The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner

Nahem Yousaf, Andrew Maunder

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350317680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This New Casebook explores the enduring significance of George Eliot's novels The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861). Eliot's radical cultural politics and the arrestingly original fictional strategies that characterise two of her most popular novels are explored from a variety of perspectives - feminist, historicist, structuralist and psychoanalytic.

1

The Mill on the Floss, the Critics, and the Bildungsroman

SUSAN FRAIMAN

I

Critics of The Mill on the Floss, no less than Maggie herself, have been troubled by the questionable appeal of Stephen Guest. Alongside the more famous debate between those who favour the pictorial charms of Adam Bede and those who prefer the philosophical challenges of Middlemarch, readers of Eliot have continued to ask: Is the handsome heir to Guest and Co. really, as Leslie Stephen would have it, ‘a mere hair-dresser’s block’? F. R. Leavis’s contribution in The Great Tradition (1948) was arguably not only to recuperate the later novels and Eliot’s reputation in general but also to raise the stakes in discussions of Maggie’s lover by claiming that Eliot herself, identifying with her heroine, ‘shares to the full the sense of Stephen’s irresistibleness’.¹ Eliot’s own blind weakness for Stephen constitutes, according to Leavis, a lapse from ‘the impersonality of genius’ into an embarrassing mode of ‘personal need’.² Gordon Haight, on the other hand, in his 1961 introduction to the Riverside Edition, spent several pages defending Stephen. Noting Eliot’s interest in the theory of evolution, he characterised Philip and Stephen as rivals in a Darwinian process of sexual selection and observed that ‘in simple biological terms Stephen is a better mate’.³ As Haight’s formulation implies, the continual question of Stephen is in many ways the question of finding a mate for Maggie.⁴ A similar phrasing of Maggie’s dilemma – and the dilemma of The Mill on the Floss – as a matter of heterosexual options was implicit, I think, in John Hagan’s careful 1972 overview of Eliot criticism. Hagan sorted Eliot critics into two opposing camps: those who value Maggie’s self-denial, associated with her loyalty to Tom and her father (Bernard J. Paris, Reva Stump, George Levine) and those who value her self-assertion, associated with her attraction to Stephen and Philip (William R. Steinhoff and Jerome Thale). Resuming Hagan’s metacritical project some twenty years later, I would say that his reading not only codified but was itself the culmination of that pre-1970s critical strand tending to cast The Mill on the Floss’s narrative alternatives in terms of competing male claims.⁵

Yet there were also critics of the fifties and sixties who, rather than judge the sufficiency of this man or that to satisfy Maggie, interpreted her fate in ways that exceeded such a framework. In his 1968 book on the early novels, U. C. Knoepflmacher paused over the ‘enlightened’, pro-Stephen view (that Maggie should just have gone with the flow) only to moot the controversy altogether by asserting that ‘Stephen is merely a convenient device’.⁶ Arguing that ‘Maggie is condemned, regardless of her choice’,⁷ he speculated on the relation between her downfall and issues of gender identity.⁸ Barbara Hardy’s reading of Maggie, though written nine years earlier, went further still to circumvent the Stephen–Tom continuum. The tragedies of Eliot’s heroines begin, she proposed, in their disabilities as women, particularly their lack of education.⁹ Since Hardy and Knoepflmacher, the emergence in the seventies of feminist criticism – an intervention that will be one of this chapter’s recurrent concerns – has produced a wealth of elaborations on these early gender analyses of Maggie’s plight. Whereas Hagan saw both of Maggie’s male-defined objects as ‘good’, her tragedy arising from their incompatibility,¹⁰ feminist critics have in general insisted that both goals available to Maggie are ‘bad’; variations on the same catastrophe, the endings implied by lover and by brother may each, in and of itself, entail Maggie’s self-denial. Though Stephen and Tom still have their partisans, critics of many feminist stripes have taken for granted the overdetermination of Maggie’s doom, reshaping the critical debate accordingly. If they agree on Maggie’s inevitable defeat (and its comment on conditions for Victorian women), they are divided about whether she goes to her destiny kicking or quiescent.

In the context of an early seventies feminism concerned to expose and protest female victimisation, one strain of readings stressed Maggie’s systematic disempowerment and resignation to her plight. Elizabeth Ermarth, in ‘Maggie Tulliver’s Long Suicide’ (1974), suggested that Maggie internalises ‘crippling norms’ and ‘grows up fatally weak’.¹¹ Three years later, in A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter concurred, calling Maggie a ‘heroine of renunciation’ in contrast to the rebellious Jane Eyre.¹² Another early feminist critic, in an impulse again typical of the seventies, gave this reading for female self-sacrifice a different political twist. Patricia Spacks also identified Maggie with what seem to be choices against herself but explained that, in terms of Eliot’s distinctly ‘female’ Victorian morality, the acceptance of worldly defeat may constitute a spiritual victory.¹³ Marianne Hirsch’s more recent consideration of The Mill on the Floss as a female Bildungsroman is arguably in this tradition as well. Like Ermarth and Showalter, Hirsch laments Maggie’s disadvantage in the social sphere; like Spacks, however, she is also interested in tracing another, compensatory path of spiritual success. Once again, by shifting into a recuperated ‘female’ register (in this case a developmental model valuing inner over outer growth, return to origins over separation from family), Hirsch is tempted to redeem Maggie’s fate. What looks like a disastrous Bildung by male standards may actually look something like success within a renovated paradigm.¹⁴ Of course this kind of revision is crucial, and Hirsch makes an appealing case. Yet to conclude that Maggie’s untimely death completes what is ‘nevertheless a development of a total individual, spiritual, moral, intellectual, emotional, even sexual’¹⁵ is to downplay what Hirsch admits is the continual difficulty of Maggie’s story and to ignore the anger and resistance packed around this difficulty. Focusing either on failure or on a redefined success, the ground-breaking readings I have outlined above seem limited, finally, by their inattention to The Mill on the Floss’s portion of radical discontent. Here Nina Auerbach’s depiction of Maggie’s ‘demonism’ provides a valuable antidote. In ‘The Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie Tulliver’,¹⁶ Auerbach catalogued not Maggie’s weakness but rather her power to terrorise: Maggie kills rabbits, spills wine, crushes cake, mutilates dolls, drops books, dashes card houses, and hangs on Tom in ‘a strangling fashion’. This forceful rendition of the gothic extremity present in The Mill on the Floss strikes me as a necessary corrective to more palliating versions. Oddly, however, Auerbach’s essay links Maggie to witches, pagan goddesses, vampires, and other types of the monstrous female without examining the social meaning and operation of these types, and the result is almost to reify Maggie-the-witch as evil.¹⁷ Only by placing Maggie’s witchery in the context of ‘St Ogg’s’ circa 1825 can seemingly simple and arbitrary evil be recognised as systematic defiance and, moreover, a key site of protest in Eliot’s text.

Just as feminist scholarship in general needs to maintain a doubled view of women as agents as well as victims, it seems to me the most useful responses to The Mill on the Floss combine the two perspectives I have described. As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, feminist critics began to explore the complex tension between resignation and defiance in Eliot’s work. They did this in part by looking less at Maggie as a character and more at authorial strategies: George Eliot’s manipulation of ‘masculine’ plots and discourse. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Nancy Miller and Mary Jacobus¹⁸ to take three prominent examples, all decline to romanticise Maggie’s fate but look elsewhere in the text for struggle and ire. My own argument proceeds from these, and specifically from the view that the thwarting of Maggie’s Bildung can coexist with oppositional effects. I want to reaccent the way Maggie is dominated at every turn – denying, however, that all disobedience is curbed or that subordination can be rescued for a new ethical scheme. Sharing the interest of many of the studies above in The Mill on the Floss as a fiction of female development, I would situate the text’s polemic in precisely the story of Maggie’s embattled formation, which both invokes and, I believe, finally distances itself from the Bildungsroman based on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. […] I want to move from the perception that Maggie has trouble growing up to argue that George Eliot’s text takes on and has trouble with Goethe’s version of growing up, in a way that begins to call it into question. Inquiring into the uncomfortable fit between the conventional Bildungsroman and The Mill on the Floss, I will eventually be asking not only what this says about the novel but also what it might further reveal about the generic category. […] I will be resuming that genealogy of the genre with a few of those critics subsequent to Susanne Howe, exploring somewhat further the ideological implications of her legacy. Extending the investment throughout this book in feminist interventions into literary studies, I will be, more specifically, returning to the early 1970s in order to situate some popular notions about the Bildungsroman in relation to the dawning of American feminist criticism. Finally, I will be offering an alternative way of reading for formation, insisting less on the progress of an alienated individual than on her or his constitution by manifold social relationships – once again, attending less to the single-minded development of one character than to the tangle of conflicting notions about development and the duelling narratives that result.

For if the novel as a genre is notoriously about the individual in society – according to Ian Watt’s history, arising alongside and enabled by Cartesian, capitalist, and Calvinist conceptions of the individual – then the Bildungsroman, as Dilthey and Howe among others have defined it, brings this deep structure of the novel to the surface. Or if, as Fredric Jameson rephrases Watt’s account, the nineteenth-century novel does not reflect individual selves born of new philosophies and practices but rather works itself to produce a ‘mirage’ of isolate subjectivity,¹⁹ then the classic Bildungsroman would seem to do this work especially well. Thus Hartmut Steinecke, referring narrowly to those German novels in the wake of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795), called the Bildungsroman the ‘individual novel’ as opposed to the social novel.²⁰ It will be recalled that when Jerome Buckley extended the term to a British tradition from David Copperfield to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he too emphasised the special, artistic child set off from ‘his’ inimical environment. David Miles’s contention that the Bildungsroman since Goethe has become increasingly psychological (as the picaresque hero begins to look in his heart and write) suggests, indeed, a heightening of this genre’s preoccupation with the solitary, ever more introverted self. These views of the Bildungsroman are structured by and structure assumptions not only about the (male) protagonist’s autonomy but also about his progressive movement through the world. A crude picture of the genre shows an especially rugged or especially sensitive young man, at leisure to mull over some life choices, not so much connected to people or the landscape as encountering or passing through them as ‘options’ or ‘experiences’ en route to a better place. Travel, I have said, is key, for though the story pulls toward settling the youth – its telos is repose – what it actually recounts is his relentless advance.²¹

Several qualifications of this traditional mapping of the genre are in order. Goethe’s optimism notwithstanding, few of his successors’ novels progress toward happy, assimilative endings. But if the Bildungsroman is less hopeful and less integrative than Wilhelm Meister (it does not always, as Hegel claimed, bring its hero to embrace bourgeois society),²² it still generally assumes that some kind of movement is possible. This movement is not necessarily a literal journeying, say, from country to city; it may involve mental travel to a higher moral or emotional ground. It may bring the hero to terms or to blows with society. Often, as Buckley and Miles agree, it brings him to art. But in all cases it takes for granted that the Bildungsheld has room to manoeuvre and somewhere to go. Finally, I would note that these two imperatives – individualism and mobility – are closely related. Their coincidence is explicit in Buckley’s account, the hero journeying to the city in order to separate from his family. Of course all development narratives, including the classic German text, can be seen to strain against the composite model I have recounted. But it is fair to say that The Mill on the Floss, while alluding to the model (one that, unlike my other novelists, Eliot knew intimately), also resists it with special vehemence.²³ In their introduction to The Voyage In, Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland point out the insufficiency of the Bildungsroman, as it is usually construed, to describe works by women and featuring female protagonists. Yet this volume is mostly interested in identifying ‘distinctively female versions of the Bildungsroman’;²⁴ as in Hirsch’s essay on The Mill on the Floss (anthologised there), its emphasis is on recuperating an exclusively female form. My own, by contrast, is on Eliot’s engagement and struggle with the dominant paradigm. I read The Mill on the Floss less as a wholly alternative structure than as an ironisation and interrogation of the old.²⁵ My primary purpose is to locate the continual collisions between gender and received genre in The Mill on the Floss, to examine the stress points, blockages, and j...