Peer Webinar (chapter 2) organized by the Department of English

Peer Webinar is a novel initiative taken by the Department of English as an attempt to encourage academic dialogue and widen research perspectives amongst the members of the faculty in the department of English. The final semester students of M.A English are also included as audience in order to encourage research aptitude and familiarize them with research methodology. As a part of this ongoing regular process, the Department will be organising a peer webinar each month where a member of the faculty will present their research papers in front of the other teachers of the Department and the final semester students of M.A English.  

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The second chapter of the departmental Peer Webinar was organized by the Department of English, The Bhawanipur Education Society College on 22.12.2021 from 7.00 p.m. In this session, Prof. Ananyya Banerjee, Associate Professor, Department of English and Coordinator, M.A (English) delivered a paper entitled “The Victorian Tightrope: George Eliot”. Prof. Banerjee, alumni of Jadavpur University, has been teaching for the last thirty years in the BESC. She served as the Chief Editor of Colloquium – the multidisciplinary journal of the Arts Section, BESC since its inception. Her areas of specialization include fiction and non-fiction from Romantic and Victorian literature.

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Prof. Banerjee began her paper with a reference to her school library and her earliest encounter with the classics, including The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). She said how the unfairness and injustice of the plight of Maggie Tulliver, the protagonist left a mark on her childhood self. This became her research interest later as she got acquainted with English literary history. Prof. Banerjee illustrated how most of George Eliot’s female protagonists deviate from the socially acceptable normative woman of the Victorian times and observed with reference to the biographical details of George Eliot that despite the rebellion she undertook in her own life, she kept herself aloof from the feminist movements of the time. Her critique of patriarchy was manifested in her transgressive works where she wrote about the feminist concerns. Prof. Banerjee referred to Kate Millett’s objection to George Eliot who, she thought, did not offer a positive model for aspirant women but simply presented their curtailment. According to Prof Banerjee, Eliot’s moral philosophy and notions of duty were in constant conflict with the feelings of the dissatisfaction of the women in her society. Though she became an example of the liberated woman herself, she maintained a cautious distance from explicit participation in the feminist movements. She was more concerned about what was good for human nature and her protagonists walk the no man’s land in between the Victorian ideology and the feminist ideology.  Prof. Banerjee concluded her paper with the relevance that Eliot’s works hold even today while depicting the conflicts of the aspirant women because though the times have changed globally and the social structure has been transformed, yet the plight of women in the patriarchal society has not changed much since the Victorian times. The paper was followed by an interactive session.