Özet:

Neo-Victorian fiction is closely connected to Victorian texts in theme, tone and style. Rather than purely replicating the Victorian novel, or the Victorian era, neo-Victorian novel revisits Victorian time and setting to reconsider past from a critical distance. This study investigates neo-Victorian challenging of Victorian heroine conventions in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992). To achieve this aim, I will comparatively examine ‘heroine’ of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things in the neo-Victorian context. Gray’s Poor Things reveals historical limitations of Eliot’s feminist critique while it demonstrates the possibilities associated with the neo-Victorian genre for disrupting Victorian heroine conventions, thereby freeing the protagonist from the Victorian conventions. Neo-Victorian fiction constructs a heroine more explicitly feminist than appears in most Victorian texts. Gray’s critique of Victorian conventions gains much of its sharpness from its power to articulate explicitly sexual matters to which Eliot could only prudentially refer due to the reading public of her time. My analysis will show that how Eliot’s historical world limited the choice of possible endings for her idealistic heroine; however, Gray envisions a heroine whose domestic role is overshadowed by her public role with career of her own.

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