Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T00:16:53.008Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Aquatic spaces and women’s places: a comparative reading of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Alexandros Papadiamantis’s H φόνισσα

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou
Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou*
Affiliation:
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This article will attempt a comparative reading of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Alexandros Papadiamantis’s H φόνισσα (1903), aiming to illustrate how both texts are preoccupied with the problem of inventing spaces for their deviant and superfluous female characters. Although enmeshed in the dominant ideologies of their time, such as the evolutionary pattern of life as a sign of progress, and women’s marginalisation and domestication within this model, these novels simultaneously reject these ideologies. Interestingly, both Eliot’s and Papadiamantis’s problematic heroines are associated with water and experience a cathartic death by water. As a deus ex machina, the overflowing waters of the river in the first case, and the rising waves of the sea in the latter, provide a sanctuary, an intermediate space, where the two exiled heroines escape from traditional definitions of women as homeless containers or empty receptacles. George Eliot’s Maggie and Papadiamantis’s Frangoyannou discover an alternative geography in water, as the Darwinian aquatic space, a site of contestation, is reappropriated and transformed into a nursing space. This return to an intrauterine bliss, however, apart from its revolutionary potential, signifies also a return to essentialism and suggests the impossibility of ascribing any space to women except for that of endless metaphoricity. In the open-endedness of these two texts, women are floating signifiers, both promoting and transcending female archetypes.

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , 2005 , pp. 187 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andreadis, Y. (1987), ‘H Φόνισσα: Μια δομικη ανάλυση’, Diavazo 165, 109-12.Google Scholar
Aslanidis, E.G. (1988), To μητρικό στοιχείο στη «Φόνισσα» του Παπαδιαμάντη: Ψυχαναλυτικό δοκίμιο (Athens).Google Scholar
Athanasopoulos, V. (1987), ‘О Παπαδιαμάντης και το κακό’. Diavazo 165, 68–79.Google Scholar
Athanasopoulos, V. (2001), Άπό τη Μετανάστιδα στη Φόνισσα, κοα από τη Φόνισσα στη Γυναίκα Πλέουσα’, Eleftherotypia, 28.12.2001.Google Scholar
Beaton, R. (1989), ‘The Sea as Metaphorical Space in Modern Greek Literature’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7, 253-72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chryssanthopoulos, M. (1997), ‘Anticipating Modernism: Constructing a Genre, a Past, and a Place’, in Greek Modernism and Beyond, ed. Tziovas, D. (Lanham, MD), 61–76.Google Scholar
Constantinides, E. (1988), ‘Love and Death: The Sea in the Work of Alexandros Papadiamantis’, Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 4, 99–110.Google Scholar
Darwin, C. (1998), The Origin of Species, ed. Beer, G. (Oxford).Google Scholar
Duncan, N., ed. (1996), Body Space: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality (London).Google Scholar
Eliot, G. (1992), ‘Adam Bede, Book II, Chapter 17’, in Selected Critical Writings, ed. Ashton, R. (Oxford).Google Scholar
Eliot, G.(1998), The Mill on the Floss, ed. Haight, G.S. (Oxford). [MF]Google Scholar
Farinou-Malamatari, G. (1987), Αφηγματικες τεχνικές στον Παπαδιαμάντη: 1887-1910 (Athens).Google Scholar
Farinou-Malamatari, G. (1992), Ή ειδυλλιακη διάσταση της διηγηματογραφίας του Παπαδιαμάντη’, in H αδιάπτωτη μαγεία: Παπαδιαμάντης 1991 — Ένα αφιέρωμα (Athens), 39–90.Google Scholar
Farinou-Malamatari, G. (1996), #Ή διηγηματογραφία του Παπαδιαμάντη κοα η ολλανδική ζωγραφνκή’, in Πρακτικά A’ Αιεθνούς Συνεδρίον για τον Αλέξανδρο Παπαδια,μάντη (Athens), 457-68.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1986), ‘Texts/Contexts: Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16, 22-7.Google Scholar
Gilmour, R. (1993), The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830-1890 (London and New York).Google Scholar
Grosz, E. (1995), Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London).Google Scholar
Haritakis, Y. (1941), ‘H παιδοκτονία της «Φόνισσας»’, Nea Estia 355, 47-9.Google Scholar
Irigary, L (1993), Je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, tr. Martin, A. (London).Google Scholar
Kargakos, S.I. (1987), Ξιχνοίδιθίβάζοντας τη «Φόνισσα»: Mia véa. κοινωνική και πολιτική θεώρηση του Παπα,διαμάντη (Athens).Google Scholar
Keith, M. and Pile, S., eds (1993), Place and the Politics of Identity (London).Google Scholar
Kokolis, X.A. (1993), Гш τη «Φόνισσα» του Παπαδιαμάντη: Δύο μελετήματα (Thessaloniki).Google Scholar
Law, J. (1992), ‘Water Rights and the “crossing o’ breeds”: Chiastic Exchange in The Mill on the Floss ’, in Rewriting the Victorians, ed. Shires, Linda (London), 52–69.Google Scholar
Mackridge, P. (1992), ‘The Textualization of Place in Greek Fiction 1883-1903’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 2, 148-68.Google Scholar
Malthus, T.R. (1976), An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Appleman, P., (New York and London).Google Scholar
Massey, D. (1998), Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge).Google Scholar
Matthew, C., ed. (2000), The Nineteenth Century: The British Isles: 1815-1901 (Oxford).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDowell, L. (1999), Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Cambridge).Google Scholar
Papadiamantis, A. (1977), The Murderess, trans . Xanthopoulides, G.X. (London and Athens).Google Scholar
Papadiamantis, A. (1992), H Φόνισσα (Athens).Google Scholar
Peckham, R.S. (1995), ‘Memory and Homelands: Vizyinos, Papadiamantis and Geographical Imagination’, Κάμπος: Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek 3, 95–123.Google Scholar
Peckham, R.S. (1994), ‘O Παπαδιαμάντης кои η έννοια του δένδρου’, Ελληνικά 44,147-57.Google Scholar
Peckham, R.S. (2001), National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece (London).Google Scholar
Politi, J. (1996), ‘Δαρβινικό κείμενο κοα «H φόνισσα» του Παπαδιαμάντη (Πρόταση ανάγνωσης)’, in Συνομιλώντας με m κείμενα. (Athens), 155-81.Google Scholar
Ricks, D. (1992), ‘Papadiamantis, Paganism and the Sanctity of Place’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 2, 169-82.Google Scholar
Saunders, R. (1992), ‘Creating Contents: Papadiamantis’ E Fonissa as an Allegory of Epistemological Treachery’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 18, 55–65.Google Scholar
Saunier, G. (2001), Εωσφόρος και Άβυσσος: О προσωπικός μυθος του Παπαίδιοίμάντη (Athens).Google Scholar
Shuttleworth, S. (1986), George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Science (Cambridge).Google Scholar
Smith, J. (1991), ‘The “wonderful geological story”: Uniformitarianism and The Mill on the Floss ’, Papers on Language and Literature 27, 430—63.Google Scholar
Tziovas, D. (2003), ‘Selfhood, Natural Law, and Social Resistance in The Murderess ’, in The Other Self: Selfhood and Society in Modern Greek Fiction (Lanham, MD), 83–101.Google Scholar
Vlahoyiannis, Y. (1938), ‘Ένας άγραφος γυναικείος νόμος και η «Φόνισσα» του Παπδιαμάντη’, Nea Estia 265, 9–12.Google Scholar