"A storm in her mind": representations of female melacholy in Ruth and The mill on the floss

There is a long history of criticism concerning certain trends in the characterisation of female characters within Victorian novels. This thesis aims to explore a trend that has been largely ignored within literary criticism, the melancholic woman. This thesis will explore the representation of female melacholy in two Victorian realist novels, Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth and George Eliot's The mill on the Floss. It aims to demonstrate the ways in which representations of female melancholy functioned politically in these novels, in either reflecting or undermining Victorian gender ideologies. In approaching this question the intersections between Victorian medical and social understandings of female melancholy and the literary representations of melancholy will be examined. Through this exploration it will be argued that these novels were a space in which the assumptions underpinning the Victorian psychological discourse, and wider normative ideologies of womanhood could be challenged and complicated.