ABSTRACT
In this essay I want to look at the particular patterns of intelligibility implied by determinism and to think about ways in which the dominance of deterministic organizations of experience in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries bore upon women, and in particular upon two writers: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. In the course of the argument I hope to demonstrate some of the ulterior or alternative patterns created by the two novelists. These fictive patterns question, dilate, or surpass the deterministic ones which were so vigorous a part of their intellectual and emotional upbringing. To put it at its simplest: can the female self be expressed through plot or must it be conceived in resistance to plot? Must it lodge ‘between the acts’? Virginia Woolf said that she could not make up plots and George Eliot that conclusions are at best negations. At the end of Middlemarch George Eliot writes of Dorothea’s two marriages: Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.1
