DIANA TRILLING
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this is not to be laughed away as nineteenth- century folk nonsense. In
our current literature of femal e self-realization, if a woman novelist has
but one liberated life to write she will still write it as a blond or, at her
most concessive, a redh ead. Even George Eliot took the matt er into
serious account: in
Mill on the Floss
she has Maggi e Tulliver say, ''I'm
determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women ca rry
away all the happin ess." And yet figuratively speaking-and this is the
overriding sociobiological fact about our life in society-the conquer–
ing blonds still abound in Eliot's own novels. Defiant of convention as
she was in her personal life, living with Lewes unmarried in Victorian
London and th en , at the age of sixty, marrying a man twenty years
younger than herself, th ere was littl e more that Eliot could in hon es ty
do for the spirited heroines in her novels than give them the support of
her own hard-earn ed wisdom as they journeyed toward their in ev itabl e
frustration. As in all good writing, a second voice speaks throughout
George Eliot's books. The author's commentative function is
to
be
understood in large part as her rebuke of culture where culture,
reinforced by biology, takes too easy an advantage of women of mind
and spirit. For instance, in
Middlemarch
Dorothea Brooke grotesquely
underes timates her own intell ectual capacities and overestimates those
of Casaubon whom she has decided to marry in order to h elp him with
his literary career instead of making a career of her own, and Eliot
remarks drily: " Dorothea's inferences may seem large; but really life
could never have gone on at any period but for this libera l allowance of
conclusions, which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of
civilization ." Or in the same novel she lets Lydgate,say of Dorothea in a
passage whose irony is unmistakable: "Notwithstanding her undeni–
able beauty ... [she] did not look at things from the proper feminine
angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from
your work to teach the second form instead of reclining in a paradize
with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven." Or again,
Casaubon has died and Eliot has Dorothea say ruefully : "I used to
despise women a little for not shaping their lives more." This confes–
sion of Dorothea's, so impressive in its spareness, represents of course
George Eliot speaking for all of entrapped womankind - she was not
one of those emancipated women who measures her own success by the
failure of others of her sex. But perhaps most telling of all is the
sorrowing comment on Dorothea's marriage: "She was always trying
to be what her husband wanted, and never able to repose on his delight
in what she was." Spoken in suitable accents of anger, the first half of
that sentence could be a present-day summary of the liberated woman's
