Fatherhood in Victorian Era: Critical Analysis of Fatherhood in George Eliot's Silas Marner
Faculty Sponsor
Ingrid Ranum, Gonzaga University
Research Project Abstract
Victorian England was a time of societal change and economic prosperity in the nineteenth century. This era of transformation also brought about a widespread societal questioning of gender roles. Literary productions of this time reveal of this domestic reconfiguration and hint at a larger issue of a masculine reordering of society. George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner arises out of the Industrial Revolution of the time period, and provides insight to this reordering of domesticity and assertion of fatherhood in Victorian English society. The character of Silas Marner is created to be a nuanced version of a father, and provides an example of what an emotionally intimate, yet authoritative family patriarch should embody. This research paper will seek to critically engage in the complexity and discontent of the concept of fatherhood in the Victorian Era, and will strictly consider this concept in the novel Silas Marner, analyzing the character of Silas in comparison to the paradigmatic, Victorian father.
Session Number
SS9
Location
Weyerhaeuser 305
Abstract Number
SS9-a
Fatherhood in Victorian Era: Critical Analysis of Fatherhood in George Eliot's Silas Marner
Weyerhaeuser 305
Victorian England was a time of societal change and economic prosperity in the nineteenth century. This era of transformation also brought about a widespread societal questioning of gender roles. Literary productions of this time reveal of this domestic reconfiguration and hint at a larger issue of a masculine reordering of society. George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner arises out of the Industrial Revolution of the time period, and provides insight to this reordering of domesticity and assertion of fatherhood in Victorian English society. The character of Silas Marner is created to be a nuanced version of a father, and provides an example of what an emotionally intimate, yet authoritative family patriarch should embody. This research paper will seek to critically engage in the complexity and discontent of the concept of fatherhood in the Victorian Era, and will strictly consider this concept in the novel Silas Marner, analyzing the character of Silas in comparison to the paradigmatic, Victorian father.
