George Eliot Review Online
Date of this Version
2000
Document Type
Article
Citation
The George Eliot Review 31 (2000)
Abstract
The third annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at the beautiful Bunka Women's University in Musashino, Tokyo, on Saturday, 27 November 1999. On the rather cold day with eighty-seven active participants, the morning session began with a welcome speech by Yoko Yanagi, Dean of the Literature Department of Bunka Women's University. Among the three papers, the first was 'Eppie's Innocent Challenge in Si/as Mamer' by a graduate student at Edinburgh University, Yuko Nakamura. She thought that Eppie, as an eighteen-year-old woman, challenged mid-Victorian ideology with her marriage by rejecting that system of patriarchy and class society, but that her way of making decisions and her origins showed Eliot's limitations as a feminist. Next, Rika Igarashi, an assistant professor at Wakkanai Hokusei-Gakuen Junior College, evaluated Daniel Deronda with 'Seeing More Possibility - Centering on Daniel Deronda'. She felt that the descriptions of Deronda and the Jewish problems, even if artificial, gave Eliot's novels a new phase and that Eliot tried to describe the sorrow and sufferings of all human beings through expanding Deronda's personal anguish. The third paper by Harumi Nakazawa, an assistant professor at Bunka Women's University, was 'The Victorian Reception of Middlemarch in the Light of the Discrepancy Between Masculine and Feminine Interpretations'. Ms. Nakazawa imagined Eliot's views about her characters, quoting the contemporary criticisms of the men's point of view.
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