Mill on the_floss

The Victorian Experience




"Mrs Lewes is getting her eyes redder and swollener every morning as she lives through her tragic story. But there is such a strain of poetry to relieve the tragedy that the more she cries, and the readers cry, the better say I.” (G.H.

Lewes, 5 March 1860)


I cannot choose but think upon the timeWhen our two lives grew like two buds that kissAt lightest thrill from the bee’s swinging chime,Because the one so near the other is.

He was the elder and a little manOf forty inches, bound to show no dread,And I the girl that puppy-like now ran,Now lagged behind my brother’s larger tread.

I held him wise, and when he talked to meOf snakes and birds, and which God loved the best,I thought his knowledge marked the boundaryWhere men grew blind, though angels knew the rest.

If he said Hush! I tried to hold my breath;Wherever he said Come! I stepped in faith.


Autobiographical: Maggie grows up in a provincial milieu = reflects Eliot’s own struggles growing up as an intellectually ambitious girl. Several incidents related to GE’s own childhood: hacking off her hair, running away with gypsies…

A double Bildungsroman? How is Tom’s development explored sympathetically?


Tom’s schoolmaster Mr Stelling, declares that girls may have ‘a great deal of superficial cleverness; but they couldn’t go far into anything. They’re quick and shallow.’

Maggie is sent instead to Miss Firniss’s boarding-school, which concentrates more on the development of manners than the expansion of the mind

(Book 2, ch. 1).


‘an over-’cute woman’s no better nor a long-tailed sheep — she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that’ (Mr Tulliver, Book 1, ch. 2).

Maggie’s childhood reading: Pug’s tour of Europe, Animated Nature.

Daniel Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil

‘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?’ (Book 1, ch. 3)

John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress



‘It had the corners turned down in many places, and some hand, now for ever quiet, had made at certain passages strong pen and ink marks, long since browned by time. Maggie turned from leaf to leaf and read where the quiet hand pointed. … She went on from one brown mark to another, where the quiet hand seemed to point, hardly conscious that she was reading—seeming rather to listen to a low voice. ‘


The Mill on the Floss as tragic Bildungsroman, or anti-Bildungsroman?

Susan Fraiman Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development 1993 (Columbia UP, 1992)


GE, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ - published anonymously in the Westminster Review in 1856. In the essay, Eliot criticises the majority of novels written by and for women, objecting to their 'silliness' and disregard for reality.

In contrast, Eliot wants to explore how social environment acts to produce different outcomes for young women who are apparently born in similar circumstances e.g. Maggie and Lucy...


"It's for your own good I say this."

Modeled on GE’s mother's sisters, the Pearsons

"to leave an unimpeachable will”

A particular moment in human development –‘how rich Protestant peasants lived in middle England ‘ (Hughes)

played out in the character of Maggie

“She’s more like a gypsy nor ever,” says Aunt Pullet; “it’s very bad luck, sister, as the gell should be so brown . . . I doubt it’ll stand in her way i’life to be so brown” (i:7:68).

“I can tell you something about Geography too – that’s about the world we live in – very useful and interesting,…it’s in my Catechism of Geography” (i:11:109). (Maggie offering to educate the Gypsies


Transgressive romantic liaisons - Philip Waken, Stephen Guest

However, to Stephen, “if the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie?” (vii:4:475).

Ultimately Maggie chooses “duty” over passion; brother and family over her lover; the past over the future.

Renunciation rewarded only by death – a deeply pessimistic novel?


Maggie inherits her innovative spirit from her father and his lineage:

“Mr. Tulliver’s grandfather had been heard to say that he was descended from one Ralph Tulliver, a wonderfully clever fellow, who had ruined himself” (iv:1:274).


In Sophocles’ play, Antigone insists on carrying out funeral rites for her dead brother, despite Creon’s orders – this leads to her own death

In her essay, “The Antigone and its Moral” (1856), GE explains that the basis of Antigone’s tragedy is the “dramatic collision” of principles of equal validity; not the triumph of one set of principles over the other.

“the impulse of sisterly piety which allies itself with reverence for the Gods,” and this “clashes with the duties of citizenship; two principles, both having their validity, are at war with each other”.

Maggie, however, acts more on feeling (‘sympathy’) than duty.


The Mill on the Floss indicates that emotional attachment to the past is stronger than an imagined future. Other novels display a stronger belief in innovation and progress. E.g.

Silas Marner: Eppie chooses to remain with her adoptive father, Silas, and the community to which she has grown accustomed;

Middlemarch: Dorothea renounces her inheritance from Casaubon.

However a reversal in Daniel Deronda: blood comes to be associated with race.



Education

Mill on the_floss