The scientific aesthetic and female agency in the novels of George Eliot

My thesis examines George Eliot's heroines within the context of her developing scientific realist aesthetic. Critics have approached Eliot's work with an interest in her scientific content and narrative structure or they have employed feminist criticism in order to understand the struggles of her heroines. But, there is no adequate discussion of the gender assumptions underlying Eliot's medical, scientific perspective and the subsequent impact on her narrative. While Eliot's early work is indebted to a scientific method and technique that reduces her heroines to saints or sirens, her scientific aesthetic grows to accommodate her more mature heroines. Using historicism and a postmodern, feminist framework, I argue that Eliot must challenge scientific objectivity and the subject-object relationship embedded in androcentric, Victorian sciences to fully explore the inner richness and complexity of her heroines.