ABSTRACT
Literary research has taught the author about vulnerability and its disavowal in patriarchal society. In order to explore the precarious position of the female knower who risks being discredited on account of her gender, the author analysis will focus on selected literary examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this chapter, the author start with Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, whose heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is not the only woman who rebels as a child only to be restrained and moulded into submission as an adult woman. However, the disavowal of a female knower also lies at the heart of the ban on female priesthood in the Catholic Church. The disavowal of woman as knower is repeated throughout all the texts highlighted, even those in which the female characters awaken to "their cognitive and non-cognitive" potential.
