of language of varying extent or size which carry, recurrently, meaningful patterns. Structure is concerned with the nature of these patterns themselves. The category class arranges items in the language according to the way they operate in patterns, and the category, system accounts for those limited groups of possibilities from which choices are made at certain places in the patterns. In lexis, this model proposes two categories: collocation (the relation between one lexical item and the other with which it is associated), and lexical set (the grouping of items having the same range of collocations). The functional theory of language, on the other hand, can be broken down into three categories. The first is ideational (a function serving the expression of content); the second is interpersonal (language playing a communicative role); the third is textual (the function which establishes the relation between the text and the context). The practical analysis of Little Gidding is carried out with the above theoretical framework in the spirit of a linguist, while the selection of prominent features largely depends on the sensitivity and intuition of a literary critic. The grammar in the poem is analysed from sentence rank to word rank at the primary degree of delicacy, while the lexis is studied according to the notion of collocation and lexical set. From the grammatical study some prominent features in the poem emerge: first, the effect of balance at sentence, group and word rank; second, the preponderance of nominal groups; third, the deverbalization of the verbal groups. Two more features come to light as a result of the lexical study: the collocation, of the abstract item with the concrete and the element of polarity. Viewed from the general functions of language, the delay of the subject element in the clause structure and the abundance of adjuncts and complements are indicative of the poet's consciousness of the ideational component, while Eliot's shift of the pronoun you to we fulfils the interpersonal function. Textual function, however, is mainly achieved through the repetition of lexical items and the recurrence of the same lexical sets. Concerning the Firth-Halliday model, two problems merit consideration. They are the concept of rank and the lack of distinction between the function of a finite verb and a non-finite verb in a dependent clause. Yet the model's insistence that language should be described sytematically at all ranks does offer an auxiliary tool to practical criticism. In addition, its designation of all dependent clauses in traditional grammar as rankshifted clauses operating at group rank is an important step towards the functional relationship in the structure of language. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

T. S. Eliot's concern with the philosophy of time is evidenced from his earliest poetry. It is part of the development of his whole philosophy of life: his engagement with reality, his concept of consciousness, the function of history and myth in his life, and his concept of "something beyond", a harmony for which he is striving. Although Eliot was a serious student of philosophy, his poetry is not philosophical in the sense that he is recording already formulated ideas. The poetry, is itself part of the process, the working out and realization of his philosophy. Eliot's concept of time includes two streams which exist simultaneously, and which intersect at significant moments. These are time temporal, in which man must live his life in the changing phenomenal world, and the Timeless, noumenal world which he encounters in these significant moments. He may live in phenomenal time in either of two ways, without hope or purpose, so that he is "time-ridden", or he can live in time teleologically, striving for the understanding of the design into which he must fit in order to achieve the harmony of the still point at the intersection of time and the Timeless. The harmony toward which he is striving in his dialectic struggle in time is complete wholeness of personality and spiritual transcendence. Eliot's philosophy of time and consciousness develops in three stages. In The Waste Land period, in which man is time-ridden and unconscious, he is unable to confront time and create his own being by reconciling his present with his past or "other". In Ash Wednesday he sees his other for the first time through the Lady, the "anima" or primordial image of his own unconscious. She brings him hope and energy, and plunges him into the dialectic struggle in teleological time. Marina and the childhood memories of his "Landscape" poems give more "hints and guesses" and images for moments of "partial ecstasy". In Four Quartets he reconciles all the oppositions in his life and poetry to achieve the harmony of the transcendent still point. Eliot's medium for the progress through time and the development of consciousness is a series of protagonists through which the poet casts off masks of the self, surrendering himself as he is at the moment to something more valuable. Parallel to the poet's struggle in time to achieve the spiritual harmony of the Absolute, is his struggle in poetry to get the better of words. The conflict with words, his "raid on the inarticulate", is his struggle in time to find new ways to express changing concepts and, ultimately to present in poetry those "frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail though meanings exist". The techniques which he uses to achieve these aims are the continuity and growing significance of his images, his symbolism and his "mythical method", the contrasting of the sterility of contemporary life with the living myth of earlier times. Finally, I believe that Eliot's achievement in Four Quartets is not necessarily the expression of Christian dogma, but that his striving in time for the harmony of the Absolute of the Timeless, and its realization in poetry, is an artistic creation which is his own private myth. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (B.A.)--Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

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