Maggie's intense relations with her older brother Tom reflect the young MaryAnne's adoration of her only brother, Isaac Evans.
In its searching exploration of the roots of adult destiny in childhood experience, The Mill on the Floss owes an evident debt to her reading of Wordsworth, the great poet of memory. Ten years later, Eliot was to compose a Wordsworthian series of sonnets, ' Brother and Sister', in which she traces the sources of her nature in her childish love for Isaac: 'Those hours were seed to all my after good'. One of the chapters of The Mill on the Floss is also called ' Brother and Sister', and ' Sister Maggie' is among the titles Eliot considered for the book. The ineffaceable love that Maggie bears for Tom directs the deepest currents of the life that Eliot remembers and mourns in The Mill on the Floss. Yet Maggie's childhood is never an untroubled Eden. She is both unruly and emotionally vulnerable, constantly harassed by adult demands for a
feminine conformity which is alien to her nature, and distressed by Tom's reluctance to return her passionate affection. Tom Tulliver's severity, which grows ever more implacable as Maggie develops, also has roots in Eliot own history. Isaac Evans could not accept the firmminded choices that his devoted little sister made as she matured into a learned and stalwartly independent woman, abandoning the Evangelicalism of her adolescence, earning her own living,and scandalously setting up house with George Henry Lewes,who was already married. Isaac refused to see or write to this increasingly insubordinate member of his respectable family,and he forbade his sisters to maintain any contact with her.The illness and death of Eliot favourite sister Chrissey came in March 1859--just as Maggie Tulliver's story was taking shape. Eliot was bitterly grieved. 'It has ploughed up my heart.' Chrissey's death, like Isaac's intransigence, casts a long shadowover The Mill on the Floss.
Maggie Tulliver's misfortunes are closely intertwined with Eliot's own family difficulties. The novel insists on the claims of remembered affection, and at its sombre climax
Maggie voices Eliot strongest convictions: 'If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment' (p. 475). But the past had not, after all, bound MaryAnne Evans. She had needed to cast it off in order to becomeGeorge Eliot, and in the shape of the inflexible Isaac, it had stillmore conclusively rejected her. In The Mill on the Floss, Eliotsimultaneously represents and rewrites hard memories. Thefinal catastrophe is an expression of damage beyond repair. Adivided past can never be mended: 'the parted hills are leftscarred: if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same asthe old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear themarks of the past rending' (pp. 521-2). Nevertheless, the novel's ending insists on restored unity, a tragedy invested with thepower to heal--'In their death they were not divided' (p. 522).
The apparent disparity is characteristic of the energies of The Mill on the Floss, for this is a book whose richness is woven out of tension and persistent difference. Dorlcote Mill is not quite Arbury Mill, and the topography of St Ogg's is drawn from research in Lincolnshire, not Warwickshire. Eliot chose the town of Gainsborough, close to the meeting point of the Idle and the Trent, as an appropriate model for the provincial communitythat produces and then condemns Maggie Tulliver. Following F. R. Leavis, many critics have argued that Eliot is too close to Maggie, and is given to special pleading on her behalf. The reader is repeatedly asked to pity 'poor Maggie', and there is no doubt that her comfortless history dominates the novel. Yet this is a complicated matter, for Maggie is not merely an embryonic George Eliot, and in the presentation of her rebellious story Eliot is careful to set a critical distance between the narrator and her unlucky heroine. St Ogg's, 'that venerable town' (p. 115) which is served by Dorlcote Mill, is like Maggie's childhood presented in terms of its origins in nature and the past. 'It is one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature as much as the nests of the bower-birds or the winding galleries of the white ants'. This is, however, a curiously exotic kind of natural history, for neither bower-birds nor white ants are to be met with in theWarwickshire countryside. In making these comparisons, Eliot suggests that she, and her reader, might regard the provincial community of St Ogg's as an appropriate object for study, justas a biologist might study the strange natural phenomena encountered on field trips. The town is known, 'familiar with forgotten years', in Eliot resonant Wordsworthian phrase; yet it is also seen as an alien place. Before Maggie first enters the novel, Eliot makes a curious dream-beginning to her story, suggesting both sympathetic involvement and cool detachment from the events that are to follow. The full stream that flows past the mill is half remembered and half dreamed, as Eliot prepares the reader for what is to be her most fluid and unfixed fiction: `
I am in love with moistness, and envy the white ducks that are dipping their heads far into the water here among the withes--unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above' (p. 8). The Mill on the Floss thinks deeply about what water represents, with its power to generate and to destroy, and its associations with the flowing vitality embodied by Maggie Tulliver. But the observing narrator reminds us that she is not like the unmindful ducks she ironically envies--she belongs to 'the drier world above'. Eliot is fond of those ducks,as she is fond of Maggie, and she wants us to feel indulgent towards them. Nevertheless, her narrative voice instructs the reader to smile at them from a position of superior understanding and wider experience.When Tom is expected home from the academy, Maggie rebels against her mother's ruling that the morning is 'too wet' for her to go out and meet him, and 'suddenly rushed from under her hands and dipped her head in a basin of water standing near--in the vindictive determination that there should be no more chance of curls that day' (p. 27). In a rare moment of brotherly approval when the heedless Maggie accidentally catches a fish in the Round Pool, Tom calls her a 'little duck'(p. 40). Like the ducks, Maggie is awkward when seen by conventional eyes; like the ducks, she is unmindful of the fact.
She is constantly seen in conditions of forgetfulness. This is one of the many ways in which the novel associates her with water, whose 'rush' brings 'a dreamy deafness' (p. 8) to those who are near it. Maggie is always inclined to neglect what is expected of her. Her mother, foolish and ineffectually prophetic, is often the means of drawing the reader's attention to what matters most in the novel: 'if I send her up-stairs to fetch anything, she forgets what she's gone for, an' perhaps 'ull sitdown on the floor i' the sunshine an' plait her hair an' sing to herself like a Bedlam creatur' (p. 13). Here Maggie sounds as much like a mermaid as a creature from Bedlam; 'wanderin' upan' down by the water, like a wild thing: she'll tumble in someday' (p. 12). With her 'gleaming black eyes' (p. 13), Maggie has an indeterminate nature that, like that of a mermaid, combines humanity with something that is not quite human. She is persistently associated with animals. Eliot tells us that she is like a 'small Shetland pony' (p. 13), or a 'Skye terrier' (p. 16).The choice of analogy here is revealing. Shetland ponies and Skye terriers are (like white ducks) hardly wild or menacing beasts. They are small and domesticated--endearing rather than threatening. As she begins to grow into a young woman, the suggestion of animal life within Maggie becomes part of her erotic appeal. Philip Wakem, robbed of physical vigour by his deformity, is immediately struck by it. 'What was it, he wondered, that made Maggie's dark eyes remind him of the stories about princesses being turned into animals? . . . I think it was that her eyes were full of unsatisfied intelligence, and unsatisfied, beseeching affection' (p. 178). There is an unmistakable suggestion of Maggie as a pet dog, rather than a mermaid, here--the 'puppy-like' little girl that Eliot was to recall in the'Brother and Sister' sonnets. George Eliot liked dogs (sheacquired a much-cherished puppy, Pug, while writing The Mill on the Floss), and Maggie's story has a generous share of them. Yap, Mumps, and Minny are warmly observed canine charactersin their own right, and they have an active part to play in thestory. But they also serve to emphasize the enigmatic link between animal and human life that constitutes one of the deepest themes of the novel.
MAGGIE has a hybrid nature, dark and light, one ear turned back to the past; like Yap (the pet terrier) she spends much of the novel vaguely 'in search of a companion'. Her musical and impetuous temperament, with its exuberant physical animation, is vividly apparent in this episode when she runs out with the dog, grabbing her bonnet on the way out, with Luke calling after her. Significantly, Eliot likens Maggie to a 'Pythoness', the name given to the mysterious priestess of the Delphic oracle of Apollo, Greek god of music, healing, and light. Driven into a whirling frenzy by the god's possessing spirit, the ancient Pythoness would give cryptic replies to the supplicants who asked Apollo's help in solving their dilemmas. Here Eliot touches lightly on further layers of contradiction within Maggie's nature. She is a powerful figure, sometimes uncannily so; buts he is also, like the Pythoness, a passive medium for forces outside her control.
One implication of her occult energy is that though Maggie is often self-effacingly meek, she is also capable of destructive physical violence. As a child, she hammers nails into the head of her 'Fetish', impulsively chops off her bothersome long hair, knocks things over, and is commonly a source of disruption and disorder. In general, the reader is asked to see this as innocently engaging childish mischief, simply part of the charm of her animal high spirits. But we are not allowed to lose sight of something darker within Maggie's violence. In forgetting to feed Tom's cherished pet rabbits, she kills them. When we first see Tom and Maggie brought together as children,
she 'hung on his neck in rather a strangling fashion'(p. 33)--an ominous anticipation of their shared destiny. Jealous of Tom's attention to her cousin, the gentle Lucy Deane, Maggie ruthlessly pushes her into the mud. Hardly major sins, these incidents nevertheless accumulate in the reader's mind to suggest that there might be something to be feared in Maggie's unmindful impulses. As the demands of her fatally mixed disposition become more insistent, her condition is repeatedly juxtaposed with that of a helpless animal, or dark unthinking river. Drifting into her dangerous passion for Stephen Guest, she 'had no distinct thought . . . she was unable to look up, and saw nothing but Minny's black wavy coat' (p. 406). It is part of Maggie's misfortune that neither Philip nor Stephen is able to resolve the riddling oppositions which divide body from mind, and mind from spirit. She is left perilously confined within the conflicts of her enchantment, unprotected by the resources of human reason.
One of the 'opposites' (p. 409) which make up Maggie's character and function is that despite these repeated suggestions of something other than human in her make-up, she is endowed with a quick and penetrating
'unsatisfied intelligence' in a novel where mental acumen is a notably rare attribute. The multiplicity of her own nature enables Maggie to know that language, ideas, and moral decisions are likewise not simple matters. This is among the qualities that have tempted readers to see Maggie as a self-portrait. Like George Eliot, she is able to see from more than one perspective. Maggie is proud of her abilities and likes them to be acknowledged and admired. Understanding and self-satisfaction are both displayed when she explains to Tom that language allows for a more generous kind of good than he has yet realized:
'I know what Latin is very well,' said Maggie, confidently. 'Latin's a language. There are Latin words in the Dictionary. There's bonus, a gift.' Throughout her history, we see Maggie learning much from books. Her eager bookishness is another reason for readers to find it easy to see the learned George Eliot in this spirited child,with her firm intention to be 'a clever woman' (p. 146). Yet even here Eliot's presentation is sharply ambivalent. Maggie is just as liable to forget her books as any other purposeful activity in which she is supposedly engaged. When we first see her with a book, she is characteristically 'dreaming' (p. 16) over it. Hearing Tom's name fall under suspicion in her father's conversation with Mr Riley, she casts the book aside as she leaps to his defence: 'Maggie jumped up from her stool, forgetting all about her heavy book, which fell with a bang within the fender'(p. 17). From the first, Maggie's relations with books are seen to be other than entirely intellectual. Mr Riley discovers that the book she was dreaming over was Daniel Defoe History of the Devil. Her response to the pictured fate of the witch is one of the many moments in the early chapters in the book which predict its conclusion:
That old woman in the water's a witch--they've put her in to find out whether she's a witch or no, and if she swims she's a witch, and if she's drowned--and killed, you know--she's innocent, and not a witch, but only a poor silly old woman. But what good would it do her then, you know, when she was drowned? Only, I suppose, she'd go to heaven, and God would make it up to her. (p. 18)
Her favourite illustration in Pilgrim's Progress represents the devil--a picture coloured for her by Tom--'the body all black,you know, and the eyes red, like fire, because he's all fire inside,and it shines out at his eyes' (p. 19). Here again, the momentis prophetic. Like Christian, Maggie has to struggle with diabolic forces throughout her pilgrimage, her soul always liable to possession by 'small demons' (p. 98), and her power intermittently evident in the shining eyes that Eliot repeatedlydescribes.
Maggie's books take their part in Eliot's carefully worked strategy of using these childhood episodes to foreshadow the action and define the themes of the narrative in sustained detail. The books open a window into her inner life. Later, Maggie is seen to depend on them as a means of constructing a resigned spiritual self-abnegation after her father's ruin. This process too is seen to be full of contradiction. In finding her salvation through books, Maggie Tulliver might seem to be following a pattern established in the life of George Eliot, whose resolute programme of self-education had offered the means of escape from dependent spinsterhood. The devotional books Maggie acquires from Bob Jakin, Thomas à Kempis The Imitation of Christ and John Keble The Christian Year, are among those that Mary Anne Evans had revered as a young woman moving through a phase of Evangelical fervour. But even in that Christian stage of her growth, Mary Anne had an active and restless relation with books that bears little resemblance to Maggie's quiescent absorption of à Kempis's teaching. It is significant that these texts did not enter Maggie's life throughher own purposeful seeking. They arrive accidentally, through Bob Jakin's fortuitous act of kindness. She interprets them as a spiritual extension of the self-forgetfulness to which her nature already inclines. What she sees in the Bible, à Kempis,and Keble, 'her three books' (p. 293), is a way towards the 'ekstasis or outside standing-ground' (p. 292) that she had previously sought through her childish dreaminess. Though self renunciation, rather than self-indulgence, is now her aim, Maggie is 'still panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found the key to it' (p. 291). In one of the most carefully written passages of the novel, Eliot makes her compassion for Maggie's situation abundantly clear, while emphasizing the dangerous insufficiency of the unquestioning acceptance of the self-effacing creed she has found in her books. z
. . hardly conscious that she was reading--seeming rather to listen . . .' (pp. 289-90). Here, the consequences of her unconscious state are at least partly constructive. But the loss of consciousness is never without risk, and Eliot intends us to remember this passage when she
dwells later on the role played by Maggie's 'sensibility to the supreme excitement of music' (p. 401) in her succumbing to the magnetic sexual charm of Stephen Guest: 'all her intentions were lost in the vague state of emotion produced by the inspiring duet--emotion that seemed to make her at once strong and weak: strong for all enjoyment, weak for all resistance'(p. 416). Maggie's experience of books and music, and of love, combine to confirm rather than challenge her destructive hunger for the pleasure of oblivion.
George Eliot's own relations with books were of quite a different order. As if to balance the emotional intensity of a story so intimately bound up with her own memories and sorrows, The Mill on the Floss engages with the most fiercely contested intellectual and literary controversies of the day. The most autobiographical of her novels, it is also a complex record of her mature response to a lifetime's reading. In November 1859, as Eliot was reaching the final stages of the book, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published. She read it at once, and wrote to her friend Charles Bray on 25 November: 'It is an elaborate exposition of the evidence in favour ofthe Development Theory, and so, makes an epoch.' Ten dayslater, she expressed a cooler judgement to Barbara Bodichon, explaining that 'the Development theory and all explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes.
Though the mysteries of human love are the cardinal concern of her novel, they are explored alongside a pressing interest in explaining 'the processes by which things came to be'. Gillian Beer has shown how Victorian literature and Victorian science shared a changing imaginative world. Like Darwin's great work, The Mill on the Floss is a book about origins. George Eliot was much better acquainted than most of her contemporaries with current theories of the natural world--partly because of the share she took in the research of Lewes,who was a capable natural historian. Darwin's book struck her as the culmination of ideas that had been fermenting for years in the work of geologists and biologists who had overturned the old Christian certainties to shape their radical newinterpretations of the history of life on earth. The new science suggested that men and women had not, after all, been miraculously and separately created by God, but had gradually evolved, generation after generation, from older life-forms.
Eliot broods on the implications of contemporary natural science throughout her novel. What does it mean to be human? If the modern theories are correct (and by and large George Eliot was convinced by them), does it follow that we are no better than other animals? Sigmund Freud was later to suggest that the Darwinian movement amounted to a blow to human pride comparable to that represented by the Copernican revolution in thought centuries before. Here, as elsewhere, Eliot can be seen to anticipate Freudian insight. Humanity is not, after all, distinct from animal life:
We all know that little more than half a century ago the researches of Darwin and his collaborators and forerunners put an end to this presumption on the part of man. Man is not a being different from animals or superior to them; he himself is of animal descent, being more closely related to some species and more distantly to others.The acquisitions he has subsequently made have not succeeded ineffacing the evidences, both in his physical structure and in his mental dispositions, of his parity with them. This was the second, the biological blow to human narcissism.
It was not only her scientific knowledge that enabled Eliot todeal with this shock more easily than many; it was also, ironically, the nature and the intensity of her early Christian experiences. Though she no longer accepted the possibility of supernatural agency in human life, she never abandoned her
Evangelical belief that 'human narcissism' is the enemy of spiritual progress.
She had always believed in the need for humility. Now science had given her reasons for insisting on it. Maggie is not the only character in the novel to be associatedwith the animal world. If she is a 'little duck', her brother Tom is introduced to the reader as a goose: 'one of those lads that grow everywhere in England, and, at twelve or thirteen years of age, look as much alike as goslings' (p. 33). Lucy is constantly linked with harmless and diminutive animals: 'She was fond of feeding dependent creatures, and knew the private tastes of all the animals about the house, delighting in the little rippling sounds of her canaries when their beaks were busy with fresh seed, and in the small nibbling pleasures of certain animals which, lest she should appear too trivial, I will here call "the more familiar rodents"' (p. 370).
Lucy's association with caged canaries and mice makes hersound still more vulnerable than her friend Maggie, for whom she is evidently no match.
'While Maggie stood and unplaited her long black hair over her pink drapery, Lucy sat down near the toilette-table, watching her with affectionate eyes, and head a little aside, like a pretty spaniel' (p. 385). Lucy's relation with Maggie here mirrors that between Maggie and Stephen in the erotically charged and mutually destructive love-tangle that develops in the closing chapters of the book. Lucy, who playfully refers to Maggie's 'witchery' (p. 372) and 'general uncanniness'(p. 387), is almost as deeply under her spell as Maggie is under Stephen's, and here seems to become her creature, as Maggie finds herself on the verge of becoming Stephen's pet.
In suggesting such comparisons, Eliot never chooses wild or predatory creatures. This is not Tennyson's bestial 'Nature, redin tooth and claw', haunted by the disturbing possibility of human kinship with 'ape and tiger'. Tennyson's sense of Christian tradition led him to fear the implications of the new science. Like many of his contemporaries, he presented it as loathsome. George Eliot, writing like Lewes from a secular perspective, wants to reconcile her readers to the far-reaching significance of modern scientific interpretations of human nature. Though analogies with small domestic animals hardly promote the dignity of her characters, they make the interrelatedness of beast and man less threatening or degrading than it might otherwise have appeared. We have shared our lives with domestic animals throughout our history, so that the idea of a closer relationship than anything previously imagined might seem more like natural progression than revolutionary subversion. Any untamed creature that Eliot selects for purposesof comparison is usually equally innocuous.
In likening Mr. Stelling's ideas on education to the processes of a rock-boring mollusc, Eliot is thinking of the seaside expeditions she hadshared with Lewes: 'how should Mr Stelling be expected to know that education was a delicate and difficult business? anymore than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through a rock should be expected to have wide views of excavation. Mr Stelling's faculties had been early trained to boring in a strait line, and he had no faculty to spare' (pp. 167-8).
14 Eliot's gleeful pun here--Mr Stelling is unquestionably avery boring man--makes the comparison not only reductive,but also reassuringly funny. This is a strategy she often adopts.
The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot's most tragic fiction, but it also displays her writing at its most comic. This is frequently apparent when she approaches issues of inheritance and origin, for Eliot shared Lewes's interest in heredity to the full.
The death of Maggie and Tom Tulliver is the catastrophic climax to histories of personal misfortune, and also the final destruction of a family. The unlucky union of the dissimilar Tullivers and the Dodsons produces two children who have inherited the seeds of their family's ruin.
Mr Tulliver, irascible and incompetent, is obsessed by his desire to retain control over the river that provides his livelihood. His unreasoning and futile hostility towards the calculating new world represented by the lawyer Wakem is his undoing. Mrs Tulliver, equally incompetent, was chosen to be his wife on the grounds of her remarkable stupidity. Mr Tulliver wants mastery over his family, just as he wants to dominate the river--both calamitously hubristic errors, for which he is amply punished. Neither of the Tulliver children is as foolish as their parents. But Maggie does inherit her father's disastrous tendency to forget himself at crucial moments. Its consequences are climactically seen when, beside himself with rage, he gives Wakem a violent thrashing, thus precipitating his own decline into the final unconsciousness of death. Tom is endowed with his mother's calm but equally obsessive nature, as narrowly focused on restoring the family inheritance as she had been onher linen and china. Maggie, to the family's surprise and dismay,is far more intelligent than her brother. Eliot renders her father's mixed pride and regret at this unexpected fact with brilliant insight and good humour:
'It seems a bit of a pity, though,' said Mr Tulliver, 'as the lad should take after the mother's side istead o' the little wench. That's the worst on't wi' the crossing o' breeds: you can never justly calkilate what'll come on't. The little un takes after my side, now: she's twice as 'cute as Tom. Too 'cute for a woman, I'm afraid,' continued Mr Tulliver, turning his head dubiously first on one side and then on the other. 'It's no mischief much while she's a little un, but an over-'cute woman's no better nor a long-tailed sheep--she'll fetch none the bigger pricefor that.' (p. 12).
