A Study of Daughters in Daniel Deronda and One of Our Conquerors

Abstract

The relationships between mothers and daughters do not reveal their intimacy or solidarity but their disparity or conflict in the novels. Mothers are more often than not unable to fulfil their roles for their daughters and to protect their daughters against the society. And they are so weak and frail and have so much worldliness, lack of morality, and conventionality that they can be an obstacle to their daughters' growth and development. But daughters are maturer, wiser, more sensible than their mothers and they conflict with their mothers and moreover with their society. This essay studies the social aspects of the Victorian time, particularly about women and the ideal womanhood. And, through the study of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and George Meredith's One of Our Conquerors, it examines how the mothers of the novels suffer socially and mentally and become it's victims in the male-centered society and how they exercise their influence over their daughters in opposition to their experience or past unconventionality, and how the daughters in the relationship with their mothers cope with their mothers' influences and how they strive to gain their independence and freedom struggling against the pressure of the ideologies of womanhood and restraints on women from the patriarchal society which seems to be still premature for most fictional daughters, and if they could turn themselves into a new woman of the time.