Patriarchy In George Eliot's Poetry

ABSTRACT:

The study tends to depict how Eliot treated women as mere second sex in his poetry. It further explores Eliot’s misogynic, female-hater temperament and the reasons behind this abhorrence against women. The subjugation of women, throughout centuries, from ancient to present time has been done by male in patriarchal society. Eliot in his poetry, through the allusions of myth, history, religion, literature and philosophy not only narrates the degenerated state of women but also contributes to it by his fun, ridicule and satire of women. Instead of breaking the notion of patriarchy, Eliot becomes a torch-bearer of patriarchy and contributes to perpetuate the process subjugation of women by strengthening the mechanisms of women subordination.

It is male-centered and male-controlled. The mechanism is maneuvered in such a way as to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal, scientific, artistic and so on. From the time of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Vedic civilization, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Hebrew Bible and the Greek philosophy through the Middle Ages, to the present, the fair sex tends to be defined by negative traits to the male as the human norm, hence as an Other, by her lack of male powers and of the male character traits that are presumed, in the patriarchal view, to have achieved the memorable inventions and works of civilization. In the process the women themselves are taught to assimilate the patriarchal view of male as the superior and female as the subordinator to male and are so conditioned to derogate and degrade their own sex and thus to cooperate in the process of their own degeneration and subordination. Aristotle’s comment may be cited in this respect. He said in Politics, “Again, as between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject. And the same must also necessarily apply in the case of mankind as a whole; therefore all men that differ as widely as the soul does from the body and the human being from the lower animal （and this is the condition of those whose function is the use of the body and from whom this is the best that is forthcoming) these are by nature slaves, for whom to be governed by this kind of authority [20] is advantageous, inasmuch as it is advantageous to the subject things already mentioned.” The concept of male prerogatives and female subordination is largely a cultural construct that is generated by the dominant patriarchal biases of our civilization. As Simone de Beauvoir put it, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman …. It