Meredith’s Women Characters and Victorian Reform

As a champion of the Victorian women's cause, George Meredith tries through his artistic representation of female characters to question and examine the social and legal status of women in the Victorian Age. In his novels, Meredith disentangles the inextricably intertwined political and social complexities of the different notions about identity, self-renunciation, self-annihilation, and realization of the self. His novels bring into a degree of prominence major conflicts which seem to conspire against the evolvement and the actualization of womanhood. The female characters in his novels attempt to undermine and defy the conventional set of social rules which are mostly defined by egoist male characters. The apparent challenge of subverting the already established patriarchal notions of womanhood is contingent upon sheer masculine hostility and defiance. By exemplifying the female characters' efforts to re-define their status—sexual, emotional, social, legal, political, and even economic—Meredith emerges as one whose art communicates ideas of social and moral reform. Just as many Victorian fictional works question womanhood, so do Meredith's novels reflect upon marriage as a social institution and upon identity as an important concept.