‘None of Your Eyes at Me’: The Patriarchal Gaze in Little Dorrit

Abstract

In The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot’s extraordinary exploration of the social and psychological roots of patriarchal oppression of women and, specifically, its relationship to Victorian male anxiety, the narrator pinpoints one mechanism through which patriarchal culture self-replicates: the maxim.

[T]he man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgement solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made, patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality, without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide, fellow feeling with all that is human. (521)¹