The Mill On The Floss – George Eliot, 1860 ★★★½

A Current Affair

A great novel doesn’t have to be a fun read. In fact, a case can be made that a certain amount of reader pain is required for any literary masterpiece to be properly appreciated.

But what can you say about a book that focuses on not one, not two, but three coincidences that are each ridiculous and painful in equal measure, all of them involving the river that figures in the second half of this novel’s title?

Don’t work or live on a river if you can at all help it, I guess.

Sorry to be so flippant. This is considered one of the great works of English literature, and in fact it is pretty smashing most of the way through. It’s just when Mill On The Floss goes wrong, it really goes wrong. I will try to be careful with spoilers, but consider yourself warned.

The book opens on Dorlcote Mill, a bucolic current-driven enterprise which sits alongside the River Floss. Back in the 1820s, the mill provided a home and a good living for a gruff if honest fellow named Tulliver. He and his wife had two children, Tom and Maggie. But what the river gives it can take away, too, as Mr. Tulliver learns to his lasting regret. Once grown to manhood, Tom seeks to reverse fortune’s tide, while Maggie tries to make her own way in a harsh world:

Mr. Tulliver had a destiny as well as Oedipus, and in this case he might plead, like Oedipus, that his deed was inflicted on him rather than committed by him.

Destiny is a central element of Mill On The Floss. It is implanted on Tom and Maggie not only via the mill itself, but through family and their own divergent personalities. The more they struggle with it, especially Maggie, the more destiny ensnares them and deepens its hold upon them.

George Eliot had something to say about destiny, being as she was a woman, Mary Anne Evans, writing under the pseudonym of a man. In Maggie, who emerges in the early chapters as the key figure of the novel, Eliot presents us with a female character who must struggle with harsh social expectations. She faces disapproval from her family for her flighty nature, for her preference of books over society, and even a dark complexion which runs against the predominant blondness of her mother’s side of the family. “The gell’s rude and brown” is how one of the less brusque aunties puts it.

Mary Anne Evans wrote under the name George Eliot in order to be taken seriously in a man's world. Maggie Tulliver is said to be an autobiographical portrait, an avid reader like Evans, though one not as free in her life choices. In life, Evans went off with a married man, something innocent Maggie never considers in The Mill On The Floss. Image from Wikipedia.

Even Eliot slips at least once and dubs Maggie “a conceited little minx.” A pleasure in reading Mill On The Floss is how Eliot works our sympathies not by pushing a character’s virtues but rather their foibles in a gently joshing way. It marks a welcome advance in narrative style.

Maggie starts out a willful child who can’t seem to help herself where her passions are concerned. She gets odd ideas in her head, like cutting off her hair for a lark or running off to join a gypsy camp. She’s the sort who can see her mistakes only in retrospect.

Tom’s trouble, conversely, is he is adamantine in his beliefs about right and wrong:

But Tom, you perceive, was rather a Rhadamanthine personage, having more than the usual share of boy’s justice in him – the justice that desires to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be hurt, and is troubled with no doubts concerning the exact amount of their deserts.

If you sense trouble forthcoming between the siblings regarding this diametric difference in worldview, give yourself a pretzel.

Eliot’s style is refreshingly different from other English authors of her century. Dickens gave you personalities that often verged on caricature, while later on Thomas Hardy pushed determinism to extremes. Realism is more central to Eliot’s approach. It proves a rewarding tack, especially when undergirded by abundant humor. People are really people in Mill On The Floss, each with his or her own set of pluses and minuses.

One of the best examples is a secondary character whose every appearance is pungently memorable. Mrs. Glegg is one of Mrs. Tulliver’s three sisters, on the face of it a very nasty example of upper-middle-class snobbery in a book that is at times an extensive riff on this very subject. Yet Mrs. Glegg is also the center of some markedly comic moments, particularly late in the novel when the weather gets stormier. And she proves surprisingly less miserable in some things than do other characters.

Even the villain of the piece, Wakem, has his good points. Not that Mr. Tulliver can see, to be sure, but we get a broader view of how this operator of angles, who more or less cheats the Tullivers out of their mill by employing the Floss to his advantage, is not all bad, just limited by his mercenary perspective.

A constant focus of Eliot’s, and also one of the novel’s core strengths, is the way it draws upon the rise of the middle class at the dawn of the Industrial Age. Not that she presents this development in a positive light. We see, for example, the town of St. Ogg’s, closest population center to Dorlcote Mill near where the Floss meets the English coast, as a place of marked narrowness and materialism. Gone, notes Eliot, is the time when spiritual or political matters moved the townspeople:

The mind of St. Ogg’s did not look extensively before or after. It inherited a long past without thinking of it and had no eyes for the spirits that walked the streets.

For quite a while, some 350 or so pages in my Penguin edition, Eliot draws out this world in engaging detail. She employs sharp twists of plot to keep us interested in the parallel lives of Maggie and Tom Tulliver, as he goes off to a boarding school and she undergoes a period of religious self-denial. Both meet Wakem’s son, Philip, who stakes a claim on Maggie’s affections not easily dispensed, however Tom tries.

Maggie looks put out as Tom favors his cousin Lucy with his attentions. This will result in one of Maggie's many youthful acts of rebellion, which provide notes of bucolic humor as well as hints of the conflict to come. Image from finithajose.blogspot.com

The matter of the Waken claim on the mill, the first story twist that involves the Floss itself, causes the father to have a sudden, near-fatal stroke. We do get some overbaked melodrama here, but because Eliot is writing so well, you go with it. Or at least I did.

When the novel veers again from its realistic bent, the result is less happy. Maggie, now grown up and ready to re-experience life on its own terms, falls in love with her cousin Lucy Deane’s narcissistic beau, Stephen Guest. He’s presented as an unlikable cad, the sort who presses his claims on Maggie’s affections so ruthlessly you are left to wonder at her attraction. Although we are told again and again of his handsomeness, he seems otherwise a poor match.

“Of course, you are angry with me for coming,” he tells her after chasing her down at the farm of her poorer relatives, whom he orders around like servants. “Of course it is of no consequence what a man has to suffer; it is only your woman’s dignity that you care about.”

Eliot doubles down on this part of the story in a starry-eyed way that goes against the grain of all she set down before. As Stephen sets his sights on dark-eyed Maggie, both are eventually swept away. This happens both figuratively and literally, when he takes her on a boat ride only to miss their destination, eventually floating adrift until a Dutch cargo vessel picks them up. A “Wake Up Little Susie” scenario then plays out, with Stephen noting they have been gone too long for them to do anything other than marry in order to avoid the social opprobrium that will likely result from such an episode.

Yet Maggie refuses to place her own happiness over that of Lucy, returning alone without having given Stephen’s love the consummation he sought. The predicted fallout happens nonetheless. However much she explains herself, tongues still wag. A minister puts her up for a while as a governess, but eventually the gossip gets too much for him and he sends her away.

Worse for her is Tom’s reaction. Always ready to think the worst of his wayward sister, he bars her from the family home.

Tom begins the book as a character of some interest, a fellow of humor and honor whose own rise to monetary prominence has a note of real accomplishment. By this point, however, he has remade himself into a complete tool. In order to restore his family’s place at the mill, Tom took the advice of his uncle, Lucy’s father Mr. Deane: “If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself.” He certainly can be called that by the time we get to the ending.

The Mill On The Floss moves into a finale which is the novel’s acknowledged sore spot even among many of its admirers. For the third and last time, the river takes charge in a sudden, tragic conclusion that renders the story ridiculous, with a touch too much of Hardy for me.

For all its faults of story, Eliot’s attention to character and setting make this a rewarding read, more for its journey than its destination. No one is presented as totally worthless; even Stephen has a grace note or two to offer. You sense in this a majestic development in the way fiction was written, something too many writers ignore even today. For that, and for its presentation of a time already past when the novel was written, you get a lot to keep you reading through its 530 pages, and to chew on after.