The Mill on the FlossEliot, George(1860)

Nathan Uglow, Trinity and All Saints, Leeds

Domain: Literature. Genre: Novel. Country: England, Britain, Europe.

After the success of her first full-length novel, Adam Bede, George Eliot quickly set to work onthe writing of a second novel, encouraged both by her husband-agent, George Henry Lewes, andher publisher, John Blackwood. Curiously, she knew that the story would end tragically in acataclysmic flood before she even knew what the details of that story would be. In January 1859she researched the flood-history of the River Dove, near her childhood home in Wawickshire, butit was clearly not floody enough. Rivers in Weymouth and Dorchester failed to inspire her a fewmonths later, and finally it was the Trent River at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire that provided herwith the requisite images for the fictional village of St. Ogg’s on the Floss River. After someastute bargaining Lewes fixed a price of 3,000 pounds for the novel, and it was ready forpublication in April 1860, appearing under Blackwood’s suggested title, The Mill on the Floss.Although it had sold 6,000 copies by June, the reviews were modest with a tendency to worryabout its morality. It is widely assumed that the reviewers’ moral equivocation was due to thefact that Mary Ann Evans had been exposed as the real George Eliot, and that her relationshipwith G. H. Lewes, separated but not divorced from his wife, had unsettled them. However, as weshall see, the novel’s complex and strictly determined moral position may well have been the rootcause behind critical prevarication.

The Mill on the Floss essentially narrates the history of a tragic relationship between MaggieTulliver and her brother, Tom, whose childhood closeness is progressively fractured by thepressures and demands of life. These pressures and demands are thrust to the fore with the loss oftheir father’s mill to his rival, the lawyer Wakem, and the fall of the Tullivers from socialrespectability. The ensuing plot developments serve to highlight the alternative ways in whichTom and Maggie cope with such adversity, and how they cope will turn out to have beenprogrammed by their emotional formation so lovingly documented in the extensive account oftheir childhood. Thrown suddenly into the adult world by the death of his father, Tom’simperative need for social power and status results in his dedication to the acquisition of moneyand family honour. Repeatedly he privileges these social abstractions over the warmth andhappiness of the real loving community that his family is ever able to offer him. As head of thefamily Tom tries to manoeuvre Maggie into a socially advantageous marriage, and then severs allties with her when she refuses to co-operate. The artificial divisions created by social conventions

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are only overcome when death renders clear the primacy of natural love over the false medium ofsocial ritual and status.

For most readers it is the bravura recreation of the child’s-eye view of life in the first two of thethree books of the novel that constitutes its true value. But though Eliot’s writing can be taken asa series of memorable vignettes, it is carefully structured as a systematic sequence of childhoodphases that constitute an imaginative statement of a specific psychological thesis. While writing Adam Bede (1857) Eliot had stated that my stories always grow out of my psychologicalconception of the dramatis personae, and with The Mill on the Floss she shows that it is still thecharacter of her subjects that is important. In fact, The Mill on the Floss is Eliot’s most deliberateattempt to explore the consequences of the choices children have to make when they begin tointeract with others, struggling to find a just image of themselves and a place within the socialorder. The plot of the novel and its subsidiary episodes are constructed so as to highlight theimplications of the choice of social action. These implications of choice are essentially twofold.First, our choices and actions affect those around us and can rebound back upon us our actionsmay indirectly determine our fate, as Mr Tulliver’s short-sighted humiliation of Mr Wakemdemonstrates. But secondly, our choices also act directly, not just indirectly, upon us by formingor reforming our own character through each act of practical moral decision. FollowingWordsworth’s belief that the child is father to the man, Eliot gives greater weight to the earliestchoices, which, she believes, establish a characteristic bias for our subsequent choices.

Typical for a George Eliot novel, The Mill on the Floss features two central characters whosecharacters are carried in opposite directions, one toward altruism and one toward egotism; typicalfor an early Eliot novel, the fates of the two characters are directly intertwined. The separation ofMaggie and Tom is effectively predetermined and foreordained by Tom’s youthful internalisationof the social values (prestige, status) which he struggles to keep commensurate with his highself-esteem. As a child he can achieve prestige through his physical strength and dominantpersonality, but as an adult, such qualities are blunt instruments when not accompanied by theability to accommodate the feelings and rights of others, factors which are socially and legallyprotected. His main emotions quickly become those of self-assertion and resentment: havingaccepted a socialised ideal of success, he aspires to it, resenting those who have it (unjustly) andautomatically despising those who seem likely to inherit it (Philip Wakem). His attitude to theDodsons, his four maternal aunts, whose social position he admires without admiring them in theslightest, is a mirror reversal of his attitude to Philip.

Maggie, on the other hand, never manages to internalise the accepted social values and alwaysretains an internal distance from them, even as she comes to recognise their ubiquitous hold overothers. For her, the immediate experiences of life are generous and selfless love for others andnatural joy when such feelings are reciprocated. Such spontaneous natural love forms andmaintains a mutually supportive community, irrespective of social formality, which she only everexperiences as a clumsy and ambiguous medium for communicating her true feelings. Her basicchildhood emotion is that of frustration, and her character is best evoked through a memorablesequence of childhood vignettes in which her natural attitude clashes with the alien world of

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social formality. Cutting off her own hair to distract Tom from teasing her (chapter 7) andrunning away to join a gypsy community (chapter 11) deliberately highlight how her need forreciprocal affection has evaded socialisation. Her later decision to run away with the foppishStephen Guest is somewhat incredible but serves the purpose of making her a fallen womanfigure cast out from society, preparing the way for the final reconciliation in extremis with hercensorious brother.

Although the plot is largely driven forward by the clumsy activity of the male characters, it isviewed very much from the perspective of those (such as Maggie) who basically suffer from andtry to cope with the results of the masculine recourse to the world of public activity. Even theomniscient authorial voice implicitly presumes the validity, though not the wisdom, of Maggie’snatural view of the world, and insistently underscores the fatalistic implications of those whoselimited conception of human interrelations make them value false social idols of gold, status, andpower. To a great extent it is the masculine possession of brute strength and the assumptions ofsocial superiority this causes in youth that is proposed as the cause of their drive to act in thesocial world rather than to live the uneventful life that privileges mutuality and altruism. In thiswe can see the influence of Eliot’s favourite philosophers. Auguste Comte had categorised menas active agents in social and historical life, and women as essentially passive, but lessconventionally, he had attributed the greater value to the emotionally cohesive and constructiverole of women rather than to the socially divisive nature of men. Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Essence of Christianity Eliot had translated in 1854, provided clear and persuasive descriptions ofhumanity’s innate tendency to create artificial idols and values, through which individuals thenproceed to evaluate themselves and to the service of which they dedicate their lives.

Eliot does more than rehearse a Wordsworthian distinction between the natural world ofspontaneous emotional generosity and the artificial medium of social formality, which frequentlyusurps the place of nature. Instead she provides a more precise and systematic account of thederivation and development of these distinct categories, and often does so with tacit reference tothe systematic philosophy of dynamic development espoused by writers such as Comte andFeuerbach. Consequently there is present in the novel a definite emphasis on determinatepractical action as a way to reinstate the natural qualities of life. Ultimately this begins with theindividual reformation of character, and the implication is that the process also ends here, withthe messier practicalities of the political world withering away of their own accord in the face ofreformation of communal attitudes. Wisely Eliot frees herself entirely from such utopianspeculation by emphasising the active reform of character as an individual end in itself.

Tom is like one of Feuerbach’s idolaters, who imagine that society is just childhood writ large,and that strength and charismatic presence remain the key to society. The truth is that society isof a different order to the small-scale world of domestic relations, and is governed by theimpersonal mechanisms of law and economic exchange, which require strategic mental effort andsustained application rather than charisma. Crucially the story’s greatest social success is thesimple Bob Jakin, who lacks all but the most rudimentary emotional skills, but slowly builds upgreat wealth by his ability to carry commercial products from cheap places to expensive ones,

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repeatedly. As a child Tom lorded it over Bob, but this only serves to measure the difference inquality, not just in degree, of the personal world of childhood to the impersonallegal-social-economic one of adulthood.

Thus the real cause of the reviewers’ moral equivocation is most likely to be the socialphilosophy that structures the fictional worlds Eliot created. Characters who have a falseconception of the Social Good and how to realise it are treated far more sympathetically, evenwhere they wreak havoc, than those who social position is assured and never put at risk. Whensome critics suggested that Tom was harshly judged, and that his insistence on promoting thefamily name was a noble ideal, Eliot was the first to agree. Tom does desire what he sees as agood not just for himself, but for his family as well; the criticism is that he misconstrues thenature of that good (money and social prestige), and the means to achieve it (authoritarian forceof character). The other socially successful characters are the Dodson aunts, comic creationswhose addiction to possession of social status precludes its enjoyment or usage. Like so manyDickensian characters, they experience their lives so thoroughly mediated through abstractedsocial values that they can hardly be said to live at all, and attempt to realise the eternal serenityof death as an ideal state here on earth. The credibility and significance of Tom’s repentancereveals Eliot’s empathy for him, whereas such repentance from one of the Dodson aunts wouldsimply be comic rather than tragic.

Having established such an absolute gulf between Tom and Maggie only an extraordinary event,one that can suspend the ethical rule of polite society, will be able to reunite them. The final floodfulfils this function, and though it is a wilfully tragic deus ex machina, brought in to conclude theplot, it still provides a powerful moment of resolution.

Nathan Uglow, Trinity and All Saints, LeedsFirst published 18 June 2002

Citation: Uglow, Nathan. "The Mill on the Floss". The Literary Encyclopedia. 18 June 2002.[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=167, accessed 13 August 2010.]

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