“‘Woven and Interwoven’”: Threading the Female Web from George Eliot to Du Bois

Eliot’s Middlemarch explores interactions that weave the larger tale of human history using web and thread metaphors of connection. This web is specifically concerned with the domestic woman and should be read alongside W.E.B. Du Bois’s lesser known novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece, where the web of female connectedness becomes racialized. While Eliot presents the connections between her women as strength despite their entrenchment in domesticity, Du Bois’s heroines get entangled in their web. Drawing upon Nancy Armstrong’s ideas of domesticity in the novel and Daniel Hack’s “African Americanization” of Victorian literature, my paper will assert that by reassessing the web metaphor of female connection in both novels, we can participate in a large-scale connective process to link the Victorian female identity to a later depiction of feminine blackness. This pairing represents the larger need for Victorian Studies to dialogue with conceptions of race and otherness.