We
have applied optical absorption spectroscopy to investigate van der
Waals heterostructures formed of pairs of monolayer transition metal
dichalcogenide crystals, choosing MoS2/WS2 and
MoSe2/WSe2 as test cases. In the heterostructure
spectra, we observe a significant broadening of the excitonic transitions
compared to the corresponding features in the isolated layers. The
broadening is interpreted as a lifetime effect arising from decay
of excitons initially created in either layer through charge transfer
processes expected for a staggered band alignment. The measured spectral
broadening of 20 meV – 35 meV implies lifetimes for charge
separation of the near band-edge A and B excitons in the range of
20–35 fs. Higher-lying transitions exhibit still greater broadening

Albert F. Rigosi (1602997)

Heather
M. Hill (1602985)

Yilei Li (1233738)

Alexey Chernikov (1342101)

Tony F. Heinz (1233723)

This luminous new work - dedicated to \u27the millions of women deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by society\u27s misogynist myths\u27 - casts fresh light on George Eliot\u27s feminism, which has often been the subject of controversy. \u27I want to show\u27 , says the author, \u27that however ambivalent George Eliot was about practical matters, she strongly accepted most of the ideals of contemporary feminists […]. [S]he moves, through her works, from a repudiation of rebellion against conventional views of women to an acceptance of that rebellion in her later works; and, in each of her major works, she supports one or more causes of contemporary feminists [….] against patriarchy\u27s privileging of men\u27 (32).
Benjamin Jowett commented: \u27There was a time when [Eliot] greatly desired to write something for the good of women\u27 (27); but she was doubtless also afraid that overtly expressed ideas combined with her anomalous position with Lewes in society would harm the women\u27s movement. Attitudes have shifted so much that we now find it difficult to grasp how, especially early on, Eliot was marginalized as a dangerous \u27scarlet woman\u27. The alcoholic heroine of \u27Janet\u27s Repentance\u27, a brave depiction of a woman suffering at the hands of her brutal, drunken husband, though even with legal sanction (77), was then the least popular of Eliot\u27s characters, in a story, according to Harriet Martineau, pervaded with \u27moral squalor\u27; but the strong disapproval of Janet\u27s own drinking, manifest in (and out of) the novel, betrays the double standard then prevalent in a society which often admired her husband\u27s large capacity for alcohol consumption. Maggie Tulliver was seen as wicked, and The Mill was often forbidden reading for girls, who, as Florence Nightingale complained, were taught that \u27women have no passions\u27 (228, n68). Lady Amberly, four years before her marriage, was allowed only to read the first half, while in 1885, when 19-year-old Harriet Weaver was caught reading the novel, the village minister publicly reprimanded her from the pulpit (230, n89). Indeed, the sexual passion between Step hen and Maggie still has the power to move and disturb readers: we are here in stormy Bronte territory

Szirotny, June Skye

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The George Eliot Review English, Department of
2015
Review of George Eliot's Feminism: 'The Right to
Rebellion'
June Skye Szirotny
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Szirotny, June Skye, "Review of George Eliot's Feminism: 'The Right to Rebellion'" (2015). The George Eliot Review. 676.
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger/676
June Skye Szirotny, George Eliot's Feminism: 'The Right to Rebellion' 
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. ix + 284. 
ISBN 978 1137406149. £60. 
This luminous new work - dedicated to 'the millions of women deprived of life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness by society's misogynist myths' - casts fresh light on George Eliot's 
feminism, which has often been the subject of controversy. 'I want to show' , says the author, 
'that however ambivalent George Eliot was about practical matters, she strongly accepted most 
of the ideals of contemporary feminists [oo.]. [S]he moves, through her works, from a 
repudiation of rebellion against conventional views of women to an acceptance of that 
rebellion in her later works; and, in each of her major works, she supports one or more causes 
of contemporary feminists [oo.] against patriarchy's privileging of men' (32). 
Benjamin Jowett commented: 'There was a time when [Eliot] greatly desired to write 
something for the good of women' (27); but she was doubtless also afraid that overtly 
expressed ideas combined with her anomalous position with Lewes in society would harm the 
women's movement. Attitudes have shifted so much that we now find it difficult to grasp how, 
especially early on, Eliot was marginalized as a dangerous 'scarlet woman'. The alcoholic 
heroine of 'Janet's Repentance', a brave depiction of a woman suffering at the hands of her 
brutal, drunken husband, though even with legal sanction (77), was then the least popular of 
Eliot's characters, in a story, according to Harriet Martineau, pervaded with 'moral squalor'; 
but the strong disapproval of Janet's own drinking, manifest in (and out of) the novel, betrays 
the double standard then prevalent in a society which often admired her husband's large 
capacity for alcohol consumption. Maggie Tulliver was seen as wicked, and The Mill was often 
forbidden reading for girls, who, as Florence Nightingale complained, were taught that 'women 
have no passions' (228, n68). Lady Amberly, four years before her marriage, was allowed only 
to read the first half, while in 1885, when 19-year-old Harriet Weaver was caught reading the 
novel, the village minister publicly reprimanded her from the pulpit (230, n89). Indeed, the 
sexual passion between Step hen and Maggie still has the power to move and disturb readers: 
we are here in stormy Bronte territory. 
June Szirotny's monograph is, in fact, the place to find what Eliot and other nineteenth-
century writers actually thought about the oppression of women, unencumbered by 
anachronistic political views and the self-satisfied denunciations by 'radical' feminists, 
particularly of the 1970s and 1980s, who at their most extreme argued for the removal of Eliot 
from the canon. As Gillian Beer once commented, there is something fundamentally wrong 
when such women try to exclude the most high-achieving woman from the sisterhood. 
Szirotny, however, casts her net wide across the nineteenth century, in the sensible belief that 
Eliot's feminism needs to be evaluated by comparison with contemporary writers - from the 
notorious bathos of Mrs Ellis (according to whom married women's 'highest duty' was 'to 
suffer and be still'; for woman 'has nothing, and is nothing, of herself', 229), to radical John 
Stuart Mill and that public protester against her husband's cruelty, Caroline Norton, who both, 
unlike Eliot, had doubts about married women pursuing a vocation, an issue that divided 
contemporary feminists; and thence to Florence Nightingale, who states in 'Cassandra' (1859) 
- a seminal work - that some women chose celibacy and the 'sacrifice [of] marriage, because 
they sacrifice all other life ifthey accept it'; for, Nightingale asks, having vulgarly' sold herself 
for an establishment', is a woman any better than 'those we cannot name [prostitutes]?' (235). 
Thus Szirotny, in one of her many parallels between Eliot's novels and contemporary theory, 
67 
argues that Romola, depicted as having suffered a brutal marriage, and in order to promote 
female autonomy, sets up 'a community of women' at the novel's end - thus following 
contemporary feminists who encouraged 'numerous "redundant women" [ ... ] to form 
networks', to avoid a corrupted, self-serving and brutal patriarchy (105). 
Not one to mince words, Szirotny decries patriarchy as an 'evil [that] is often 
intolerable', a view she attributes to Eliot, probably rightly (though Eliot would not have used 
words like 'patriarchy' and 'feminism', which only came into vogue near the end of the 
century) (188-9). Clearly driven by strong emotion, Szirotny reveals an extraordinarily 
thorough reading of her subject. This could only be the product of years of immersion in Eliot's 
fiction. Relatively unknown, short pieces of Eliot's journalism are also profitably looked at, 
which show surprisingly forthright statements on woman's position at an earlier time when 
Eliot was not constrained by fiction-writing to avoid 'decided deliverances' - not least of these, 
her deprecation of relations between the sexes where woman is regarded as a chattel- 'a mere 
piece of furniture, or livestock, too insignificant to determine in any degree a man's happiness 
or misery' ('Menander', 1853,26), something which brings a character like Lydgate to mind. 
Through intensive readings of Eliot's fiction, therefore, informed by a fine, close study 
of her life's story, this book's argument, that Eliot was more radically engaged with the Woman 
Question than is commonly thought, is convincing. Certainly, I know of no Victorian novelist 
who depicts so powerfully the terrible sufferings of women at the hands of power-loving men. 
Eliot, as Szirotny demonstrates with sustained acuity in this long work, almost always critiques 
patriarchy's double standards in her fiction, and espouses the right of women to marry whom 
they please (though not always with happy results when they get their way, as in the case of 
Dorothea and Casaubon). She implicitly argues for the pursuit of education, and a vocation in 
a world which put barriers up for women seeking careers in a society which disliked middle-
class women engaging in any significant occupation. She maintains clearly if indirectly the 
right to child custody, as is demonstrated for instance in argument over Eppie's best place of 
domicile in Si/as Marner. She depicts a woman's entitlement to leave a husband who is a 
malefactor who takes part in crime and continuous betrayal of others, as we see in Romola's 
difficult 'right to rebellion'; and Janet Dempster permanently leaves her spouse after he throws 
her out on a cold night. Also, Gwendolen's intense pain, psychologically but probably also 
sexually at the hands of her sadistic husband in Deronda, where her virtual imprisonment leads 
to an inevitable, intense wish for his death, is surely a silent plea for divorce. Eliot's complexity 
is suggested by the fact that in The Spanish Gypsy, Fedalma's self-sacrifice is not only seen as 
heroic, she is also seen as a young girl victimized in an androcentric world (119). The final 
chapter on the many instances of child abuse, which Szirotny ably uncovers in Daniel 
Deronda, is especially poignant. 
Szirotny's study includes a psychological analysis of Eliot and her traumatic early 
experiences, to interpret how these experiences affected her writings, how the working through 
of problems in her creative life became a catalyst which helped radicalize her subsequent art, 
relatively speaking; and this section is a tour deforce, unfortunately too complex to detail here. 
The temptation to 'get into the head' of one's subject carries the risk that the writer reveals as 
much about herself as about her subject, but Szirotny manages skilfully to retain objectivity 
and distance. She cites Eliot's remark that at best, 'Human happiness is a web with many 
threads of pain [in] it' (L, lll, 230). Comments by Cross and Haight on Eliot's 'need to be 
loved', over which much ink has been spilled, are bravely re-assessed. Yes, she often stood 
alone and against others with courage, but she did also suffer from a morbid dependency on the 
68 
love of those she was close to. Like Maggie, painful difficulties with her conventional, 
bourgeois family and the fact that she was undervalued because a girl created, as the author 
contends, a narcissistic disturbance, which Eliot decries as her 'egoism'. She was 'abnormally 
bonded to others because, from a young age, she felt loved, and thus able to survive, only as 
she served others' needs' (79; emphasis added) - something Lewes and Agnes and the children 
had good reason to appreciate. The need of women to serve at this time was common. Florence 
Nightingale states: 'The family uses people, not [oo.] for what they are intended to be, but for 
what it wants from them - its own uses' (229). Eliot herself commented that her own youthful 
experience was worse than Maggie's in her novel - 'Everything is softened, as compared with 
real life' (229). Again and again, though not given to exaggeration, she tells us that no one 
could have suffered worse from years ofloneliness and 'terrible pain' - how she had frequently 
been 'inert and suffering' (18). Szirotny states astutely that Eliot's early idealists are unable to 
maintain rebellion against their fathers, and resignation is enjoined, because of their intense 
emotional dependence on a paternal figure, just as Eliot, engaging in a Holy War with her own 
father, eventually capitulated, despite her apostasy, to his demands. Thus in later works where 
rebellion becomes possible, the protagonists are able partially to protect their own boundaries 
because they are adopted and thus less neurotically unable to assert a tendency to rebellion. I 
would add that, suffering seriously from her own aggressive father fatigue, the author of 
Romola kills off every figure who can be construed as paternal in the novel, and this was 
cathartic: Romola's father, brother, uncle, husband, confessor, and father-in-law are all 
dispatched to the grave - thus largely freeing Eliot from the need to engage with fathers 
subsequently - except, at the end of her career, for Alcharisi's repudiation of her controlling 
biological father in Deronda - an action which, however, has serious consequences for her 
health. There can be little doubt that the Princess's particular narrative is partly 
autobiographical. Furthermore, after her life began with Lewes, as Szirotny points out, Eliot 
'had never been so happy [oo.J, and her happiness went on deepening as she found in her "one 
perfect love", [oo.] the sympathetic love she needed to function (18). 
Summing up the autobiographical nature of The Mill, Szirotny comments: 'There is no 
more accurate portrayal of the unhappiness of many Victorian girls under patriarchy than in this 
novel' [oo.]. The Mill is probably her grimmest work. It is not so much Maggie's death that tears 
us apart but our understanding that the world will be no better for the cataclysm [oo.]. But 
Maggie is dumb; she could never make anyone understand her, and a silenced Maggie leaves 
us no reason to think her sad story will not continue to be enacted' (78). 
This is an extremely distinguished work, and I regret that a short review can only give 
us a glimpse of the excellent analyses of the novels; I have decided to concentrate on The Mill, 
to give some idea of the flavor of the entire work. There are, however, occasional anomalies 
that sit uncomfortably beside the richness of the whole - a sporadic want of nuance that leads 
the author to label the adulterous Mrs Transome as a 'malefactor', in a work where the male 
'sinners', guilty of far worse, suffer far less grievous consequences. Tito Melema, more 
appropriately, is also labeled a 'malefactor'; but why is Arthur Donnithorne a 'stereotypical 
malefactor'? Nevertheless, this work succeeds in justifying its hypothesis that Eliot was more 
interested in women's difficulties than she has often been given credit for. It helps us to gain 
more insight into the enigmatic genius of the woman who called herself George Eliot. 
Brenda McKay 
Hertfordshire UniversitylBirkbeck College 
69 


English

Review of George Eliot\u27s Feminism: \u27The Right to Rebellion\u27

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Probing Interlayer Interactions in Transition Metal
Dichalcogenide Heterostructures by Optical Spectroscopy: MoS2/WS2 and MoSe2/WSe2

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Probing Interlayer Interactions in Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Heterostructures by Optical Spectroscopy: MoS<sub>2</sub>/WS<sub>2</sub> and MoSe<sub>2</sub>/WSe<sub>2</sub>

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