Educating Women and Women's Educability

摘要

Though the general principles underlying the definition of a museum were well recognized by mid-nineteenth-century, British officials and critics such as Henry Cole and John Ruskin continued to debate what instructive roles museums should play in the transmission of culture. Responding to Cole's vision of the “civilizing” museum and Ruskin's perfect museum, Eliot, in “Mr. Gilfil's Love Story” and Middlemarch, uses the ambiguity of nineteenth-century collectionsim and the patriarchal models of hosting to expose how the educational functions of museums can be problematic when women are not considered the legitimate participants but are both the spectator and the exhibited object. Eliot's narrator-host re-interprets women's educability by destabilizing the subject-object and teacher-student relations and challenging the gendered definition of knowledge.