New Casebooks

POETRY
WILLIAM BLAKE Edited by David Punter
CHAUCER Edited by Valerie Allen and Ares Axiotis
COLERIDGE, KEATS AND SHELLEY Edited by Peter J.Kitson
JOHN DONNE Edited by Andrew Mousley
SEAMUS HEANEY Edited by Michael Allen
PHILIP LARKIN Edited by Stephan Regan
PARADISE LOST Edited by William Zunder
DYLAN THOMAS Edited by John Goodby and Chris Wigginton
VICTORIAN WOMEN POETS Edited by Joseph Bristow
WORDSWORTH Edited by John Williams

NOVELS AND PROSE

AUSTEN: Emma Edited by David Monaghan
AUSTEN: Mansfield Park and Persuasion Edited by Judy Simons
AUSTEN: Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice Edited by Robert Clark
CHARLOTTE BRONTË: Jane Eyre Edited by Heather Glen
CHARLOTTE BRONTË: Villete Edited by Pauline Nestor
EMILY BRONTË: Wuthering Heights Edited by Patsy Stoneman
ANGELA CARTER Edited by Alison Easton
WILKIE COLLINS Edited by Lyn Pykett
JOSEPH CONRAD Edited by Elaine Jordan
DICKENS: Bleak House Edited by Jeremy Tambling
DICKENS: David Copperfield and Hard Times Edited by John Peck
DICKENS: Great Expectations Edited by Roger Sell
ELIOT: Middlemarch Edited by John Peck
ELIOT: The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner Edited by Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder
E.M. FORSTER Edited by Jeremy Tambling
HARDY: Jude the Obscure Edited by Penny Boumelha
HARDY: The Mayor of Casterbridge Edited by Julian Wolfreys
HARDY: Tess of the D’Urbervilles Edited by Peter Widdowson
JAMES: Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew Edited by Neil Cornwell and Maggie Malone
LAWRENCE: Sons and Lovers Edited by Rick Rylance
TONI MORRISON Edited by Linden Peach
GEORGE ORWELL Edited by Byran Loughrey
SHELLY: Frankenstein Edited by Fred Botting
STOKER: Dracula Edited by Glennis Byron
STERNE: Tristram Shandy Edited by Melvyn New
WOOLF: Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse Edited by Su Reid

DRAMA
BECKETT: Waiting for Godot and Endgame Edited by Steven Connor
APHRA BEHN Edited by Janet Todd
REVENGE TRAGEDY Edited by Stevie Simkin
SHAKESPEARE: Antony and Cleopatra Edited by John Drakakis
SHAKESPEARE: Hamlet Edited by Martin Coyle
SHAKESPEARE: Julius Caesar Edited by Richard Wilson
SHAKESPEARE: King Lear Edited by Kiernan Ryan
SHAKESPEARE: Macbeth Edited by Alan Sinfield
SHAKESPEARE: The Merchant of Venice Edited by Martin Coyle
SHAKESPEARE: A Midsummer Night’s Dream Edited by Richard Dutton
SHAKESPEARE: Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew Edited by Marion
Wynne-Davies
SHAKESPEARE: Romeo and Juliet Edited by R.S. White
SHAKESPEARE: The Tempest Edited by R.S. White

(continued overleaf)
SHAKESPEARE: Twelth Night Edited by R.S. White
SHAKESPEARE ON FILM Edited by Robert Shaughnessy
SHAKESPEARE IN PERFORMANCE Edited by Robert Shaughnessy
SHAKESPEARE’S HISTORY PLAYS Edited by Graham Holderness
SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES Edited by Susan Zimmerman
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GENERAL THEMES
FEMINIST THEATRE AND THEORY Edited by Helene Keyssar
POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES Edited by Michael Parker and Roger Starkey

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New Casebooks

THE MILL ON THE FLOSS

and
SILAS MARNER
GEORGE ELIOT

EDITED BY NAHEM YOUSAF

AND ANDREW MAUNDER
Introduction, selection and editorial matter
© Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder 2002
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
General Editors’ Preface ix
Introduction: NAHEM YOUSAF and ANDREW MAUNDER 1
1. The Mill on the Floss, the Critics, and
the Bildungsroman
SUSAN FRAIMAN 31
2. The Two Rhetorics: George Eliot’s Bestiary
J. HILLIS MILLER 57
3. The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism,
and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss
JOSÉ ANGEL GARCÍA LANDA 73
4. Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss
MARY JACOBUS 83
5. Nationhood, Adulthood, and the Ruptures of
Bildung: Arresting Development in The Mill on the
Floss
JOSHUA D. ESTY 101
6. Narcissistic Rage in The Mill on the Floss
PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE 122
7. ‘Light enough to trusten by’: Structure and
Experience in Silas Marner
TERENCE DAWSON 143
8. The Miser’s Two Bodies: Silas Marner and
the Sexual Possibilities of the Commodity
JEFF NUNOKAWA 163

v
vi CONTENTS

9. ‘A report of unknown objects’: Silas Marner

JIM REILLY 188
10. Silas Marner: A Divided Eden
SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH 204
Further Reading 225
Notes on Contributors 228
Index 230
Acknowledgements
The editor and publishers wish to thank the following for permis-
sion to use copyright material:
Terence Dawson, for ‘“Light enough to trusten by”: Structure and
Experience in Silas Marner’, The Modern Language Review, 88:1
(1993), 26–45, by permission of the author and the Modern
Humanities Research Association; Joshua D. Esty, for ‘Nationhood,
Adulthood, and the Ruptures of Bildung: Arresting Development in
The Mill on the Floss’, Narrative, 4:2 (1996), 144–59. Copyright ©
1996 by the Ohio State University Press, by permission of Ohio
State University Press; Susan Fraiman, for material from
Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of
Development by Susan Fraiman, pp.121–41. Copyright © 1993
Columbia University Press, by permission of Columbia University
Press; Mary Jacobus, for material from Reading Women: Essays in
Feminist Criticism by Mary Jacobus, pp.62–79. Copyright © 1986
Columbia University Press, by permission of Routledge and
Columbia University Press; José Angel García Landa, for ‘The
Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes
in The Mill on the Floss’, Papers on Language and Literature, 27:1
(1991), 41–50. Copyright © 1991 by the Board of Trustees,
Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, by permission of Papers
on Language and Literature, Southern Illinois University at
Edwardsville; J. Hillis Miller, for ‘The Two Rhetorics: George
Elliot’s Bestiary’ from Writing and Reading Differently:
Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature, ed.
G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson (1985), pp.101–14, by
permission of University Press of Kansas; Jeff Nunokawa, for ‘The
Miser’s Two Bodies: Silas Marner and the Sexual Possibilities of the
Commodity’, Victorian Studies, 36:3 (1993), 273–92, by permission
of Indiana University Press; Jim Reilly, for material from

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and

George Eliot by Jim Reilly (1993), pp.83–97, by permission of
Routledge; Sally Shuttleworth, for material from George Eliot and
Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning by
Sally Shuttleworth (1984), pp.79–95, by permission of Cambridge
University Press.
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders but if any
have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to
make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.
General Editors’ Preface
The purpose of this series of New Casebooks is to reveal some of the
ways in which contemporary criticism has changed our understanding
of commonly studied texts and writers and, indeed, of the nature of
criticism itself. Central to the series is a concern with modern critical
theory and its effect on current approaches to the study of literature.
Each New Casebook editor has been asked to select a sequence of
essays which will introduce the reader to the new critical approaches
to the text or texts being discussed in the volume and also illuminate
the rich interchange between critical theory and critical practice that
characterises so much current writing about literature.
In this focus on modern critical thinking and practice New
Casebooks aim not only to inform but also to stimulate, with
volumes seeking to reflect both the controversy and the excitement
of current criticism. Because much of this criticism is difficult and
often employs an unfamiliar critical language, editors have been
asked to give the reader as much help as they feel is appropriate, but
without simplifying the essays or the issues they raise. Again, editors
have been asked to supply a list of further reading which will enable
readers to follow up issues raised by the essays in the volume.
The project of New Casebooks, then, is to bring together in an il-
luminating way those critics who best illustrate the ways in which
contemporary criticism has established new methods of analysing
texts and who have reinvigorated the important debate about how
we ‘read’ literature. The hope is, of course, that New Casebooks
will not only open up this debate to a wider audience, but will also
encourage students to extend their own ideas, and think afresh
about their responses to the texts they are studying.

John Peck and Martin Coyle

University of Wales, Cardiff

ix
Introduction
NAHEM YOUSAF and ANDREW MAUNDER

I
The rise, fall and resurgence of George Eliot’s literary reputation
represents many of the changes and fluctuations in literary taste that
have taken place over the last 150 years. In her own day Eliot was
widely regarded as an iconic sage, a sibyl, and moral teacher – roles
which she herself seemed to take very seriously.1 Through her work,
the English novel was seen to reach new heights of social and philo-
sophical concern. Justin McCarthy described the reading public’s
adulation of Eliot as ‘a kind of cult, a kind of worship’.2 Yet in the
years following her death, attacks on a morality that came to be
regarded as quintessentially Victorian rapidly displaced Eliot as a lit-
erary idol and she was transformed into a figure of ridicule: ‘Pallas
with prejudices and a corset’, as W. E. Henley labelled her in 1895.3
The publication, in 1885, of John Cross’s George Eliot’s Life as
Related in her Letters and Journals had intensified this emerging
picture of a stern moralist and respectable daughter of middle
England who ruled over the realm of English literature as majesti-
cally as Queen Victoria did her own Empire.4 With Cross’s careful
expurgation of any details of his wife’s life that could be regarded as
scandalous or simply improper, it became very easy to see Eliot as
‘oppressively great’,5 too out of date and too pompous to speak
meaningfully to a modern sensibility.6 Indeed, in 1906, Edmund
Gosse referred to her cruelly as a ‘ludicrous pythoness’.7 Later, in
1919, he returned to the subject, remembering her as

1
2 INTRODUCTION

a large, thickset sibil [sic], dreamy and immobile, whose massive fea-
tures, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bor-
dered by a hat, always in the height of the Paris fashion, which in those
days commonly included an immense ostrich feather; this was George
Eliot. The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the frivolity
of the headgear had something pathetic and provincial about it.8

Although one wonders how trustworthy Gosse’s recollections are,

his intentions seem clear enough. He sought to make Eliot look
foolish and grotesque, and does so by making fun of her transgres-
sion of two fiercely protected boundaries: class and gender.9 Gosse
thus singles out her bizarre headgear, which he presents as a frivo-
lous attempt on the part of a less than attractive woman to appear à
la mode. By emphasising the enormity of Eliot and her hat, Gosse
presents her as vulgar, lacking in subtlety, and obsessed by triviali-
ties. As an intellectual with working-class origins (her father, Robert
Evans, was a land-agent), Gosse’s constructed Eliot cannot possibly
have mastered the intricacies of good taste and refinement of dress.
Even when decked out in the height of Parisian fashion, Eliot’s
provinciality is, for Gosse, all too evident. Eliot’s hat is also, of
course, a covering for what was often viewed as a masculine brain
and Gosse’s attack is demonstrative of his inability to accept a
woman of intellect. He is unable to fault her either as a scholar or
an artist and therefore attempts to contain her by deriding her
appearance and depicting her as a social outsider. In contrast, and
although renowned for her own snobbery, Virginia Woolf was able
to appreciate Eliot’s achievements as an artist without dwelling on
her class origins and depicting her as a ‘counter-jumper’. Woolf
published her important centennial essay ‘George Eliot’ in the Times
Literary Supplement in November 1919, a time when it was all too
clear that Eliot was no longer in favour. Articles in periodicals refer-
ring to her work had become few and far between, and those that
existed were often derogatory and condescending. She was, as
Woolf noted, ‘one of the butts for youth to laugh at’, yet, she
added, ‘They do not find what they seek and we cannot wonder’.
Woolf admired Eliot’s brilliance and originality, describing
Middlemarch as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up
people’.10
It is interesting to speculate as to why Eliot was so little regarded
by the beginning of the twentieth century. In a very obvious sense,
the decline and subsequent revival of interest in Eliot’s work are
indicative of the kinds of shifts and changes in taste and understand-
 INTRODUCTION 3

ing that Hans Robert Jauss details in his important Toward an

Aesthetics of Reception (1982). Jauss would argue that the lack of
interest in Eliot at the beginning of the twentieth century can be
attributed to a change in the ‘horizon of expectations’ and an
‘altered aesthetic norm’ that causes ‘the audience [to] experience
formerly successful works as outmoded and [to] withdraw its appre-
ciation’.11 Yet, it is also apparent that Eliot was a frustrating figure
simply because she was very difficult to pigeonhole. Amongst
women writers there was resentment at and envy of what was
regarded as Eliot’s tendency to hold herself too far above the fray.
In particular, her presentation of herself as superior, not so much in
what she said but in her bodily movements, was disliked, as were
her gestures and assumption that she was different from others.
Eliza Lynn Linton, one of many contemporaries for whom the Eliot
cult provoked gall coupled with admiration, deemed her fellow nov-
elist (whom Linton had known in the early 1850s as plain Marian
Evans) ‘artificial, posée, pretentious, real … interpenetrated head
and heel, inside and out, with the sense of her importance as the
great novelist and profound thinker of her generation’.12 For the
succeeding generation of ‘New Women’ writers in the 1880s and
1890s Eliot was seen to fall too short of their radical gestures (just
as she did for many feminist critics in the 1970s). Such impatience is
exemplified in The Woman Who Did (1895), when Grant Allen’s
Herminia Barton declares in a typically impassioned moment:
‘When George Eliot chose to pass her life with Lewes on terms of
equal freedom, she defied the man-made law – but still, there was
his wife to prevent the possibility of a legalised union. As soon as
Lewes was dead, George Eliot showed she had no principle
involved, by marrying another man.’13 Elsewhere, the belittling of
Eliot’s physical appearance combined with the sense of her as what
Jane Gallop would term a ‘phallic mother’, whose influence must
be shaken off, lay behind a good many reactions.14 At the same time,
Eliot’s lifestyle (in spite of her best efforts, referring to G. H. Lewes
as her ‘husband’ and styling herself ‘Mrs Lewes’), intellect, and
work were simply too unconventional to allow her to be slotted in
with the other mid-Victorians. This difficulty in categorising Eliot is
perhaps why Virginia Woolf felt she was such an ‘attractive charac-
ter’ and why she was enthusiastic about her work.
In spite of Woolf’s admiration, it was F. R. Leavis in the journal
Scrutiny, and later in The Great Tradition (1947), who made the
most passionate response to Eliot’s novels and, convinced of their
4 INTRODUCTION

relevance to contemporary society, began the project of rehabilitat-

ing Eliot. For Leavis and the Scrutiny group, writing in the after-
math of World War II and searching for literary works that could be
used to resist what they saw as the debilitating influence of modern
commercial and media culture, Eliot was a peculiarly fortifying and
wholesome writer whose novels embodied the possibility of a moral
art, ‘significant in terms of that human awareness they promote;
awareness of the possibilities of life’.15 Although it is now fashion-
able to disparage Leavis, a critic whose readings of Eliot are based
on a narrow and ‘literary’ analysis of British society, his views were
extremely influential in the development of the study of English lit-
erature in British universities, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.
Since then, however, the celebration of Eliot as a mainstay of liberal
individualism, whose strengths were her social and psychological
realism and her skill in creating character, has gradually been
broken up and a multiplicity of readings of her work have come into
play. New interpretations have resulted from a range of twentieth-
century critical developments: the resurgence of Marxist criticism
as a mode of intellectual inquiry; deconstruction, taking its cue from
the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida; and a revived
interest in the intellectual contexts of Eliot’s fiction. Biblical
hermeneutics, positivism, and science have formed the basis for
studies by, for example, Elinor Shaffer, Gillian Beer and Sally
Shuttleworth.16 The emergence, in the 1970s, of a generation of
feminist critics, who lauded Eliot’s unconventional lifestyle, while
lamenting the novelist’s apparent reluctance to take a more stri-
dently feminist position in her writings, has also added to the
number of critical positions.
Notwithstanding the lengthy spell in which Eliot all but vanished
from the literary canon, her novels can only be considered superb
creative achievements. Her first work of fiction, ‘The Sad Fortunes
of the Reverend Amos Barton’, was initially published in
Blackwood’s Magazine in 1857 and reappeared in 1858 as one of
the three stories comprising Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). The
younger Eliot was a prolific writer: Adam Bede followed in 1859
and then The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola
(1863), Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–2) and
Daniel Deronda (1876). In addition, Eliot’s diverse output included
novellas (The Lifted Veil [1859] and Brother Jacob [1864]), and
poetry (The Spanish Gypsy [1861], Armgart [1871] and The Legend
of Jubal and Other Poems [1874]). Before she transformed herself
 INTRODUCTION 5

into ‘George Eliot’, Marian (Mary Ann) Evans penned numerous

essays and reviews, mostly for John Chapman’s radical Westminster
Review, a quarterly periodical set up in 1824 by Jeremy Bentham
and James Mill to support political reform. The extraordinary
nature of her position – an unmarried woman pursuing an indepen-
dent career in a free-thinking man’s world of London in 1852 –
should not be underestimated. Serving as assistant editor on the
Westminster from 1851 to 1854, Eliot also wrote for the magazine,
producing not only reviews, but also several now well-known cri-
tiques of novel-writing and realism, including ‘The Natural History
of German Life’ and ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. Having taught
herself German, she had also translated important works of philoso-
phy and theology, notably David Frederich Strauss’s The Life of
Jesus, Critically Examined (1846) and Ludwig Feurbach’s The
Essence of Christianity (1854). After the death of her partner
George Henry Lewes in November 1878, Eliot distracted herself by
preparing his great work of psychology, The Problems of Life and
Mind, for publication, assembling and redrafting the text from
Lewes’s notes. Eliot’s final published work, a series of disturbing
essays, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), records her
bleak vision of the modern world and imagines an even bleaker
future constructed in its likeness. The diversity of these achieve-
ments is a reminder that Eliot is a figure who cannot be conve-
niently classified with a single label.
Like the list of Eliot’s works given above, the essays reprinted in
this New Casebook serve as a reminder of the dimensions of Eliot’s
achievements and the complex and often open-ended questions her
work elicits. That there has always been and still remains a difficulty
in ‘pinning’ down Eliot owes much to the confusion that her roles as
realist, scientist and sage provoke. It also has a great deal to do with
the immense complexity and scale of her work. As Elizabeth
Ermarth rightly points out: ‘The counterbalancing dip of one inter-
pretation against another is basic to her message, which is far more
capacious and consistent than any of the lesser messages she is seen
either to support or to fall short of.’17 The capaciousness that
Ermarth identifies is formulated in many ways in the criticism
offered here. The pieces selected exemplify the tensions between
Eliot’s unorthodox life and her often reactionary portrayals of
women’s experience; the schism within a writer with a nostalgic
longing for the past, but who was also geared firmly towards the
future, and a writer caught between the clashing forces of provincial
6 INTRODUCTION

respectability and the wrench of an emotional turmoil stemming

from her fundamental unconventionality.
The essays included in this volume were written between 1981
and 1996. By its very nature, any anthology of criticism dealing with
such rich and multivalent works can only offer a slice of the many
different types of essay elicited by the texts. This collection is no
exception, and the various structuralist, psychoanalytic, deconstruc-
tive or feminist readings of The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner
offered here are intended to whet the reader’s appetite. The articles
in this new anthology are also designed to complement the essays
featured in the original Casebook edited by R. P. Draper (1977) by
demonstrating some of the ways in which George Eliot has fared
over time with developments in critical theory. In particular, by
examining the two collections alongside one another, one can see
the progression from the emotive responses of the novels’ early
readers to a less impassioned, more academic stance that is assumed
once Eliot’s place in the canon has been secured. Like Eliot, the sen-
sitive critic can often feel caught between two worlds; one of nostal-
gia for a reader-response steeped in sheer enthusiasm, and one of
impatience for the onward march of critical progress.

II
The Mill on the Floss has been since its first publication in 1860 a
novel that has provoked strong and mixed emotions. Some of its
earliest reviewers hailed it as a work which ‘awes us with a glimpse
into the deepest questions, and the most tremendous realities of life,
questions and realities about our temptations, our sins, and our
destiny’.18 ‘We feel the throbbing of her heart at each new sensa-
tion’, as Richard Holt Hutton wrote in The Spectator.19 John Ruskin
was rather less lyrical in his praise, declaiming that ‘Tom is a clumsy
lout’ and the rest of the characters are simply the ‘sweepings out of
a Pentonville omnibus … personages picked up from behind the
counter and out of the gutter’.20 Yet, no less a representative of
middle-class morality than Queen Victoria was to express her ‘great
admiration’ for the novel.21 And 60 years later, the young Simone
de Beauvoir found in The Mill on the Floss an expression of her
own sense of frustration as a young woman living in a narrow, rigid
society, faced with the dilemma of needing to find self-fulfilment,
but expected to live for others. Maggie Tulliver’s story seemed, she
wrote, to ‘translate my exile into words’:
 INTRODUCTION 7

I saw my own isolation not as a proof of infamy, but as a sign of my

uniqueness. I couldn’t see myself dying of solitude. Through the
heroine I identified myself with the author: one day other adolescents
would bathe with their tears a novel in which I would tell my own
sad story … Maggie Tulliver, like myself, was torn between others
and her self: I recognised myself in her. She too was dark, loved
nature, and books and life, was too headstrong to be able to observe
the conventions of respectable surroundings; and yet she was very
sensitive to the criticism of a brother she adored.22

De Beauvoir’s passionate response was shared by Marcel Proust,

who admitted having been moved to ‘weep’ uncontrollably when he
read and re-read Maggie’s story.23 In addition, D. H. Lawrence
claimed Maggie as his favourite heroine and ‘adored’ The Mill on
the Floss,24 while in 1979 A. S. Byatt stressed the affective qualities
of this complex novel, highlighting ‘the problems of custom, devel-
opment, sexuality, intellectual stunting, real and imaginary duty,
which we have been made to see and live’.25 Undoubtedly, it is this
capacity of the characters to soar between the plains of ‘keenest joy
and keenest sorrow’, as Eliot herself put it,26 that has enabled
readers to identify with The Mill’s protagonists from 1860 to the
present day. Even when it was transferred from the printed page to
the screen, the rather ponderous 1997 BBC film of The Mill on the
Floss made the Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries want to ‘read George
Eliot’s novel, to leave the shallows behind and dive into the depths
of this very British tragedy’.27 Eliot’s storytelling exhibits a timeless,
transcendent appeal that aligns her tales with a strong sense of
national selfhood.
Feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and the deeply held
interest in the relation between literature and other forms of dis-
course underlie the readings and re-readings of The Mill on the Floss
discussed in this section. In the first essay, Susan Fraiman explores
some of the early reactions to the novel and to Eliot’s ambiguous
stance on the ‘Woman Question’, before focusing on some of the
problems that Maggie Tulliver has presented to critics. In the essay’s
opening section, she usefully charts developments in feminist schol-
arship about Eliot since the 1970s, in order to situate her own work
within what she describes as a ‘doubled view of women as agents as
well as victims’ (p. 34). She places The Mill on the Floss in the tradi-
tion of the novel of development, or Bildungsroman. How, asks
Fraiman, can there be a female Bildungsroman when a woman’s life
which may seem able to go anywhere, will inevitably need to return
8 INTRODUCTION

to the starting post, to the values of family and home? Whilst the
journey of the male involves travelling onward and upwards
through the world, eventually reaching psychological and financial
autonomy, the route of a woman’s life is more likely to be circular
rather than linear, involuted rather than progressive. The limitations
placed on women, ranging from social prescriptions for feminine
behaviour to restraints on female mobility, are difficult to jettison.
However, such social baggage can also represent desirable and nec-
essary ties of love and bonds of social connection as crucial forms of
attachment that complicate and impinge upon any attempt to
deviate from the norm. In her discussion of Maggie and Tom
Tulliver, Fraiman stresses the conflicts between these possibilities of
growth, which a new emphasis on the idea of individuality might
offer women (via forms of education and learning, for example) and
what was considered the proper structure of a woman’s life: a life,
that is, without incident, plot or development. As Fraiman argues:
‘If Tom indicates the work’s nominal status as Bildungsroman,
Maggie’s problem – and the problematic of the novel – is her inabil-
ity to enter the designated mode’ (p. 39). Brimming with energetic
potential though she may seem, the aspirations of Maggie Tulliver
come to naught.
Eliot certainly offers a challenge to the conventions of the
Bildungsroman in the early pages of The Mill on the Floss, when
Maggie is notable for an active impulse that leads her out into the
public world. While for Tom an encounter with the gypsies would
have proven to be little more than a boyish scrape, Maggie herself
feels threatened and it is here that the limitations of the female
world are demarcated. The juxtaposition of Maggie’s thwarted
energy with the rather dull passivity of her cousin Lucy emphasises
just how convention has curtailed Maggie’s aspirations toward self-
fulfilment and development. Maggie lacks her brother’s ‘easy mobil-
ity’, and as they become adults she and her cousin Lucy ‘are ushered
into a diminishing space’, their vitality suppressed (p. 42).
Ultimately, Eliot is unable to resolve the tensions between the
oppressive demands of society and her heroine’s own spiritual
growth and is forced to satisfy the demand for narrative closure in a
catastrophic flood of self-sacrifice and oblivion.
Fraiman’s essay presents not so much a new approach to Eliot as a
woman writer, as an attempt to locate the kinds of narrative discon-
tinuities feminist criticism has uncovered within the Bildung tradi-
tion. In her resistance of the role of passive heroine and the brief
 INTRODUCTION 9

period in which she frustratingly embraces it whole-heartedly,

Fraiman suggests that Maggie with a kind of colonial intent, as it
were, is attempting to appropriate her brother’s Bildung narrative.
As a result of her entrapment within the domestic sphere, her
thwarted attempts at participation are peppered with gothic prison
motifs, as Maggie escapes one prison of convention only to tumble
into another. Such a tracing of narrative complexities in The Mill on
the Floss may not lead to revolutionary retheorising but it does lead
to a solid interpretation of form, character and event which is all
too frequently shunted by critics to one side. If Fraiman’s essay has a
weakness, it is a tendency (shared with many twentieth-century
critics) to reaffirm her own values in discussions of Eliot’s fiction,
notably a faith and endorsement of individualism.28 In terms of Eliot
criticism generally, it is a tendency which manifests itself most obvi-
ously in feminist searches for role models of self-fulfilment and
strong images of women in ‘a literature of their own’ (to use Elaine
Showalter’s evocative phrase).29 What is most important and valu-
able about Fraiman’s essay is her recognition that the privileging of
gender as a total category by which to understand Eliot can some-
times be inadequate. Yet she recognises, too, that women have been
formed – as has feminism itself – by those vertical histories of
power, ambition and mobility, by the very discourses of individual-
ism that Eliot interrogates.
If many feminist critics view women’s writing as a process of
writing against the authority of a hegemonic discourse, J. Hillis
Miller (essay 2) undertakes another kind of radical reading which
points to the basic indeterminacy of all literary discourse. Hillis
Miller has written extensively on Eliot, who, he suggests, in writing
Middlemarch produced the ‘English masterpiece’ of realistic
fiction.30 The essay on The Mill on the Floss reprinted here was first
published in 1985. As a poststructuralist in the American tradition,
Miller is engaged in the task of ‘deconstructing’ the text.
‘Deconstruction’ is often referred to as ‘reading against the grain’ or
reading the text against itself, with the purpose of ‘knowing the text
as it cannot know itself’.31 One way of describing this would be to
say that such readings seek to uncover the unconscious rather than
the conscious dimensions of the text, all the things that its overt tex-
tuality glosses over. Barbara Johnson has defined deconstruction as
‘the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the
text’.32 Miller, himself, however, reads against the grain of decon-
struction and argues that all meanings are embedded in the text,
10 INTRODUCTION

which deconstructs itself. Miller’s argument answers the charge that

deconstruction is ‘nihilism or the denial of meaning in literary
texts’; rather, it is an attempt to show ‘that language is figurative
through and through, all the way down to the bottom, so to speak’
(p.70).
Just as Fraiman makes a case for a dual reading of The Mill on the
Floss, so Hillis Miller points to the importance of a number of
often-incompatible readings, which stem from the cultural condi-
tions under which the text was produced. The importance of ideo-
logical and social context to Miller’s project is outlined in his
introduction to his book Victorian Subjects (1991).33 Each author is
interpellated, brought into being by pre-existing reigning ideologies,
but is never simply their subaltern. The essay included here, ‘The
Two Rhetorics: George Eliot’s Bestiary’, posits the ways in which
Victorian subjects were not merely subjected to social, historical,
and ideological forces, but actually reworked and transformed them.
Miller’s version of deconstruction, then, attempts to capture the
multiplicity of Victorian experiences embedded within the text,
while registering that the reader will bring her/his own historical
context to bear on her/his interpretations. By employing a close
reading of a passage from chapter 14, focusing on Tom Tulliver’s
school experiences at the hands of Mr Stelling, Miller posits that
‘good readers have always been deconstructionists’ (p. 57).
According to Miller, this passage manifests a type of textual self-
awareness by the way in which it ‘rises from height to height by a
continual process of capping itself or going one better’. The passage
‘constantly deconstructs itself’ in order to register the fundamental
instability of all language (p. 62). To put it another way, ‘the decon-
structive movement of this passage is constituted by the proffering
and withdrawing of one metaphorical formulation after another’.
Moreover, the excerpt not only gives ‘oblique hints to the reader
about how to read the novel’, but hints at the dangers lurking in the
pedagogy of grammar and composition, the type of rules and regu-
lations (grounded in male authority) which are responsible for
Maggie’s state of frustration (p. 61). According to Miller, Eliot’s
text revels in the anarchy that is posed by its realisation that it
cannot say what it truly means. Instead of being challenged by this
prospect (as one would suspect the rigidly ordered Mr Stelling and
the patriarchal world-order he represents would be), the sign-
manipulating omniscient narrator delights in the jouissance.
Metaphor is piled on top of metaphor to demonstrate the linguistic
 INTRODUCTION 11

predicament, and perhaps also to subtly undermine Tom Tulliver’s

all too rigid assertions of what is right and wrong. Such studies of
the text’s rhetoric of doubleness and equivocation reveal how this
kind of deconstructive criticism may prove productive in helping
students deal with or divide the rhetorical potentialities of the texts
they read.
In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir wrote that ‘one is not
born a woman one becomes one’. De Beauvoir’s point behind her
much-quoted comment was that ‘“woman” is a cultural construc-
tion rather than a biological one’. As Ruth Robbins notes, the
reason why this remark is so important is that it highlights the
fact that ‘the ideas about sex roles which any given society may
have come to regard as natural are not really so and given that
they are not natural, they may even be changed’.34 De Beauvoir’s
insight is a useful starting point for discussion of the third essay
included in this volume, José Landa’s ‘The Chains of Semiosis:
Semiotics, Marxism and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the
Floss’. Like Miller’s, this essay takes language as its central
concern. Landa’s interest, however, is in the way in which litera-
ture can act as a code-giver, offering the reader examples by
which s/he should behave. The nineteenth-century novel is no
exception, telling its readers how to live and in doing so forming
the culture in which it is read. But the novel is also born out of a
specific culture.
Taking up the argument where Miller left off, Landa considers
the work of the Marxist linguistic theorist V. N. Voloshinov as a
way of examining how all representations or theories are governed
and shaped by ideology by their very nature as (unreliable) semiotic
constructions. As Landa observes, ‘[t]hat a semiotic chain is endless
does not mean that it is cut off from the world. Instead it means that
the world is a semiotic construct’, a construct in which meaning is
never fixed since it will be adjusted by each new interpreter. In
other words, the literary work is in a constant state of flux as each
new reader brings her/his context to bear upon it. Landa’s argument
continues (p. 75):
A writer is working in two contexts. The first is the institution of lit-
erature, consisting of works by writers of other nations or other ages,
models, plots, character types, and narrative strategies. The second is
his experience of social life at large. A writer – for example, George
Eliot – may derive her semiotic materials from any of the ‘real life’
12 INTRODUCTION

contexts she is involved in, such as the discourse on/of woman in

Victorian England.

Taking up the issues of gender representation and female self-

representation, Landa reads The Mill on the Floss as a ‘liberating
fiction’ centring on Eliot’s conscious dramatisation and undermin-
ing of the different kinds of representation of women available to
mid-nineteenth-century writers. In particular, he focuses upon the
various conflicts of gender within the text, most notably in the
perpetuation and subtle undermining of the fictional stereotypes
of the blonde, blue-eyed heroine (who is conformist and desir-
able) and the dark heroine (who is neither of these things). Such
binary oppositions in which one element is privileged over the
other are, as Dale Spender has pointed out, ‘fundamental premises
in an order based on the supremacy of one group over another’.35
Landa identifies the arbitrariness of such categories and divisions
and draws attention to how the perpetuation of such traits as a
desirable norm functions on an ideological level to reinforce the
power base of a dominant group. Thus, according to Landa,
although Eliot makes use of these stereotypes in the novel (in the
characters of Maggie Tulliver and her cousin Lucy), her aim is to
expose the way in which these stereotypes are used as a form of
female education/indoctrination within bourgeois society. They
represent, as Landa notes, ‘a whole catalogue of activities,
hearsays, admonitions, and attitudes of the child towards her own
body, which is supposed to become the emblem of her successful
socialisation into female difference …’ (p. 76). Eliot shows the
process of Maggie’s acculturation – her family’s attempts to make
her act as sign rather than subject – and her own refusal to fit into
the stereotype.
Of course, by announcing the dark-haired Maggie’s refusal to fit
in or her inability to do so, Eliot exploits the very stereotype she
condemns, caught up as she is in a vicious creative circle imposed
upon her literary tradition. Yet Landa suggests that Maggie is a self-
aware character who resists attempts to read her according to con-
vention and who as ‘an intertextual heroine’ (p. 77) seeks to
explode the stereotypes that attempt to contain her. Eliot’s charac-
ters negotiate and react against a set of ideologies that are
simultaneously constructs and very real for the characters whose
movements are curtailed by them. It is in this sense that the novel
can be read as ‘a direct attack on the subject positions available to
 INTRODUCTION 13

nineteenth-century women’ (p. 81). Of course, readers who remem-

ber Maggie’s death might say that Eliot herself cannot think beyond
the restraints of a patriarchal culture. In 1820s St Ogg’s, the dark,
rebellious woman cannot be vindicated, nor can the apparently
‘fallen’ woman be slotted back into society. Landa demonstrates
that, in fact, Maggie reveals all the qualities espoused by the mid-
Victorian bourgeoisie which had rejected Eliot herself. However,
because of her gender, the individual growth and self-examination
she manifests pose a threat to the order of things. The self-scrutinis-
ing, self-improving woman will not be content to accept her socially
imposed role as homemaker and threatens to disrupt male hege-
mony by venturing out into the world and behaving autonomously.
Constrained herself by the ideologies of realist fiction, Eliot cannot
envisage any existence wherein her independent, free-spirited
heroine will be anything other than an outcast. She is therefore
compelled by the marketplace demand for narrative closure to
drown Maggie. Thus, as a result of her position within a patriarchal
culture, Eliot ultimately reveals her own internalisation of the social
conventions against which she seeks to rebel, thereby revealing the
strength and rigidity of the ideological power structure.
As is perhaps becoming apparent, many of the essays included in
this volume refer to, or are informed by, a feminist perspective (the
obvious exception being Hillis Miller’s chapter on The Mill on the
Floss). The essays highlight the plurality of feminist criticism, which
seldom seeks to be prescriptive. Some, like Peggy Johnstone (essay
6), deploy a psychoanalytic model to discover a repressed feminism
beneath the surface of The Mill. Others, like Landa, detect hidden
meanings beneath a patriarchal surface, or find subversive rework-
ings and parodies of patriarchal literary conventions. The influence
of a further strand is also apparent in Mary Jacobus’s ‘Men of
Maxims and The Mill on the Floss’ (essay 4). Jacobus’s work, along
with that of Nancy K. Miller, can be said to exemplify the poststruc-
turalist direction of a good deal of feminist criticism.36 While Susan
Fraiman studies the relationship between Eliot and genre, Mary
Jacobus is interested in the question of language, but from a feminist
perspective. Following Luce Irigaray, she poses the question: How is
it possible for a woman to express her otherness or difference
through a discourse that is both phallocentric and the expression of
the dominant culture in which she is an inexpressible ‘other’? The
Mill on the Floss is chosen by Jacobus as a work which will permit
‘putting the question of our social organisation of gender’, and as a
14 INTRODUCTION

feminist, Jacobus says that she aims to be ‘at once transgressive and
liberating, since what [feminist criticism] brings to light is the
hidden or unspoken ideological premise of criticism itself’.
According to Jacobus ‘what pleases the feminist critic most … is to
light on a text that seems to do her arguing, or some of it, for her –
especially a text whose story is the same as hers’ (p. 87). Indeed, she
highlights the propensity (noted above) of a number of 1970s femi-
nists who grafted their own struggles onto nineteenth-century pro-
tagonists and thus identifies a more subjective, personal relationship
between the feminist critic and the text. In her reading of The Mill
on the Floss, Jacobus analyses what she takes to be Eliot’s implicit
criticism of the language of the dominant culture, ‘the maxims that
pass for the truth of human experience’ (to quote Nancy Miller).37
This makes itself felt in various forms in the novel but most obvi-
ously in the scenes surrounding Tom’s education at the hands of Mr
Stelling. In Jacobus’s reading of this scene, Maggie’s covert unlawful
learning of Latin provides access to an elitist education and language
from which women are excluded. As Jacobus sees it, such ‘lapses’ on
Maggie’s part can be read as the aporia that reveal what is unique to
women’s writing. They are directed against the system that creates
them, raising the question of women’s access to power and knowl-
edge and how notions of the feminine are determined by (male) dis-
course. Jacobus’s move from a subtle analysis of the text to the
larger theoretical debate via Luce Irigaray has deservedly made this
a very influential essay in feminist criticism, with its pressing ques-
tioning of how women can disentangle themselves alive from the
concepts that bind them. Jacobus notes that both Irigaray – for
whom ‘the price paid by the woman writer for attempting to
describe the claims of women, within an order prescribed by the
masculine’ may ultimately be death – and George Eliot ‘kill off the
woman engulfed by masculine logic and language …’. Thus, in
Jacobus’s terms, gender constructions and the misery that they
produce can only be erased through death. Whilst she lives Maggie
is doomed to be constantly interpreted and signified upon by a
male-dominated order that cannot think metaphorically and can
only view her conduct as ‘wrong-doing and absurdity’ (p. 88).
The next extract (essay 5) in this volume is from Joshua Esty’s
‘Nationhood, Adulthood, and the Ruptures of Bildung: Arresting
Development in The Mill on the Floss’. Esty’s essay is a pertinent
example of the way in which critics have engaged with Eliot partly
because of their own curiosity as to the instability of meanings, signs
 INTRODUCTION 15

and metaphors and also because of her centrality within the history
of nineteenth-century fears and ideas. Like Fraiman, Esty is inter-
ested in the obstructions to Maggie Tulliver’s growth and develop-
ment, but whereas Fraiman is interested in the Bildungsroman as a
generic structure in which women sit uneasily, Esty focuses on the
larger historical forces preventing their full participation. In part,
Esty’s essay can be read as belonging to a long tradition of Eliot crit-
icism which has sought to investigate her relationship with history
and the establishment of a myth of rural England. It is worth
reminding ourselves that when they were first published all Eliot’s
early works – Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner – were
cherished by some readers for their evocation of a stable, pre-indus-
trial, rural world. One of the reasons behind Adam Bede’s popular-
ity was that it could be read as a pastoral idyll of Gemeinschaft or
community, to use the typology of Ferdinand Tönnies, which dis-
placed the tensions of 1859 by projecting an idealised world of
1799.38 Thus, for example, Frances Taylor, writing in the Dublin
Review, exhibited nostalgia for the time Eliot depicted so evoca-
tively, when ‘war kept the population under, and men were thankful
to stay in their own homes, and die in the place in which they had
been born’.39 This idealisation was no doubt the result of the social
and political upheaval ensuing from the large-scale industrialisation
of the mid-Victorian period, which saw the mass migration of
labourers from the country to the city as agriculture gave way to the
factory. In 1801 less than 20 per cent of the British population lived
in cities, by 1851 more than 50 per cent had become city dwellers,
while by 1901 more than 77 per cent of the people lived in urban
concentrations. With a society in literal and social flux, one can
hardly be surprised at such nostalgia for a more static way of life.
Yet, the idealised communities which Eliot might appear to
promote are not without their instabilities. Eliot shows a society in
transition from Gemeinschaft (the old communal values of a feudal
economy) to Gessellschaft (a society governed by the cash nexus
relations of an industrial economy) which is deeply unsettling to her
protagonists who are essentially communal dwellers. In the essay
included here, Esty argues that The Mill on the Floss resists the read-
ings of historical and psychical contiguity that some readers have
associated with Eliot. In the novel, modernisation is a lethal force,
killing off characters and social traditions and ‘arresting the devel-
opment of Maggie and Tom Tulliver’ (p. 106). A crucial event is
the change in irrigation technology, an innovation which alters the
16 INTRODUCTION

lives of the Tullivers for the worse, and which can also be read as
representative of the technological developments of the Industrial
Revolution. As Esty points out, ‘By describing drastic changes (not
smooth transitions), the text implicitly casts doubt on recuperative,
organic versions of English history, wherein the land and the folk
remain mystically constant despite the complete re–organisation of
their economy’ (p. 102). Instead, as Esty has rightly noted, ‘The eco-
nomic transformations that Eliot documents leave Maggie stranded
in the historical gap between old St Ogg’s and modern industrial
England’ (pp. 106–7).
As well as showing us Eliot trying to make sense of the rapid, but
disruptive, process of social change which she regards as both tragic
and necessary, Esty also suggests that The Mill can be read as an
interrogation of national identity, a process which is never com-
plete. Any sense of a continuity of identity is disrupted by supple-
mentary, competing or radically alternative versions of Englishness,
from both the past and the present within which its characters are
helpless. Optimistic assertions of England’s cohesion are impossible
to sustain in the aftermath of the industrial revolution; in Esty’s
words: ‘The modern economy of industry and empire has forced
England to develop into something quite different from what
romantic nationalism would identify as its essential core’ (p. 106).
In this sense Esty’s reading once again cuts into the construction of
Eliot as the novelist of England and quintessential Englishness, a
representation Josephine McDonagh has laid at the door of John
Cross,40 although, as Chris Baldick has shown, many later critics
continued this trend, particularly in the period surrounding World
War I.41 Later, F. R. Leavis was also partly responsible, emphasising
the value of Eliot’s representation of a ‘rooted community’ and ‘the
atmospheric richness of the past seen through home tradition and
the associations of [her] childhood.’ 42
Leavis’s comment is also a telling reminder that one of the most
common consequences of confusion in the interpretation of Eliot’s
work has been the persistence of a tendency to read the novels
directly as autobiographies. The parallels between Eliot’s own life
and The Mill on the Floss have undoubtedly made it a compelling
work, both for the inquisitive reader and for critics concerned with
Eliot’s literary creativity. In George Eliot and the Politics of National
Inheritance (1994), Bernard Semmel reads The Mill as a very per-
sonal, nostalgic novel about the conflict between different genera-
 INTRODUCTION 17

tions and the ‘failure of the young to rate sufficiently the bonds that
join them to their parents …’.43 Kerry McSweeny has likewise called
it Eliot’s ‘most autobiographical novel’, and detects a wistful tone in
the book, especially in the early sections where the setting is ‘unmis-
takably the Warwickshire of [Eliot’s] childhood’.44 In many ways
this stance is a critical throwback to that adopted by George Eliot’s
contemporary reviewers who offloaded their censure of what they
regarded as her infamous relationship with the married G. H. Lewes
onto the erring women in her fiction. In 1885, the London
Quarterly Review, true to its Methodist sympathies, described
Maggie Tulliver as a sign of Eliot’s ‘unquiet conscience’, noting that
‘the figure of the woman under a social ban recurs rather frequently
in George Eliot’s vigorous representation of English life’.45
Dissatisfaction with Cross’s Life prompted Margaret Oliphant to
suggest that we can only recover the details of Eliot’s early years
that Cross omitted by reading the story of Maggie Tulliver’s child-
hood. Although Oliphant hesitated in accepting the novel as ‘an
actual picture of the scenes that surround the child of genius’,46
many twentieth-century critics have not been so reluctant. Indeed,
as some of the essays included here demonstrate, as a critical habit
this Maggie/Eliot conflation has proved remarkably persistent. In
reading Eliot’s fiction it is often assumed without much discussion
that the narrator is the author, or that a particular character is a
‘mouthpiece’ for Eliot or that s/he is a psychological slip on Eliot’s
part. The limitations of some of these kinds of readings become
increasingly evident as the extent of Eliot’s achievements is grasped
more fully.
Peggy Johnstone’s ‘Narcissistic Rage in The Mill on the Floss’
(essay 6) walks this critical tightrope. The essay is traditional in its
concern for Eliot’s life, but modern in its application of psychoana-
lytic principles, presenting us with a carefully detailed case study of
Maggie Tulliver. Johnstone suggests that Maggie’s aggressive actions
in childhood, followed by feelings of guilt and desire for reparation,
reflect her ‘chronic and disproportionate anger in response to any
incident perceived as a narcissistic injury’ (p. 124). When she
reaches adulthood these actions and feelings of low self-esteem
prevent her from disentangling herself from her old patterns of
behaviour and develop into a ‘misuse of sexual power’ in her rela-
tionships with men. Maggie’s cruelty to Philip and then Stephen
comes about as a ‘cyclical reaction to her underlying narcissistic rage
18 INTRODUCTION

against her family and society …’ (p. 133). Yet for Johnstone the
apparently confessional nature of the novel also reveals a good deal
about George Eliot herself. Johnstone is not concerned solely with
the author’s memories of her childhood home at Gryff, but focuses
also on the parallels in the patterns of both Maggie and her creator’s
relationships with other men as they are written out in the novel.
Johnstone believes that the mature Eliot projects the idealised self-
image of her youth onto Maggie. It is Eliot’s ‘failure to separate her
own life from her heroine’s [which] results in a work of art flawed
by decreasing control over the narrative as the novel approaches its
deus ex machina ending’ (p. 139). Johnstone’s reading offers
perhaps the most challenging analysis of the relationship between
text and author’s life in the Mill on the Floss, and certainly one very
different from those in the first Casebook.

III
‘There is a multiple typicality about the case of Silas Marner’, wrote
Q. D. Leavis in 1967 and, indeed, Leavis’s response to the novel has
continued to ring true.47 On the one hand, critics hold up the novel
as another contribution to realism. Thus Joseph Wiesenfarth has
written that its action is ‘best seen as one of demythologising: of
divesting men, their actions, and institutions of mythological or leg-
endary attributes’.48 On the other hand, Robert Dunham has viewed
the novel as ‘essentially a Romantic statement’ centring on Eliot’s
allegiance to the Wordsworthian child.49 Like Adam Bede it deals in
an apparently realistic manner with rural life but it has often been
seen as a fairy tale.50 When it was widely studied in schools (as it
was for much of the twentieth century), Silas Marner tended to be
taught as a simple Christian moral fable in which good triumphs
over bad and moral order is restored at the end. Yet as Ken Newton
has argued, it is surely significant that Silas Marner was written soon
after Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859. The world
that the novel’s characters have to confront is ‘Darwinian in basis;
that is, a world in which there is no evidence of a divine or provi-
dential world order, a world in which events are the product of
chance, circumstance and accident.’51 This was the second time Eliot
was to fictionalise the concerns of Darwin’s book. The Mill on the
Floss is also studded with Darwinian metaphors referring to the suc-
cessful or otherwise attempts by the Tullivers and their counterparts
 INTRODUCTION 19

to adapt to a changing environment. In both novels, Eliot evinces

her interest in the unseen laws of nature which underlie the process
Darwin was to call ‘inheritance and the complex action of natural
selection, entailing extinction and divergence of character’.52
Characteristically, she also adopts a carefully considered position
which is very much her own.
When it was first published in 1861, Silas Marner restored Eliot’s
moral standing with readers who had shuddered at The Mill on the
Floss. The novel’s successful blending of realism and romance, the
historical and the legendary, its combination of humour and pathos
made it an instant hit – 8000 copies were sold in the first year.53
E. S. Dallas praised its charm and truth to life, lauding the way in
which the characters were ‘ennobled and beautified’ by their ‘won-
derful’ sense of ‘sympathy’ with each other’s problems.54 Eliot’s
publisher, John Blackwood, told her: ‘You paint so naturally that in
your hands the veriest earthworms become most interesting perfect
studies in facts’.55 It was fortunate, too, that, unlike The Mill on the
Floss, the novel’s story provided less opportunity for snide com-
ments about sexual error. None of the critics invoked the vision of
the author as a strong-minded woman of dubious morals.
While we can no longer resort to a simple amalgamation of the life
and the work to dismiss Eliot’s work as involuntary self-revelation
rather than deliberate self–diagnosis, twentieth-century critics of Silas
Marner, as of The Mill on the Floss, find such biographical
approaches difficult to avoid. Thus in ‘“Light enough to trusten by”:
Structure and Experience in Silas Marner’ (essay 7), one of the ways
in which Terence Dawson reads Eliot’s novel is as an example of
‘spiritual autobiography’. The novel becomes an expression of a
‘woman’s psychological concerns’ (p. 145) and in Dawson’s reading
it is Nancy Lammeter, a character often relegated to the critical side-
lines, who takes centre stage alongside the novel’s eponymous hero.
Drawing on the patterns suggested by structuralism and the (unfash-
ionable) patterns of Jungian psychoanalysis, Dawson suggests that it
is Nancy above all other characters who functions as a ‘carrier of an
aspect of her [Eliot’s] unconscious personality’ (p. 158). Dawson dis-
plays the need to find a remorseful or dissatisfied Marian Evans
lurking in the text and argues that Silas Marner, even more than The
Mill on the Floss, is a work haunted by Eliot’s personal ghosts. In this
discussion of the novel the events of the narrative can be read as
symptoms; they are at one and the same time real within the narra-
tive and metaphoric of a psychic structure. Thus according to
20 INTRODUCTION

Dawson, a close study of the novel reveals a strong desire on Eliot’s

part to find imaginary solutions not only to social but also to per-
sonal dilemmas. Silas Marner ‘is about Nancy’s relationship with
Godfrey, which has been made difficult as a result of an over-
attachment to her father, and a corresponding tendency to suspect
the worth of any other man’ (p. 158). Nancy’s story, which, like
that of Silas, is characterised by isolation, was, Dawson suggests,
particularly relevant to Eliot at the time of the novel’s writing. She
was herself living a life of ostracism, shunned by respectable society.
Dawson is cautious enough to point out that Eliot does not equal
Nancy (or indeed Silas) any more than Godfrey equals G. H. Lewes,
but believes that the process of writing the novel was undeniably
therapeutic.
While Dawson finds a good deal of milage in psychoanalytic and
textual readings, other critics adopt a socio-political approach to
Silas Marner. This is notably so in the case of Jeff Nunokawa (essay
8) who, building on the work of Michel Foucault, links commodity
exchange to decadent bodies. In ‘The Miser’s Two Bodies: Silas
Marner and the Sexual Possibilities of the Commodity’, Nunokawa
draws together three different strands of thought about Silas
Marner, each of which has been the focus of recent criticism but they
have not been generally synthesised together. The first is the investi-
gation of illicit sexuality; the second the exploration of the themes
of property and commodification; and the third is Eliot’s stance as
‘an unblinking monitor of proper conduct’ (p. 168). Thus whereas
Dawson’s essay in this volume suggests that Silas’s exile is represen-
tative of his author’s own social exile, Nunokawa posits that Silas’s
isolation is a mixture of both the personal and the economic. He
interrogates the novel’s apparently obsessive flagging of family
values to provide a complexly argued account of the novel’s fear of
illicit sexual contact and Victorian anxieties about the kinds of alien-
ation caused by money and capital. Silas Marner is strange, a kind of
‘spinning insect’, an ‘emigrant … from town into the country’. He is
one of those ‘pallid undersized men, who by the side of the brawny
country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race’ and
one of ‘those scattered linen-weavers-emigrants from the towns into
the country – who were to the last regarded as aliens by their rustic
neighbours.’56 But Nunokawa also suggests that Eliot’s account of
this ‘pallid undersized man’ reads ‘like a case study of the solitary
practices and enervating consequences of masturbation imagined by
nineteenth-century sexology, the consequences of which range from
 INTRODUCTION 21

bodily debilitation to homosexuality (p. 165). Although other critics

have noticed and analysed the ways in which Eliot fixates on what
happens when relationships between characters exceed expected
bounds of behaviour (one thinks of the relationship between Maggie
and Stephen in The Mill on the Floss, and Hetty Sorel and Arthur
Donnithorne in Adam Bede), they have not located its origins and
the anxiety it produces with Nunokawa’s precision.
The crux of Nunokawa’s argument is that by hoarding his gold
and living alone, Silas is guilty of a form of economic masturbation,
whereby his wealth alone gives him pleasure without being put to
the use for which it was intended, i.e. expenditure. This conflation
of the economically productive body with the sexual body is one
that Foucault traced to the beginning of the seventeenth century
when sexuality began to be regulated according to a set of economic
criteria which were inextricably bound to the body’s (re)productiv-
ity. Sexual acts which did not produce new labourers or consumers
(such as masturbation, or same-sex relationships) were labelled
‘deviant’ and criminalised. According to Nunakowa, ‘The appear-
ance of impropriety that clings to the miser’s fondlings is an affront
to the rules of proper bodily conduct, or more precisely, of proper
bodily contact …’ (p. 166). Nunakowa argues that it is only with the
arrival of Eppie and the proper domesticity she represents that the
miser can return to more normative relations of social exchange. To
follow this argument to its logical conclusion we must realise that
Eppie’s arrival transforms Silas, not simply as a character and a
social being, but also as a consumer. By becoming a family unit, Silas
learns the value of the gold he has lost and comes to understand
that it cannot be productive through being hoarded, but that it must
enter into circulation and be used to purchase.
Nunokawa has developed this argument in his book The Afterlife
of Property in which he suggests links between Eliot and Dickens –
another nineteenth-century novelist who, in novels such as Dombey
and Son (1846–8) and Little Dorrit (1855–7) connects commodity
exchange to decadent bodies. Nunokawa also argues that in Eliot’s
Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth has good reason to linger in
the marriage market, for this state of commodification is better than
being bought either as a physical or a psychic property, and the state
of dread and powerlessness her role as a ‘secured’ woman entails.
Significantly, Nunakowa notes how Silas Marner is slightly different
in its focus since it suggests that perversion can just as easily be
attached to withdrawal from the marketplace as to activity in it.
22 INTRODUCTION

The notion that the hoarding of money should be associated with

abstraction, perversion and the loss of physical sensation, is a theme
continued in the third extract on Silas Marner, Jim Reilly’s ‘A report
of unknown objects’: Silas Marner’ (essay 9) which comes from his
1993 study, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Conrad,
Hardy and George Eliot. Reilly’s approach to the novel (his
announcement, for example, that in Silas Marner Eliot is ‘evidently
engaging with a contemporary construction of identity in its new,
bourgeois form’ [p. 189]) signals an allegiance to historicist
approaches to literary texts. His work represents a growing trend
within literary studies to situate literature within history once more,
but a history understood not in the simplistic manner of
‘Background’ but instead as ‘cultural text, which is the matrix or
master code that the literary text both depends on and modifies’.57
Although this kind of work was initially associated most frequently
with the study of the English Renaissance, the transitional state of
nineteenth-century society which Eliot represents, together with her
own interest in historical and scientific debate, offers a good deal of
potential for this method of approach. Catherine Gallagher’s book,
The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985), was influential
in that it helped set a precedent for viewing Eliot’s fiction from the
perspective of its wider social, economic and political contexts.
Gallagher relates both the politics and the realism of Felix Holt
(1866) to the question of representation in literature and debates
about political representation involving such writers as John Bright
and Matthew Arnold.58 Reilly himself argues that ‘history’ as it is
represented in Eliot and later novelists such as Thomas Hardy and
Joseph Conrad is merely a ‘gigantic tale’, to use Conrad’s phrase, of
world dimensions which, as Reilly has observed, ‘might well be a
big lie’.59 This last remark may suggest that Reilly’s aim is to get at a
truer history, underrepresented or misrepresented by Victorian nov-
elists – the type of ideological constructs that both Esty and Landa
attempt to unravel in their essays on The Mill on the Floss. In fact,
history is only that which is written and it is the manner in which it
is recorded, whether in the form of a diary, newspaper, novel, or
poem, that is important. What Reilly, like Gallagher, is interested in
is the extent to which Eliot’s fiction can be said to have been shaped
by social structures and ideological sources, given the conflict in the
nineteenth century between the declining older land-owning class
and the developing commercial industrial bourgeoisie. In Silas
Marner, as in The Mill on the Floss, Eliot quite clearly draws atten-
 INTRODUCTION 23

tion to her characters’ positions within this changing social struc-

ture and the impingement of society on the development of the indi-
vidual.
One frequently seen way of starting New Historicist critique is
the quoting of another textual source which offers a brief snapshot
of what the critic wants to highlight about the main text she is dis-
cussing.60 Thus Reilly opens his essay with an extract from Karl
Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in which
Marx argues that the ‘sense of having’ has insidiously replaced the
physical and intellectual senses. Reilly’s essay also begins with a dis-
cussion of Dickens’s Dombey and Son, in which the cold, money-
obsessed Mr Dombey initially misses his opportunity for
redemption through a relationship with his loving daughter. The
point of these extracts is to allow Reilly to introduce ideas of alien-
ation, acquisition and greed, versus more natural human relations,
and the issue of whether Silas Marner, too, interrogates the ques-
tion of ‘whether it is not now natural to be unnatural?’ (p.189).
This manner of opening the discussion offers a useful way of point-
ing out that histories, whatever we know of one text or event, are
depicted differently by any number of texts. Silas Marner takes part
in a contest between competing ideologies and Eliot’s role in this
conception should be seen in relation to such contemporary texts as
those of Dickens, and Marx, or Samuel Smiles’s Self Help (1859)
and Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851). Read alongside these
(con)texts, Eliot’s novels begin to take on new dimensions, emerg-
ing as records of social crisis and ensuing social conflicts. It is the
transitional and embattled nature of nineteenth-century society that
interests Reilly and in particular the concept of the individual
subject.
According to New Historicist thought, the ‘individual’ is not
inherently unique or complete but is produced as an effect of the
social order.61 One immediate discursive context for Silas Marner is
the urgency with which mid-nineteenth-century writers debated the
figure of the alienated commodified worker. In Capital, Karl Marx
argues that commodities are inherently contradictory ‘sensuous
things which are social’ and objects which have only ‘the semblance
of objectivity’.62 The much-quoted result of this contradiction is
commodity fetishism, the forms of which continue to resist analy-
sis. Reilly’s main thesis, therefore, is that in fictional terms the
world of Silas Marner is an early expression of themes that would
be taken up by later novelists. Henry James, in works such as The
24 INTRODUCTION

Golden Bowl (1904), is a notable example. Yet Silas Marner is also

very much a product of its own time, 1861. Eliot utilises the fears of
alienation and the commodified worker of Marx’s analysis in a way
which, according to Reilly, is ‘strikingly congruent’, and he places
extracts from Eliot’s romance alongside extracts from Marx in order
to illustrate this. In Reilly’s compelling discussion of
Vergegenstandlichung (‘objectification’, ‘commodification’) Marx’s
text is thus used to establish the grounds of the analysis. The
alliance is not, one should stress, without potential problems. If one
wanted to point out a weakness in Reilly’s approach it would be
possible to argue that Eliot’s representation of the dehumanising
consequences of commodity production is more primarily meaning-
ful in the context of her historicist humanism. Marx, on the other
hand, is proposing a radical deconstruction of the appearance of
value in which ‘humanity’ is a result of the mode of production of
value, an effect and not an end in itself.
The acknowledgement of Eliot’s place within the history of nine-
teenth-century ideas has been one of the most positive developments
in recent criticism, even if it has meant that critics have perhaps
spent too much time trying to link Eliot to Comtism and many
other ‘isms’ to the extent it becomes a heavily academic pursuit.
Nonetheless, what is certainly important is the acceptance that the
Eliot as revealed in Gordon Haight’s and Rosemary Ashton’s impor-
tant biographies is not so much the ‘dull’ (Margaret Oliphant’s
description) kept woman, as an important intellectual and literary
figure, part of a dynamic network of prominent scientists, philoso-
phers, artists and writers. The relationships to Eliot’s thought of
philosophical and social theories of figures such as David Friederich
Strauss, Ludwig Feurbach, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer, to
say nothing of the work of G. H. Lewes, have been incisively estab-
lished.63
The final essay in the current collection is taken from Sally
Shuttleworth’s George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (1984).
This is a study that underlined a good deal of what had already been
noted but not fully explored, that is the extent of George Eliot’s
scientific interests and how she integrated them into her writing.
Obviously science makes a claim to knowing and controlling the
world in a certain way, and to be accepted as a scientist one must
speak, write and act in a ‘scientific’ manner, that is, within the dis-
course of science. What Shuttleworth argues is that Eliot’s knowl-
edge of science was ‘unmatched by any of her peers’ and she stresses
 INTRODUCTION 25

the communality of the beliefs she shared with nineteenth-century

philosophers such as Comte, Spencer and Lewes. Most notable of all
these beliefs is the one that ‘science could provide the foundations
for a system of ethical conduct’. Shuttleworth also tries to show
how ‘scientific ideas and theories of method affected not only the
social vision but also the narrative structure and fictional methodol-
ogy’.64
In the extract reprinted here, Shuttleworth argues that the
Raveloe community of Silas Marner is used by Eliot to explore ‘the
various historical routes of man’s behaviour’ and ‘to offer, in accor-
dance with Comtean theory, a full account of the ways in which the
characters evolved through interaction with their surrounding social
medium’ (p. 208). However, what Shuttleworth is at pains to point
out is that Eliot’s engagement with these ideas is far from passive or
reflective (a charge brought against her by early twentieth-century
critics such as Leslie Stephen). Thus, as Shuttleworth sees it, Eliot
actively ‘challenges dominant assumptions of social and psychologi-
cal community’, particularly in her presentation of the novel’s
eponymous hero. Eliot’s ‘analysis’ of her hero’s growing alienation
‘inverts organicist theories of historical development’ (p. 211). Silas,
after all, evokes hostility, not altruism, from his Raveloe neighbours,
while he himself is thrown into isolation and egoism.
The world of Silas Marner which Shuttleworth reads is also heavily
influenced (naturally enough perhaps) by G. H. Lewes, himself an
influential figure in the development of a physiologically based psy-
chology, alongside Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer. For
Shuttleworth, the novel reveals Eliot adopting Lewes’s theories as a
means of making her characters’ behaviour scientifically plausible.
However, Eliot is not dealing simply with a question of descriptive
accuracy but rather a way of shifting between different levels of analy-
sis, ‘combining intricate psychological analysis with wider social and
moral conclusions’ (p. 214). Thus, Silas’s move to ‘full consciousness’
is not only a psychological state (‘an integrated sense of self based on
continuous memory’), but also an awareness and acceptance of social
life (p. 213). According to Shuttleworth, Eliot also uses physiology to
reinforce the moral structure of the tale; Silas’s isolation is made to
appear not as a product of social relations but as an accident of per-
sonal circumstances to be resolved on an individual level.
The diverse critical reactions to the novel show no sign of
abating. The essays in this section reveal that a number of very dif-
ferent Silas Marner exist and co-exist. The four essays included
26 INTRODUCTION

suggest once again that such different constructions of Eliot are the
result of productions of cultural politics, of positions being con-
stantly formed and held, challenged and subverted but also of Eliot’s
own complexity as a writer. This same complexity means, of course,
that the directions in which criticism might go are numerous. For
example, if early twenty-first century critics are not as obviously
concerned with the poetics of the novels as they might have been 30
years ago, they are more alert to their involvement in the creation of
social discourse and to the anxieties that fiction may manipulate or
conceal. They are beginning to be conscious, too, of the economic
milieu in which Eliot’s novels were produced.65 The recognition that
Eliot’s writing was a form of labour, that publishing is a business
and that the shape of her novels was equally marked by these mater-
ial facts is a growing area of interest. Finally, as the works of non-
canonical women novelists of the nineteenth century are
rediscovered, Eliot’s hard won and much cherished status as a ‘high
culture’ novelist, as well as her surprising envy of the mass reader-
ship enjoyed by Ellen Wood, Dinah Craik and Mary Braddon, are
also providing new contexts for thinking about her fiction and its
importance.66

NOTES
1. See F. H. Myers’ obituary of Eliot in the Century magazine: ‘Taking as
her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring
trumpet-calls of men, – the words, God, Immortality, Duty, – [she]
pronounced with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first,
how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute
the third. […] her grave majestic countenance turned toward me like a
sibyl’s in the gloom.’ Cited in Gordon Haight, George Eliot: A
Biography (Oxford, 1968), p. 464.
2. Justin McCarthy, Reminiscences (London, 1899), Vol. II, p. 310. For a
more recent examination of the power of the George Eliot myth, her
acolytes and the financial benefits she gained by its perpetuation, see
Leah Price, ‘George Eliot and the Production of Consumers’, Novel,
30:2 (1997), 145–70.
3. Cited in Gordon S. Haight (ed.), A Century of George Eliot Criticism
(Boston, 1965), p. 162.
4. John Cross, George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals, 3
Vols (Edinburgh, 1885).
5. Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘George Eliot’, in Women Novelists of Queen
Victoria’s Reign, ed. Margaret Oliphant et al. (London, 1897), p. 64.
 INTRODUCTION 27

6. See: F. Joseph Jacobs, Literary Studies (London, 1895): ‘[T]he reputa-

tion of George Eliot is undergoing a kind of eclipse in this last decade
of the nineteenth century. It is becoming safe to indulge in cheap
sneers at the ineffectiveness of her heroes, at the want of élan’ (p. xxi).
George Saintsbury, Corrected Impressions (London, 1895), likewise
noted that by 1895 she had passed out of ‘contemporary appreciation’
(p. 172).
7. Cited in Haight, A Century of George Eliot Criticism, p. 162.
8. Edmund Gosse, Aspects and Impressions (London, 1922), p. 1.
9. See, for example, Kristen Brady, George Eliot (London, 1992), pp.
4–12.
10. Virginia Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, in Collected Essays (London, 1966),
Vol. I, p. 196.
11. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetics of Reception
(Minnesota,1982), p. 27. On the changing categories by which fiction
is evaluated, see also Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural
Work Of American Fiction (Oxford, 1985). The classification of fiction
is dependent upon the ‘changing currents of social life’, currents which
affect the perceptual frames and horizon of expectations through
which critics read and evaluate texts (p. 192).
12. Cited in Deirdre David, Intellectual Woman and Victorian Patriarchy:
Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (London,
1987), p. 171.
13. Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (Oxford, 1995), p. 45. For further
discussion of the apparent decline of Eliot’s critical reputation, see
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de
Siècle (London, 1992), ch. 4, and J. Russell Perkin, A Reception History
of George Eliot’s Fiction (London, 1990), ch. 4.
14. To designate the female figure ‘who wields the phallic tools of the sym-
bolic order, of language and culture … ’ Jim Reilly in Shadowtime:
History and Representation in Conrad, Hardy and George Eliot (London,
1993), uses Jane Gallop’s term ‘phallic mother’ (p. 89). See, also, Jane
Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction (Ithaca, NY, 1982), pp. 77–8.
15. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph
Conrad (Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 10.
16. Elinor Shaffer, Kubla Kahn and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological
School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880
(Cambridge, 1975); Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary
Narrative in George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction (London,
1983); Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century
Science (London, 1984).
17. Elizabeth Ermarth, George Eliot (Boston, 1985), p. 139.
28 INTRODUCTION

18. From an unsigned review, Guardian, 25 April 1860, in David Carroll

(ed.), The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), p. 115.
19. From an unsigned review, Spectator, 7 April 1860, in Carroll, George
Eliot: The Critical Heritage, p. 112.
20. John Ruskin, ‘Fiction Foul and Fair’, Nineteenth Century, October
1881, in Carroll, George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, p. 167.
21. In Eliot’s Journal, 22 November 1860, in R. A. Draper (ed.), The Mill
on the Floss and Silas Marner: A Casebook (London, 1977), p. 35.
22. Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James
Kirkup (Harmondsworth, 1963), p. 140.
23. Cited in Draper, Casebook, p. 17.
24. Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (London, 1965),
pp. 17–18.
25. A.S. Byatt, ‘Introduction’, The Mill on the Floss (Harmondsworth,
1979), p. 7.
26. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Byatt, p. 657.
27. Stuart Jeffries, ‘Channel Surfing: So much Floss’, Guardian, 4 January
1997, p. 7.
28. Examples of earlier feminist impatience with George Eliot are given in
Zelda Austen’s article, ‘Why Feminists are Angry with George Eliot’,
College English, 37 (1976), 549–61.
29. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: Women Novelists from
Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ, 1977).
30. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Narrative and History’, ELH, 41 (1974), 462.
31. These are Terry Eagleton’s definitions. For a usefully succinct discus-
sion of deconstruction, see Peter Barry, Beginning Theory (Manchester,
1996), pp. 70–1.
32. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary
Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore, MD, 1980), p. 5. For other examples
of deconstruction in action, see G. Douglas Atkin, Reading
Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading (Lexington, MA, 1983).
33. J. Hillis Miller, Victorian Subjects (London, 1991).
34. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), trans H. M. Parshley
(London, 1972), p. 1; Ruth Robbins, ‘“Snowed Up”: Feminist
Approaches’, in Julian Wolfreys and William Baker (eds), Literary
Theories (London, 1996), p. 118.
35. Cited in Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader:
Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (London,
1997), p. 46.
 INTRODUCTION 29

36. Nancy K. Miller, ‘Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s

Fiction’, PMLA, 96 (1981), 36–48. See Perkin A Reception History of
George Eliot’s Fiction.
37. Miller, ibid., p. 37.
38. In George Eliot and Community (Berkley, CA, 1984), Suzanne Graver
discusses Eliot’s novels in relation to the typology of Ferdinand
Tönnies. In Tönnies’ formulation, society could be divided into two
types: Gemeinschaft or ‘local, organic, agricultural communities that
are modelled on the family and rooted in the traditional or the sacred’;
and Gesellschaft or ‘urban, heterogeneous, industrial societies that are
culturally sophisticated and shaped by the rational pursuit of self-
interest in a capitalistic and secular environment’ (p. 14).
39. Frances Taylor, ‘Adam Bede’, Dublin Review, 47 (1859), 34.
40. Josephine McDonagh, George Eliot (Plymouth, 1997), pp. 5–6.
41. Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932
(Oxford, 1983), pp. 87–108.
42. F. R. Leavis, ‘Re-evaluations (XV): George Eliot (I)’, Scrutiny, 13
(Autum–Winter 1945), in Stuart Hutchinson (ed.), George Eliot:
Critical Assessments (London, 1996), Vol. 2, p. 151.
43. Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance
(London, 1994), p. 11. In ‘Industrial Culture and the Victorian Novel’
Joseph Childers also stresses Eliot’s ‘quiet but insistent nostalgia’ (in
Deirdre David [ed.], Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel
[Cambridge, 2001] p.91).
44. Kerry McSweeny, George Eliot (London, 1991), p. 88.
45. From an unsigned review, ‘George Eliot’s Life’, London Quarterly
Review, 64 (April–July 1885), 208–9, in Teresa Mangum, ‘George Eliot
and the Journalists: Making the Mistress Moral’, in Victorian Scandals,
ed. Kristen Garrigan (Ohio, 1992), p. 175. Eliza Lynn Linton was like-
wise in no doubt that ‘in the sensitive, turbulent, loving nature of Maggie
Tulliver Marian Evans painted herself’ (‘George Eliot’, in Women
Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign, p. 72).
46. Margaret Oliphant, review in, Edinburgh Review, 161 (Jan.–June
1885), 519, in Mangum, ‘George Eliot and the Journalists’, p. 174.
47. Q. D. Leavis, ‘Introduction’, Silas Marner (Harmondsworth, 1967),
p. 41.
48. Joseph Wiesenfarth, ‘Demythologizing Silas Marner’, ELH, 37 (1970),
in Critical Assessments, ed. Hutchinson, Vol. 3, p. 180.
49. Robert Dunham, ‘Silas Marner and the Wordsworthian Child’, Studies
in English Literature, 16 (1976), in Critical Assessments, ed.
Hutchinson, Vol. 3, p. 196.
30 INTRODUCTION

50. In 1897, Eliza Lynn Linton suggested that the novel could best be
understood by taking this ‘beautiful unreality … out of the ranks of
human history and placing it in those of fairy tale and romance’
(‘George Eliot’, in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign, p. 83).
51. Ken Newton, ‘Victorian Values and Silas Marner’, in Varieties of
Victorianism, ed. Gary Day (London, 1998), p. 113.
52. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859), in Rosemary Ashton,
George Eliot: A Life (London, 1996), p. 238.
53. Cited in Ashton, George Eliot, p. 252.
54. E. S. Dallas, ‘Silas Marner’, The Times, 29 April 1861, p. 12, in
Carroll, Critical Heritage, p. 179.
55. John Blackwood to George Eliot, 19 February 1861, in Ashton, George
Eliot, p. 253.
56. George Eliot, Silas Marner, ed. Q. D. Leavis, p. 51.
57. Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of
English (London, 1985), p. 33.
58. Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction:
Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago, 1985).
59. Jim Reilly, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad
and George Eliot, p. 136.
60. For a useful overview of New Historicist methodologies see: John
Brannigan, ‘A New Historicist Reading of “Snowed Up”’, in Wolfreys
and Baker, Literary Theories, pp. 157–76.
61. Ibid., p. 166.
62. Karl Marx, Capital (New York, 1965), p. 167.
63. See, for example, David Maria Hesse, George Eliot and Auguste Comte
(London, 1996); Nancy L. Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer
(Princeton, NJ, 1991).
64. Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Science, p.ix;
p. 11; p. x.
65. See K. McCormack, ‘George Eliot’s First Fiction: Targeting
Blackwood’s’, The Bibliotheck, 21 (1996), 69–80.
66. See, for example, Nicola Thompson, ‘Responding to the woman ques-
tion; rereading non-canonical Victorian women novelists’, in Victorian
Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. Nicola Thompson
(Cambridge, 1999), pp. 9–10.
 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 philosophi-
cal 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 contribu-
tion in The Great Tradition (1948) was arguably not only to recu-
perate 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 imper-
sonality 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

31
32 SUSAN FRAIMAN

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 culmi-
nation 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 ‘enlight-
ened’, 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 incompatibil-
ity,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 parti-
sans, 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.
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 33

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), sug-
gested 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 renuncia-
tion’ 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 dis-
advantage 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 stan-
dards 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 indi-
vidual, 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
34 SUSAN FRAIMAN

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 resig-
nation 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 sub-
ordination 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 conven-
tional 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 implica-
tions 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 alterna-
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 35

tive 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 con-
tention that the Bildungsroman since Goethe has become increas-
ingly psychological (as the picaresque hero begins to look in his
heart and write) suggests, indeed, a heightening of this genre’s pre-
occupation 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
36 SUSAN FRAIMAN

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 identify-
ing ‘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 jammings, because these seem to me the infu-
riated places productive of critique.

II
The isolating mobility of the Bildungsroman ‘proper’ is strongly
evoked by the adventures of Tom Tulliver. As Judith Lowder
Newton has remarked, ‘Tom is already in motion when we first
encounter him’.26 He is first seen bowling along in a gig, which soon
deposits him into the arms of an eager family. His first words,
spoken ‘with masculine reticence as to the tender emotions’, suggest
a kind of anticonversation: ‘Hallo! Yap – what! are you there?’ (p.
30). To whom, we might ask, is this actually addressed? Is ‘hallo!’
meant for Yap (the dog) or simply shouted out into the void? Is
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 37

‘what!’ a cry of recognition or, as the last phrase implies, a ques-

tion? And again, is this recognition-immediately-doubted still
directed to Yap? or has Tom suddenly noticed Maggie and Mrs
Tulliver? Perhaps he intends a metaphysical ‘you’ – as if to ask, ‘Is
there anyone listening?’ Possibly the subject of this fragment is really
‘yap’, or language estranged from intelligibility. More than a boy’s
amusing shyness, displacing his real love for sister and mother onto
dog, the speech conveys an almost existential doubt about whether
an interlocutor exists and whether meaningful exchange can occur.
This is not an uncertainty shared by the text as a whole; indeed, I
will ultimately be arguing that The Mill on the Floss encourages its
readers both formally and thematically to see characters in inter-
locutory terms. What Tom’s stammering hello suggests, rather, is
the difficulty of dialogue for him. The subsequent action reiterates
this difficulty. When Maggie grabs her brother around the neck,
Tom absents himself by looking and travelling in his mind’s eye
‘towards the croft and the lambs and the river, where he promised
himself that he would begin to fish the first thing to-morrow
morning’ (p. 30). In fact, Tom hardly ever allows Maggie (or any
Other) to be present to him until their penultimate crisis, face to
face in the flood. Only then does he utter a genuine cry of recogni-
tion – ‘Magsie!’ (p. 455) – finally controverting the elided recogni-
tion above, in which ‘Yap’ followed by a dash seems to indicate the
place where Maggie and a chance at connection are suppressed.
Tom’s desire for autonomy and its relation to mobility are illus-
trated time and again. He maintains (the illusion of) his freedom
from extended kin ties by absconding whenever the uncles and
aunts appear (p. 40). And the one time Tom decides to risk their
visit for the sake of ‘the pudden’, he braces his ego by asserting his
independence of Maggie in the famous jam puff scene (pp. 41–3).
Here Tom’s studied division of the pastry into ‘mine’ and ‘yours’,
the resolute descent of his ‘hovering knife’, seems to figure the sev-
ering from Maggie that this scene literally accomplishes. Carefully
orchestrated to find fault with his sister whether she gives him more
or less puff, it ends like so many of their encounters with Tom
running off in anger. It is also an example of how Tom’s resisted
family ties are mediated by food, by Uncle Deane’s peppermints and
Mrs Tulliver’s cakes and puddens, as if hearkening back to a pre-
oedipal feeding. The violent bisection of the puff attempts to undo
the children’s earlier communion over cake, when Maggie ‘put out
her mouth for the cake and bit a piece: and then Tom bit a piece,
38 SUSAN FRAIMAN

just for company, and they ate together and rubbed each other’s
cheeks and brows and noses together’ (pp. 35–6).
When Tom abandons Maggie, he typically turns to Lucy, Luke, or
Bob Jakin, ‘an inferior, who could always be treated with authority’
(p. 43), not to console but rather to consolidate his separateness.
Anxious to lead Lucy, fire Luke, or patronise Bob, Tom defends his
solitary state by demonstrating his (gender and class) superiority.
This will, of course, be accomplished more lastingly by the genteel
education and apprenticeship in trade that, seemingly mismatched,
together raise him farther above Maggie, Bob, and even his own
father. As in most Bildungsromane, the mobility underwriting Tom’s
sovereignty is finally social mobility. But what distinguishes The Mill
on the Floss from Wilhelm Meister, David Copperfield, and even
Ann Murry’s Mentoria is its repudiation of precisely this story of
self-advancement – its critical if not satirical view of Tom’s lonely
climb from averted adolescent to competitive businessman, its
evident concern to dramatise the moral and narrative deficiency of
Tom’s story. This deficiency is especially clear at the trajectory’s
highest point, the moment of ‘arrival’ that should bring semantic
and formal satisfaction. For when Tom’s laborious apprenticeship is
at last completed by an offer to join his uncle’s firm, it is still not
enough. He also wants to recover and manage the mill, both to
avenge his father and because, as he explains, ‘I want to have plenty
of work. There’s nothing else I care about much’. Here the narrator
remarks, ‘There was something rather sad in that speech from a
young man of three-and-twenty’ (p. 348). Uncle Deane assures Tom
he will one day have a wife to care about, but Tom’s interest in Lucy
never goes anywhere. For the male protagonist, marriage is not a
goal so much as a reward for having reached his goal; it symbolises
his gratification. But unlike Dickens’s social-climbing Pip, Tom
never manages to reframe his great expectations, does not reroute
his course in time for a chance at romantic ‘happiness’, and he
reaches a moral turning point only moments before his death. By
killing instead of wedding Tom, Eliot’s text refuses, narratively, to
validate his formation and to invest it with significant content.27
Of course, The Mill on the Floss undercuts Tom’s Bildungsroman
principally by shoving it off to the side, unwilling to make it the
centre or norm. Jerome Buckley and Charlotte Goodman have tried
to conserve Tom’s primacy by arguing that The Mill on the Floss is a
‘double’ Bildungsroman. Buckley cites George Eliot’s own statement
to publisher John Blackwood, describing her novel as ‘the history of
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 39

two closely related lives’. Though readers may prefer Maggie,

Buckley says, ‘we must not ignore the declared duality of purpose’.28
Goodman also asserts that The Mill on the Floss places ‘virtually
equal emphasis on both a male and a female protagonist’.29 This
seems to me a somewhat misleading claim. Whatever Eliot’s pro-
fessed intention, from the very first moment one’s attention, like the
narrator’s, is devoted to Maggie. Readers enter the Tulliver house-
hold because Maggie leads them there, and it is her interior life,
more lovingly detailed than Tom’s, that catches them up and carries
them through. She refigures, in short, enough of Wilhelm or Pip to
be recognisable in some conventional sense as the character whose
formation ought to be primarily at issue. But though Maggie may be
the more conspicuous protagonist, it is equally true that any com-
fortable centrality is thrown off by Tom. Her narrative deposes but
does not, however, wholly displace his. Nor are the two balanced in
some stable symmetry or amiable doubleness. They tend, rather, to
pull each other off balance, to conflict with and contest one another.
Perhaps the tension is a generic one. Taking Fredric Jameson’s
point that ‘genre theory must always in one way or another project a
model of the coexistence or tension between several generic modes
or strands’,30 one may provisionally regard the distance between
brother and sister as the space between genres. If Tom indicates the
work’s nominal status as Bildungsroman, Maggie’s problem – and
the problematic of the novel – is her inability to enter the desig-
nated mode. The novel is structured by her vain attempts to partici-
pate in the genre I have attributed to Tom and by her inevitable
lapses back into another, something resembling the gothic and
recalling Evelina; in spite of her aspirations to Bildung, Maggie is
continually returned to a place of terror, re-enclosed in a familiar
prison.31 In Jameson’s reading of Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, the
separation of lovers occasions a very similar tension, splitting the
work into

two very distinct narrative lines which can be read as two different
generic modes. The plight of Lucia, for instance, gives [Manzoni] the
material for a Gothic novel, in which the feminine victim eludes one
trap only to fall into a more agonising one … Meanwhile, Renzo
wanders through the grosse Welt of history and of the displacement of
vast armed populations … His own episodic experiences, formally
something like a roman d’aventures … thus provide a quite different
narrative register from that, inward and psychologising, of the Lucia
narrative.32
40 SUSAN FRAIMAN

Jameson describes but does not take notice of the evident gender
specificity of these two registers. As in The Mill on the Floss,
Manzoni’s female character is seized by an agonising, claustrophobic
circularity, while the male adventures his way through a more spa-
cious landscape. Insisting on the manifestly gendered aspect of these
divergent plot lines is the first step toward making sense of such a
seeming generic discontinuity and its organisation of The Mill on
the Floss.
I would argue that, although Tom’s is the coveted mode, the elu-
siveness of this mode for Maggie serves to call it into question. The
problem it poses for her makes the form itself finally problematic. In
a sense, her continual tugging at the Bildungsroman works eventually
to loosen its moorings. Furthermore, the rivalry between sibling nar-
ratives has a decentring effect that puts The Mill on the Floss itself at
odds with the usual novel of formation. Buckley and Goodman are
right to notice that Eliot’s Bildungsheld is, if not doubled, then at
least decentred. What they fail to appreciate is how this decentring
contests the very terms of the Bildungsroman, to which a single,
central character has been seen as fundamental.33 Not only Tom’s
particular story, but the genre as a whole and its implied values are
unsettled by this configuration. Apparently the centred subject was
not so thoroughly or enthusiastically constructed by the nineteenth-
century novel as Jameson implies. The critique he locates in our
current period of late capitalism34 may have antecedents in the work
of women such as George Eliot for whom, from the start, the
centred subject wavered suspiciously like a mirage.35
Maggie’s wishes to learn Latin and earn money by plain sewing
typify her futile efforts to make Tom’s Bildung her own. Among
these efforts, her flight to the gypsies is particularly revealing, and
its disappointed outcome is key to my argument. This episode begins
as a rejection of Tom and his middle-class values, as Maggie reck-
lessly embraces the whole string of overlapping pejoratives marking
her as ‘bad’: darkness/dirtiness/demonism/gypsyness. In this sense,
joining the gypsies is continuous with pushing ‘little pink-and-white
Lucy into the cow-trodden mud’ (p. 91) and urging the fair-skinned
Tom to ‘stain his face brown’ (p. 94). Repudiating the ‘clean’ and
‘fair’ while asserting the disreputable, reviling genteel sensibilities
(much as the blackened Lucy does when she appears in aunt Pullet’s
parlour), it represents a strategy of impenitence. Yet claiming a
nomadic people, like the act of running away itself, also expresses
Maggie’s longing for Tom’s easy mobility. And though she begins in
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 41

opposition to Tom, Maggie soon comes to imagine her relation to

the gypsies in Tom’s own condescending terms. She tells herself
they will ‘pay her much respect on account of her superior knowl-
edge’ (p. 94). At the camp, the once defiantly messy girl begins to
wish her gypsy friends were less dirty and plans to introduce
washing basins along with books (p. 97). Having briefly challenged
bourgeois notions of dirty and clean, Maggie now reverts to the old
valuations. But the moral agenda Maggie brings to the gypsies is less
about feminine virtue reflected in aunt Pullet’s glossy floors than it is
about teaching, improving, and ‘civilising’. Her eagerness to explain
who Columbus was – ‘a very wonderful man, who found out half
the world’ (p. 98) – makes explicit the colonial mission Maggie has
assigned herself, and it is an eminently masculine one.36 In fact, this
second phase of Maggie’s venture is a kind of cross-dressing as
Columbus. Her running away to the gypsies is, the narrator
remarks, a larger-scale version of what Tom would have done under
similar circumstances (p. 93). Likewise, the Columbian dream of
crossing oceans to rule a ‘barbarian’ nation is a larger-scale version
and logical extension of Tom’s more modest capitalist career. Here
then is Maggie’s bid to generate a Bildungsroman for herself and
even to beat Tom at his own genre.
Maggie’s conquesting Bildungsroman takes, however, a sudden
gothic swerve, leading her through terror back to where she began.
By the time a gypsy escorts her home, ‘no nightmare had ever
seemed to her more horrible. … Not Leonore, in that preternatural
midnight excursion with her phantom lover, was more terrified than
poor Maggie’ (p. 102). And Maggie’s ‘rescue’ by her father only
returns her to the constraining community she so desperately fled in
the first place; her wanderings produce not escape but reimprison-
ment, and in this they anticipate her later flight with that phantom
lover, Stephen Guest. Yet if the colonial version of the
Bildungsroman proves inaccessible to Maggie, her disenchantment
does make this story-type somewhat less appealing. On the one hand,
Eliot’s text is itself complicit with the tale of thieves and primitives in
need of reform. On the other, however, Maggie’s foolish misconcep-
tions about the gypsies, her laughable arrogance about schooling and
governing them, also lampoon this particular narrative of self-
definition through domination, including Tom’s domestic variety.
Ousted from the footloose ‘male’ mode, Maggie lapses back into
the claustrophobic ‘female’ mode – the gothic register associated
with aunt Pullet in the chapter immediately before Maggie departs
42 SUSAN FRAIMAN

for gypsydom. This scene, the unveiling of aunt Pullet’s new bonnet,
offers not only (what the bonnet implies) a peek at female sexuality,
but also an ominous glimpse of the usual plotting of female destiny.
The drawn-out solemnity of the disclosure, reverently witnessed by
Mrs Tulliver and the two fearful girls, makes it indeed a kind of
ritual initiation into the ways of womanhood.37 It is marked off as
such by the perilous climb up polished stairs, Maggie and Lucy trail-
ing after the older women, leaving Tom behind (p. 79). Needless to
say, this is not the steady march to masculine selfhood, but a slip-
pery anti-expedition to femaleness, which threatens to be crippling.
Once upstairs, in search of the touted bonnet, aunt Pullet leads her
sister and nieces through a Chinese puzzle of locked rooms and
wardrobes. Far from an invigorating mobility, this is an approach to
greater and greater stillness, passing by ‘the corpses of furniture in
white shrouds’ (p. 80) in a movement away from movement. Even
the unshrouded furniture postures its passivity, legs in the air. Think
of Paul Morel, striding at the end of Sons and Lovers ‘towards the
faintly humming, glowing town’; by contrast, Maggie is led inward
to compartments of increasing darkness and disuse. Think of The
Prelude, its ecstatic protagonist looking out from Alpine heights, or
David Copperfield more quietly stirred by his view of a Swiss valley;
here Eliot depicts the plumbing of a house for its dimmest and nar-
rowest perspective.
So Maggie and Lucy, excluded from a boy’s roving, self-enlarging
genre, are ushered into a diminishing space. Adult femininity, here
as in a gothic novel, seems to require live burial in the smallest
closets of a large house. More terrible still, however, is the banality
of the object finally uncovered: ‘The sight of the bonnet at last was
an anticlimax to Maggie, who would have preferred something
more strikingly preternatural’ (p. 80). What aunt Pullet reveals is
the trick of female destiny, that there is no rabbit in the hat – only
the hat. Aunt Pullet’s bonnet is ineluctably ordinary, non-magical,
empty. Like Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, Eliot seems to revise
the gothic in anticipation of Freud’s perception that the scariest
place and worst villain are not only the most remote, but also the
most familiar. In these domesticated gothic novels, the cruellest tor-
ments are the boredom and triviality of a woman’s routine; the
tightest bonds – could they be the strings of her bonnet? There is
also a sense in which the bonnet refers to the fashionable Dodson
female herself. Turning ‘slowly around, like a draper’s lay-figure’,
(p. 81), aunt Pullet seems indeed a shell of clothing with very little
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 43

inside. Like her clothes, she is primarily ornamental, signifying her

husband’s wealth and taste. And in this objectification aunt Pullet
resembles her favourite sister, Bessie, who falls apart when she loses
her things. ‘Elizabeth Dodson’ is literally written into her table-
cloths, so that when these are dispersed she herself is hopelessly
scattered. Maggie, in short, quite correctly intuits that there is ‘some
painful mystery about her aunt’s bonnet’ (p. 82). Though uncom-
prehending, she is not too young to catch the allusion of this head-
gear to the claustrophobia, inconsequentiality, and desperate
consumerism of Victorian women’s lives.
In all the ways I have described, the bonnet scene suggests a goth-
icised formation in keeping with the long suicide view of Maggie’s
fate and in stark contrast to Tom’s aggressive forays into the world.
Yet, while marking Maggie’s exclusion from the masculinised
Bildungsroman, it may also communicate a restless desire for it and
ultimately, I would argue once again, serve to criticise by parodying
the official genre. Take, for example, this musing on the bonnet by
the two sisters:
‘Ah’, [aunt Pullet] said at last, ‘I may never wear it twice, sister;
who knows?’
‘Don’t talk o’ that, sister’, answered Mrs Tulliver. ‘I hope you’ll have
your health this summer.’
‘Ah! But there may come a death in the family, as there did soon after
I had my green satin bonnet. Cousin Abbot may go, and we can’t
think o’ wearing crape less nor half a year for him.’
(p. 81)
Aunt Pullet’s moan seems at first, to us and Mrs Tulliver, like a
woeful and even wishful prediction of her own death. Yet as it turns
out, Aunt Pullet is not thinking about herself at all, but about some
other family member – preferably cousin Abbott. Remembering
cousin Abbott’s wealth, one realises that aunt Pullet’s fantasy, far
from suicidal, is in fact distinctly homicidal. Judging by the lethal
effect of her previous, green satin bonnet, she is optimistic about
her new one. ‘Cousin Abbott may go’, she says hopefully. So aunt
Pullet in the last analysis stands for more than female victimisation
and more than resignation to a gothic fate; here she reveals an
inflated and enjoyed sense of power over others reminiscent of
Tom, and even her hypochondria is really a form of competitiveness
akin to his. Aunt Pullet takes a quantitative approach to illness, enu-
merating the various medicines she ingests, hoarding up her physic-
bottles, and calculating the shelves they fill. She measures her status
44 SUSAN FRAIMAN

in the community in numbers of visits to the doctor. In the same

sad, self-dramatising vein, aunt Pullet competes in quantities of
tears: poor Bessy ‘couldn’t cry so much as her sister Pullet did, and
had often felt her deficiency at funerals’ (p. 82). The desire to
surpass extends to clothes as well. According to a sartorial logic by
which more is again assumed to be better, aunt Pullet’s shoulders
are wide as a doorway, her sleeves balloonlike, her bonnet ‘architec-
tural’ (p. 51). Naturally, hers is ‘the best bonnet at Garum Church,
let the next best be whose it would’ (p. 81).
Thus while aunt Pullet likes to think of herself as wasting away
she also contrives to take up as much space as possible, at least in
the terms available to her. If she cannot participate directly in Tom’s
economic rivalries or physical aggressions, still she finds comparable
ways to push herself forward in order, like him, to tyrannise the
rest. Aunt Pullet simply expresses her ambitions in acceptably female
terms, challenging everyone else to be sicker or more over-dressed
than she. The story she stages for Maggie is not only a gothic foil to
the Bildungsroman; it is also an aping, humiliated rendition of it.
Yet I would argue that aunt Pullet’s efforts in the direction of a
Bildungsroman do not legitimate so much as travesty the genre. The
impulse she shares with Tom to scramble into selfhood over and
beyond other people is shown to be petty, illogical, and even self-
destructive. Like Maggie in her attempt to colonise the gypsies, aunt
Pullet engages and then manages to caricature the Bildungsroman.
Her futile pursuit of this mode defamiliarises and eventually mocks
it, so that envy slides into critique.

III
Having looked at The Mill on the Floss in relation to the
Bildungsroman, I turn now to the generic category itself, especially
as schematised and popularised by Jerome Buckley’s Season of
Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Published in
1974, Season of Youth was the first book-length study of the English
Bildungsroman since Susanne Howe’s initial mapping of the German
genre onto English terrain in 1930 (Hans Wagner’s 1951 book, in
German, excepted).38 Buckley’s focus on canonical novels and his
highly excerptable formulation have, moreover, made the book
influential perhaps beyond its merits; its interest for me lies less in
its scholarly than in its ideological significance as a text invariably
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 45

cited in subsequent teaching and writing about the English genre.

According to Buckley, this form originated with Wordsworth, who
in The Prelude ‘first gave prolonged and serious attention to each
stage of the imagination, to boyhood, maturity, and the darker
space between’.39 Though different in tone, Buckley continues,
Byron’s Don Juan ‘likewise follows a young man in his progress
from boyhood to the threshold of a poised maturity’.40 Carlyle’s
1824 translation of Wilhelm Meister provided the first novelistic
model, and the genre developed from there through such major
works as David Copperfield and Sons and Lovers. As noted earlier,
Buckley stresses the form’s autobiographical cast, arguing that the
English Bildungsroman is therefore typically a Künstlerroman: ‘what
Joyce’s title promises, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.41
It would be easy enough to take Buckley to task for continually
equating ‘youth’ with ‘boyhood’, but the editors of The Voyage In
have already sufficiently shown that Buckley’s phases of develop-
ment (formal education, leaving home, making one’s way in the city,
etc.) are inapplicable to most female protagonists.42 My concern
here is with some of the other implications of the approach I take
Buckley to represent and what they meant in the particular social
context of 1974. Buckley comments on ‘the awkwardness of the
German term [Bildungsroman] as applied to English literature’;43
yet, like late 1960s essays by Tennyson and Jost, his book holds onto
the clumsy foreignism and what I have already shown to be its con-
siderable ideological baggage. What, one might wonder, was at stake
in privileging the German denomination at this particular moment?
Like all generic categories, the Bildungsroman is bound up with a
process of canon formation, called upon to identify a tradition of
texts. Jeffrey Sammons observes that the early twentieth-century
delineation of the Bildungsroman by Dilthey ‘placed Goethe and
Romanticism firmly at the core of the [German] canon’.44 The
concept worked then to foreground a certain thematics – Goethe’s
‘scheme of the salvation of the striving individual in an ultimately
benign universe’45 – and also to define and promote a distinctively
German literature at a time of surging nationalist sentiment. Thomas
Mann among others, Sammons explains, was instrumental in setting
up ‘the inherent German tradition of the Bildungsroman as a
defence against the infiltration of the social and political novel’.46
Sammons argues that the Bildungsroman is thus a ‘phantom genre’,
more responsive to modern ideological needs than to any objective
body of texts.
46 SUSAN FRAIMAN

What canon was being asserted, what infiltration defended against

in the early 1970s? The canon represented by Season of Youth is, not
coincidentally, also derived from the Romantics and again includes
Goethe. […] Buckley’s emphasis on ‘portrait of the artist’ novels
seems to indicate that what he and others get from Romanticism and
bring to the examination of later works is primarily an infatuation
with alienated genius; their Bildungsheld is by definition a child
whose lyric tendencies are at odds with a prosaic community.
Clearly, Buckley not only invoked the emphatic individualism of the
Bildungsroman described earlier in this chapter but also helped to
construct it along these lines. He makes passing mention, in relation
to the American 1930s, of ‘the Studs Lonigan trilogy of James T.
Farrell with its new insistence on the social and economic determi-
nants of character’.47 For the most part, however, the protagonist’s
constitution by social and economic factors is precisely what
Buckley’s canon and approach function to obscure. His conclusion –
that the Bildungsheld from Wilhelm Meister to Stephen Dedalus
‘brings his own inner resources of sensitivity to confront a hostile and
insensitive environment’48 – reveals the book’s attraction to heroes
developing not in, but in spite of their social contexts, not shaped by
cultural pressures so much as bravely withstanding and transcending
them. Favouring works that dramatise a triumph of the artistic tem-
perament, its paradigm can better explain David Copperfield’s suc-
cessful literary/moral apprenticeship than the bridling of Emma
Woodhouse’s imagination by marriage. Preferring firm, independent
protagonists, stable and unequivocally central, it can only make sense
of The Mill on the Floss by hitching Maggie’s moral stamina to Tom’s
commercial success, as if sister and brother were the inseparable
halves of a single, battle worthy character. Accordingly, in a chapter
on later novels, Season chooses Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (though trou-
bled by its elusive hero) over the more diffuse To the Lighthouse,
which Buckley says ‘turned away from the content as well as the form
of the Bildungsroman’.49 And finally, it happily leaves Woolf alto-
gether for the Angry Young Men of the fifties, in whose ‘fictions reap-
pear many motifs of the conventional Bildungsroman’.50
To the Lighthouse is a revealing example of the kind of text that
fails to register as a novel of development within the schema crys-
tallised by Season of Youth. For Lily Briscoe, its putative
Bildungsheld, is never permitted to dominate the narrative, which
continues to shift away from her even as she approaches her climac-
tic vision.51 Lily and her vision are always inextricable from the
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 47

social relationships that define the woman artist – from parent

figures Mr and Mrs Ramsay or from Mr Tansley, figure for the male
critic. In formal terms, moreover, Lily is quite literally displaced
from the centre of the text by the spectre of ‘Time Passing’: Prue
Ramsay, done in by childbirth; Andrew Ramsay blown up in
France; Mrs Ramsay, wearied to death by marriage and maternity;
Mrs McNab and Mrs Bast, scrubbing against the forces of decay.
And perhaps this is not Lily’s story after all, so much as an array of
rival fictions about gendered development variously represented by
Lily, Minta, Prue, Andrew, James, Cam, and the Ramsay parents
themselves. Yet the effect of Buckley’s canon was to ward off the
infiltration of just such texts in which history and society, not the
masterful individual, are central; texts in which development is not
one, clear thing, but many, unsure, contested and changing things. I
want to argue that it did this at precisely the moment when feminist
criticism was beginning to discover new works and reread old ones
with Woolf’s contextual and polyphonic model very much in mind.
So my point is not to offer the easy poststructuralist critique of
Buckley’s modernist view of the ‘self’ as stable, integrated, etc., but
to look at this view in relation to articles such as ‘Maggie Tulliver’s
Long Suicide’ by Elizabeth Ermarth, which also appeared in 1974.
This was the year the twentieth-century women’s movement began
to rock the academy. In literary criticism, Mary Ellmann’s preco-
cious Thinking about Women (1968) had already been around for
six years, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) for four. The previ-
ous year had seen, for example, the publication of Carolyn
Heilbrun’s Toward a Recognition of Androgyny and, in
Ms. Magazine, Adrienne Rich’s ‘Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a
Motherless Woman’. Clearly the storm of feminist criticism that
broke in the following years – with Patricia Spacks’s The Female
Imagination in 1975, Ellen Moers’s Literary Women in 1976, Elaine
Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own in 1977, and Barbara Smith’s
‘Toward a Black Feminist Criticism’, also in 197752 – was visible on
the horizon in 1974. Not that Buckley consciously sought to head
off feminist criticism when he refused to look at Maggie Tulliver or
George Eliot in relation to their sexist societies, or when he failed to
see that development itself, especially for girls, may be a controver-
sial plot; the effect of doing so was nevertheless to man the barri-
cades that were already under attack by feminist scholars.
To this mixed metaphorical account I would add a further obser-
vation about David Miles’s ‘The Picaro’s Journey to the
48 SUSAN FRAIMAN

Confessional: The Changing Image of the Hero in the German

Bildungsroman’, also published in 1974. […] Miles argues that the
Bildungsroman becomes progressively more introspective, reaching
its logical culmination in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen
des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), which takes the form of a confes-
sional journal.53 Even more than Buckley, Miles articulated a
privatised notion of the Bildungsroman, to the point of suggesting
that development takes place wholly in the twentieth-century hero’s
head. Construing the genre as a form of self-address, Miles fore-
closes on more dialogic narratives that might, for example, take the
form of letters rather than journals. To consider, say, epistolary
novels from Evelina to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple might be to
think of a young woman’s formation as a process of exchange, an
ongoing debate, a social relationship. The problem, therefore, goes
beyond the fact that fictions of development such as Evelina, To the
Lighthouse, and The Color Purple go unrecognised by the precepts
of a Buckley or Miles. By neglecting these works one also neglects
their invitation to reconceive identity in terms of interlocutory
structures.
Unlike Sammons, I am not saying that the Bildungsroman is a
‘phantom’ genre as opposed to ‘the actual German [or British] novel
of the nineteenth century’.54 For while Sammons claims to see
genres as ‘instrumental, not ontological’,55 he remains implicitly
attached to the notion of an ‘actual’, flesh and blood genre in some
objective sense. If genres are simply pragmatic constructs then they
are all phantoms, defined in the service of some explanation (and
ideology) or another, and I would like to conclude this chapter and
book by recurring to my own feminist phantom: the different way
of reading for formation that I hope has haunted the preceding
pages, that I have wanted, in relation to women writers, to conjure
into being. I have been arguing that Maggie and The Mill on the
Floss regard Tom’s individualistic Bildungsroman with some desire,
but that its difficulty for Maggie estranges and ironises it. This
theme – Maggie’s inability to enter the story of self-culture, her
stubbornly relational mode – points further to the formal tendency
of Eliot’s novel, and of novels in general, to establish character
interactively. The very structuring of the work as a series of collo-
quies, intimacies, disputes, suggests not a lone figure pushing past a
painted backdrop, but a girl hedged in, defined at every point, by a
specific cultural conversation. She is formed as a girl only in opposi-
tion to her brother’s stubborn boyness (and vice versa), just as Bob’s
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 49

class identity emerges from the scuffle with his overpowering play-
mate, and Maggie’s class and race from her condescending contact
with the gypsies. Above and beyond its critique of the traditional
Bildungsroman, The Mill on the Floss may, in its very dialogic form,
offer to reformulate development as a matter of social context and
conflict.56
Maggie’s development, then, in the crucible of sibling conflict, con-
sists of a series of transactions in the context of dominative male-
female, among many other, social relations. But The Mill on the Floss is
more than its struggles between brother and sister. It is also […] a com-
petition of narratives, referring less to the apprenticeship of a central
figure than to a drama of dissonant ideas about just what formation is
or should be. In rephrasing the genre, I have been recommending a
shift away from character altogether – and especially from that Ur-
character, Wilhelm Meister – and a turning of critical attention to
those discourses of development at war in a given text. I have guessed
that this approach might shed particular light on conduct materials and
novels by women, whose representations of female formation are so
typically beset by contradiction. I hope I have shown that when the
ideology of Bildung is driven up against ideologies of femininity urging
self-effacement one result may be precisely the splintering and counter-
pointing of narratives […] in Burney, Austen, and Brontë, and that
appear with particular explicitness in The Mill on the Floss.
To recapitulate briefly, in relation to Eliot, these divergent narra-
tives are succinctly invoked early in the novel in the episode of the
dead rabbits. Maggie’s neglect has killed Tom’s pets, and now she
nervously offers to pay for them. But Tom doesn’t want her money,
as he explains: ‘I always have half-sovereigns and sovereigns for my
Christmas boxes, because I shall be a man, and you only have five-
shilling pieces, because you’re only a girl’ (p. 32). Here in a phrase –
‘I shall be a man’ – is just that tale of individual agency and growth
associated with wealth played out, to its discredit, by Tom. And
here in the figure of ‘only a girl’ with little money and no future
tense is the embittered, gothic story of repetition and diminution
recognisable as Maggie’s destiny. Revising an earlier precept, I am
now proposing that the disjunction between these be thought of not
as the space between genres but as the space within a genre for con-
fusion, complaint, critique, and possibly compensation regarding
issues of female development.
Eliot’s controversial ending provides a final image of the relation-
ship between Tom’s conventional narrative of formation and
50 SUSAN FRAIMAN

Maggie’s counternarrative. The moment when brother and sister are

pulled beneath the waves in a dying embrace has been variously
interpreted as androgynous reunion, incestuous orgasm, the climax
of a long suicide or perhaps sororicide, and also as authorial
revenge. Wishing neither to redeem Maggie’s fate nor to discount
Tom’s, I suggest their simultaneous deaths mark a moment when
their narratives collide for the last time, and now Tom’s upward-
bound Bildungsroman is fatally assimilated to Maggie’s downward
spiral. Little to celebrate except the negation of a story that, failing
to work for Maggie, is finally discarded altogether. And yet – if self-
centred Bildung is traumatically abandoned here, nevertheless assert
this conclusive grappling may be the inescapable relatedness of cir-
cumstances and subjectivities.

From Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers

and the Novel of Development (New York, 1993), pp. 121–41.

NOTES
[This excerpt, taken from Susan Fraiman’s book Unbecoming Women:
British Women Writers and the Novel of Development, is the first of several
essays in this volume which focus very specifically on feminist interpreta-
tions of Eliot’s novels. In her full-length study Fraiman, in addition to offer-
ing a reading of Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, considers novels by Fanny
Burney, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. The essay reproduced here is in
many ways representative of Fraiman’s thesis and her interest in the way in
which the heroine’s progress towards selfhood in the western
Bildungsroman or ‘novel of development’ is often obstructed by the burdens
of femininity which society imposes upon her. These burdens can include
moral and social prescriptions for female decorum to more physical inhibi-
tions and restraints on mobility. All quotations in the essay are taken from
The Mill on the Floss (Boston, 1961). Eds]

1. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York, 1960), p. 44.

2. Ibid., p. 32.
3. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston,
1961), p. xiii. All further references are contained in the text.
4. Haight concludes that Eliot, while accepting Darwin’s theory, refused
to celebrate a process of selection based on biological criteria alone, to
the exclusion of moral factors – thus Maggie’s ultimate rejection of
Stephen (p. xix). Yet Haight’s interpretive schema remains an evolu-
tionary one, invested in the procreative couple. It is tempting, I might
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 51

add, to see the accumulation of critical language around Stephen, the

repeated assigning and analysing of desire including Eliot’s own, as an
attempt to gain control over the spectre of female sexuality raised by
Maggie’s elopement.
5. See John Hagan, ‘A Reinterpretation of The Mill on the Floss’, PMLA,
87:1 (1972), 53–63. Hagan sums up Maggie’s quandary as an impossible
choice among men: ‘Had she gone on to love and marry Philip against
her father’s and Tom’s wishes’ or ‘had she run away and married Stephen’
she would, in either case, have betrayed someone’s trust (p. 54). Hagan
argues, I should note, that readers are meant to value Maggie’s loyalty to
her earliest ties and duties, not Tom per se – in fact Hagan blames Tom
for making family loyalty and erotic love mutually exclusive for Maggie.
Underlining the concept of ‘division’ between ‘the large-souled woman …
and the narrow-souled father and brother’ (p. 62), he could be said to
anticipate feminist discussions of ‘difference’ in George Eliot.
6. U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of
Realism (Berkeley, CA, 1968), p. 214.
7. Ibid., p. 213.
8. The problem of Maggie’s destiny might have been solved, Knoepflmacher
points out, had she been either a man or, like her mother, a less gifted
woman. But he undercuts the feminist implications of this perception by
agreeing with Mr Tulliver that Maggie’s female intelligence was a genetic
fluke; her frustration and eventual sacrifice are therefore the result less of
character or social conditions than of ‘hereditary caprice’ (ibid., p. 213).
For Knoepflmacher, this makes her story unsuccessful as ‘tragedy’.
9. Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (New
York, 1959), pp. 47–53.
10. Hagan, ‘A Reinterpretation of The Mill on the Floss’, p. 57.
11. Elizabeth Ermarth, ‘Maggie Tulliver’s Long Suicide’, Studies in English
Literature, 14:9 (1974), 587.
12. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists
from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ, 1977), p. 112.
13. Patricia Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York, 1975), pp. 44–6.
Spacks’s appropriation of conventionally feminine values for feminist
purposes is a strategy descended from Eliot’s time to our own. It is
especially characteristic of ‘cultural feminism’, emergent in the 1970s
and exemplified by such diverse figures as Adrienne Rich, Carol
Gilligan and Hélène Cixous.
14. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative,
Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington, IN, 1989), p. 37.
15. Ibid.
52 SUSAN FRAIMAN

16. See Nina Auerbach, ‘The Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie
Tulliver’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 30:2 (1975), 150–71.
17. In Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge,
1982), by contrast, Nina Auerbach goes on to read through the
Victorian myth of the feminised demon to a fantasy of empowered
womanhood. But the 1975 essay lacks the historical analysis that distin-
guishes her later book, and in this it resembles still another strain of sev-
enties work – of which Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (New York, 1970) is
the most notable example. Calling attention in important ways to misog-
ynist characterisations of women, particularly in writing by men, this
approach tended initially to produce lists of ‘virgins’ and ‘bitches’
without considering how such categories function in a specific context.
18. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New
Haven, CT, 1979); Nancy Miller, ‘Emphasis Added: Plots and
Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction’, PMLA, 96:1 (1981), 36–48; and
Mary Jacobus, Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New
York, 1986), pp. 62–79 [reprinted in this volume, essay 4 – Eds].
19. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY, 1981), p. 153.
20. This observation by Hartmut Steinecke in Romantheorie and
Romankritik in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1975), I, p. 27 is cited by
Jeffrey L. Sammons in ‘The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman, or:
What Happened to Wilhelm Meister’s Legacy?’, Genre, 14:2 (1981),
232–3. As I discuss later, Sammons offers a very suggestive metacom-
mentary on the popularisation of the Bildungsroman as a critical cate-
gory in the early twentieth century. I take my lead from Sammons as
well as Jameson in speculating about more recent uses of the term and
their implied political agenda. Here I want also to note Georg Lukács’s
dissenting view, at least about Wilhelm Meister itself. In The Theory of
the Novel (Cambridge, MA, 1971), Lukács stresses that Wilhelm is rep-
resentative not unique, that Goethe’s novel is not about individual
development so much as ‘common destinies and life-formations’ (p.
135). It is the ‘modern’ novel of education that has, to his regret,
become a merely ‘private memoir of how a certain person succeeded in
coming to terms with his world’ (p. 137).
21. Franco Moretti phrases this as a tension between ‘dynamism and limits,
restlessness and the “sense of an ending”’ (p. 6). Though weakened by
a disregard for gender differences, Moretti’s recent book on the
Bildungsroman makes an important case for the genre’s ‘intrinsically
contradictory’ nature (p. 6). While for me this makes it the locus of
struggle and dissent, Moretti sees it as implicitly conservative, an
attempt to gain consent to the contradictions of modern bourgeois
culture. We differ on Eliot as well, for Moretti does not consider The
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 53

Mill on the Floss, and his discussions of Middlemarch, Felix Holt, and
Daniel Deronda all privilege the stories of male destiny. What we
share, however, is an interest in the Bildungsroman as the ‘symbolic
form’ of a particular time and place (p. 5), thus an attention to its ideo-
logical components. See Franco Moretti, The Way of the World
(London, 1987).

22. See Hegel’s Vorlesungen uber die Aesthetik, in Werke in zwanzig Banden
(Frankfurt, 1970), p. 220, a reference called to my attention by David
Miles. See David H. Miles, ‘The Picaro’s Journey to the Confessional:
The Changing Image of the Hero in the German Bildungsroman’,
PMLA, 89:5 (1974), 980–92.

23. Eliot wrote about Wilhelm Meister for the Leader (‘The Morality of
Wilhelm Meister’, 21 July 1855), and George Lewes was no less than
Goethe’s biographer.

24. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland (eds), The
Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover, NH, 1983), p. 5.

25. In her work on gender and genre, Celeste Schenck has suggested that
female interventions into masculinised genres involve both deconstruc-
tion and reconstruction. In these terms, I associate Eliot primarily with
the first project – in Schenck’s words (speaking here of the elegy), ‘the
deliberate undoing of generic conventions … the despoiling of generic
purity by recourse to attenuated, incomplete, even parodic renderings’
(p. 23). See Celeste M. Schenck, ‘Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-
constructing the Elegy’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 5:1
(1986), 13–27.

26. Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion: Social

Strategies in British Fiction (New York, 1985), p. 139.

27. Since I am making feminist criticism’s usual assumptions about the

gender specificity of George Eliot’s text, let me briefly extend this com-
parison of The Mill on the Floss to Great Expectations. Dickens’s
novel, one might easily observe, similarly invokes a conventional
version of Bildung only to debunk it. Nevertheless, Pip’s story of ties
broken and money made, although criticised, is still taken more seri-
ously and made more central than Tom’s; however wrong-headed, it
always dominates the text and finally proves redeemable, even thera-
peutic, in a way Tom’s never is. It is also worth noting that Estella,
quite like Maggie, is a girl whose story of expectations is appropriated
by a boy – Magwitch is, after all, her father. Yet Estella’s inability to
have a Bildung of her own is not an issue for Great Expectations. I will
be arguing that Maggie’s comparable exclusion from the male
Bildungsroman (denying her Pip’s chance to live out, if only to reject,
this plot) is by contrast a major issue for The Mill on the Floss. In short,
54 SUSAN FRAIMAN

Eliot’s distance from the normative genre seems to me more dramatic

than Dickens’s, her stake in critique more profound.
28. Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from
Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, 1974), p. 97.
29. Charlotte Goodman, ‘The Lost Brother, the Twin: Women Novelists
and the Male-Female Double Bildungsroman’, Novel, 17:1 (1983), 30.
30. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 141.
31. As I have mentioned, Auerbach is also intrigued by the gothic elements
of Eliot’s novel, which she agrees are embodied by Maggie. She makes
the helpful biographical observation that ‘just before beginning The
Mill on the Floss [Eliot] turned from the rather overinsistent naturalism
of Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede to write “The Lifted Veil”, a
short story in which gothic fantasies run wild’. See Auerbach, ‘The
Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie Tulliver’, p. 235. But
whereas Auerbach discusses Maggie as a type of the gothic uncanny
(witch, vampire, lamia), I am interested in the unluckily gothic orbit of
Maggie’s narrative, its downward, drowning spiral. Judith Wilt is
another critic in pursuit of ‘ghosts of the gothic’ in Eliot. Wilt identifies
Maggie’s fatal relation to Tom, their inevitable double death, as evi-
dence of a distinctly gothic ‘machine’ (whose operation she explores in
‘The Lifted Veil’, Romola, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda): the
murderous marriage. See Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen,
Eliot and Lawrence (Princeton, NJ, 1980), pp. 187, 195. I disagree
somewhat in arguing that Maggie’s plot as opposed to Tom’s is con-
trolled by a gothic logic of repeated imprisonment, though in the very
last pages this logic subsumes Tom as well.
32. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 143.
33. It is true that Goodman sets out to redefine the genre in relation to the
male-female pair in novels – Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Willa Cather,
Jean Stafford, and Joyce Carol Oates. But her mapping posits an initial
‘prelapsarian’ unity, followed by separation and ending with a return
to ‘androgynous wholeness’. Her mythification of The Mill on the Floss
still pulls toward the formation of a single, ‘whole’ individual, thereby
neutralising what I see as the critical struggle between Maggie’s narra-
tive and Tom’s. See Goodman, ‘The Lost Brother, the Twin’, pp. 30–1.
34. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, pp. 124–5.
35. Virtually all of Eliot’s novels, in spite of their titles, are similarly decen-
tred. Adam Bede is parcelled out among Adam, Hetty, and Dinah;
Book 1 of Romola focuses on Tito; Felix Holt is divided between Felix
and Mrs Transome, as Middlemarch is between Dorothea and Lydgate;
and the right to the title of Daniel Deronda is notoriously contested by
Gwendolen Harleth. Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park,
 THE CRITICS AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN 55

and Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley happen also to feature duelling protago-

nists. Sandra A. Zagarell explores a related diffuseness in what she calls
‘narratives of community’. This genre is dominated by women writers
and includes nineteenth-century novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Eliot,
Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sarah Orne Jewett. Jonathan Arac has also
commented on the decentredness of The Mill on the Floss. His sense of
two patterns at work in Eliot’s novel – one suggesting harmony, unity,
stability, while the other (associated with the figure of ‘hyperbole’) sug-
gests excess, incoherence, and instability – is similar to my sense of the
book’s generic dialectic. Though Arac does not see these patterns as
gendered, he does at one point tie hyperbolic speech to Maggie, in so
far as her language and desires exceed masculine norms. See Jonathan
Arac, ‘Rhetoric and Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Hyperbole
in The Mill on the Floss’, ELH, 46:4 (1979), 680.
36 Newton makes the similar point that ‘Maggie’s notion of life among the
gypsies is essentially a fantasy of power and significance – and a rather
“masculine” fantasy at that’. I want to elaborate on this and also on her
remark that Maggie’s ‘sojourn among the gypsies ends, predictably
enough, in confirmation not of her power but of her powerlessness’.
See Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion, p. 144; pp. 144-5.
37. It was a student of mine, Carolyn Price, who first called my attention
to the importance of this scene as a rite of female initiation. In a highly
provocative reading, Price stressed the sexual subtext of the manifold
cloaking and mystification of the obviously symbolic bonnet. The inci-
dent, she argued, introduces the two girls both to the shrouding of
female sexuality and, in Aunt Pullet’s flirtatious modelling of her hat,
to the forms of sexual displacement.
38. For notable early essays on the English genre, see G. B. Tennyson, ‘The
Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century English Literature’, in Rosario P.
Armato and John M. Spalek (eds), Medieval Epic to the ‘Epic Theater’
of Brecht (Los Angeles, 1968), pp. 135–46; François Jost, ‘La Tradition
du Bildungsroman’, Comparative Literature, 21:2 (1969), 97–115.
39. Buckley, Season of Youth, p. 2.
40. Ibid., p. 7.
41. Ibid., p. 14.
42. Ibid., pp. 7–9.
43. Ibid., p. vii.
44. Sammons, ‘The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman, or: What
Happened to Wilhelm Meister’s Legacy?’, p. 240.
45. Ibid., p. 241.
46. Ibid.
56 SUSAN FRAIMAN

47. Buckley, Season of Youth, p. 265.

48. Ibid., p. 282.
49. Ibid., p. 265.
50. Ibid., p. 267.
51. Lily’s relatively advanced age might seem to disqualify her altogether
from a genre conventionally associated with youth. But as the editors
of The Voyage In have argued, attention to female protagonists sug-
gests a different pattern. Observing that often ‘fiction shows women
developing later in life’, they include in their collection essays on such
late bloomers as Emma Bovary, Edna Pontellier, and Mrs Dalloway.
See Abel, Hirsch and Langland (eds), The Voyage In, p. 7.
52. Patricia Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York, 1975); Ellen
Moers, Literary Women (New York, 1976); Elaine Showalter, A
Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to
Lessing (Princeton, NJ, 1977); Barbara Smith, ‘Toward a Black
Feminist Criticism’, Conditions: Two, 1:2 (1977).
53. Abel et al. observe in reference to Miles that fictions of female develop-
ment seem to move in the opposite direction, ‘from introspection to
activity’, culminating today in worldly texts such as Erica Jong’s The
Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones. Clearly Miles’s schema both
assumes and assures the exclusion of works such as Jong’s. See Abel,
Hirsch and Langland (eds), The Voyage In, p. 13.
54. Sammons, ‘The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman, or: What
Happened to Wilhelm Meister’s Legacy?’, p. 238.
55. Ibid., p. 230.
56. Like the editors of The Voyage In, I would draw on feminist object-
relations theorists such as Nancy Chodorow to question the possibility
and desirability of ‘autonomy’ as a developmental goal. I want to stress,
however, that formation is relational in a socio-economic as well as
psychological sense, to a degree that may ultimately be more Marxist
than psychoanalytic. My view of the novel as dialogic is obviously
indebted to Bakhtin and implies not simply conversation but a roar of
antagonistic social voices: male and female, dominant and labouring
classes, white and ‘gypsy’. Like Bakhtin, I want to build on the Marxist
perception that, as Jameson puts it, ‘classes must always be appre-
hended relationally’ – and I would add that the same goes for genders.
 2

The Two Rhetorics:

George Eliot’s Bestiary
J. HILLIS MILLER

In an essay published in 1983, ‘Composition and Decomposition:

Deconstruction and the Teaching of Writing’,1 I argued that all
good readers as well as all good writers have always been ‘decon-
structionists’. Deconstruction was defined as presupposing a
methodical awareness of the disruptive power that figures of speech
exert over the plain construable ‘grammatical’ sense of language, on
the one hand, and over the apparent rigour of logical argumentation
on the other. I concluded from this that rhetoric in the sense of
knowledge of the intricacies of tropes should be taught in courses in
composition, along with grammar and rhetoric in the sense of per-
suasion. Knowledge of figures of speech should also be taught in
courses in reading. In the process of arguing that more attention
should be given in courses both in reading and in writing to knowl-
edge of figures of speech and their disruptive power, I discussed
briefly (as examples of the way the great writers are all ‘deconstruc-
tionists’ before the fact) a passage from Plato and one from George
Eliot. I propose here to analyse those passages in more detail in an
attempt to identify their deconstructive rigour. It should be remem-
bered that ‘deconstruction’ is not something that the reader does to
a text; it is something that the text does to itself. The text then does
something to the reader as she or he is led to recognise the possibil-
ity of two or more rigorously defensible, equally justifiable, but logi-
cally incompatible readings of the text in question.

57
58 J. HILLIS MILLER

The passage from Plato comes from the Phaedrus. Plato’s rejec-
tion in the Gorgias and in the Phaedrus of empty skill in writing well
still has force. It is not enough to learn to write correctly and force-
fully about any subject at all, taking any side of an argument, as a
gifted lawyer can get the man on trial freed or condemned depend-
ing on which side has hired him. Writing well is not writing well
unless it is guided by all of those ethical, political, and even meta-
physical considerations that cannot be excluded from the teaching
of writing. Such considerations involve true knowledge both of the
human soul and of language. Here rhetoric as reading or as the
knowledge of tropes comes in even for Plato. Plato’s discussion of
rhetoric in the Phaedrus contains a programme for both kinds of
rhetoric – rhetoric as writing and rhetoric as reading. The latter,
too, must be guided by a knowledge of truth and conducted in the
name of truth. Here is the crucial passage in the Phaedrus:
Socrates So contending with words is a practice found not only in
lawsuits and public harangues but, it seems, wherever men speak
we find this single art, if indeed it is an art, which enables people to
make out everything to be like everything else, within the limits of
possible comparison, and to expose the corresponding attempts of
others who disguise what they are doing.
Phaedrus How so, pray?
Socrates I think that will become clear if we put the following ques-
tion. Are we misled when the difference between two things is
wide, or narrow?
Phaedrus When it is narrow.
Socrates Well then, if you shift your ground little by little, you are
more likely to pass undetected from so-and-so to its opposite than
if you do so at one bound.
Phaedrus Of course.
Socrates It follows that anyone who intends to mislead another,
without being misled himself, must discern precisely the degree of
resemblance and dissimilarity between this and that.
Phaedrus Yes, that is essential.
Socrates Then if he does not know the truth about a given thing,
how is he going to discern the degree of resemblance between that
unknown thing and other things?
Phaedrus It will be impossible.
Socrates Well now, when people hold beliefs contrary to fact, and
are misled, it is plain that the error has crept into their minds
through the suggestion of some similarity or other.
Phaedrus That certainly does happen.
Socrates But can anyone possibly master the art of using similarities
for the purpose of bringing people round, and leading them away
 GEORGE ELIOT’S BESTIARY 59

from the truth about this or that to the opposite of the truth, or
again can anyone possibly avoid this happening to himself, unless
he has knowledge of what the thing in question really is?
Phaedrus No, never.2
Rhetoric as reading, as the knowledge of tropes, is here defined as
the only means of protection against the powers of rhetoric as
writing, as illicit persuasion, as well as the essential means of com-
position for those who write successfully. A mastery of the truth
about things and a mastery of the various forms of similitude turn
out to be the two things that are needed by the rhetorician, both in
his guise as writer and in his guise as reader. For Plato, too, reading
and writing are intrinsically connected.
But what of Plato himself? What happens if we apply to Plato’s
discourse the method of reading that he himself advises? It is readily
observable that Plato’s own argument (or that of Socrates) proceeds
by just that persuasion by means of similitude against which he
warns – for example, when Socrates expresses his condemnation of
rhetoric in the Gorgias in what he calls ‘the language of geometri-
cians’: ‘Sophistic is to legislation what beautification is to gymnas-
tics, and rhetoric to justice what cookery is to medicine.’ A moment
before, Socrates has condemned cookery and beautification as being
mere semblances of medicine and gymnastics respectively: ‘Cookery
then, as I say, is a form of flattery that corresponds to medicine, and
in the same way gymnastics is personated by beautification, a mis-
chievous, deceitful, mean, and ignoble activity, which cheats us by
shapes and colours, by smoothing and draping, thereby causing
people to take on an alien charm to the neglect of the natural beauty
produced by exercise’ (Gorgias, 465b, p. 247). By the remorseless
logic of the language of geometricians, then, if we condemn cookery
and beautification, we must also condemn rhetoric and its brother in
false similitude, sophistry. The language of geometricians, however,
it is easy to see, is nothing but a somewhat misleading name for that
reasoning by similitude which Socrates condemns in the Phaedrus.
A is to B as C is to D: this is just the paradigmatic form of a pro-
portional metaphor as Aristotle gives it in the section on metaphor
in the Poetics. The ship is to the sea as the plough is to the waves,
and therefore we say that the ship ploughs the waves. The basic
resources of rhetorical argumentative persuasion are, in Aristotle’s
Rhetoric, said to be the example and the enthymeme. An example is
a synecdoche – part used for the whole and then applied to another
part – with all the problems appropriate to that trope; and the
60 J. HILLIS MILLER

enthymeme is defined as an incomplete syllogism – that is, once

more, argument by similitude or trope, since a syllogism is a for-
mally stated proportional metaphor.3
It is all very well for Plato to have Socrates claim that he is divid-
ing things according to their essential nature, as a good butcher
cleaves a carcass at the joints – for example, in the distinction
between body and soul on which the comparison of cookery to
rhetoric depends – but Socrates’ argument proceeds as much by
similitude as by division. Plato’s ‘dear gorgeous nonsense’, as
Coleridge called it, is primarily a brilliant gift for arguing by means
of similitudes or tropes – for example, in the famous condemnation
of writing in comparison with speaking at the end of the Phaedrus.
Writing is like the stupid farmer who sows his seeds in a barren
garden of Adonis, while speaking is like the farmer who sows his
seeds in suitable soil, that is, in the souls of living men (276b–7a,
pp. 521–2). The wise reader will remember this by-no-means-
innocent metaphor of farming when I come in a moment to discuss
the passage from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. In the
Gorgias, Callicles responds to a metaphor from shoemaking pro-
posed by Socrates, followed by another use of the figure of the
farmer who sows seed, by saying in exasperation, ‘By heaven, you
literally never stop talking about cobblers and fullers and cooks and
doctors, as if we were discussing them’ (490e, p. 273). That is to
say, Plato never stops talking non-literally, not least in personifying
himself as Socrates, and the result is that readers of Plato need most
of all a skill in interpreting arguments based on tropes.
Plato’s writings, too, both in what he says about rhetoric and in
how he says it, provide an example of the inextricable interinvolve-
ment of the two kinds of rhetoric and of the impossibility of having
one without the other. He also provides another example of the way
in which the act of reading can uncover directions for reading the
text at hand in such a way as to undermine or deconstruct the
apparent affirmations of that text, if the reader is cannily attentive
to the play of tropes in the text. This is just what Plato tells us to be,
along with learning to use tropes cannily in our own compositions.
The text warns against the argument by tropes on which the text
itself depends. To put this in another way, all discourse about
rhetoric, for example Plato’s Gorgias, or a modern textbook of
freshman composition, is itself an example of rhetoric and demands
to be read as such, if we are not to be bamboozled by its
 GEORGE ELIOT’S BESTIARY 61

enthymemes. This is another argument for the necessity of teaching

reading along with writing.
As an exemplification of what might be meant by a ‘deconstruc-
tive’ or rhetorical reading or of a reading as such, along with a
demonstration of the truth of my claim that all good readers have
always been deconstructionists, I shall discuss a wonderfully pene-
trating and witty passage from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.
The passage reads itself, or gives the reader directions for how to
read it. It is not only a text to be read but also a lesson in how to
read. Any careful reader of The Mill on the Floss is likely to notice
this passage. It has not failed to elicit comment.4 The passage gives
oblique hints to the reader about how to read the novel itself, as
well as hints about some dangers lurking in the pedagogy of
grammar and composition. The passage has to do with poor Tom
Tulliver’s sufferings at school in the hands of Mr Stelling. It might
have as title ‘The Beaver, the Camel, and the Shrewmouse’:

Mr. Broderip’s amiable beaver, as that charming naturalist tells us,

busied himself as earnestly in constructing a dam, in a room up three
pair of stairs in London, as if he had been laying his foundation in a
stream or lake in Upper Canada. … With the same unerring instinct
Mr. Stelling set to work at his natural method of instilling the Eton
Grammar and Euclid into the mind of Tom Tulliver. …
[Mr. Stelling] very soon set down poor Tom as a thoroughly stupid
lad; for though by hard labour he could get particular declensions
into his brain, anything so abstract as the relation between cases and
terminations could by no means get such a lodgment there as to
enable him to recognise a chance genitive or dative. … Mr. Stelling
concluded that Tom’s brain being peculiarly impervious to etymol-
ogy and demonstrations, was peculiarly in need of being ploughed
and harrowed by these patent implements: it was his favourite
metaphor, that the classics and geometry constituted that culture of
the mind which prepared it for the reception of any subsequent crop.
I say nothing against Mr. Stelling’s theory: if we are to have one
regimen for all minds, his seems to me as good as any other. I only
know it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as if he had
been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which
prevented him from digesting it. It is astonishing what a different
result one gets by changing the metaphor! Once call the brain an
intellectual stomach, and one’s ingenious conception of the classics
and geometry as ploughs and harrows seems to settle nothing. But
then it is open to some one else to follow great authorities, and call
the mind a sheet of white paper or a mirror, in which case one’s
62 J. HILLIS MILLER

knowledge of the digestive process becomes quite irrelevant. It was

doubtless an ingenious idea to call the camel the ship of the desert,
but it would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast. O
Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being ‘the freshest modern’
instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your
praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a
lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without
metaphor – that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by
saying it is something else?…
At present, in relation to this demand that he should learn Latin
declensions and conjugations, Tom was in a state of as blank unimagi-
nativeness concerning the cause and tendency of his sufferings, as if
he had been an innocent shrewmouse imprisoned in the split trunk of
an ash-tree in order to cure lameness in cattle.5

This admirable passage rises from height to height by a continual

process of capping itself or going itself one better, which is to say it
constantly deconstructs itself. The passage speaks of the activity of
reading, manifests a model of that activity, and invites us to read it
according to the method it employs. In all these ways it is a fine
example of the form of reading that I am calling ‘deconstructive’ or
of reading as such. Though good reading does not occur as often as
one might expect or hope, it is by no means confined to any one his-
torical period and may appear at any time, perhaps most often in
those, like George Eliot, who are also good writers, masters of com-
position. The deconstructive movement of this passage is constituted
by the proffering and withdrawing of one metaphorical formulation
after another. Each metaphor is dismantled as soon as it is pro-
posed, though the sad necessity of using metaphors is at the same
time affirmed. No doubt, most teachers of English grammar and
composition, like teachers of Latin, have experienced Mr Stelling’s
exasperation at the obduracy and denseness of their students’ inabil-
ity to remember the rules of grammar and idiom when they try to
write or to grasp syntactical concepts, while at the same time they
speak with fluency and force, just as Tom Tulliver ‘was in a state
bordering on idiocy with regard to the demonstration that two
given triangles must be equal – though he could discern with great
promptitude and certainty the fact that they were equal’ (p. 215).
Though Tom cannot learn Latin grammar, he uses English with dev-
astating cruelty towards his sister.
It might seem that George Eliot is placing in opposition the use of
literal language and the abuse of metaphorical language and that she
is counselling the former in a way that recalls the late-seventeenth-
 GEORGE ELIOT’S BESTIARY 63

and eighteenth-century tradition alluded to in her Lockean figure of

the mind as a sheet of white paper. In fact, the passage demonstrates
that ‘rarely’ or ‘seldom’ seems to be ‘never’. The only weapon
against a metaphor is another metaphor, along with an awareness of
our linguistic predicament in not being able – or in being so seldom
able that ‘rarely’ is ‘almost never’ – to declare what a thing is, except
by saying it is something else. Mr Stelling’s problem is not that he
uses the metaphor of ploughing and harrowing for his teaching of
Euclid and the Eton Grammar, but that he takes his metaphor liter-
ally, has no awareness of its limitation, and uses it as the excuse for
a brutally inappropriate mode of instruction in Tom’s case. Mr
Stelling teaches ‘with that uniformity of method and independence
of circumstances, which distinguishes the actions of animals under-
stood to be under the immediate teaching of nature’, such as that
beaver who builds a dam ‘up three pair of stairs in London’ in
sublime indifference to the absence of water (p. 213). The beaver,
like Mr Stelling, is a literalist of the imagination. To take a
metaphor literally is the aboriginal, universal, linguistic error, for as
George Eliot says in an often-quoted passage in Middlemarch, ‘We
all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in Metaphors,
and act fatally on the strength of them’.6
The escape from this entanglement in the net of a metaphor
(another metaphor!) is not a substitution of literal language for mis-
leading figure, but is the replacement of one metaphor by another.
The second metaphor may neutralise the first or cancel out its dis-
tortions. This is a cure of metaphor by metaphor, a version of
homeopathy. So George Eliot replaces the metaphor of ploughing
and harrowing with a metaphor of eating. Forcing geometry and
Latin grammar on Tom is like curing an inability to digest cheese
with doses of cheese, or, the reader might reflect, like curing the
disaster bought on by carrying the metaphorical basis in a pedagogi-
cal theory into practice by the application of another theoretical
metaphor, replacing one kind of cheese with another kind of cheese.
It is at this point that the narrator draws herself (himself?) up and
makes the exclamation about how astonishing it is what a different
result one gets by changing the metaphor.
To the other figures here must be added irony and prosopopoeia,
irony as the pervasive tone of the narration and personification as
the trope whereby the ironic discrepancy between narrator and
character is given a name and a personality in the putative story-
teller, ‘George Eliot’. That narrator pretends to have made Mr
64 J. HILLIS MILLER

Stelling’s mistake, or the beaver’s mistake – namely, to have used a

metaphor without reflection – and then to have been surprised by
the results into having a metalinguistic insight into the role of
metaphor in pedagogical theory. But of course the narrator, who
has been aware of this all along, is manipulating the metaphors in
full deliberate awareness. He only pretends to be astonished. The
sentence is ironic in the strict sense that it says the opposite of what
it means, or rather that it says both things at once. It is astonishing
and not astonishing, and the reader is challenged to ally himself
with one side or the other, though at the same time he is put in a
double bind. If he is not astonished, he may be putting himself
unwittingly in the same camp as the beaver and Mr Stelling, since
another way to define a literalist is to say that he is incapable of
being astonished by the workings of language. If the reader is aston-
ished, then he is admitting that until a moment ago at least, he was a
linguistic innocent, lagging behind the all-knowing narrator, who
only ironically pretends to be astonished by something that he or
she has known all along.
The digestive metaphor is then followed by two more traditional
metaphors for the mind – the Lockean one of the white sheet of
paper, and the figure of the mirror, which has had such a long
history in expressions of ‘realism’ in the novel: for example, in
Georg Lukács or in George Eliot herself in the celebrated chapter 17
of Adam Bede, the locus classicus for the theory of realism in
Victorian fiction.
The next metaphor, that of the camel as the ship of the desert,
seems to be irrelevant or non-functional, not part of the chain, no
more than a textbook example of metaphor.7 It allows the bringing
in of Aristotle and the opposition of the ancients who naïvely
praised metaphor, on the one hand, and the moderns, such as
Locke, who lament its presence in language and try (unsuccessfully)
to expunge it, on the other. Aristotle, by the way, did not, strictly
speaking, ‘praise … metaphorical speech as a sign of high intelli-
gence’, as George Eliot says. Aristotle said a ‘command of metaphor’
was the ‘mark of genius’, ‘the greatest thing by far’, in a poet, the
one thing that ‘cannot be imparted by another’.8 A command of
metaphor is for Aristotle not so much a sign of intelligence as an
intuitive gift, ‘an eye for resemblances’ (1495a, p. 87). The poet
does not rationally think out metaphors. They just come to him in a
flash, or they fall under his eye. In any case, the figure of a camel as
 GEORGE ELIOT’S BESTIARY 65

a ship accomplishes three moves simultaneously in the intricate

sequence of George Eliot’s thought in the passage as a whole.
First move: the image of the camel more or less completes the
repertoire of examples of metaphor that makes the passage not only
a miniature treatise on metaphor but also, unostentatiously, an
anthology, bouquet, herbarium, or bestiary of the basic metaphors in
our tradition – that is, coming down from the Bible and from the
Greeks. No choice of examples is innocent, and it is no accident that
metaphors of farming and sowing (for example, in Plato’s Phaedrus
or in Christ’s parable of the sower, with the sun lurking somewhere
as the source of germination); metaphors of specular reflection, the
play of light, of images, of reflection, and of seeing; metaphors of
eating, of writing on that blank sheet of paper, and of journeying
from here to there (that is, of transport, whether by camel back or on
ship board) – all tend to reappear whenever someone, from Aristotle
on down to the freshest modern teacher of composition, pulls an
example of metaphor out of his pedagogical hat. These remain the
basic metaphors still today, and though he will not necessarily have
the poet’s instinctive command of them, a good reader can learn to
thread his way from one to another in their interchangeability and
begin to master them as a deliberate reader if not as a writer. If the
ship ploughing the waves mixes the agricultural with the nautical
region of figure, the sowing of seed, for both Plato and Jesus, is at the
same time a form of writing, a dissemination of the word. And does
not the assimilation of learning to eating appear in that extraordinary
image of Ezekiel eating the scroll, as well as in Hegel’s interpretation
of the Last Supper in The Spirit of Christianity, not to speak of the
Communion service itself, in which the communicants eat the Logos,
and of a strange passage in George Eliot’s own Middlemarch?9
Second move: the camel as ship of the desert is not just an
example of metaphor. It is a metaphor of metaphor; that is, of
transfer or transport from one place to another. This is not only
what the word metaphor means etymologically but also what
metaphor does. It effects a transfer. If George Puttenham’s far-
fetched Renaissance name for metalepsis is the ‘Far-fetcher’, he else-
where calls metaphor the ‘Figure of Transport’.10 Metaphor gets the
writer or reader from here to there in his argument, whether by that
‘smooth gradation or gentle transition, to some other kindred
quality’, of which Wordsworth speaks in the ‘Essays upon
Epitaphs’,11 following the Socrates of the Phaedrus on ‘shifting your
66 J. HILLIS MILLER

ground little by little’, or by the sudden leap over a vacant place in

the argument, of which George Meredith writes: ‘It is the excelling
merit of similes and metaphors to spring us to vault over gaps and
thickets and dreary places.’12 Pedagogy is metaphor. It takes the
mind of the student and transforms it, transfers it, translates it,
ferries it from here to there. A method of teaching, such as Mr
Stelling’s, is as much a means of transportation as is a camel or a
ship. My own ‘passages’ from Plato and Eliot are synecdoches, parts
taken from large wholes and used as figurative means of passage
from one place to another in my argument.
Third move: the sentence about the camel brings into the open
the asymmetrical juxtaposition between the opposition of literal and
figurative language, on the one hand, and the opposition of theory
and practice, on the other. The reader may be inclined to think that
these are parallel, but this probably depends on a confusion of mind.
One thinks of literal language as the clear non-figurative expression
of ideas or concepts: for example, the ‘abstract’ concepts of
grammar, such as the relation between cases and determinations in
the genitive and the dative, which Tom Tulliver has as much trouble
learning as a modern student of English composition has in learning
the rules of English grammar. At the same time, one thinks of literal
language as the act of non-figurative nomination, calling a spade a
spade and a camel a camel, not a ship. We tend to think of figure as
applied at either end of the scale – from abstract to concrete – as an
additional ornament making the literal expression ‘clearer’, more
‘vivid’, or more ‘forceful’. As George Eliot’s sentence makes clear,
however, the trouble with theory is not that it is abstract or concep-
tual but that it is always based on metaphor – that is, it commits
what Alfred North Whitehead calls ‘the fallacy of misplaced
concreteness’.
If it is true that original thinking is most often started by a
metaphor, as both Whitehead himself and such literary theorists as
William Empson and Kenneth Burke aver in different ways, it is also
the case that each metaphorically based theory, such as the alterna-
tive pedagogical theories that George Eliot sketches out, has its own
built-in fallacious bias and leads to its own special form of catastro-
phe in the classroom. If a camel is not a ship, the brain is neither a
field to plough nor a stomach nor a sheet of paper nor a mirror,
though each of these metaphors could, and has, generated ponder-
ous, solemn, and intellectually cogent theories of teaching. Neither
theory nor literal meaning, if there is such a thing (which there is
 GEORGE ELIOT’S BESTIARY 67

not), will help you with that camel. As soon as you try to tell
someone how to manage a camel, you fall into theory – that is, into
some metaphorical scheme or other. The opposition between theory
and practice is not that between metaphorical and literal language,
but is that between language, which is always figurative through and
through, and no language – silent doing. If the praxis in question is
the act of writing, the habit of writing well, it can be seen that there
are going to be problems in teaching it, more problems even than in
teaching someone how to drive a camel or to make a chair. That the
terms for the parts of a chair are examples of those basic personify-
ing catachreses, whereby we humanise the world and project arms
and legs where there are none, may cause little trouble as the appren-
tice learns from watching the master cabinetmaker at work, but it
might cause much trouble to someone who is writing about chairs.
After what has been said so far, the function of the final animal in
George Eliot’s bestiary, the shrewmouse – the vehicle for the last
metaphor in the segment that I have excised from her narrative – is
clear enough. Having seemingly aligned herself with those fresh
moderns who would opt for an antiseptic ‘speech without
metaphor’, George Eliot, far from speaking without metaphors
herself, goes on to present the most ostentatious and elaborate of all
the metaphors in this sequence – ostentatious in the sense that the
literal elaboration of the vehicle of the metaphor, a bit of
Warwickshire agricultural folklore, seems far to exceed its parabolic
application to Tom’s suffering: ‘Tom was in a state of as blank
unimaginativeness concerning the cause and tendency of his suffer-
ings, as if he had been an innocent shrewmouse imprisoned in the
split trunk of an ash-tree in order to cure lameness in cattle.’ This
not only demonstrates once more that ‘we can … seldom declare
what a thing is, except by saying it is something else’. It also shows
that the only cure for metaphor is not literal language but another
metaphor that so calls attention to itself that no one could miss that
it is a metaphor or take it as innocently ‘dead’. If literal language is
possible, it is likely, paradoxically, to occur in the elaboration of the
vehicle of the figure, as in this case or as in the parables of Jesus in
the Gospels. It is possible to speak literally about shrewmice in
Warwickshire or about the details of farming, fishing, and house-
hold care in first-century Palestine, but this literal speech almost
always turns out, by a kind of fatality intrinsic to language, to be the
means of speaking parabolically or allegorically about something
else. The most figurative language, it would follow, is the language
68 J. HILLIS MILLER

that appears to be the most literal. The good reader is one who, like
George Eliot, brings this sad fact into the open, as a secret writing in
sympathetic ink beneath the writing on the surface is brought out by
the application of heat or the right chemicals. Bringing it into the
open, alas, is not an escape from it or a ‘cure’ for it.
From where does my metaphor of ‘cure’ come? Is it my own licit
or illicit addition, the reader’s licence? No, it is of course already
there as one of the places of passage in the quotation from George
Eliot. I have said that the shrewmouse is the last animal in George
Eliot’s bestiary and that the literal details of the shrewmouse’s suf-
fering exceed its figurative application. Obviously, neither of these is
the case. The last animals are those lame cattle, and they function to
make the figure of the shrewmouse, at a second remove, a figure for
the failure of teaching to cure lameness in the sense of linguistic
incapacity – for example, an inability to write clear and concise
English prose. Mr Stelling’s pedagogy, based as it is on the magic lit-
eralisation of a metaphor, is as much a piece of superstition as is the
countryman’s beliefs about shrewmice and cattle. Which of us
twentieth-century teachers can be sure that our method is not
another such blind belief in an unread metaphor?
In any case, the reader at the end of my sequence from The Mill
on the Floss remains as trapped as ever within the linguistic situation
of not being able to say what a thing is, except by saying it is some-
thing else. Tom is imprisoned within the obstinate rigours of Mr
Stelling’s pedagogy, rigours that result from the literal application of
a metaphor. His situation makes him like a poor innocent impris-
oned shrewmouse. The melancholy wisdom of this passage affirms
that the reader or writer of any sort – you or I – is imprisoned as
much as Tom, Mr Stelling, or the shrewmouse within the linguistic
predicament that the passage both analyses and exemplifies. The
most that one can hope for is some clarification of the predicament,
not escape from it into the free light of day.
In ‘Composition and Decomposition’ I concluded my brief dis-
cussion of the passages from Plato and George Eliot with the claim
that both teachers and students of rhetoric as persuasion or as com-
position must aim to become as good readers as Plato, George Eliot,
or Jacques Derrida, as wise in the ways of tropes, or else they will
not learn to be good teachers or practitioners of writing either.
‘Good courses in rhetoric as reading’, I concluded, ‘must always
accompany programmes in composition, not only in preparation for
reading Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens,
 GEORGE ELIOT’S BESTIARY 69

but as an essential accompaniment to courses in writing.’ I draw

now another, perhaps more radical or disturbing, conclusion. If the
medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric is indeed a place in
which the pathways of those three disciplines come together or
cross, as the etymology of trivium suggests (tri-viae, ‘three roads’), it
may be that rhetoric is not so much the climax of a progressive
mastery of language both for reading and for writing as it is the
place in which the impossibility of mastery is definitively encoun-
tered. The road called ‘rhetoric’ is always marked ‘impassable’ or
‘under construction; pass at your own risk’ or, as it is succinctly put
on signs in England, ‘road up!’
Paul de Man certainly thought this was the case with rhetoric as
the wrestling with tropes. In an interview with Robert Moynihan, in
answer to a question about irony, de Man asserted that ‘the claim of
control, yes, when it is made, can always be shown to be unwar-
ranted – one can show that the claim of control is a mistake, that
there are elements in the text that are not controlled, that it is
always possible to read the text against the overt claim of control’.13
And in another essay, ‘Semiology and Rhetoric’, discussing Archie
Bunker’s question ‘What’s the difference?’ de Man asserts: ‘The
grammatical model of the question becomes rhetorical not when we
have, on the one hand, a literal meaning and on the other hand a
figural meaning, but when it is impossible to decide by grammatical
or other linguistic devices which of the two meanings (that can be
entirely incompatible) prevails. Rhetoric radically suspends logic and
opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. … I
would not hesitate to equate the rhetorical, figural potential of lan-
guage with literature itself.’14
Certain notorious quarrels among literary critics or between
philosophers and literary critics or among philosophers occupy the
polemical field of humanistic study today. I am thinking, for
example, of interchanges between Jacques Derrida and John Searle
or between Paul de Man and Raymond Geuss or between me and
Meyer Abrams, or of attacks on ‘deconstruction’ in the name of
history and straightforward referential language by Gerald Graff,
Frank Lentricchia, and others.15 The issues at stake in these various
quarrels are complex, but it may be possible to understand them
better by seeing them as disagreements about the proper relation
among the three branches of the ancient trivium. A critic such as
Meyer Abrams wants to make grammar, what he calls ‘construing’
of the plain sense of a poem or a novel, the basis for literary study
70 J. HILLIS MILLER

to which the study of the ‘perfidious’ language of tropes by decon-

structionists might be added as an extra frill for a few specialists in
advanced courses. Analytical philosophers or logicians (with a few
honourable exceptions such as Wittgenstein and Austin) tend to
minimise the effect that figures of speech might have on their enter-
prise, or to believe that logic might, so to speak, reduce, encompass,
or master rhetoric. Such logicians or analysts tend to be violently
and unreasonably hostile to a philosopher of rhetoric such as
Jacques Derrida and even to deny him the name of philosopher (for
is not philosophy purely a matter of logical reasoning?)
The claim of ‘deconstruction’, by now patiently (and reasonably)
demonstrated with a wide variety of philosophical and literary texts
and patiently (and reasonably) argued in ‘theoretical’ statements, is
that language is figurative through and through, all the way down to
the bottom, so to speak, and that rhetoric in the sense of tropes
inhibits or prevents both the mastery of the plain sense of texts,
which is promised by grammar, and the mastery of reasoning, which
is promised by logic. ‘Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens
up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.’ If this is the
case (and it is), rhetoric is not so much the imperial queen of the
trivium and of basic studies in humanities generally, as it is the odd
man out, the jack of spades or the wild card, who suspends the
game or at any rate causes much trouble in playing it. This is not an
argument against the kind of study of rhetoric that I have tried to
define and exemplify in this essay. Far from it. Though the truth
about language may be a dark and troubling one, it is better to know
that truth than to fool oneself or others, since language is an edge
tool, and much harm may be done by even the most amiable and
well-meaning of mistaken assumptions about it, as the sad story of
Mr Stelling demonstrates.

From Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the

Teaching of Composition and Literature, ed. G. Douglas Atkins and
Michael L. Johnson (Lawrence, KS, 1985), pp. 101–14.

NOTES
[J. Hillis Miller, often associated with the Yale School of Criticism, has
written widely on Eliot, drawing attention to linguistic structures and con-
tradictions in Eliot’s novels, and the ideological assumptions that inform
them. In this radical essay, which first appeared in the collection Writing
 GEORGE ELIOT’S BESTIARY 71

and Reading Differently (1985), Miller takes a single passage from The Mill
on the Floss (Tom Tulliver’s suffering in school at the hands of Mr Stelling)
as a way of showing how a text deconstructs itself. ‘The passage speaks of
the activity of reading, manifests a model of that activity, and invites us to
read it according to the method it employs.’ The passage, with its abun-
dance of metaphorical structures, not only serves to demonstrate George
Eliot’s skilful and playful use of language (thus acting as an object lesson for
students of composition) but reveals her ‘awareness of our linguistic
predicament in not being able to … declare what a thing is, except by saying
it is something else’. All quotations in the essay are taken from The Mill on
the Floss (Cabinet Edition, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, n.d.) Eds]

1. In Winifred Bryan Horner (ed.), Composition & Literature: Bridging

the Gap (Chicago, 1983), pp. 38–56.
2. Phaedrus, 261d–2b, trans. R. Hackforth, in Edith Hamilton and
Huntington Cairns (eds), Plato: The Collected Dialogues (Princeton,
NJ, 1963), pp. 507–8. The citations from Gorgias are from the transla-
tion by W. D. Woodhead in the same volume, pp. 229–307.
3. See Aristotle, The Rhetoric, trans. Lane Cooper (New York, 1932), p. 10.
4. For example, by Joseph Litvak in a recent PhD dissertation in
Comparative Literature at Yale University.
5. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh and London,
n.d.), bk 2, ch. 1, pp. 213–17.
6. George Eliot, Middlemarch, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh and London, n.d.), ch.
10, p. 127.
7. The OED gives several examples under ‘Desert’ and ‘Ship’, the earliest
dated 1615.
8. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York, 1951), 1459a, p. 87.
9. Eliot, Middlemarch, Vol. 1, ch. 6, p. 86.
10. Cited by Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley,
CA, 1969), p. 100.
11. William Wordsworth, ‘Essays upon Epitaphs’, in W. J. B. Owen and
Jane Worthington Smyser (eds), The Prose Works (Oxford, 1974), Vol.
2, p. 81.
12. George Meredith, One of Our Conquerors, in Works (London,
1909–11), Vol. 17, p. 189.
13. Robert Moynihan, ‘Interviews with Paul de Man’, Yale Review, 73: 4
(July 1984), 580.
14. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT, 1979), p. 10.
72 J. HILLIS MILLER

15. For the first see Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’; John R.
Searle, ‘Reiterating the Difference: A Reply to Derrida’, Glyph, 1
(Baltimore, MD, 1977), 172–208; and Derrida, ‘Limited Inc’, Glyph, 2
(Baltimore, MD, 1977), 162–254. For the second see Paul de Man,
‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’, Critical Inquiry, 8: 4 (Summer
1982), 761–75; Raymond Geuss, ‘A Response to Paul de Man’; and
Paul de Man, ‘Reply to Raymond Geuss’, Critical Inquiry, 10: 2
(December 1983), 3375–90. For the third see M. H. Abrams, ‘The
Deconstructive Angel’; and J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’,
Critical Inquiry, 3: 3 (Spring 1977), 425–47. For the fourth see Gerald
Graff, Literature against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society
(Chicago, 1979); and Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism
(Chicago, 1980). The literature about, for, and against deconstruction
has since 1980 grown to impressive proportions.
 3

The Chains of Semiosis:

Semiotics, Marxism, and
the Female Stereotypes in
The Mill on the Floss
JOSÉ ANGEL GARCÍA LANDA

A semiotic-ideological aesthetics will include a typology of material

forms of expression in order to understand the way ideologies arise.
This typology is a historical one. In the case of literature, it includes
the study of the kinds of contact available between writer and
public: the existence of the printed press, of periodicals which
publish instalments of novels, the extension of literacy to a wider
reading public, the relationship between literacy (or kinds of liter-
acy) and social role, etc. But it also includes a study of which is the
repertory of types, conventions, genres, themes available to a writer.
Once this repertory is understood to be ideological, and in no
simple way ‘natural’, we might as well speak of ‘forms of produc-
tion’. Literary production is determined by an enormous range of
factors: the existence of a privileged literary tradition, the nature of
the division between the cultural elite and mass culture, the com-
mercial, cultural, and other links between countries which allow the
influence of foreign literatures, etc.
The literary work is seen by Voloshinov in a way which combines
the insights of Marxism with those of the Russian Formalists: it is
an instance of semiotic performance, and it does not exist outside of
a communicative context.1 The literary work is not a self-contained

73
74 JOSÉ ANGEL GARCÍA LANDA

whole. As a signic construct, it needs the implementation of the

receiver, and this changes from age to age.2 The interplay between
theme and meaning described by Voloshinov takes place at several
levels. In conversation we negotiate a specific theme from the mean-
ings that we identify at word, sentence, and textual levels. Each level
is more thematic than the previous one, but none is completely the-
matic; all rest ultimately on the intersubjective availability of
meaning. This is clearer in reading literature: the words on the page
are set in a specific context, they refer to a fictional situation and we
can identify an addressee-role or an implied reader who is a deriva-
tive of the communicative implementation coded in the text. This
implementation does not close the text for the reader: the text
remains inevitably open. The partial implementation is completed
by the actual reader, or contradicted; we may feel that we do not
want to become the implied reader of that text, and we implement
the text in a different direction; we reject the ‘evaluative accent’ that
we detect in the authorial attitude. It is in this sense that we might
say that, even in literature, ‘Any true understanding is dialogic in
nature’.3
Moreover, the communicative context is in this case wider, and it
includes the literary works of the past (at least, those which are
more directly relevant to the situation of the writer and his audi-
ence). ‘Each monument carries on the work of its predecessors,
polemicising with them, expecting active, responsive understanding
and anticipating such understanding in return.’4 This conception
amounts to a historisation of T. S. Eliot’s structural limbo, where
the great works of literature are arranged in an ‘ideal order’ which is
altered each time a work of genius is created.5 We could relate this
insight of Voloshinov’s to another concept introduced by him, that
of ‘behavioural ideology’, that is, ‘that atmosphere of unsystema-
tised and unfixed inner and outer speech which endows our every
instance of behaviour and action and our every “conscious” state
with meaning’.6 Behavioural ideology is linked to specific social
activities, and there is a constant feedback between it and the sys-
tematised social institutions:
The established ideological systems of social ethics, science, art, and
religion are crystallisations of behavioural ideology, and these crys-
tallisations in turn exert a powerful influence back upon behavioural
ideology, normally setting its tone.7

Now, at least as regards literature, it is clear that it is not only an

institution, a canon, etc., but also an activity: writing takes place as
 SEMIOTICS AND THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 75

one more of the dialogic social activities. A writer is working in two

contexts. The first is the institution of literature, consisting of works
by writers of other nations or other ages, models, plots, character
types, and narrative strategies. The second is his experience of social
life at large. A writer – for example, George Eliot – may derive her
semiotic materials from any of the ‘real life’ contexts she is involved
in, such as the discourse on/of woman in Victorian England. These
two contexts are not separate; indeed, it is one of the main tasks of
the writer to bring each to bear on the other, to turn them into one.
Literature, as the first of the mass media (in a historical perspective),
has been an influential way of diffusing ideological representations
of the self and of social relationships. Its material is not a raw one; it
has been socially elaborated.8 This material is often the ideology of
everyday life. It is also a result, an important object of the writer’s
production.
A simple instance of this ideological production is the use of
female stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss.9 Eliot’s use of these
stereotypes is one aspect of a wholesale reflection on the gender
roles favoured in her society. As a whole, The Mill on the Floss deals
with an issue of gender representation, more specifically of female
self-representation. The opening section of the book features a
ghost-like authorial narrator evoking the image of a small girl
looking at the mill. The closing lines of book 1, ch. 1 suggest that
the girl is the narrator herself. The conclusion of the book will prove
otherwise, but the empathic manoeuvre stands: Maggie Tulliver (it is
a conclusion easily drawn from Mary Ann Evans’s life) will be an
experiment in self-representation on the part of the author. This
opening movement inaugurates the tension between a system of four
terms: childhood and maturity, maleness and femaleness. The
tension is established by their collapsing into each other in the narra-
tor’s reverie. An old person remembers a distant childhood; the
voice of male maturity (remember the George on the title page) sud-
denly becomes sexually ambiguous. The conflict of gender in The
Mill on the Floss reaches the level of narration, but here we shall
only follow the thread of some of its manifestations at story level.
The issue of gender roles is at the core of the conflicts and ten-
sions in the Tulliver household dramatised in book 1 of the novel, a
book with the revealing title ‘Boy and Girl’. Mr Tulliver’s patriar-
chal convictions are already evident in the choice of his wife ‘“cause
she was a bit weak, like; for I wasn’t a-goin’ to be told the rights o’
things by my own fireside”’.10 Male superiority is in this case acci-
dental; the reverse, female superiority, is equally accidental in the
76 JOSÉ ANGEL GARCÍA LANDA

case of the Tulliver children, Tom and Maggie. That is, generic dif-
ference is represented in the novel as ideological in the narrow sense
of the word: it is a matter of tendentious representations on the part
of the dominant group. Mr Tulliver’s prejudiced views will partly
bring about the catastrophe of the novel, his ruin and downfall: he
wastes his money on Tom with no better reason than his being his
male heir, in a pathetic attempt to extract from the boy the proof of
his own superiority as a male, while he devotes the same uncon-
scious obstination to curb Maggie’s spontaneous growth.
The child’s socialisation is portrayed in The Mill on the Floss as a
complex of strategies of representation. Mr Tulliver, Mrs Tulliver,
the epitome of alienated womanhood. Mr Stelling, Mr Riley, Tom –
all foist upon Maggie the behavioural ideology of patriarchy in the
field of generic self-representation: a whole catalogue of activities,
hearsays, admonitions, and attitudes of the child towards her own
body, which is supposed to become the emblem of her successful
socialisation into female difference, a text of submission.11 But
Maggie is always portrayed as striving to escape these stereotypes:
she is rebellious, intelligent, she reads difficult books (p. 11), her
hair refuses to stay in place:

Mrs Tulliver, desiring her daughter to have a curled crop, ‘like other
folk’s children,’ had had it cut too short in front to be pushed behind
the ears, and as it was usually straight an hour after it had been taken
out of the paper, Maggie was incessantly tossing her head to keep the
dark, heavy locks out of her gleaming black eyes – an action which
gave her very much the air of a small Shetland pony.
(p. 7)

Everything in Maggie, her very physiognomy marks her out as the

contrary of what they all wish to read into her. Her hair, most
notably becomes an emblem of her irrepressible, mouldbreaking
vitality, opposed to ‘Mrs Tulliver’s curls and capstrings’ (p. 25) or
her blonde cousin Lucy’s ‘row o’ curls round her head, an’ not a
hair out o’ place’ (p. 7).
In a reflexive section of the book, Maggie and Philip Wakem are
talking about literature. Maggie opposes Philip Wakem’s desire to
idealise her: she declines to see herself as a muse, and contests the
current literary portraits of women:

‘Take back your Corinne … I’m determined to read no more books

where the blonde-haired women carry away all the happiness. I
 SEMIOTICS AND THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 77

should begin to have a prejudice against them. If you could give me

some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore
the balance. I want to avenge Rebecca, and Flora MacIvor, and
Minna, and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones.’
‘Well, perhaps you will avenge the dark women in your own person
and carry away all the love from your cousin Lucy. She is sure to have
some handsome young man of St. Ogg’s at her feet now, and you
have only to shine upon him – your fair little cousin will be quite
quenched in your beams.’
(p. 299)

As Nancy K. Miller notes, Philip anticipates here the second part of

the novel, but not wholly – and that is Eliot’s point. This is an aston-
ishing passage, where the character denounces a literary stereotype
of which she is herself an instance, used in a deliberate and self-con-
scious way by Eliot.12 The stereotypical opposition of the blonde and
the dark heroine we may take to be a construct of the behavioural
ideology of a monogamous (Northern European) patriarchy. The
idealised, socially productive elements of the female sex are embod-
ied in the blonde heroine, while the more disturbing elements of
womanhood go to the dark one. The dark heroines are not merely
powerfully sexed; they also have a strong will; they tend to be self-
assertive, courageous and demanding; they are the Amazon side of
womanhood. Examples abound, especially in English and American
literature: the female pairs of The Last of the Mohicans or The
Woman in White come to mind, apart from the heroines Maggie
mentions. But George Eliot does more than recognise and denounce
the stereotype; she uses it. By means of Maggie’s rejection of the
stereotype, Eliot deprives it of any real basis; but that does not
prevent her from exploiting it in the construction of Maggie, as a lit-
erary convention which adds a powerful echo to the work. Maggie
Tulliver becomes an intertextual heroine; the unconsciously accumu-
lated images of female subjection speak through her in a new way.
These figures of dark heroines may not be wholly ‘unconsciously
accumulated’, however. The standard example of this literary
stereotype in Eliot’s age was Mme de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie,
and it is a self-conscious one to some extent. Ellen Moers traces the
fascination of nineteenth-century writers with Corinne, a ‘female
Childe Harold’, the superior (black-haired) woman who is crowned
poetess in Rome and dies unhappily after losing her lover to her
blonde cousin Lucile.13 Corinne was a thinly disguised self-portrait
of her author, also black-haired and admired as a rara avis in a
78 JOSÉ ANGEL GARCÍA LANDA

world of men. Moers notes the symbolism of black hair in The Mill
on the Floss: throughout the novel it represents Maggie’s difficulty
to settle into the conventional female role. Moers notes the use of a
similar symbolism in Corinne and deplores Eliot’s use of the allu-
sion, and her turning Maggie, not into a Corinne (which she does
not want to be anyway), ‘but instead into a merely pretty and dan-
gerous flirt who steals a rich, good-looking suitor away from her
cousin Lucy’ (p. 174). Accordingly, Moers accepts the usual view of
Maggie’s death in the flood as a deus ex machina: ‘Maggie’s conve-
nient death in the flood is designed to smooth over, both practically
and morally, her ugly revenge on blondes in the person of “dear
little Lucy”’ (p. 175). And Moers concludes her astonishingly inade-
quate reading with the comment that ‘George Eliot was always con-
cerned with the superior large-souled woman whose distinction
resides not in her deeds but in her capacity to attract attention and
arouse admiration’ (p. 194). Moers ignores the crucial event in the
plot: Maggie’s active decision to abandon her lover and to be the
object not of the admiration but of the jeers of society. The heroine
she describes in the last quotation does not in the least resemble
Maggie. Instead, she is the very image of Corinne. If she had
accepted the last of the feminine roles foisted on her and run away
with Stephen Guest, Maggie would have been a successful Corinne,
and would have had her ‘revenge’. But she refrains from doing it. It
is clear that Eliot is rejecting the stereotype of the ‘admirable
woman’ represented by Corinne and her literary daughters, a stereo-
type that declares the black-haired heroine admirable only as the
exception of her sex, and on the traditional ‘feminine’ grounds of
powerful feeling and passion. As Eliot noted elsewhere, ‘Women
have not to prove that they can be emotional, and rhapsodic, and
spiritualistic; everyone believes that already. They have to prove
that they are capable of accurate thought, severe study, and continu-
ous self-command.’14 This is a feminist programme, although it does
not look like one to such feminist critics as Moers or Lynn
Sukenick. According to the latter, Eliot’s readers have always been
surprised to find that she is not a feminist: ‘she held closely for a
time to the Comteian view that women are the prime receptacles of
feeling in the culture’.15 However, it is clear that to the extent that
Maggie Tulliver chooses to be a ‘receptacle of feeling’ the author
does not stand by her decision because of the fact that Maggie is a
woman. ‘Feeling’ should not be restricted to women, in Eliot’s view;
consider, for instance, her masculine prototype, Adam Bede.
 SEMIOTICS AND THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 79

Anyway, ‘feeling’ is not the right word; ‘reflexive moral awareness’

is a better description of the quality Eliot is endorsing. This is why
Maggie abandons her lover and chooses moral responsibility and
duty instead of romantic feeling. The choice of an image of the self
which is wholly human involves the rejection of constraining ideo-
logical roles and elevation to a level of consciousness where mere
sexual propriety is irrelevant.
George Eliot’s attitudes towards gender can be easily decon-
structed now, and shown to be, in the last analysis, a bow to the tra-
ditional generic roles. But this would be a facile manoeuvre, possible
only because of our historical vantage point on the nineteenth
century. Besides, some recent work on feminist theory acknowl-
edges that the priorities defined by nineteenth-century feminists
were legitimate ones for their situation.16 Maybe we would have to
live in the 1860s to fully appreciate George Eliot’s project as a nec-
essary task. It is one that she carried out consistently in her life, not
least in her decision to become a ‘male’ novelist, a role which she
could not help but subvert.
The analysis of female subjection in The Mill on the Floss does not
stop here. With a sure instinct, Eliot portrays the material circum-
stances which ensure the perpetuation of ideology. Attention is
drawn to the connection between the ideological immobility of the
inhabitants of St Ogg and the stability of their material circum-
stances. The stagnant and inflexible transmission of property from
one generation to another is emphasised by Eliot; beliefs are trans-
mitted in much the same way as shops or cutlery. Mrs Glegg inherits
from her grandmother a magnificent symbol of the reification of
social status, ‘a brocaded gown that would stand up empty, like a
suit of armour’ (p. 106). There is a whole constellation of associa-
tions at work here. The family pride and reactionary ideology of the
nobility speak silently through the allusion to a suit of armour; also
the self-defensive attitude and the instinctive fear behind Mrs
Glegg’s bourgeois intolerance. That the suit can stand empty is not a
mere bow to the art of embroidery; it speaks of the inessentiality of
the bourgeois self, the bourgeois (female) respectability, and of the
alienation of the bourgeoisie in its possessions, in the fury of owner-
ship. Indeed, if we are optimistic enough, George Eliot will let us
read a materialist theory of conscience into her:

If anyone strongly impressed with the power of the human mind to

triumph over circumstances will contend that the parishioners of
80 JOSÉ ANGEL GARCÍA LANDA

Basset might nevertheless have been a very superior class of people, I

have nothing to argue against that abstract proposition; I only know
that, in point of fact, the Basset mind was in strict keeping with its
circumstances.
(p. 68)

But in fact, in George Eliot’s universe, ideological mobility exists

only in the direction of individual growth and moral awareness; in
the last analysis she regards property as inessential. The bourgeoisie
is not attacked as such: it is only a convenient vehicle for the atti-
tudes George Eliot deplores. The values she endorses and sets
against the bourgeoisie (individual growth, self-examination) are
also bourgeois values.
Nevertheless, this passage points to the fact that, after all, Maggie
Tulliver is an exception, the result, as far as we can see, of chance
and of the complex interplay of sexual roles in the Tulliver house-
hold. Elsewhere, the mind is in strict keeping with its circumstances.
George Eliot shows why this is so, and why change cannot be a
mere act of the will: everyone expects that we act our roles. In order
to lead a normal life, Maggie would have to fight St Ogg, the bour-
geoisie, and the nineteenth century. As Miller notes, ‘Everywhere in
The Mill on the Floss one can read a protest against the division of
labour that grants men the world and women love.’17 The colour
and movement of Maggie’s hair is a protest against this situation, a
protest that only apparently is silent. Her ‘implausible’ death by
water points to an oblique symbol of the weight of social conformity
against the mobility of generic roles. Maggie is doomed from the
beginning; her family’s admonitions against her boyishness are inter-
spersed with alarm that she might have drowned in the river (pp. 6,
91). Moreover, there is in this death something like a fantasy of
escape through suicide; witness a scene which maybe does not lack
symbolic overtones:

The morning was too wet, Mrs Tulliver said, for a little girl to go out
in her best bonnet. Maggie took the opposite view very strongly, and
it was a direct consequence of this difference of opinion that when
her mother was in the act of brushing out the reluctant black crop,
Maggie 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. 20)
 SEMIOTICS AND THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 81

That the parallelism with the novel’s ending is most probably

unconscious is all the more telling about the meaning of that ending,
and of Eliot’s deep compromise in this empathic self-representation.
Maggie Tulliver is the result of George Eliot’s work on the female
stereotypes of her age as she experienced them in both life and liter-
ature. The Mill on the Floss is a direct attack on the subject positions
available to nineteenth-century women, even those that seemed
most favourable, like the Corinne myth. It is a real work effected on
material-social roles, representations of gender – which is at once
imaginary and real; a fiction, but a liberating one, the kind of fiction
people live by.18

From Papers in Language and Literature, 27:1 (1991), 41–50.

NOTES
[This excerpt is taken from an essay which first appeared in the journal,
Papers in Language and Literature (PLL). In its discussion of the ideas of
gender representation, female self-representation and Marxist linguistics, it
can perhaps be seen as typical of the way in which feminist literary criticism
borrows from other theoretical discourses. Here, Landa’s specific interest is
in Eliot’s use of gender stereotypes, the implications of which are seen to
refract back onto the characters, most notably Maggie Tulliver but also her
cousin Lucy. Landa shares Fraiman’s interest in the limited subject positions
available to women and, like Fraiman (essay 1), discusses The Mill in terms
of its challenge to realist conventions. Landa’s particular focus is codes of
representation, specifically the way in which the restrictive conventions of
the light and dark heroine are played out in The Mill. These codes impose
expected forms of behaviour on the novel’s female characters from which
they may or may not struggle to free themselves. All quotations in the essay
are taken from The Mill on the Floss (New York: Bantram, 1987). Eds]

1. See V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans.

Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, 1986).
2. Cf. Roman Ingarden’s distinction between a work and its concretisa-
tion, and his notion of the life of a work of art. The Literary Work of
Art, trans. George Grabowicz (Evanston, IL, 1973), p. 333. In
Voloshinov’s work a more contextualised conception is advanced, if
only schematically.
3. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 102.
4. Ibid., p. 72.
82 JOSÉ ANGEL GARCÍA LANDA

5. T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays

(London, 1951), p. 15.

6. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 97.

7. Ibid., p. 91.

8. See Michel van Schendel, ‘L’ideologème est un quasi-argument’, Texte,

5/6 (1986–87), 93.

9. There are male stereotypes as well in George Eliot’s novels, which I

think are also used deliberately by the author, but in The Mill on the
Floss they are at the service of the central figure, Maggie Tulliver.

10. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (New York, 1987), p. 13. All
further references, included in the text, are to this edition.

11. With respect to the behavioural ideology of socialisation through dress,

movement, and attitude, see Frigga Haug et al., Female Sexualization
(London, 1987).

12. Northrop Frye notes several instances of this stereotype, as well as its
inverted ‘mate’ version in Wuthering Heights. See Anatomy of Criticism
(Princeton, NJ, 1957), p. 101. It may be significant that the two novels
which use the stereotype in a deviant or self-conscious way are the
work of women.

13. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, NY, 1976), ch. 9, espe-
cially p. 176. Note the deliberate parallelism of Lucile/Lucy.

14. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 334.

15. See Arlyn Diamond and Lee K. Edwards (eds), The Authority of
Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism (Amherst, MA, 1977).

16. See, for instance, Ellen Carol Du Bois and Linda Gordon, ‘Seeking
Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-century
Feminist Sexual Thought’, in Carole S. Vance (ed.), Pleasure and
Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston, 1984).

17. Nancy K. Miller, ‘Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s

Fiction’, in Elaine Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism (New
York, 1985), p. 357.

18. I would like to thank Neil Lazarus of Brown University for his com-
ments on a first version of this paper. This and other related works
were prepared during a sabbatical leave from the University of
Zaragoza, and I am indebted for financial assistance to the USA-
Spanish Joint Committee for Cultural and Educational Cooperation. I
appreciate the support of both institutions.
 4

Men of Maxims and

The Mill on the Floss
MARY JACOBUS

The first question to ask is therefore the following: how can women
analyse their own exploitation, inscribe their own demands, within an
order prescribed by the masculine? Is a women’s politics possible
within that order?
(Luce Irigaray)1

To rephrase the question: Can there be (a politics of) women’s

writing? What does it mean to say that women can analyse their
exploitation only ‘within an order prescribed by the masculine’?
And what theory of sexual difference can we turn to when we
speak, as feminist critics are wont to do, of a specifically ‘feminine’
practice in writing? Questions like these mark a current impasse in
contemporary feminist criticism. Utopian attempts to define the
specificity of women’s writing – desired or hypothetical, but rarely
empirically observed – either founder on the rock of essentialism
(the text as body), gesture toward an avant-garde practice which
turns out not to be specific to women, or, like Hélène Cixous in
‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, do both.2 If anatomy is not destiny, still
less can it be language.
A politics of women’s writing, then, if it is not to fall back on a
biologically based theory of sexual difference, must address itself,
as Luce Irigaray has done in ‘The Power of Discourse and the
Subordination of the Feminine’, to the position of mastery held not
only by scientific discourse (Freudian theory, for instance), not only

83
84 MARY JACOBUS

by philosophy, ‘the discourse of discourse’, but by the logic of dis-

course itself. Rather than attempting to identify a specific practice,
in other words, such a feminist politics would attempt to relocate
sexual difference at the level of the text by undoing the repression
of the ‘feminine’ in all the systems of representation for which the
Other (woman) must be reduced to the economy of the Same
(man). In Irigaray’s terms, ‘masculine’ systems of representation
are those whose self-reflexiveness and specularity disappropriate
women of their relation to themselves and to other women; as in
Freud’s theory of sexual difference (woman equals man-minus),
difference is swiftly converted into hierarchy. Femininity comes to
signify a role, an image, a value imposed on women by the narcis-
sistic and fundamentally misogynistic logic of such masculine
systems. The question then becomes for Irigaray not ‘What is
woman?’ (still less Freud’s desperate ‘What does a woman want?’)
but ‘How is the feminine determined by discourse itself?’ – deter-
mined, that is, as lack or error or as an inverted reproduction of
the masculine subject.3
Invisible or repressed, the hidden place of the feminine in lan-
guage is the hypothesis which sustains the model of the textual uni-
verse, like ether. We know it must be there because we know
ourselves struggling for self-definition in other terms, elsewhere,
elsehow. We need it, so we invent it. When such an article of faith
doesn’t manifest itself as a mere rehearsal of sexual stereotypes, it
haunts contemporary feminist criticism in its quest for specificity –
whether of language, or literary tradition, or women’s culture. After
all, why study women’s writing at all unless it is ‘women’s writing’
in the first place? The answer, I believe, must be a political one, and
one whose impulse also fuels that gesture toward an elusive ‘écriture
féminine’ or specificity. To postulate, as Irigaray does, a ‘work of
language’ which undoes the repression of the feminine constitutes in
itself an attack on the dominant ideology, the very means by which
we know what we know and think what we think. So too the
emphasis on women’s writing politicises in a flagrant and polemical
fashion the ‘difference’ which has traditionally been elided by criti-
cism and by the canon formulations of literary history. To label a
text as that of a woman, and to write about it for that reason, makes
vividly legible what the critical institution has either ignored or
acknowledged only under the sign of inferiority. We need the term
‘women’s writing’ if only to remind us of the social conditions
under which women wrote and still write – to remind us that the
 MEN OF MAXIMS 85

conditions of their (re)production are the economic and educational

disadvantages, the sexual and material organisations of society,
which, rather than biology, form the crucial determinants of
women’s writing.
Feminist criticism, it seems to me, ultimately has to invoke as its
starting point this underlying political assumption. To base its
theory on a specificity of language or literary tradition or culture is
already to have moved one step on in the argument, if not already
to have begged the question, since by then one is confronted by
what Nancy Miller, in a recent essay on women’s fiction, has called
‘the irreducibly complicated relationship women have historically
had to the language of the dominant culture’.4 Perhaps that is why,
baffled in their attempts to specify the feminine, feminist critics have
so often turned to an analysis of this relationship as it is manifested
and thematised in writing by and about women. The project is, and
can’t escape being, an ideological one; concerned, that is, with the
functioning and reproduction of sexual ideology in particular –
whether in the overtly theoretical terms of Luce Irigaray or in the
fictional terms of, for instance, George Eliot. To quote Miller again,
the aim would be to show that ‘the maxims that pass for the truth of
human experience, and the encoding of that experience in litera-
ture, are organisations, when they are not fantasies, of the domi-
nant culture’.5
But Irigaray’s ‘women’s politics’, her feminist argument, goes
beyond ideology critique in its effort to recover ‘the place of the
feminine’ in discourse. The ‘work of language’ which she envisages
would undo representation altogether, even to the extent of refusing
the linearity of reading. ‘Après-coup’, the retroactive effect of a
word ending, opens up the structure of language to reveal the
repression on which meaning depends; and repression is the place
of the feminine. By contrast, the ‘style’ of women – écriture fémi-
nine – would privilege not the look but the tactile, the simultaneous,
the fluid. Yet at the same time, we discover, such a style can’t be sus-
tained as a thesis or made the object of a position; if not exactly
‘nothing’, it is nonetheless a kind of discursive practice that can’t be
thought, still less written. Like her style, woman herself is alleged by
Irigaray to be an unimaginable concept within the existing order.
Elaborating a theory of which woman is either the subject or the
object merely reinstalls the feminine within a logic that represses,
censors, or misrecognises it. Within that logic, woman can only
signify an excess or a deranging power. Woman for Irigaray is
86 MARY JACOBUS

always the ‘something else’ that points to the possibility of another

language, asserts that the masculine is not all, does not have a
monopoly on value, or, still less, ‘the abusive privilege of appropria-
tion’. She tries to strike through the theoretical machinery itself, sus-
pending its pretension to the production of a single truth, a univocal
meaning. Woman would thus find herself on the side of everything
in language that is multiple, duplicitous, unreliable, and resistant to
the binary oppositions on which theories of sexual difference such
as Freud’s depend.6
Irigaray’s argument is seductive precisely because it puts all
systems in question, leaving process and fluidity instead of fixity and
form. At the same time, it necessarily concedes that women have
access to language only by recourse to systems of representation that
are masculine. Given the coherence of the systems at work in dis-
course, whether Freudian or critical, how is the work of language of
which she speaks to be undertaken at all? Her answer is ‘mimetism’,
the role historically assigned to women – that of reproduction, but
deliberately assumed; an acting out or role playing within the text
which allows the woman writer to know better and hence to expose
what it is she mimics. Irigaray, in fact, seems to be saying that there
is no ‘outside’ of discourse, no alternative practice available to the
woman writer apart from the process of undoing itself:
To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place
of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be
simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself – inasmuch as she is
on the side of the ‘perceptible’, of ‘matter’ – to ‘ideas’, in particular
to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but
so as to make ‘visible’, by an effect of playful repetition, what was
supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of
the feminine in language. It also means ‘to unveil’ the fact that, if
women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply
resorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere.7

Within the systems of discourse and representation which repress

the feminine, woman can only resubmit herself to them; but by
refusing to be reduced by them, she points to the place and manner
of her exploitation. ‘A possible operation of the feminine in lan-
guage’ becomes, then, the revelation of its repression, through an
effect of playful rehearsal, rather than a demonstrably feminine lin-
guistic practice.
Irigaray’s main usefulness to the feminist critic lies in this half-
glimpsed possibility of undoing the ideas about women elaborated
 MEN OF MAXIMS 87

in and by masculine logic, a project at once analytic and ideological.

Her attack on centrism in general, and phallocentrism in particular,
allows the feminist critic to ally herself ‘otherwise’, with the ‘else-
where’ to which Irigaray gestures, in a stance of dissociation and
resistance where typically characterises that of feminist criticism in
its relation to the dominant culture or ‘order prescribed by the mas-
culine’. But like Irigaray herself in ‘The Power of Discourse’, femi-
nist criticism remains imbricated within the forms of intelligibility –
reading and writing, the logic of discourse – against which it pushes.
What makes the ‘difference’, then? Surely, the direction from which
that criticism comes – the elsewhere that it invokes, the putting in
question of our social organisation of gender; its wishfulness, even,
in imagining alternatives. It follows that what pleases the feminist
critic most (this one, at any rate) is to light on a text that seems to
do her arguing, or some of it, for her – especially a text whose story
is the same as hers; hence, perhaps, the drift toward narrative in
recent works of feminist criticism such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar’s influential The Madwoman in the Attic.8 What’s usually
going on in such criticism – perhaps in all feminist criticism – is a
specificity of relationship that amounts to a distinctive practice.
Criticism takes literature as its object, yes; but here literature in a
different sense is likely to become the subject, the feminist critic, the
woman writer, woman herself.
This charged and doubled relationship, an almost inescapable
aspect of feminist criticism, is at once transgressive and liberating,
since what it brings to light is the hidden or unspoken ideological
premise of criticism itself. Engagée perforce, feminist criticism calls
neutrality into question, like other avowedly political analyses of lit-
erature. I want now to undertake a ‘symptomatic’ reading of a the-
matically relevant chapter from Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860)
in the hope that this quintessentially critical activity will bring to
light if not ‘a possible operation of the feminine in language’ at least
one mode of its recovery – language itself. I will return later to the
final chapter of Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One in which an
escape from masculine systems of representation is glimpsed
through the metaphors of female desire itself.

Nancy Miller’s ‘maxims that pass for the truth of human experi-
ence’ allude to Eliot’s remark near the end of The Mill on the Floss
that ‘the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds
that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules’.9
88 MARY JACOBUS

Miller’s concern is the accusation of implausibility levelled at the

plots of women’s novels: Eliot’s concern is the ‘special case’ of
Maggie Tulliver – ‘to lace ourselves up in formulas’ is to ignore ‘the
special circumstances that mark the individual lot’. An argument for
the individual makes itself felt as an argument against generalities.
For Eliot herself, as for Dr Kenn (the repository of her knowledge at
this point in the novel), ‘the mysterious complexity of our life is not
to be embraced by maxims’ (p. 628). Though the context is the
making of moral, not critical, judgments, I think that Eliot, as so
often at such moments, is concerned also with both the making and
the reading of fiction; with the making of another kind of special
case. Though Maggie may be an ‘exceptional’ woman, the ugly
duckling of St Ogg’s, her story contravenes the norm, and in that
respect it could be said to be all women’s story. We recall an earlier
moment, that of Tom Tulliver’s harsh judgment of his sister (‘You
have not resolution to resist a thing that you know to be wrong’),
and Maggie’s rebellious murmuring that her life is ‘a planless riddle
to him’ only because he’s incapable of feeling the mental needs
which impel her, in his eyes, to wrongdoing or absurdity (pp. 504,
505). To Tom, the novel’s chief upholder of general rules and patri-
archal law (he makes his sister swear obedience to his prohibitions
on the family Bible), the planless riddle of Maggie’s life is only made
sense of by a ‘Final Rescue’ which involves her death: ‘In their death
they were not divided’ (p. 657). But the reunion of brother and
sister in the floodwaters of the Ripple enacts both reconciliation and
revenge, consummation and cataclysm; powerful authorial desires
are at work.10 To simplify this irreducible swirl of contradictory
desire in the deluge that ‘rescues’ Maggie as well as her brother
would be to salvage a maxim as ‘jejune’ as ‘Mors omnibus est com-
munis’ (one of the tags Maggie finds when she dips into her
brother’s Latin grammar) stripped of its saving Latin.11 We might go
further and say that to substitute a generality for the riddle of
Maggie’s life and death, or to translate Latin maxims into English
commonplaces, would constitute a misreading of the novel as inept
as Tom’s misconstruction of his sister, or his Latin. Maggie’s incom-
prehensible foreignness, her drift into error or impropriety on the
river with Stephen Guest, is a ‘lapse’ understood by the latitudinar-
ian Dr Kenn. For us, it also involves an understanding that planless-
ness, riddles, and impropriety – the enigmas, accidents, and
incorrectness of language itself – are at odds with the closures of
 MEN OF MAXIMS 89

plot (here, the plot of incestuous reunion) and with interpretation

itself, as well as with the finality of the maxims denounced by Eliot.
For all its healing of division, The Mill on the Floss uncovers the
divide between the language or maxims of the dominant culture and
the language itself which undoes them. In life, at any rate, they
remain divided – indeed, death may be the price of unity – and femi-
nist criticism might be said to install itself in the gap. A frequent
move on the part of feminist criticism is to challenge the norms and
aesthetic criteria of the dominant culture (as Miller does in defending
Eliot), claiming in effect, that ‘incorrectness’ makes visible what is
specific to women’s writing. The culturally imposed or assumed
‘lapses’ of women’s writing are turned against the system that brings
them into being – a system women writers necessarily inhabit. What
surfaces in this gesture is the all-important question of women’s
access to knowledge and culture and to the power that goes with
them. In writing by women, the question is often explicitly thema-
tised in terms of education. Eliot’s account of Tom’s schooling in
‘School-Time’, the opening chapter of Book 2, provides just such a
thematic treatment – a lesson in antifeminist pedagogy which goes
beyond its immediate implications for women’s education to raise
more far-reaching questions about the functioning of both sexual ide-
ology and language. Take Maggie’s puzzlement at one of the many
maxims found in the Eton Grammar, a required text for the unfortu-
nate Tom. As often, rules and examples prove hard to tell apart:

The astronomer who hated women generally caused [Maggie] so

much puzzling speculation that she one day asked Mr Stelling if all
astronomers hated women, or whether it was only this particular
astronomer. But, forestalling his answer, she said,
‘I suppose it’s all astronomers: because you know, they live up in
high towers, and if the women came there, they might talk and hinder
them from looking at the stars.’
Mr Stelling liked her prattle immensely.
(p. 220)

What we see here is a textbook example of the way in which indi-

vidual misogyny becomes generalised – ‘maximised’, as it were – in
the form of a patriarchal put-down. Maggie may have trouble con-
struing ‘ad unam mulieres’, or ‘all to a woman’, but in essence she
has got it right.12 Just to prove her point, Mr Stelling (who himself
prefers the talk of women to star gazing) likes her ‘prattle’, a term
90 MARY JACOBUS

used only of the talk of women and children. Reduced to his idea of
her, Maggie can only mimic man’s talk.
Inappropriate as he is in other respects for Tom’s future career,
Mr Stelling thus proves an excellent schoolmaster to his latent
misogyny. His classroom is also an important scene of instruction
for Maggie, who learns not only that all astronomers to a man hate
women in general but that girls can’t learn Latin; that they are quick
and shallow, mere imitators (‘this small apparatus of shallow quick-
ness’, Eliot playfully repeats); and that everybody hates clever
women, even if they are amused by the prattle of clever little girls
(pp. 214, 221, 216). It’s hard not to read with one eye on her
creator. Maggie, it emerges, rather fancies herself as a linguist, and
Eliot too seems wishfully to imply that she has what one might call a
‘gift’ for languages – a gift, perhaps, for ambiguity too. Women, we
learn, don’t just talk, they double-talk, like language itself; that’s just
the trouble for boys like Tom:
‘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.’
‘Now, you’re just wrong there, Miss Maggie!’ said Tom, secretly
astonished. ‘You think you’re very wise! But “bonus” means “good”,
as it happens – bonus, bona, bonum.’
‘Well, that’s no reason why it shouldn’t mean “gift”’, said Maggie
stoutly. ‘It may mean several things. Almost every word does.’
(p. 214)
And if words may mean several things, general rules or maxims may
prove less universal than they claim to be and lose their authority.
Perhaps only ‘this particular astronomer’ was a woman-hater or
hated only one woman in particular. Special cases or particular con-
texts – ‘the special circumstances that mark the individual lot’ (p.
628) – determine or render indeterminate not only judgment but
meaning too. The rules of language itself make Tom’s role learning
troublesome to him. How can he hope to construe his sister when
her relation to language proves so treacherous – her difference so
shifting a play of possibility, like the difference within language
itself, destabilising terms such as ‘wrong’ and ‘good’?
Maggie, a little parody of her author’s procedures in The Mill on
the Floss, decides ‘to skip the rule in the syntax – the examples
became so absorbing’:
These mysterious sentences snatched from an unknown context – like
strange horns of beasts and leaves of unknown plants, brought from
 MEN OF MAXIMS 91

some far-off region, gave boundless scope to her imagination, and

were all the more fascinating because they were in a peculiar tongue
of their own, which she could learn to interpret. It was really very
interesting – the Latin Grammar that Tom had said no girls could
learn: and she was proud because she found it interesting. The most
fragmentary examples were her favourites. Mors omnibus est commu-
nis would have been jejune, only she liked to know the Latin; but the
fortunate gentleman whom every one congratulated because he had a
son ‘endowed with such a disposition’ afforded her a great deal of
pleasant conjecture, and she was quite lost in the ‘thick grove pene-
trable by no star’, when Tom called out,
‘Now, then, Magsie, give us the Grammar!’
(pp. 217–18)

Whereas maxims lace her up in formulas, ‘these mysterious sentences’

give boundless scope to Maggie’s imagination; for her, as for her
author (who makes them foretell her story), they are whole fictional
worlds, alternative realities, transformations of the familiar into the
exotic and strange. In their foreignness she finds herself, until roused
by Tom’s peremptory call, as she is later to be recalled by his voice
from the Red Deeps. Here, however, it is Maggie who teaches Tom
his most important lesson, that the ‘dead’ languages had once been
living: ‘that there had once been people upon the earth who were so
fortunate as to know Latin without learning it through the medium of
the Eton Grammar’ (p. 221). The idea – or, rather, fantasy – of a lan-
guage that is innate rather than acquired, native rather than incom-
prehensibly foreign, is a consoling one for the unbookish miller’s son;
but it holds out hope for Maggie too, and presumably also for her
creator. Though Latin stands in for cultural imperialism and for the
outlines of a peculiarly masculine and elitist classical education from
which women have traditionally been excluded, Maggie can learn to
interpret it. The ‘peculiar tongue’ had once been spoken by women,
after all – and they had not needed to learn it from Mr Stelling or the
institutions he perpetuates. Who knows, she might even become an
astronomer herself, or, like Eliot, a writer who by her pen name had
refused the institutionalisation of sexual difference as cultural exclu-
sion. Tom and Mr Stelling tell Maggie that ‘Girls never learn such
things’; ‘They’ve a great deal of superficial cleverness but they
couldn’t go far into anything’ (pp. 214, 221). But going far into
things – and going far – is the author’s prerogative in The Mill on the
Floss. Though Maggie’s quest for knowledge ends in death, as
Virginia Woolf thought Eliot’s own had ended,13 killing off this small
apparatus of shallow quickness may have been the necessary sacrifice
92 MARY JACOBUS

in order for Eliot herself to become an interpreter of the exotic possi-

bilities contained in mysterious sentences. Maggie – unassimilable,
incomprehensible, ‘fallen’ – is her text, a ‘dead’ language which
thereby gives all the greater scope to authorial imaginings, making it
possible for the writer to come into being.

We recognise in ‘School-Time’ Eliot’s investment – humorous, affec-

tionate, and rather innocently self-lovingly–in Maggie’s gifts and
haphazard acquisition of knowledge. In particular, we recognise a
defence of the ‘irregular’ education which until recently had been
the lot of most women, if educated at all. Earlier in the same
chapter, in the context of Mr Stelling’s teaching methods (that is, his
unquestioning reliance on Euclid and the Eton Grammar), Eliot
refers whimsically to ‘Mr Broderip’s amiable beaver’ which ‘busied
himself as earnestly in constructing a dam, in a room up three pairs
of stairs in London, as if he had been laying his foundation in a
stream or lake in Upper Canada’. It was ‘Binny’s function to build’
(p. 206). Binny the beaver, a pet from the pages of W. J. Broderip’s
Leaves from the Note Book of a Naturalist (1852), constructed his
dam with sweeping brushes and warming pans, ‘hand-brushes, rush-
baskets, books, boots, sticks, clothes, dried turf or anything
portable’.14 A domesticated bricoleur, Binny makes do with what he
can find. A few lines later, we hear of Mr Stelling’s ‘educated’ con-
descension toward ‘the display of various or special knowledge
made by irregularly educated people’ (p. 207). Mr Broderip’s
beaver, it turns out, does double duty as an illustration of
Mr Stelling’s ‘regular’ (not to say ‘rote’) mode of instruction – he
can do no otherwise, conditioned as he is – and as a defence of
Eliot’s own display of irregularly acquired ‘various or special knowl-
edge’. Like Maggie’s, this is knowledge drawn directly from books,
without the aid of a patriarchal pedagogue. Mr Stelling and the
institutions he subscribes to (Aristotle, deaneries, prebends, Great
Britain, and Protestantism – the Establishment, in fact) are lined up
against the author-as-eager-beaver. Eliot’s mischievous impugning
of authority and authorities – specifically, cultural authority –
becomes increasingly explicit until, a page or so later, culture itself
comes under attack. Finding Tom’s brain ‘peculiarly impervious to
etymology and demonstration’, Mr Stelling concludes that it ‘was
peculiarly in need of being ploughed and harrowed by these patent
implements: it was his favourite metaphor, that the classics and
geometry constituted that culture of the mind which prepared it for
 MEN OF MAXIMS 93

the reception of any subsequent crop’. As Eliot rather wittily

observes, the regimen proves ‘as uncomfortable for Tom Tulliver as
if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weak-
ness which prevented him from digesting it’ (p. 208). Nor is Eliot
only, or simply, being funny. The bonus or gift of language is at
work here, translating dead metaphor into organic tract.
Like Maggie herself, the metaphor here is improper, disrespectful
of authorities, and, as Tom later complains of his sister, not to be
relied on. Developing the implications of changing her metaphor
from agriculture to digestion, Eliot drastically undermines the realist
illusion of her fictional world, revealing it to be no more than a
blank page inscribed with a succession of arbitrary metaphoric
substitutions:

It is astonishing what a different result one gets by changing the

metaphor! Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and one’s
ingenious conception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and
harrows seems to settle nothing. But then, it is open to some one else
to follow great authorities and call the mind a sheet of white paper or
a mirror, in which case one’s knowledge of the digestive process
becomes quite irrelevant. It was doubtless an ingenious idea to call
the camel the ship of the desert, but it would hardly lead one far in
training that useful beast. O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage
of being ‘the freshest modern’ instead of the greatest ancient, would
you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech as a sign of
high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows
itself in speech without metaphor – that we can so seldom declare
what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?
(pp. 208–9)

In the Poetics Aristotle says: ‘It is a great thing to make use of …

double words and rare words … but by far the greatest thing is the
use of metaphor. That alone cannot be learned; it is the token of
genius. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resem-
blances.’15 Of course there’s authorial self-congratulation lurking in
this passage, as there is in Eliot’s affectionate parade of Maggie’s
gifts. But an eye for resemblances (between Binny and Mr Stelling,
for instance, or brain and stomach) is also here a satiric eye. Culture
as (in)digestion makes Euclid and the Eton Grammar hard to
swallow; Aristotle loses his authority to the author herself. On one
level, this is science calling culture into question, making empiricism
the order of the day. But there’s something unsettling to the mind,
or, rather, stomach, in this dizzy progression from culture, digestive
94 MARY JACOBUS

tract, and tabula rasa to ship of the desert (which sounds like a text-
book example of metaphor). The blank page may take what imprint
the author chooses to give it. But the price one pays for such
freedom is the recognition that language, thus viewed, is endlessly
duplicitous rather than single-minded (as Tom would have it be);
that metaphor is a kind of impropriety or oxymoronic otherness;
and that ‘we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying
it is something else’.
Error, then, must creep in where there’s a story to tell, especially
a woman’s story. Maggie’s ‘wrong-doing and absurdity’, as the fall
of women often does, not only puts her on the side of error in
Tom’s scheme of things but gives her a history; ‘the happiest
women’, Eliot reminds us, ‘like the happiest nations, have no
history’ (p. 494). Impropriety and metaphor belong together on the
same side as a fall from absolute truth or unitary schemes of knowl-
edge (maxims). Knowledge in The Mill on the Floss is guarded by a
traditional patriarchal prohibition which, by a curious slippage,
makes the fruit itself as indigestible as the ban and its thick rind.
The adolescent Maggie, ‘with her soul’s hunger and her illusions of
self-flattery’, begins ‘to nibble at this thick-rinded fruit of the tree of
knowledge, filling her vacant hours with Latin, geometry, and the
forms of the syllogism’ (p. 380). But the Latin, Euclid, and Logic,
which Maggie imagines ‘would surely be a considerable step in mas-
culine wisdom’, leave her dissatisfied, like a thirsty traveller in a
trackless desert. What does Eliot substitute for this mental diet?
After Maggie’s chance discovery of Thomas à Kempis, we’re told
that ‘the old books, Virgil, Euclid, and Aldrich – that wrinkled fruit
of the tree of knowledge – had been all laid by’ for a doctrine that
announces: ‘And if he should attain to all knowledge, he is yet far
off’ (pp. 387, 383). Though the fruits of patriarchal knowledge no
longer seem worth the eating, can we view Thomas à Kempis as
anything more than an opiate for the hunger pains of oppression?
Surely not. The morality of submission and renunciation is only a
sublimated version of Tom’s plainspoken patriarchal prohibition, as
the satanic mocker, Philip Wakem, doesn’t fail to point out. Yet in
the last resort, Eliot makes her heroine live and die by this inherited
morality of female suffering – as if, in the economy of the text, it
was necessary for Maggie to die renouncing in order for her author
to release the flood of desire that is language itself.16 Why?
The Mill on the Floss gestures toward a largely unacted error, the
elopement with Stephen Guest which would have placed Maggie
 MEN OF MAXIMS 95

finally outside the laws of St Ogg’s. Instead of this unrealised fall, we

are offered a moment of attempted transcendence in the timeless
death embrace which abolishes the history of division between
brother and sister – ‘living through again in one supreme moment,
the days when they had clasped their little hands in love’ (p. 655).
What is striking about the novel’s ending is its banishing not simply
of division but of sexual difference as the origin of that division. The
fantasy is of a world where brother and sister might roam together,
‘indifferently’, as it were, without either conflict or hierarchy. We
know that their childhood was not like that at all, and we can
scarcely avoid concluding that death is a high price to pay for such
imaginary union. In another sense, too, the abolition of difference
marks the death of desire for Maggie; ‘The Last Conflict’ (the title of
the book’s closing chapter) is resolved by her final renunciation of
Guest, resolved, moreover, with the help of ‘the little old book that
she had long ago learned by heart’ (p. 648). Through Thomas à
Kempis, Eliot achieves a simultaneous management of both knowl-
edge and desire, evoking an ‘invisible’ or ‘supreme teacher’ within
the soul, whose voice promises ‘entrance into that satisfaction which
[Maggie] had so long been craving in vain’ (p. 384). Repressing the
problematic issue of book learning, this ‘invisible teacher’ is an
aspect of the self which one might call the voice of conscience or,
alternatively, sublimated maxims. In ‘the little old book’, Maggie
finds the authorised version of her own and Eliot’s story, ‘written
down by a hand that waited for the heart’s prompting … the chroni-
cle of a solitary, hidden anguish … a lasting record of human needs
and human consolations, the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt
and suffered and renounced’ (pp. 384–5).
Where might we look for an alternative version or, for that
matter, for another model of difference, one that did not merely
substitute unity for division and did not pay the price of death or
transcendence? Back to the schoolroom, where we find Tom
painfully committing to memory the Eton Grammar’s ‘Rules for the
Genders of Nouns’, the names of trees being feminine, while some
birds, animals, and fish ‘dicta epicoena … are said to be epicene’.17
In epicene language, as distinct from language imagined as either
neutral or androgynous, gender is variable at will, a mere metaphor.
The rules for the genders of nouns, like prescriptions about ‘mascu-
line’ or ‘feminine’ species of knowledge, are seen to be entirely arbi-
trary. Thus the lament of David for Saul and Jonathan can be
appropriated as the epitaph of brother and sister (‘in their death
96 MARY JACOBUS

they were not divided’), and ‘the voice of a brother who, ages ago,
felt and suffered and renounced’ can double as the voice of a sister-
author, the passionately epicene George Eliot. One answer, then, to
my earlier question (why does Eliot sacrifice her heroine to the
morality of renunciation?) is that Eliot saw in Thomas à Kempis a
language of desire, but desire managed as knowledge is also
managed – sublimated, that is, not as renunciation but as writing. In
such epicene writing, the woman writer finds herself, or finds herself
in metaphor.

For Irigaray, the price paid by the woman writer for attempting to
inscribe the claims of women ‘within an order prescribed by the
masculine’ may ultimately be death; the problem as she sees it is
this: ‘[How can we] disengage ourselves, alive, from their con-
cepts?’18 The final, lyrical chapter of This Sex Which Is Not One,
‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, is, or tries to be, the alternative
she proposes. It begins boldly: ‘If we keep on speaking the same lan-
guage together, we’re going to reproduce the same history’ (p. 205).
This would be a history of disappropriation, the record of the
woman writer’s self loss as, attempting to swallow or incorporate an
alien language, she is swallowed up by it in turn:
Outside, you try to conform to an alien order. Exiled from yourself,
you fuse with everything you meet. You imitate whatever comes
close. You become whatever touches you. In your eagerness to find
yourself again, you move indefinitely far from yourself. From me.
Taking one model after another, passing from master to master,
changing face, form, and language with each new power that domi-
nates you. You/we are sundered; as you allow yourself to be abused,
you become an impassive travesty.
(p. 210)

This, perhaps, is what Miller means by ‘a posture of imposture’, ‘the

uncomfortable posture of all woman writers in our culture, within
and without the text’.19 Miming has become absorption into an
alien order. One thinks of Maggie, a consumer who is in turn con-
sumed by what she reads, an imitative ‘apparatus’ who, like the
alienated women imagined by Irigaray, can only speak their desire
as ‘spoken machines, speaking machines’. Speaking the same lan-
guage, spoken in the language of the Same (‘If we keep on speaking
sameness, if we speak to each other as men have been doing for cen-
turies, as we have been taught to speak, we’ll miss each other, fail
ourselves’), she can only be reproduced as the history of a fall or a
 MEN OF MAXIMS 97

failure (p. 205). Eliot herself, of course, never so much as gestures

toward Irigaray’s jubilant utopian love language between two
women – a language of desire whose object (‘my indifferent one’) is
that internal (in)difference which, in another context, Barbara
Johnson calls ‘not a difference between … but a difference within.
Far from constituting the text’s unique identity, it is that which sub-
verts the very idea of identity’. What is destroyed, conceptually, is
the ‘unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over
another’.20 Irigaray’s experiment in ‘When Our Lips Speak
Together’ is of this kind, an attempt to release the subtext of female
desire, thereby undoing repression and depriving metalanguage of
its claim to truth. ‘The exhausting labour of copying, miming’ is no
longer enough (p. 207).
But for all Irigaray’s experimentalism, the ‘difference’ is not to be
located at the level of the sentence, as Miller reminds us.21 Rather,
what we find in ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ is writing
designed to indicate the cultural determinants that bound the
woman writer and, for Irigaray, deprive her of her most fundamen-
tal relationship: her relationship to herself. In fact, what seems most
specifically ‘feminine’ about Irigaray’s practice is not its experimen-
talism as such but its dialogue of one/two, its fantasy of the two-in-
one: ‘In life they are not divided’, to rephrase David’s lament. The
lips that speak together (the lips of female lovers) are here imagined
as initiating a dialogue not of conflict or reunion, like Maggie and
Tom’s, but of mutuality, lack of boundaries, continuity. If both
Irigaray and Eliot kill off the woman engulfed by masculine logic
and language, both end also – and need to end – by releasing a swirl
of (im)possibility:

These rivers flow into no single, definitive sea. These streams are
without fixed banks, this body without fixed boundaries. This unceas-
ing mobility. This life – which will perhaps be called our restlessness,
whims, pretences, or lies. All this remains very strange to anyone
claiming to stand on solid ground.
(p. 215)

Is that, finally, why Maggie must be drowned, sacrificed as a

mimetic ‘apparatus’ (much as the solidity of St Ogg’s is swept away)
to the flood whose murmuring waters swell the ‘low murmur’ of
Maggie’s lips as they repeat the words of Thomas à Kempis? When
the praying Maggie feels the flow of water at her knees, the literal
seems to have merged with a figural flow; as Eliot writes, ‘the whole
98 MARY JACOBUS

thing had been so rapid – so dreamlike – that the threads of ordi-

nary association were broken’ (p. 651). It is surely at this moment in
the novel that we move most clearly into the unbounded realm of
desire, if not of wish fulfilment. It is at this moment of inundation,
in fact, that the thematics of female desire surface most clearly.22
We will look in vain for a specifically feminine linguistic practice
in The Mill on the Floss; ‘a possible operation of the feminine in
language’ is always elsewhere, not yet, not here, unless it simply
reinscribes the exclusions, confines, and irregularities of Maggie’s
education. But what we may find in both Eliot and Irigaray is a cri-
tique which gestures beyond cultural boundaries, indicating the
perimeters within which their writing is produced. For the
astronomer who hates women in general, the feminist critic may
wish to substitute an author who vindicates one woman in particular
or, like Irigaray, inscribes the claims of all women. In part a critic of
ideology, she will also want to uncover the ways in which maxims
or idées reçues function in the service of institutionalising and ‘max-
imising’ misogyny, or simply deny difference. But in the last resort,
her practice and her theory come together in Eliot’s lament about
metaphor – ‘that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by
saying it is something else’. The necessary utopianism of feminist
criticism may be the attempt to declare what is by saying something
else – that ‘something else’ which presses both Irigaray and Eliot to
conclude their very different works with an imaginative reaching
beyond analytic and realistic modes to the metaphors of unbounded
female desire in which each finds herself as a woman writing.

From Mary Jacobus, Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism

(London, 1986), pp. 62–79.

NOTES

[This essay can be read as part of an ongoing debate about the creation of a
female language as an appropriate expression of female experience. In the
essay reproduced here, Mary Jacobus continues the discussion of a politics
of women’s writing, showing that rather than attempting to produce an écri-
ture féminine, Eliot positions herself critically in relation to the dominant
male discourse. Bringing together literary criticism and cultural critique,
Jacobus argues that the character of Maggie, and the text more generally,
offer examples of women’s troubled relationship with language. This is
resolved in the novel’s ending, ‘an imaginative reaching beyond analytic and
realistic modes to the metaphors of unbounded female desire’. Jacobus thus
 MEN OF MAXIMS 99

reads The Mill on the Floss in order to deal with important questions posed
by Luce Irigary concerning the complex politics of women’s language: how,
it is asked, can women liberate themselves from its concepts? All quotations
in the essay are taken from The Mill on the Floss (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1979). Eds]

1. Luce Irigarary, ‘The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of

the Feminine’ in her This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, NY, 1985),
p. 81.

2. See Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Elaine Marks and
Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms, pp. 245–64
(Amherst, MA, 1980). The implications of such definitions of ‘écriture
féminine’ are discussed briefly in ‘The Difference of View’ section 11.1,
and by Nancy K. Miller, ‘Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in
Women’s Fiction’, PMLA, 96:1 (January 1981), 37; my own essay is
indebted to Miller’s account of The Mill on the Floss in the context of
‘women’s fiction’.

3. See Irigarary, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 68–85, and her Speculum
of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY, 1985), pp. 133–46. See also Carolyn
Burke, ‘Introduction to Luce Irigarary’s ‘When Our Lips Speak
Together’, Signs, 6:1 (Autumn 1980), 71.

4. Miller ‘Emphasis Added’, p. 38.

5. Ibid., p. 46.

6. Irigarary, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 74–80.

7. Ibid., p. 76.

8. See, for instance, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘Toward Feminist
Poetics’, Part 1 of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT,
1979), pp. 3–104; Gilbert and Gubar’s is above all a work of literary
(her)story.

9. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth,

1979), p. 628; subsequent page references in the text are to this
edition. I am especially indebted to Byatt’s helpful annotations.

10. See Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, who succinctly
state that Maggie seems ‘at her most monstrous when she tries to turn
herself into an angel of renunciation’ (p. 491), and Gillian Beer,
‘Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’, in Mary
Jacobus (ed.), Women Writing and Writing About Women (London,
1979), p. 88, on an ending that ‘lacks bleakness, is even lubricious’ in
its realisation of ‘confused and passionate needs’.
100 MARY JACOBUS

11. ‘Mars omnibus est communis would have been jejune, only [Maggie]
liked to know the Latin’: Eliot, Mill, pp. 217–18.
12. ‘Astronomer: ut – “as”, astronomus – “an astronomer”, exosus –
“hating”, muleres – “women”, ad unum – mulierem – “to one” [that is
general].’ (Eton Grammar, 1831 edn, p. 279); Eliot, Mill, p. 676, n. 55.
13. See Virginia Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf,
4 vols, ed. Leonard Woolf (London, 1966–7), I:204: ‘With every
obstacle against her – sex and health and convention – she sought more
knowledge and more freedom till the body, weighted with its double
burden, sank worn out.’
14. See Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, pp. 675–6, n. 44.
15. Poetics, 22:16 (my italics); see Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 676, n.
46. J. Hillis Miller notes apropos of this passage that it ‘is followed
almost immediately by an ostentatious and forceful metaphor [that of a
shrewmouse imprisioned in a split tree (p. 209)], as if Eliot were com-
pelled … to demonstrate that we cannot say what a thing is except by
saying it is something else’: ‘The Worlds of Victorian Fiction’, Harvard
English Studies, 6 (1975), 145n.
16. See Carol Christ, ‘Aggression and Providential Death in George Eliot’s
Fiction’, Novel, 9:2 (Winter 1976), 130–40, for a somewhat different
interpretation.
17. See Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 676, n. 53.
18. Irigarary, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, This Sex Which Is Not
One, p. 212.
19. Miller ‘Emphasis Added’, p. 46.
20. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (Baltimore, MD, 1981),
pp. 4, 5.
21. Miller ‘Emphasis Added’, p. 38
22. Cf. Gillian Beer, ‘Beyond Determinism’, in Jacobus (ed.), Women
Writing, p. 88: ‘Eliot is fascinated by the unassuageable longings of her
heroine. She allows them fulfilment in a form of plot which simply
glides out of the chanelled sequence of social growth and makes literal
the expansion of desire. The river loses its form in the flood.’
 5

Nationhood, Adulthood,
and the Ruptures of
Bildung: Arresting
Development in The Mill on
the Floss
JOSHUA D. ESTY

The Mill on the Floss has always stood out among Eliot’s works as
an unusual case – prickly, undigested, ‘immature’, but the terms of
its difference have not always been satisfactorily articulated. My
argument holds that the novel’s intractability – what Susan Fraiman
calls its ‘portion of radical discontent’1 – is fuelled by its resistance
to historical, generic and psychological conventions of develop-
ment. Specifically, The Mill on the Floss throws into question the
most typical modern narrative of social identity – nationalism –
and, in a tightly coordinated allegorical logic, undermines the most
typical modern narrative of individual progress – the
Bildungsroman. Eliot does not simply cast doubt on the idea that
societies or individuals improve over time, but asks the more radical
question of whether societies or individuals can be said to possess
any kind of continuous identity over time. A careful look at the
novel reveals a doubly anti-teleological stance whereby both
national and individual histories unfold as sequences of rupture and
loss, of separate and disjunctive states.

101
102 JOSHUA D. ESTY

Let us first consider the wider social narrative of The Mill on the
Floss (1860). The novel’s ‘historical’ setting in the 1820s allows
Eliot to locate Maggie Tulliver in the breach between two societies
with competing value systems. The narrator quickly establishes and
rigorously maintains a fault line between the ‘premodern’ village life
of St Ogg’s and the ‘modern’ conditions of mid-Victorian England.
The basic motor force that generates this historical divide is mod-
ernisation. However, rather than narrate the continuous ‘develop-
ment’ of Victorian capitalism out of a traditional agricultural and
trading economy, Eliot implies the dramatic difference between the
two.2 By describing drastic changes (not smooth transitions), the
text implicitly casts doubt on recuperative, organic versions of
English history wherein the land and the folk remain mystically con-
stant despite the complete reorganisation of their economy.
Of course, Eliot is ambiguous on this point: Victorian readers are
asked to recognise that they are on the near side of a historical
divide from the rural English past, but they are also invited to feel a
symbolic connection to the villagers of St Ogg’s. Taking the latter
half of this formulation to heart, critics have often recruited Eliot’s
writing into the service of an abiding national myth – the yeoman
farmer as quintessential Englishman.3 The nativist reading of Eliot,
especially of The Mill on the Floss, conceals a host of clues indicat-
ing that the rural past is in fact disconnected from modern readers
(including Eliot’s contemporaries). Far from invoking yeomanry as a
form of life with enduring relevance for England, the novel marks
its passage from economic viability to historical obscurity.
The novel’s setting, Dorlcote Mill, constitutes a locus classicus of
English yeomanry. Owned by the economically autonomous
Tulliver family, the mill is both a domestic and a productive site.
Uncle Glegg, a wool stapler, and Uncle Pullet, a prosperous farmer,
also belong to the yeoman class. But the early agrarian capitalism
that gave rise to such yeoman changed dramatically between 1830
and 1850 as a result of entailments and other concentrations of land
and capital.4 This economic transformation, a fait accompli for
Eliot’s readers, can barely be glimpsed by the characters in the
novel. Indeed, faced with inevitable modernisation, the St Ogg’s
families are ‘constituted … a race’ by dint of their archaic economic
habits (p. 188). Eliot attributes a quaint (which is to say dim) mer-
cantilist understanding of commerce to the village merchants, who
share the precapitalist assumption that trade is a zero-sum game in
which the participants dicker face to face. In short, the inhabitants
 ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 103

of St Ogg’s do not fully understand the abstract, anonymous, legal-

financial capitalism that is overtaking them. Mr Tulliver’s loss of
Dorlcote Mill to lawyer Wakem – the crisis that triggers the novel’s
plot – is a paradigmatic instance of the yeoman fallen prey to
modernisation.5
Modernisation in this novel kills off central characters and social
practices, making them victims ripe for historical obscurity rather
than candidates for commemoration. While Eliot’s general position
on historical commemoration certainly allows for recovery of the
past, this particular novel demands the recognition that some losses
are absolute. In later novels, Eliot takes pains to imbue her own
mundane era with some of the emotional and literary force of
tragedy. For example, Middlemarch grants its provincial bour-
geoisie an unsuspected dignity and moral significance. But in Mill,
rather than use redemptive language to rescue her characters from
history’s ashcan, the narrator admits to a ‘cruel conviction’ that the
Dodsons and Tullivers ‘will be swept into … oblivion with the gen-
erations of ants and beavers’ (p. 362). The point receives an
entirely different emphasis in the final passage of Middlemarch,
where we are told that ‘the growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts’.6 In Middlemarch, Eliot betrays a
more confident investment in the memorialising mission of her
own narrative. Serious and sympathetic treatment of obscure
provincial subjects has made them relevant to ‘the world’. In Mill,
by contrast, Eliot struggles with the possibility that the Dodsons
and Tullivers may finally be irrelevant, which is to say drastically
discontinuous from the modern world of her readers. By proposing
that elements of the past become radically unavailable to the
present, The Mill on the Floss pays tribute more to an unblinking
historicism than to the familiar operations of recuperative
Victorian history.
For Eliot, one of the chief differences between Victorian England
and premodern St Ogg’s is historical consciousness itself. In the
village, we are told, there is no need to invent communal identity
through the devices of formal history: ‘The mind of St Ogg’s did not
look extensively before or after. It inherited a long past without
thinking of it’ (p. 184). Mill is a novel about people who have no
need for historical novels. Eliot makes an implicit comparison
between the village and her own society which, rather than enjoying
a tacit assumption of shared origins, must construct its collective
national past. In representing the village as a version of what
104 JOSHUA D. ESTY

Raymond Williams calls the ‘knowable community’, the text seems

to be installing St Ogg’s as the symbolic core of modern England
and providing fodder for nativist myth-making. But the narrator
also takes pains to suggest that St Ogg’s cannot in any simple way be
imagined as the ‘inner child’ of modern England.
For example, although Mill contains nostalgic envy of St Ogg’s (as
a place where nostalgia is unnecessary), Eliot also indicates that this
version of the traditional community is itself a literary invention. In
an early description of the village, Eliot writes: ‘It is one of those
old, old towns which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth
of nature’ (p. 181). The language of autochthony invoked here is
one of the key tropes for land-based myths of tribal identity. Yet the
narrator’s phrasing makes it clear that there is only the impression of
organicism. Almost immediately, the ahistorical notion that St Ogg’s
was always, simply, St Ogg’s gives way to a more complex local
history. Rather than tell of an eternal connection between land and
ethnos, the rest of the passage tells a story of colonisation and cul-
tural intermingling among Romans and Saxons, Normans and
Danes. Furthermore, when Eliot does evoke the myth of the
yeoman, she draws attention to its fictive and conventional quality –
warning off literal-minded readers who might take St Ogg’s as the
essence of modern England. At one point, the narrator drives the
wedge between her readers and the Dodson–Tulliver clan by men-
tioning that the former already know the life of St Ogg’s ‘through
the medium of the best classic pastorals’ (p. 181). As the particular
setting of 1820s St Ogg’s dissolves into a blandly ‘classic’ agrarian-
ism, the novel checks the notion that its Victorian readership has
any specific genealogical interest in these rural folk. It is no longer
‘us’ thirty years ago, but them – the peasantry doing its timeless
peasant dance. Such rueful admissions that the English village is
more an idealised national myth than a concrete historical
antecedent qualify the novel’s apparently nativist romance.
Throughout the novel, the narrator’s self-consciously modern
voice brims with authority about a rural existence that is nonethe-
less distant from it and its presumably metropolitan audience. In
regard to its provincial subjects, the novel adopts an ethnographic
tone that reflects the difference between modernised observer and
premodern object. But the narrator is no naïve tourist; in fact, Eliot
– often recognised for her excellence as a domestic historian – might
also be considered a prescient anthropological theorist. She notes,
for example, that a modern writer needs irony in order to describe
 ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 105

‘unfashionable families’. Moreover, she identifies irony as the

product of a ‘national life’ imagined in explicitly metropolitan-rural
terms.7 In a fascinating passage, Eliot recognises that the nation,
predicated on economic injustice and the inclusion of unfashionable
rustics, supports both the material and representational needs of
‘good society’ (p. 385). As a political container for regional and
class heterogeneity, the nation allows for the ‘gossamer wings of
light irony’ that leaven the Victorian novelist’s treatment of her
archaic country cousins. This meditation on irony contains a ready
awareness of the ethnographic conceit of The Mill on the Floss.
At such moments, Eliot acknowledges that metropolitan represen-
tations of the rural often depend on a rhetoric of nationhood that
yokes together diverse populations otherwise separated by class and
religion as well as by space and time. By revealing the self-conscious-
ness involved in national myths of identity and continuity, she draws
attention to such myths as inventions that tend to obscure England’s
essential ‘lack of self-presence’.8 The novel further undermines its
own romantic nativism by insisting on the historical incommensura-
bility between 1820s St Ogg’s and the modern industrial nation of
1860. Eliot’s strong commitment to historicism – the idea that dif-
ferent epochs are irreducibly different – requires the novel to
execute a complicated double manoeuvre. First, the text shows that
modernisation generates absolute losses both materially and episte-
mologically: there are objects, documents, people, values, experi-
ences, and knowledge that can neither be preserved nor recollected
from the past. Second, the novel exposes and challenges the recuper-
ative rhetoric of nationalism that seeks to deny those losses and to
emphasise the survival of a rural English core. This double move-
ment – which is integral to the novel’s representation of social
history – also informs its representation of Maggie Tulliver’s individ-
ual history. The process of maturation generates absolute losses for
Maggie: there are moods, sensations, relationships, and experiences
that cannot survive into adulthood. And the novel bravely challenges
the recuperative rhetoric of ‘development’ that seeks to deny those
losses and to posit instead a continuous self that remembers, pre-
serves, and endures it all.
Eliot represents the passage from childhood to adulthood as more
disjunctive than additive. For example, although the narrator
describes memories of youth as the ‘mother tongue of the imagina-
tion’, this Wordsworthian sentiment quickly gives way to the recog-
nition that childhood experiences are in fact frustratingly
106 JOSHUA D. ESTY

inaccessible (p. 94). Memories of youth carry such drastically differ-

ent emotional value from the original experiences that they seem
almost to belong to another person. Just as the novel implies a ‘lack
of self-presence’ in the modern nation, it also voices doubt about the
mature self’s relationship to its childhood incarnation. Where the
conventional idea of development posits a core identity that accu-
mulates new ‘layers’, Eliot’s text recognises the gains and the losses
associated with the protagonist’s ‘progress’ towards adulthood.
Historical and individual nostalgia recur throughout the novel,
each cast by Eliot in terms of the other. In the Wordsworthian
passage cited above, for instance, the narrator describes personal
memory in ethno-linguistic terms (‘mother tongue of the imagina-
tion’) and indicates the unsatisfactory quality of recollected youth by
declaring that no ‘tropic palms’ could thrill the same fibres as a May
day in England (p. 94). Conjuring images of the colonies, this
passage establishes an analogy whereby the far-flung empire repre-
sents a lapsed national adulthood, no longer fully connected to the
authentic native setting of its English childhood.9 Later, Eliot
addresses the metropolitan reader whose experience of home cannot
match that of the legendary yeoman: ‘Our instructed vagrancy
which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows but runs away
early to the tropics and is at home with palms and banyans – which
… stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi can hardly
get a dim notion of what an old fashioned man like Tulliver felt for
this spot where all his memories centred’ (p. 352). Again the rural
English past stands in contrast to the extended colonial sphere. The
modern economy of industry and empire has forced England to
develop into something quite different from what romantic nation-
alism would identify as its essential core. The political entity
‘Britain’ is no longer coextensive with its founding ethnos – a differ-
ence measured metaphorically by the psychological rupture between
child and adult.
The maturation of the protagonist and the modernisation of the
nation unfold as parallel narratives. Indeed, the novel’s deviation
from Bildungsroman formulae depends on the thematic power of
these mutually allegorical stories of disjunction and of loss. But
modernisation is not only a figurative parallel to maturation: the
two stories also intersect causally, so that England’s economic
changes play a direct role in arresting the development of Maggie
(and Tom) Tulliver. The economic transformations that Eliot docu-
ments (including, for example, the loss of Dorlcote Mill) leave
 ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 107

Maggie stranded in the historical gap between old St Ogg’s and

modern industrial England. It is, in fact, entirely unclear what kind
of society is meant to provide the setting for Maggie’s evolving adult
identity. Thus although The Mill on the Floss is often read as a con-
ventional Bildungsroman, it departs from the generic model on
several counts. Unlike the standard novel of education, wherein the
protagonist undergoes continuous moral development towards the
goal of an integrated personality, Eliot’s novel moves disjunctively
among various moments in the conflict-ridden life of Maggie
Tulliver.10 There is a stepped chronology, but no continuity and
little promise of durable social adjustment.
In the standard novel of education, as described by Jerome
Buckley, the young protagonist develops autonomously within a
knowable social world.11 Indeed, as Franco Moretti suggests, the
classical Bildungsroman of Goethe or Austen establishes a set of
stable public values and then presides over the successful ‘adjust-
ment’ of the protagonist.12 Mill turns this generic formula on its
head so that a narrative of historical change impedes, and ultimately
prevents, the adjustment of Maggie Tulliver. Rapid changes in
England’s social conditions are thrown into relief by a heroine who
cannot adapt to them. Where most Bildungsromane make the histor-
ical backdrop a function of the protagonist’s all-important ‘forma-
tion’, this novel makes the protagonist’s fate a function of its
uncompromising historical scheme. In this way, the novel invites us
to read beyond the generic model towards a more complex recogni-
tion of the intertwining of ‘self’ and ‘society’. Along these lines,
Susan Fraiman has recently argued that Mill replaces notions of the
self-determining bourgeois subject with a more relational and
socially-embedded model of character formation.13 In my reading,
the novel’s challenge extends not just to the bounded bourgeois ego,
but also to the notion of a persistently self-identical subject. The Mill
on the Floss’s critique of development cuts into bedrock liberal
assumptions about continuous identity in both maturing women and
modernising nations. As an anti-Bildungsroman, it disrupts the usual
metaphorical affirmation between narratives of national progress
and stories of individual growth.

Modernisation in The Mill on the Floss has different effects on

women than on men and creates different narrative problems for
Maggie Tulliver than for her brother, Tom. As I hinted above, it is
the novel’s female hero who, for the most part, reveals Bildung to be
108 JOSHUA D. ESTY

a disjunctive and tragic process. At one point, the narrator acknowl-

edges that there would be neither reason nor means for telling
Maggie Tulliver’s story were Maggie not trapped in the class and
provincial margins of pre-Victorian England: ‘for the happiest
women, like the happiest nations, have no history’ (p. 494). Once
again, Maggie and her society operate in figurative parallel; both
illustrate the idea that narrative itself is an index of unhappiness. In
this postlapsarian epigram, ideal or innocent states always give way
to historical awareness. And, after the fall, grown women, like mod-
ernised societies, can only tell and retell their histories in an impos-
sible attempt to reinhabit imaginary, innocent sites like premodern
St Ogg’s or the girlhood of Maggie Tulliver.
If unhappy women are (in Elliot’s broad figurative sense) similar
to modern nations, they are also (in Eliot’s keen historical view)
subject to certain new limitations in power within modern nations.
Modernisation reorganises the culture of St Ogg’s, converting
yeoman into wage-earners and dividing domestic from productive
space. These conversions, combined with the rise of professions and
bureaucracies, move normative power from the local community to
national institutions. They also transfer such power from women to
men. In old St Ogg’s, women like the Dodson sisters enforce the
customary rules of conduct which, though rooted in the domestic
space, are not limited to household matters. Although the village is
no feminist utopia, Eliot’s account of the Dodson Aunts as policières
des moeurs shows that distinct powers accrued to women in the
kinship systems of rural England. Jane Glegg’s expertise in matters
of tradition gives her sway over an extended family that includes
the Tullivers; with power relocated in the male-run nuclear family,
Aunt Glegg will have considerably less influence.14 By registering the
potential losses for women when male institutions replace female-
regulated customs, Eliot gives special relevance to the historical
obscurity of a ‘generation of ants [aunts]’ (p. 362).
As for Maggie Tulliver, she lives in the liminal zone between tra-
ditional and modern arrangements of gender and power. Local
customs, regulated by Glegg of St Ogg’s, are the binding force at the
centre of young Maggie’s life – signalled by the Anglo-Saxon velar
stop (gg) at the centre of her name. But she does try to break away
from that social network at various points in the novel. One early
escape attempt – Maggie’s flight to the gypsies – serves as a good
example of how Eliot coordinates gender and national identity. In
the scene, Maggie rebels against the prospect of sexual and eco-
 ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 109

nomic development – processes that threaten to alienate her from

Tom and to replace her Edenic childhood at Dorlcote Mill with a
‘fallen’ modern/adult world. When Tom and his cousin, Lucy
Deane, form a bond which excludes her, Maggie flees the con-
straints of her tribe and joins the gypsies. At this point, Tom con-
forms to the kinship rules and customary expectations of St Ogg’s in
a way that Maggie cannot. Discovering that life as a reformist queen
of the gypsies is not possible, however, Maggie returns home and
signals acceptance of her identity by evincing a new attachment to
the bonnet she had earlier spurned. She pays the price in a gender
adjustment for the reassurance of belonging to a familiar, if con-
straining, community.
The gypsy episode prefigures Maggie’s attempt to escape down
the river Floss with Stephen Guest – a journey which is equally
abortive. After Maggie returns, the women of St Ogg’s ostracise her
for what is apparently a sexual transgression. But the older women
are not simply punishing a libidinal crime; they are also reclaiming
their power to regulate the behaviour of village youths. By floating
out of the sphere of St Ogg’s on their way to establish a ‘modern’
nuclear family, Maggie and Stephen threaten to erode the power of
the kinship system. The consequences of this escape are more than
just sexual, but so is Maggie’s interest in Stephen Guest. In fact,
Maggie’s desire for Stephen runs through channels that are created
by her predicament as an unhappy provincial woman. Maggie
cannot adjust to the values of old St Ogg’s (especially insofar as
those values are losing historical viability). But neither can she find
an escape route out of St Ogg’s. Stephen seems to offer Maggie a
potential pathway to a more modern existence not only through his
family’s capitalist success, but also through his pedagogical wooing.
As Mary Jacobus and Nancy Miller have suggested, education repre-
sents all that Maggie cannot have; she is recurrently and painfully
excluded from male-dominated chambers of culture. Thus when
Stephen courts her ‘as if he had been the snuffiest of old professors
and she a downy-lipped alumnus’, he seems to answer Maggie’s
fervent desire for intellectual exchange (p. 489). She acquiesces to
the illicit journey with Stephen, making a grab for modernity and
for the metropolitan privileges of literate culture. But the attempt
fails; Maggie does not and cannot escape from St Ogg’s.
Even if Maggie could surmount the constraints of her backward
and provincial circumstances, however, she would find herself in a
metropolitan culture dominated by men. This is another ambiguity
110 JOSHUA D. ESTY

in the novel: Eliot seems to indicate that Victorian Englishwomen

have gained a certain amount of intellectual freedom even if they
have lost the customary powers enjoyed by Aunt Glegg. For
example, the narrator describes the 1820s as ‘a time when ignorance
was much more comfortable than at present … a time when cheap
periodicals were not, and when country surgeons never thought of
asking their female patients if they were fond of reading but simply
took it for granted that they preferred gossip: a time when ladies in
rich silk gowns wore large pockets in which they carried a mutton
bone to secure them against cramp’ (p. 185). Victorian women have
gained freedom from quackery and medical condescension. But the
passage also suggests, with gentle irony, that the advances in
women’s cultural freedom have only really afforded them access to
cheap periodicals. Does this compensate for the quarantining of
middle-class Victorian women in the domestic space? Clearly,
Victorian society does not represent a paradise for emancipated
women any more than old St Ogg’s. Maggie Tulliver thus inhabits
the intermediate zone between two almost equally – but not mono-
lithically – unattractive historical options for women of her region
and class.
Maggie’s location in this historical breach is further confirmed by
the outcome of libidinal subplots involving Philip Wakem and Tom
Tulliver. As we have seen, the non-recuperative logic of Eliot’s his-
toricism keeps Maggie from entering into the value system of either
traditional St Ogg’s or modern England. This logic also conditions
Maggie’s investment in Philip Wakem, who, like Stephen, initially
promises to satisfy Maggie’s wish for cultural fulfilment. Philip’s
tutelage helps disengage Maggie from her place within the
retrenched values of old St Ogg’s; the currency of their relationship
is entirely intellectual and aesthetic. But Philip has roots in the
village: he is neither a ‘Guest’ nor a viable escape route from St
Ogg’s to metropolitan England. When they are together in the Red
Deeps, Philip and Maggie inhabit an enclosed and aestheticised
environment which, like the novel itself, is finite and temporary.
Marrying neither Philip nor Stephen, Maggie is barred from per-
manently entering into either traditional or modern gender arrange-
ments. The absence of a marriage plot for Maggie is the most
important index of the novel’s break from Bildungsroman conven-
tions: without a husband, she cannot be recognised as a fully
‘formed’ woman. In at least one important way, Eliot’s uncompro-
mising historical logic determines that neither Maggie nor Tom will
 ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 111

be able to marry and reproduce. After all, if modernisation consigns

the yeoman to history’s ashcan, it makes sense that the yeoman class
– as represented by the Dodson sisters and their families – cannot
reproduce itself. Consider the statistics: the Pullets and Gleggs are
childless; the Tullivers and Deanes have only three children between
them. The only families in the novel whose procreative pace exceeds
zero population growth (the peasant Mosses and the capitalist
Guests) fall on either side of the class zone staked out by the dwin-
dling Dodson clan.
In keeping with Eliot’s ethnographic narrative stance, we might
think of St Ogg’s as an endogamous village whose viability is suddenly
threatened by modernisation. The narrator implies that, under ordi-
nary circumstances, the tribe would produce a marriage between Tom
Tulliver and Lucy Deane. Economic changes, however, force the
yeoman class into retrenchment – a condition expressed by Eliot in
her extreme application of the rules of endogamy to the Tulliver off-
spring, who end up bound to each other. The loss of Dorlcote Mill
causes an artificial and premature circumscription of the Tulliver
family, cutting them off from the larger Dodson clan. In a disastrous
‘premature birth’ of the nuclear family, the Tullivers lose their status
as members of an extended kinship system and become an economi-
cally fragile, socially independent unit. This crisis in turn precipitates
the imploding family romance whose outcome is the final union and
death-embrace of Tom and Maggie.15 This manoeuvre does more than
simply thwart a literary convention, it delivers an appropriately anti-
developmental conclusion to the historical crisis facing old St Ogg’s.
Tom’s development, like Maggie’s, is arrested by uneven mod-
ernisation; he never passes the conjugal and vocational rites that we
expect in a typical Bildungsroman. At first, Mr Tulliver ships Tom
out of the family circle and into the wide world of letters and com-
merce. But the crisis of the Wakem lawsuit intervenes, drawing a
net of obligation and class insecurity tightly around the family. This
turn of events initiates an odd trajectory for Tom, who begins
moving towards a modernised education, then succeeds in a capital-
ist-style trading venture, but finally doubles back in a relentless drive
to reinstate the economic life of the yeoman and reinhabit Dorlcote
Mill. In the process, Tom not only foils his father’s Oedipally-driven
economic scheme to remove him from the scene of the mill, but also
effectively bars himself from sexual or reproductive possibilities
outside the family. Facing a similar familial and historical trap as his
sister faces, Tom has no access to the relatively unfettered character
112 JOSHUA D. ESTY

formation of the conventional bildungsheld. The novel’s refusal of

bildung, though initially driven by gendered factors particular to
Maggie, crosses over into Tom’s narrative line.
When brother and sister are united in a final moment of hyperen-
dogamy, the novel accepts the implications of its unblinking histori-
cism. Given the figurative links between personal and social
development, Eliot needs an outcome in which the losses suffered
by a given class are also suffered by its particular representatives.
Along the same lines, Lukács praises Walter Scott for remaining
faithful to the logic of historical necessity by killing off sympathetic
characters whose death represents the demise of an obsolescent way
of life.16 The exogamous plot (Maggie marries Stephen Guest) – or
even the appropriately endogamous one (Tom marries Lucy Deane)
– cannot occur because such marriages would provide an allegorical
basis for the yeoman community to ‘mature’ smoothly into the
social fabric of modern England (while, of course, preserving its
tribal essence). Such an outcome would, as we have seen, run
counter to the novel’s emphasis on the ruptures rather than the con-
tinuities of national history.
Still, Eliot makes a belated concession to an integrative history by
hinting, in a kind of epilogue, at the marriage between Stephen
Guest and Lucy Deane (p. 656). The narrator cannot resist establish-
ing – though to be sure only at the outer margins of the narrative
arc – a family unit that gives the properly Victorian bourgeois reso-
lution. The linkage of Lucy (the blond Dodson force of custom)
with Stephen (the dark Guest force of capitalism) does create a
pathway leading from old St Ogg’s to modern England.17 Such a
marriage is precisely the resolution Eliot refuses for Maggie and
Tom Tulliver. And, on the allegorical level, it is precisely the resolu-
tion whose synthetic and recuperative version of national history the
novel otherwise eschews.

In discussing the historical factors that determine Maggie Tulliver’s

suspension on the threshold of womanhood and modernity, I have
no doubt implied that her arrested development is an unfortunate
narrative outcome. In a certain sense, however, it would be still
more unfortunate if Maggie’s energies, desires, and talents were sub-
ordinated to the strictures of womanhood in either St Ogg’s or
Victorian England. Female protagonists like Maggie challenge the
conventions of Bildung because they so often imply a kind of social
adjustment that restricts women’s freedom. In The Mill on the Floss,
 ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 113

Eliot manages to short-circuit the generically ordained process of

social adjustment.
It is especially surprising for readers of the mature Eliot to con-
sider Mill in this light. Where the exquisitely wrought narrative
machinery of a novel like Middlemarch grinds out an accommoda-
tion between major characters and their social environment, this
novel does not, finally, subject Maggie to her Victorian norms of
class, gender, region and religion.18 The standard Eliot heroine
grows up and makes her peace with social exigencies (an outcome
which, despite Eliot’s belief in the Christian value of submission,
often seems tantamount to defeat for her talented female protago-
nists). But Mill represents Maggie’s childhood in and for itself, not
as mere prelude to the demands of full Victorian womanhood.19
Mill refuses the socialisation plot precisely in order to forestall the
conversion of Maggie into a mature ‘angel of the house’. From this
perspective, we can endorse F. R. Leavis’s famous identification of
the novel as an ‘immature’ work while reversing its valuation. The
novel’s immaturity is neither accident nor flaw, but the necessary
formal premise and thematic goal of its entire operation.
Of course, given that Maggie dies in the novel’s climactic flood,
readers may legitimately wonder whether she – socially adjusted or
not – is an apt vehicle for feminist resistance. Taken in the context of
the novel’s general critique of development, however, her watery
death has formal justification. In the first place, it seems a fitting
device, given that Eliot so regularly deploys the language of hydraulic
currents and pressures. In fact, the flood confirms Eliot’s investment
in a rich figurative system built around images of land and water, of
Mill and Floss. The language of flows and currents dominates the
novel’s representation of desire and becomes quite literal when
Maggie and Stephen drift downstream. The river Floss plays an
equally important role in the novel’s wider historical scheme, where
it acts as the conduit for economic modernity into St Ogg’s.
Merchant ships from beyond the village borders open the gates to
the capitalist economy and disrupt the traditional yeoman world.
Bearing the seeds of economic change, the river runs like an epis-
temological fault line through St Ogg’s. As Raymond Williams sug-
gests, nineteenth-century capitalist dynamism tends to produce
fractures in the ‘knowability’ of the community and to place strains
on literary realism.20 Ordinarily, realism functions in the
Bildungsroman to make visible the worldly codes that the protago-
nist must learn. Here, however, modernisation places Maggie and
114 JOSHUA D. ESTY

Tom on the historical margins where those codes are no longer

intelligible or viable. Thus the river represents not only unautho-
rised desire, but also the disintegration of traditional community. In
this figurative scheme, the flood serves as the ultimate figure for
modernisation itself – for the drastic transformations wrought by
capitalism. Eliot’s modernisation is an implacable Hegelian force
that renders an entire cast of characters quite literally antediluvian.
In a different novel, one whose historical logic conformed more to
our stereotypes of Victorian liberalism, modernisation might figure
as a controlled form of progress that gradually improved conditions
for these provincial Britons. However, instead of the humanist and
recuperative bourgeois tragedy of, say, Middlemarch, Mill expresses
the stern fatalism of classical tragedy, with the flood as its natu-
ralised, secularised deus ex machina.
The Mill on the Floss concludes with a final indication that,
although nature and society can rebuild themselves after the flood,
some losses are absolute: ‘if there is a new growth, the trees are not
the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture
bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on
the past, there is no thorough repair’ (p. 656). Like most flood
stories, this one describes a quasi-apocalypse through which selected
elements of the past survive. Lévi-Strauss has taught us that myths
use natural analogies to explain (and thereby muffle the threat of)
social contradictions. Eliot’s flood story seems at first to perform
this mythic trick: it explains the chief contradiction of recuperative
history by showing that, even when drastic changes occur, the essen-
tial landscape remains the same. But this story ends on a different
note: it registers the losses associated with modernisation and matu-
ration by recognising that, for modern nations and Victorian
women, there is no thorough repair.
Maggie’s non-adjustment to society exposes and resists the con-
ventions of bildung, but it also works as a formal sentence to death.
Critics like Elaine Showalter have read Maggie’s drowning as an
almost punitive foreclosure on Eliot’s part. Maggie’s exit from
Bildungsroman conventions is thus only a Pyrrhic victory over the
constraints of gender, genre, and history. Indeed, the end of Mill
provokes the same kind of difficult questions for feminist readers as
the end of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (or, in more contemporary
narrative, Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise). Does the heroine’s
death disqualify a novel from positive feminist interpretation? In my
view, the answer is no. Maggie’s death testifies to the costs paid by
women as both maturation and modernisation unfold. A more inte-
 ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 115

grative and recuperative closure that spared Maggie’s life might

have muted the novel’s demonstration of the sacrifices attendant on
Victorian womanhood.21
Critics of Eliot’s tendency to thwart female characters have pointed
out that Maggie Tulliver, to all appearances a fictional self-portrait, is
nonetheless denied the options enjoyed by George Eliot herself.
Despite the parallels between the fictional Maggie Tulliver and the real
Marian Evans, the latter gained access to metropolitan privileges
denied the former: intellectual achievement, escape from sexual and
social conventions (the non-marriage to G. H. Lewes), escape from
national rootedness (the extended continental travels), and escape of a
kind even from assigned gender roles (the assumption of the male
pseudonym). And yet, as the pseudonym cannot help but remind us,
these advances for Eliot also entailed a certain drastically self-
alienating process – a process from which Maggie Tulliver is ‘spared by
death’. The novel is less an autobiography than a counter-
autobiography: it imagines the fate of Marian Evans without the social
compromises made by George Eliot. Its apparently paradoxical conceit
– the recovery of irrecoverable material from a childhood past – seems
less paradoxical when we recognise the theory of memory operative in
the text. For Eliot, the recovery of the past (whether personal or
national) is perforce an act of invention – the half-blind gropings of a
remembering subject that is only nominally identical to its previous
incarnations.
Eliot’s investment in Maggie’s girlhood runs athwart the generic
ethos of maturity and eschews the standard method for ending a
Bildungsroman. In the ordinary (male-centred) ‘novel of socialisa-
tion’, as Franco Moretti describes it, the protagonist’s achievement
of maturity provides the necessary symbolic closure, preventing the
novel from becoming an endless story of change. Moretti holds that
the narrative of youthful development (which represents the
dynamic growth of nineteenth-century capitalism) must be con-
tained by the imposition of an artificial and static endpoint – adult-
hood. But of course the modernisation process itself never reaches
such an endpoint – a fact that is swept under the carpet by the
Bildungsroman’s symbolic closure. By refusing the genre’s normal
telos of adulthood, Eliot fully and honestly assimilates the logic of
capitalism and accords genuine power to modernisation as a con-
stant, ruthless process.22 Eliot’s unwillingness to posit an ‘adult
Maggie’ undermines psychological and historical fantasies of com-
pletion. The novel does not ratify adulthood as a final and static
form, nor does it provide an allegorical basis for believing that
116 JOSHUA D. ESTY

English society had or has arrived at its final, stable form. Just as
moral and psychological change proceed without regard to received
ideas about the mature self, social and economic change proceed
without regard to romantic illusions about national permanence.
In this sense, the novel sides with narrativity itself as the literary
expression of historicism (change always occurs). But the book must
come to a stop, even if it does not reach the expected kind of
closure. Enter the flood, which provides a kind of artificial or arbi-
trary endpoint. This literary device draws attention to the losses
attendant on the conventional process of Bildung. The image of
Maggie permanently suspended at the threshold of committed and
constrained womanhood cannot last. That image is, nevertheless,
the lyric possibility at the heart of this anti-developmental narrative.
A female anti-Bildungsroman, The Mill on the Floss unsettles
national and personal myths of development. At a number of levels,
it expresses the heterodox notion that individuals and societies do
not always maintain their essences while undergoing radical trans-
formation. Here Eliot combines feminist complaint with conserva-
tive lament in complex and paradoxical ways. Nostalgia for
girlhood fuses with nostalgia for traditional community in a joint
rejection of the progressivist assumptions of the male-oriented
Bildungsroman and modern nationalism. As a woman surveying the
transition to capitalism in nineteenth-century England, Eliot occu-
pies the same kind of tragic, non-aligned position that Lukács
ascribed to Walter Scott. According to Lukács, Scott’s perspective
on the bourgeois revolution was unbiased precisely because he knew
that his class (the provincial low aristocracy) was doomed no matter
what the outcome. If The Mill on the Floss evinces an especially
clear-eyed vision about the losses that result from ceaseless mod-
ernisation, perhaps it is because Eliot knew that women were
unlikely to share equally in the spoils of Victorian capitalism. To
explore this connection, we might consider other women writers
who, like Virginia Woolf, register suspicion of male-oriented narra-
tives of social progress and male-oriented narratives of individual
growth. Does their awareness of the costs of mature womanhood in
most societies make available special insights about the costs of eco-
nomic modernisation? Such an inquiry would doubtless advance our
understanding of the organic metaphors that connect novels of
development and narratives of romantic nationalism – metaphors
embedded not only in the fabric of Victorian literature, but in the
wide discursive networks of contemporary culture.
 ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 117

In 1857, George Eliot wrote: ‘I feel every day a greater disinclina-

tion for theories and arguments about the origins of things in the
presence of all this mystery and beauty and pain and ugliness that
floods one with conflicting emotion’.23 Three years later, she pub-
lished The Mill on the Floss, in which the incidental choice of the
verb ‘floods’ becomes a full-blown narrative and thematic device.
The letter points up the novel’s central tension between ‘arguments
about the origins of things’ and the ‘conflicting emotions’ embodied
by the flood. Eliot pits the ark of origins – both national and indi-
vidual – against a flood of ruptures and discontinuities.24 She thus
posits a terra firma that supports the recuperative promises of
nationalist history and the assumed continuities of personal develop-
ment while, in the same text, she unleashes the disruptive floodwa-
ters that force our recognition of the groundless breach between
past and present, between the unregenerate girl-ghost of Maggie
Tulliver and the mature Victorian angel of the house. If there is any
doubt, finally, whether this is a myth of the Ark or a narrative of the
Flood, then we must remember the narrator’s impulsion towards the
stream, enunciated from the very first: ‘I am in love with moistness’
(p. 54).25

From Narrative, 4:2 (1996), 144–59.

NOTES
[Joshua Esty’s essay first appeared in the journal Narrative in 1996. It forms
part of a growing body of work (see Jim Reilly, essay 9 in this collection)
which has sought to integrate Eliot’s engagement with historical events and the
meaning of history. It also builds on readings which focus on the ambiguous
and divided nature of Eliot’s work and the novelist’s problematic relations to
concepts of national identity and community. In its integration of these issues
Esty’s essay reinforces the argument that to regard Eliot as a nostalgic writer
or an uncritical traditionalist is to underestimate the extent to which The Mill
on the Floss, rather than simply mourning the past, reinforces and examines
the process by which social and cultural change within a community or a
nation comes about in a complex and highly analytical way. Esty’s essay exam-
ines questions central to Eliot’s work: How is change generated? How is it
incorporated into people’s lives? All the quotations in the essay are taken from
The Mill on the Floss (New York: Penguin, 1985). Eds]

1. Susan Fraiman, ‘The Mill on the Floss, the Critics, and the
Bildungsroman’, PMLA, 108 (1993), 137. [Reprinted in this volume
pp. 31–56 – Eds]
118 JOSHUA D. ESTY

2. In a recent article on class and gender relations in Eliot’s early fiction,

Margaret Homans suggests that Mill projects high Victorian elements
onto a pre-Victorian setting. See her ‘Dinah’s Blush, Maggie’s Arm:
Class, Gender and Sexuality in George Eliot’s Early Novels’, Victorian
Studies (1993), 169. Homan’s argument looks at many of the same
modernisation processes as mine, but sees them in the service of a his-
torical conflation that universalises middle-class experience. In my
view, Eliot is more committed to making historical distinctions than
anachronistic fusions, though the novel’s complexity depends on the
use of both devices. Eliot’s challenge to a nationalist rhetoric of conti-
nuity, in other words, demands that she also make that rhetoric avail-
able and plausible in the text. Similarly, as we will see, Eliot’s revision
of the conventional Bildungsroman requires her to reproduce (in order
to question) some of the genre’s basic structural elements.
3. Consider, for example, F. R. Leavis’s anointment of Eliot in The Great
Tradition (New York, 1949). Leavis recognises historical change and in
fact seems to lament the loss of organic rural communities, but his crit-
icism emphasises certain essential continuities in what becomes a nor-
mative discourse of Englishness. Leavis’s reading of Eliot in some way
secures the imprimatur of the English yeoman ideal for what Francis
Mulhern identifies as Leavis’s own up-by-the-bootstraps, white, hetero-
sexual middle class. See Francis Mulhern, ‘English Reading’, in Homi
Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (New York, 1990), p. 259. It
should be noted that Leavis’s general admiration for Eliot did not
extend to Mill, which he dismissed as ‘immature’. Although the terms
of his dismissal were rather more formal, perhaps Leavis intuitively
grasped this novel’s challenge to recuperative national history.
4. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford, 1973), p. 98.
5. Franco Moretti in The Way of the World (London, 1987) suggests that
Jane Austen’s economic plots depend on the amalgamation of indus-
trial and agrarian capitalism (pp. 63–4). By representing these two eco-
nomic modes in conflict rather than in cooperation, Mill already
reverses the conventional operations of the classical Bildungsroman.
6. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Boston, 1956), p. 613.
7. Eliot’s awareness of these issues no doubt draws on the cultural context
so well described by Nancy Armstrong in her recent article on
Wuthering Heights – ‘Emily’s Ghost: The Cultural Politics of Victorian
Fiction, Folklore, and Photography’, Novel, 25 (1992). Armstrong
locates that novel within an early Victorian cultural system in which
‘modern literate urban’ Britons expressed a folkloric interest in their
‘primitive’ rural compatriots (p. 245). Armstrong’s discussion also
points out the way that Victorian literary and photographic representa-
tions of a putatively authentic English past often ‘destroyed the very
thing [they] sought for’ (p. 247). In similar terms, Eliot’s ethnographic
 ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 119

‘observer’s voice’ derives from the sad recognition that her literary
attempts to recover the life of St Ogg’s only widen the gap between
nostalgic modern intellectuals and the vanishing past.
8. I borrow this phrase from Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris
Sommer and Patricia Yaeger, Nationalisms and Sexualities (New
York, 1991), who suggest that, as a rule, the modern nation has an
‘insatiable need’ for representations that will ‘supplement its found-
ing ambivalence, the lack of self-presence at its origin or in its
essence’ (p. 5).
9. As Armstrong demonstrates, the idea that rural or provincial life
somehow constitutes ‘the idyllic childhood of the modern nation’ satu-
rated the rhetoric of English folklorists during the 1830–50 period. See
Armstrong, ‘Emily’s Ghost: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Fiction,
Folklore, and Photography’, p. 253. Here Eliot exploits but also casts
doubt on that kind of organic rhetoric.
10. In this sense, the novel runs athwart the ideal of the Bildung in its clas-
sical German sense. Perhaps the novel might better be described by the
term Entwicklungsroman which, G. B. Tennyson points out, admits a
broader and less teleological description of the protagonist’s trajectory
than does the term Bildungsroman, with its inevitable goal of ‘harmo-
nious cultivation of the whole personality’. See G. B. Tennyson, ‘The
Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century English Literature’, in Medieval
Epic to the ‘Epic’ Theater of Brecht, ed. Rosario P. Armato and John
M. Spalek (Los Angeles, 1968), p. 142.
11. See Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens
to Golding (Cambridge, 1974).
12. See Moretti, The Way of the World.
13. Fraiman, ‘The Mill on the Floss, the Critics, and the Bildungsroman’, p.
138.
14. These observations are indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s discussion
of ‘sphere ideology’ in Eliot’s Adam Bede (pp. 138–46). Following
Mary Poovey – Uneven Developments: The Ideological work of Gender
in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988) – in placing the domestic
sequestration of women within the context of economic histories,
Sedgwick argues that Adam Bebe creates a foundation for restrictive
class and gender relations in the Victorian period.
15. I think it makes sense to analyse the Tulliver family romance in histori-
cal terms, but for a fairly strict Lacanian account of these issues, see
Ranjini Philip, ‘Maggie, Tom and Oedipus: A Lacanian Reading of The
Mill on the Floss’, Victorian Newsletter, 82 (1992), 35–40.
16. Georg Lukás, The Historical Novel (Boston, 1962), p. 55.
120 JOSHUA D. ESTY

17. The Stephen–Lucy pairing recalls the synthesising, reproducing pair at

the end of Wuthering Heights (dark Hareton Earnshaw and blonde
Catherine Linton). In fact, the various sexual, ethnic, and economic
attributions Eliot gathers around blonde and dark features throughout
Mill suggest an extended comparison with Wuthering Heights. In that
novel, dark Heathcliff represents (like Maggie) a principle of will,
passion, and sexual energy. Heathcliff also represents (like Stephen) a
principle of economic advance, an infusion of modern capital into the
sluggish provincial economy. In both novels, a faded blonde English
rural population (Lintons, Dodsons) cannot reproduce itself and
requires revitalisation from dark, alien characters (Heathcliff as Black
Irish, Stephen the Guest). For more on ethnic attributions in Wuthering
Heights, see Elsie Michie, ‘From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots:
Heathcliff, Rochester and Racial Difference’, Novel, 25 (1992), 125-40.

18. Christina Crosby in her The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘the
woman question’ (New York, 1991) finds in Eliot a general pattern of
subordinating the specific claims of female characters to the unfolding
of a Hegelian historical totality, but goes on to note that The Mill on
the Floss presents an anomalous – and much debated – case
(pp. 161–3). Even more suggestively, Crosby claims Eliot’s Daniel
Deronda as a participant in the Victorian historical industry that pro-
vided a ‘secular guarantee’ of ‘origins and ends’ (p. 5). I am arguing
that Mill departs from Eliot’s normal historical commitments precisely
by challenging ‘origins and ends’ with a thoroughly historicist vision of
continual change.

19. Here I concur with Charlotte Goodman, who sees the final reunion of
Tom and Maggie as an affirmation of childhood values (against the
gender separations precipitated by adolescence). See Charlotte
Goodman, ‘The Lost Brother, the Twin: Women Novelists and the
Male–Female Double Bildungsroman’, Novel, 17 (1983), 28–43.

20. Williams, The Country and the City, p. 165.

21. Chopin’s heroine also drowns – a resemblance that raises the possibility
of reading Maggie’s death as an immersion in some specifically femi-
nine (and potentially redemptive) symbolic zone such as the one
described by the liquid language of French feminist Luce Irigaray. I am
inclined to concur with Mary Jacobus’s reading of the novel in terms
informed by Irigaray. In Jacobus’s view, the flood is a sign of the near-
impossibility of fully resisting male-oriented conventions, even if it also
entails a moment of symbolic access to unmediated female desire. See
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, NY, 1985), p. 215;
Mary Jacobus ‘The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The
Mill on the Floss, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), p. 222. My argument
depends less on declaring the drowning either a defeat or a victory
 ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS 121

than on pointing out its inevitability within the historical narrative that
Eliot weaves around Maggie Tulliver.
22. Thus The Mill on the Floss performs the ‘assimilation of real historicist
time’ that Bakhtin sees as crucial to the Bildungsroman – but which few
orthodox Bildungsromane are able to maintain. M. M. Bakhtin, ‘The
Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism: Toward a
Historical Typology of the Novel’ in Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays (Austin, TX, 1986), p. 21.
23. Gordon S. Haight, The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 2 (New Haven, CT,
1954), p. 341. In her Introduction to the Penguin The Mill on the
Floss, A. S. Byatt aptly cites this letter as evidence for her claim that the
novel resists totalising historical schemes. See A. S. Byatt (ed.), The Mill
on the Floss (London, 1979).
24. In his discussion of nationalism’s mythic repertoire, Regis Debray cites
the Ark as an especially potent symbol. More to the point, Debray sug-
gests that the Ark is to embody national origins, preventing the society
from dissolving into ‘an infinite regression of cause and effect’ and
allowing a symbolic ‘defeat of the irreversibility of time’. Regis Debray,
‘Marxism and the national question’, New Left Review, 105 (1977),
27. It is only fitting, then, that Eliot’s Flood should represent both the
symbolic victory of irreversible time and the infinite regress of mod-
ernisation.
25. I would like to thank Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Marianna Torgovnick,
Clyde Ryals, Heather Hicks, and Carolyn Gerber for their comments
on earlier versions of this essay.
 6

Narcissistic Rage in
The Mill on the Floss
PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE

In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver’s unresolved childhood

rage, which results from her sense that she is devalued by her family
and society, is transformed into her adult misuse of sexual power in
her relationships with Philip, Stephen, and Dr Kenn. Her creator,
George Eliot, rationalises Maggie’s behaviour with men and even
turns her into an idealised heroine in the last section of the book.
Eliot’s apparent inability to see the aggression in her heroine’s
actions seems to derive in part from the autobiographical nature of
the novel and possibly reflects the patterns of her own relationships
with men in her young adult life.
Psychoanalytic literary critics have discussed the closeness between
Maggie and her brother Tom, who serves as a substitute in Maggie’s
life for her rejecting mother and her weak father.1 Emery’s Freudian
analysis stresses Maggie’s need to identify with Tom, a male, in a
family which devalues females. Paris’ Horneyan analysis emphasises
Maggie’s morbid dependence on Tom: Maggie, the ‘self-effacing
person’, is drawn to Tom, the ‘arrogant-vindictive person … because
[she] needs to be protected by and to live vicariously through
someone who can master life aggressively’.2 Both Paris and Emery
emphasise Maggie’s childhood fear of being openly aggressive
toward Tom because she needs him so much. Paris observes that
‘[Maggie] suppresses awareness of her vindictive drives and acts them
out only in direct or disguised ways’.3 Emery notes further that Eliot

122
 NARCISSISTIC RAGE 123

portrays as accidental some of Maggie’s aggressive actions toward

Tom: letting his rabbits die when she has promised to take care of
them while he is away at school (p. 82)4 and upsetting his pagoda
(p. 147) and knocking against his wine (p. 155) during a visit with
their relatives.
Maggie’s excessively close attachment to Tom reflects her under-
lying need to be accepted by her parents; yet at the same time, her
recurring aggression toward him enacts her anger at her parents’
rejection. Emery explains that because Maggie feels rejected by her
mother, she ‘remains “hungry” for love, and … her loving retains
the quality of narcissistic need’.5 The intensity of her attachment to
Tom along with her repeated expressions of aggression toward him,
reflect this hunger for love. Maggie’s later relationships with other
men also combine the need for attachment with the need to express
aggression, as she attempts to revive her childhood sense of close-
ness to Tom. But her involvements with Philip, Stephen, and Dr
Kenn only cause Tom’s rejection of her and cannot satisfy her vora-
cious need for his love.
Maggie’s expression of aggression follows the pattern of the
Prodigal Son story, which is told in a series of pictures on the wall at
Luke’s house, where she goes for comfort after she learns that
Tom’s rabbits are dead. Maggie’s behaviour follows a cyclical
pattern of impulsive and/or aggressive action and flight, followed by
guilt and reparation. For example, after she lets the rabbits die, she
tries to persuade Tom to forgive her, but he rebuffs her, and she
runs upstairs to the attic. When the family notices that Maggie is
missing, Mr Tulliver sends Tom to look for her. Maggie, seeking
reparation, ‘rushe[s] to him and [clings] round his neck’, and Tom
finally kisses her and offers her a piece of cake (p. 91). On another
occasion, when Mrs Tulliver’s visiting relatives make negative com-
ments about Maggie’s skin and hair, she seeks revenge by running
upstairs and cutting her hair (p. 120). She soon feels sorry for what
she has done, and when she returns to face her relatives’ inevitable
reactions, she seeks reparation by running to her father: she ‘hid her
face on his shoulder and burst out into loud sobbing’ (p. 126). And
when Maggie pushes the family’s model female, Lucy, in the ‘cow-
trodden mud’ (p. 164) as a way of getting back at Tom, Lucy, her
mother, and her aunts, she runs off to the gypsies. One of the
gypsies finally takes her home, and Mr Tulliver once again rescues
and comforts her (p. 180). Thus Maggie’s aggression in all three
124 PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE

incidents follows the pattern of aggressive action and flight, fol-

lowed by guilt and finally, reparation with the father (figure).
The cyclical pattern of Maggie’s expression of aggression reflects
the underlying low self-esteem that results from her family’s
ongoing devaluation of her. Maggie’s is a ‘narcissistic rage’: a
chronic and disproportionate anger in response to any incident per-
ceived as a narcissistic injury – any incident that attacks her already
weak sense of self, or that repeats the pattern of rejection by her
parents and society. When Tom goes away to school, Maggie, the
female, stays at home, receives inferior educational opportunities
despite her superior intelligence, and is even expected to care for
Tom’s rabbits. When Maggie is with her relatives, they criticise her
and look upon Lucy as an example of femininity; even her beloved
Tom ignores her in favour of Lucy. These situations provoke her
underlying sense of outrage and result in her aggressive actions.
According to Heinz Kohut, mature aggression is direct, proportion-
ate, and under the control of the ego; it dissipates as soon as the cause
of the provocation is removed. Narcissistic rage, however, is not dis-
sipated by aggressive action; the rage continues to return until the
underlying problem of low self-esteem is resolved – hence Maggie’s
continuing cycles of rage and reparation. Kohut refers to an early
work on aggression, which, by way of explaining human aggressive
responses, presents the ‘schema of a self-perpetuating cycle of psy-
chological phenomena’. The Paper describes ‘the dynamic cycle of
hostility – guilt – submission – reactive aggression – guilt, etc.’.6 This
cycle can be applied to Maggie: she behaves aggressively, she feels
guilty, she submits to her father or Tom; then she gets angry at her
inferior status and reacts aggressively again. Kohut also describes the
fight/flight pattern of narcissistic rage: ‘the narcissistically vulnerable
individual responds to actual (or anticipated) narcissistic injury either
with shamefaced withdrawal (flight) or with narcissistic rage (fight).7
In all three of the above examples, Maggie, ambivalent about express-
ing hostility, responds with both ‘fight’ and ‘flight’: after she lets the
rabbits die, she runs to Luke’s house, and then upstairs to the attic
when Tom refuses to forgive her; when her relatives criticise her, she
runs upstairs to cut her hair; after she pushes Lucy in the mud, she
runs to the gypsies; later in life she repeats the pattern when she goes
away from her family and refuses to let Tom support her8 after her
father dies, and when she runs away with Stephen. Her pattern of
running away is bound up with her pattern of expressing aggression.
Although Ermarth, Steig, Woodward9 and other critics have dis-
cussed some of the effects of the rigid, provincial society on Maggie,
 NARCISSISTIC RAGE 125

none has fully considered the effect of the family’s status in the
community on Maggie’s self-esteem. The sense of personal disgrace
that marks Mr and Mrs Tulliver’s lives at the outset becomes self-
fulfilling in them as they move toward their financial fall and later in
Maggie as she finds ways to disgrace herself.
Mrs Tulliver begins with a low position in her own family: she is
compared unfavourably to her sisters, and ‘is always on the defen-
sive towards [them]’ (p. 227). There are many references to Mrs
Tulliver’s inferiority: Mr Tulliver has picked his wife because she is
‘a bit weak’ (p. 68); he is proud to have ‘a buxom wife conspicu-
ously his inferior in intellect’ (p. 73); she is the ‘feeblest’ member of
the Dodson family (p. 97). Mrs Tulliver’s own sibling rivalry comes
out in her worries that Maggie can’t compare to her sister’s daugh-
ter Lucy: ‘It seems hard as my sister Deane should have that pretty
child’ (p. 61). She is always concerned about the impression Maggie
will make on her sisters. When Maggie dips her head in a basin of
water ‘in the vindictive determination that there should be no more
chance of curls that day’, Mrs Tulliver warns Maggie that the aunts
won’t love her, and then adds her fears for herself: ‘Folks’ull think
it’s a judgment on me as I’ve got such a child – they’ll think I’ve
done summat wicked’ (p. 78).
Maggie is said to resemble Mr Tulliver’s sister, who suffers the
disgrace of marriage to a poor man and has the burden of raising
eight children in poverty. Both she and Maggie are said to take after
Mr Tulliver’s mother. Mr Tulliver wants to take care of his sister,
just as he wants Tom to take care of Maggie (p. 116). The implica-
tion is perhaps that her aunt’s existence is what awaits Maggie: mar-
riage to a poor man. As the unappealing daughter of the lowest in
status in the family, she could not expect more. One important
source of Maggie’s rage, then, in addition to that which she feels
toward the rejecting members of her nuclear family, is her low posi-
tion in a rigid society which allows very little room for upward
mobility, especially for women.
Maggie’s low position in society is made worse by her father’s
financial fall. Eliot emphasises the Tulliver’s sense of disgrace fol-
lowing the loss of the lawsuit to Wakem. Mr Tulliver suffers a phys-
ical collapse, and Maggie and Tom are devastated: ‘Tom had never
dreamed that his father would “fail”: that was a form of misfortune
which he had always heard spoken of as a deep disgrace, and dis-
grace was an idea that he could not associate with any of his rela-
tions, least of all with his father. A proud sense of family
respectability was part of the very air Tom had been born and
126 PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE

brought up in’ (p. 267). The Dodson family proves to be unsupport-

ive and judgmental. They, like Tom, feel disgraced because ‘one of
the family [has] married a man [who] has brought her to beggary’
(p. 294). Both Tom and Maggie are angry with their relatives’ reac-
tions, but since Tom shares some of their feeling of blame toward
his father, ‘he felt nothing like Maggie’s violent resentment against
them for showing no eager tenderness and generosity’ (p. 308).
Maggie is openly angry with her mother and Tom whenever they
seem to be joining the relatives in blaming her father. She ‘hated
blame’ and only wants to remember how her father ‘had always
defended and excused her’ (p. 284).
Maggie’s ‘Valley of Humiliation’ (Book IV), however, her own
reaction to the family’s fall, sets the stage for the beginning of a new
cycle. During the monotonous period of time when Tom is working
to pay off the family debt and Maggie is at home taking care of her
sick father, she falls into the despair which is described in the three
chapters of Book IV. Chapter 1 provides the context for her despair
by emphasising the oppressiveness of life in a society which holds up
respectability as its chief virtue. In chapter 2, Maggie, unable to
count on her ailing father’s customary warmth to distract her from
her predicament, is becoming weighed down by her family’s dis-
grace. Her father is unresponsive to ‘her little caresses’ (p. 371) and
seems preoccupied with Maggie’s ‘poor chance of marrying, down
in the world as they were’ (p. 372). In chapter 3, Maggie turns to
books for comfort, although she is easily distracted by her sorrow.
She has fits of anger and hatred ‘towards her father and mother who
were so unlike what she would have them to be – toward Tom, who
checked her and met her thought or feeling always by some thwart-
ing difference’ (p. 380). Then she reacts to her own anger with ‘wild
romances of a flight from home in search of something less sordid
and dreary: – she would go to some great man – Walter Scott,
perhaps, and tell him how wretched and how clever she was, and he
would surely do something for her’ (p. 381). Her real father would
inevitably interrupt her fantasy and complain, for example, that she
had failed to bring his slippers. In desperation, Maggie finally dis-
covers Thomas à Kempis and begins to try to apply his ideas to her
situation: ‘renunciation seemed to her the entrance into that satis-
faction which she had so long been craving in vain’ (p. 384). As time
goes on, her mother notices and approves her new submissiveness;
her father, also approving the change, but still worrying about her
prospects for marriage, shifts his plaint to: ‘there’ll be nobody to
 NARCISSISTIC RAGE 127

marry her as is fit for her’ (p. 388). Thus in chapter 3 Maggie

repeats her pattern: she feels angry toward her family for her infe-
rior position in society, she flees (in fantasy), she feels guilty (when
her father interrupts her fantasy) and then regains her parents’
approval with her new found submissiveness, brought on by her
misguided attempts to apply Thomas à Kempis to her life.
After the Thomas à Kempis incident, there is little mention of
Maggie’s anger, and there are no accounts of overtly aggressive
action on her part.10 At this point in the story Maggie begins to act
out her rage in her relationships with men. Her childhood aggres-
sion is transformed into her young adult misuse of sexual power.
Neither Philip, nor Stephen is a suitable or appealing choice for
Maggie, but she becomes involved in them as a means of hurting
them and others around her. Yet just as Eliot portrays Maggie’s
aggressive actions toward Tom as accidental, so she portrays her
heroine’s actions toward other men as innocent. Furthermore, by
the end of the novel, Eliot idealises Maggie on the grounds of her
struggle of conscience over her involvements with the two men.
Maggie’s long period of renunciation has prepared her for a new
cycle: her sense of inferiority, exacerbated by her father’s financial
fall, his illness, and her own self-deprivation and recent growth into
‘early womanhood’ (p. 393), are motivating factors in the action
that follows. Maggie’s expression of aggression takes the form of
pursuing a relationship with Wakem’s son, Philip. By becoming
involved with him, Maggie expresses her anger toward her family
for their inadequacies, and toward Tom,11 who has forbidden her to
speak to Philip (p. 279). And although she has never acknowledged
any feelings of anger toward Philip for his father’s role in Mr
Tulliver’s failure, she typically acts out her resentment indirectly.
The foundation for friendship is laid when Maggie meets Philip as
a child on a visit to Tom’s school. Maggie feels ‘growing interest’ in
Philip, despite his and Tom’s antagonism toward each other,
because he is so ‘clever’, and because she has ‘rather a tenderness for
deformed things’ (p. 252). During the visit, Philip becomes Maggie’s
replacement for Tom, whose troubles with his studies had ‘made
him more like a girl than he had ever been in his life before’: his
‘boyish self-satisfaction’ had been replaced by ‘something of the
girl’s susceptibility’ (p. 210). When Philip becomes a student at the
school, his academic successes add to Tom’s ongoing need to prove
himself as a fighter. Finally Tom bribes the school drill master into
lending him his sword, which he plans to ‘tie around his waist’ and
128 PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE

show off to Maggie as his own. But when the time comes, ‘his wrist
trembles’ as he lowers the sword, drops it on his foot and wounds
himself (p. 255) – a symbolic castration which reveals his sense of
inadequacy. Soon after, Maggie, needing a male to complete her
sense of identity, ‘turns toward Philip, and identifies not with what
she would like to be, but with something that resembles her own
need’.12 His humpback represents her own low self image. In
chapter 6, ‘A Love Scene’, which immediately follows the scene in
which Tom is injured, Maggie expresses her feelings toward Philip
in relation to her need to be loved by Tom: first she tells him that
she doesn’t think she could love him better than Tom, ‘But I should
be so sorry … for you’ (p. 259); then she corrects her allusion to his
deformity by saying that she wishes he were her brother; finally she
concludes, ‘I think you’re fonder of me than Tom is’ (p. 260). The
relationship that develops later in their young adult years follows
from Maggie’s ongoing need to be loved by Tom at the same time
she needs to express aggression toward him.
Maggie meets Philip again a few years later on one of her solitary
walks in the ‘Red Deeps’. Although Philip initiates their conversa-
tion, Maggie, glad to see him despite the rift between their families,
responds warmly. But although Eliot assures her readers of Maggie’s
innocence, her behaviour toward Philip is actually flirtatious. When
Maggie, who has grown into ‘early womanhood’ (p. 393), asks
Philip if she is like what he expected, Eliot comments, ‘The words
might have been those of a coquette, but the full bright glance
Maggie turned on Philip was not that of a coquette. She really did
hope he liked her face as it was now, but it was simply the rising
again of her innate delight in admiration and love’ (p. 395). Philip
tells her she is much more beautiful than he expected, which Eliot
intimates is a surprise to Maggie, who, during her renunciation, has
‘abstain[ed] from the looking glass’ (p. 396). Maggie then tells
Philip that she must not see him again (p. 396), but Philip plays on
her sympathies and finally says, ‘I should be contented to live, if you
would let me see you sometimes’ (p. 398). Maggie, beginning to
wonder whether she might do him some good in seeing him,
wavers, and then postpones the decision by submitting to his sugges-
tion that he come to the woods as often as he can until he meets her
again on one of her walks. By failing to prevent his meeting her
again, she chooses to pursue the relationship. She lets Philip appear
to make the decision in which she actually participates. Meanwhile,
 NARCISSISTIC RAGE 129

she inwardly plans to tell him the next time they meet of her deter-
mination not to keep seeing him.
Maggie’s aggression is not only evident in the choice of Philip
against her family’s wishes, but also in the portrayals of her interac-
tions with him. Her cycles of giving Philip hope and then rejecting
him reveal the latent cruelty in her behaviour. For example, in the
passage in Book V, chapter 3, ‘The Wavering Balance’, Maggie tells
Philip that they cannot meet again (p. 425), and Philip responds by
asking her to talk for half an hour before they part. When he takes
her hand, ‘Maggie felt no reason to withdraw it’ (p. 425). Thus she
declares she will not see him again, but then immediately gives in to
his advances. Then Philip flatters her by asking to study her face one
last time so that he can finish her portrait; he elicits her sympathy
and her own discontent about her lot by expressing bitterness about
his deformity (p. 426); finally, he argues vehemently against her
practice of self-deprivation (p. 427). Maggie, still seeing the rela-
tionship in terms of her need for Tom, says, ‘What a dear, good
brother you would have been’ (p. 427). By the end of the conversa-
tion, in which Philip continues to argue against her determination to
renounce him, Maggie finally gives in to his suggestion that he con-
tinue to walk in the woods and meet her ‘by chance’ (p. 429). It is
clear in this passage that Maggie wants to continue seeing Philip
(‘her heart leap(t) at this subterfuge of Philip’s’ [p. 429]), yet ‘even
to Maggie he was an exception: it was clear that the thought of his
being her lover had never entered her mind’ (p. 430) – i.e., his
deformity stands in the way of his attractiveness to Maggie.
Although Philip’s interest in Maggie is clear to the reader, Eliot
claims Maggie’s innocence of his intentions; so Maggie continues to
lead him on, although her rejection of him is inevitable.
A year later they are still meeting. Philip finally declares his love
and asks Maggie whether she loves him. She replies, ‘I think I could
hardly love any one better: there is nothing but what I love you for’
(p. 435). Later in the conversation when Philip asks if she is forcing
herself to say she loves him, she repeats the thought: ‘I don’t think I
could love any one better than I love you. I should like always to
live with you – to make you happy’ (p. 437). But she also says she
will never do anything to wound her father, and adds that it is
impossible for them ever to be more than friends. Philip continues
to try to get her to clarify her feelings, but by this time, Maggie is
feeling that she must return home: ‘the sense that their parting was
130 PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE

near, made her more anxious lest she should have unintentionally
left some painful impression on Philip’s mind. It was one of those
dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive –
when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks
which are never reached again’ (p. 437). Philip says, ‘We do belong
to each other – for always – whether we are apart or together?’ And
Maggie responds, ‘Yes, Philip: I should like never to part: I should
like to make your life very happy’ (p. 437). Philip, however, aware
of the ambiguity of her answer, is ‘waiting for something else – I
wonder whether it will come’ (p. 438). Maggie stops to kiss him
and has ‘a moment of belief that if there were sacrifice in this love
[because of Philip’s deformity] – it was all the richer and more satis-
fying’ (p. 438). Her feeling for Philip is more a need to be ‘wor-
shipped’ (p. 426) than the kind of love that Philip wants.
Tom inevitably discovers their meetings, and Maggie promises
not to see Philip again without Tom’s knowledge (p. 446). He con-
fronts and insults Philip (pp. 447–8). After they leave Philip, Tom
asks her, ‘Pray, how have you shown your love that you talk of
either to me or my father? By disobeying and deceiving us. I have a
different way of showing my affection.’ Maggie’s response, ‘Because
you are a man, Tom, and have power, and can do something in the
world’ (p. 450), reveals a motive for pursuing the friendship: her
sense of powerlessness as a female. Shortly after the discussion with
Tom, Maggie inwardly acknowledges her relief that the relationship
is over (p. 451). The implication in this passage and those cited
above is that she does not want to be seriously involved with Philip.
After she becomes involved with Stephen, she quickly loses interest
in Philip: she ‘shivers’ at Lucy’s offer to contrive a way for her to
marry Philip (p. 498); she is ‘touched not thrilled’ when Philip sings
to her in the presence of Lucy and Stephen (p. 533). Although
Maggie and Philip share many interests, her feeling for him never
gets beyond her need to be admired; he plays on her sympathies
when he persuades her to see him, and she continues to submit to
his suggestions to meet. But despite Philip’s declarations of love, she
never actually declares hers. Relieved when Tom breaks up the rela-
tionship, she lets him verbalise what she represses. Through her
brother, she vicariously lives out her own unacknowledged feelings
of aggression toward Philip, whose father has ruined hers.
The relationship is not all Maggie’s fault; Philip has sought her
out and pressured her into declaring her love. His motives interact
with hers. He feels bitter about his deformity (pp. 398, 430), dis-
 NARCISSISTIC RAGE 131

couraged about his painting, and ‘had never been soothed by [a]
mother’s love’ (p. 431). Perhaps a relationship with Maggie could
also be seen as an expression of his (and his father’s) power over the
Tullivers. In any case, the story of the relationship between Maggie
and Philip is suspended when Mr Tulliver dies and Maggie and Tom
are reconciled. When Maggie asks Tom’s forgiveness, ‘they clung
and wept together’ (p. 465). Maggie completes her cycle: by becom-
ing involved with Philip she takes revenge on Tom, her family, and
the Wakems; ‘weary of her home’ (p. 436), she flees her family by
habitually meeting him at the Red Deeps; she feels guilty afterwards,
especially after her father’s death; finally, she is reconciled to Tom.
Maggie’s next period of submissiveness follows during her lonely,
monotonous two years as a teacher after her father’s death. By the
time she visits Lucy in Book VI, she is ready for a new cycle. She
meets Stephen, Lucy’s intended fiancé, and soon finds herself
tempted to run away with him. Although he seems to be an unlikely
object of her affections, the reasons for her involvement with him
become clear if the relationship is seen in the context of Maggie’s
recurring cycles of submission and rage.
Book VI, which traces the relationship with Stephen, emphasises
Maggie’s low position in the society at St Ogg’s, especially in con-
trast to Stephen, who represents the established society.13 Unlike
Maggie, the daughter of a failure, Stephen is in the privileged posi-
tion of being the son of the owner of ‘the largest oil-mill and the
most extensive wharf in St Ogg’s’ (p. 469). Lucy’s father and Tom
both work for him. Stephen feels superior to all the people around
him: he speaks with ‘supercilious indifference’ of Mr Tulliver
(p. 471); he makes fun of Mrs Tulliver’s ‘conversational qualities’
(p. 472); he refers to Tom as ‘not a brilliant companion’ (p. 473); he
has even chosen Lucy ‘because she did not strike him as a remark-
able rarity’ (p. 477). He is conscious of her inferior position as ‘the
daughter of his father’s subordinate partner; … he had had to defy
and overcome a slight unwillingness and disappointment in his
father and sisters – a circumstance which gives a young man an
agreeable consciousness of his own dignity’ (p. 478). Stephen’s
sisters, too, ‘associated chiefly on terms of condescension with the
families of St Ogg’s, and were the glass of fashion there’ (p. 512).
For Maggie, it is supposed to be ‘a great opportunity’ (p. 512) to be
included in the parties of such a group.
One of the earlier conversations between Maggie and Philip
reveals the motivation for her later involvement with Stephen. When
132 PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE

Maggie tells Philip she would like to read a book in which the dark-
haired lady triumphs, Philip jokes, ‘perhaps you will avenge the dark
women in your own person, and carry away all the love from your
cousin Lucy’. Maggie, insulted, denies that she is ‘odious and base
enough to wish to be her rival’ (p. 433) and insists that ‘It’s because I
always care the most about the unhappy people. … I always take the
side of the rejected lover in the stories.’ Then when Philip asks her if
she would ever have the heart to reject a lover, she responds: ‘I think
perhaps I could if he were very conceited; and yet, if he got
extremely humiliated afterwards, I should relent’ (p. 434). Stephen
is the kind of conceited person that Maggie tells Philip she would be
able to reject. The infatuation for Stephen is bound up with her hos-
tility toward him and others around her. By running away with him,
she repeats the pattern of the gypsy incident: angry with her father
and jealous of Lucy, she pushes her in the mud, runs away to the
gypsies, where she fantasises that she is queen – ‘in Lucy’s form’,14
and then returns to be rescued by her father.
The nature of infatuation has been explored by psychoanalysts,
although there is relatively little literature on the subject. One study
stresses that such an attraction is ‘based on resemblance to a fantasy
which, for both sexes, derives from the “original love object” – the
mother’. Another asserts that ‘falling in love represents an attempt
to undo the original separation from mother, as well as subsequent
separations’. A third says that ‘people who become infatuated have
an incapacity for establishing [constant relationships with others]:
infatuation is a repetition compulsion whose origins are in develop-
mental failures’. Werman and Jacobs build on these and other
studies in stating their belief that infatuation has its roots in the ear-
liest years of life. Its ‘shifting and inconstant nature reflects the
experience of the child prior to the formation of [love] object con-
stancy’ and suggests ‘the existence of difficulties in the mother-
infant relationship that contribute to the development of critically
important aggressive conflicts in the child’; this accounts for the
latent hostility in infatuations. They can occur normatively during
adolescence, a time when oedipal conflicts are revived at the same
time the individual is struggling for a sense of identity. They can
also occur repeatedly during a person’s life, or in some people, only
during a particularly stressful time: ‘[an infatuation] may come
about when an individual is in a crisis of defensive regression, subse-
quent to severe stress, intense anxiety, or during time of depression’.
 NARCISSISTIC RAGE 133

An infatuation ‘typically condenses both narcissistic and oedipal

wishes’.15
Maggie’s infatuation for Stephen comes about as a cyclical reac-
tion to her underlying narcissistic rage against her family and
society; it also comes about during a time of special stress and
depression: Maggie has suffered the death of her father, has grown
bored with her teaching position, and is suddenly in a social setting
in which she is continually reminded of her low status.
In a conversation with Lucy in chapter 2 of Book VI, Maggie
expresses her discontent by comparing herself to a bear confined in a
cage. She says she often hates herself ‘because I get angry sometimes at
the sight of happy people’ (p. 481). She feels that she has slipped back
‘into desire and longing’ (p. 482). When she goes for a ride in the
boat with Stephen and Lucy, ‘She felt lonely, cut off from Philip – the
only person who had ever seemed to love her devotedly, as she had
always longed to be loved’ (p. 491). Renewed anger at her relatives
adds to her feelings of discontent. When her mother and aunt make
remarks about her brown skin, Maggie laughs, but feels ‘impatient’
(p. 492). When Tom expresses his distrust of her, ‘she rebelled and
was humiliated at the same time’ (p. 504). She tries to be reconciled to
him at the end of the conversation, and he does kiss her, but has to
rush off to a consultation with Deane. Her anger appears in flashes in
her relationship with Stephen: after he takes her for a walk in the
garden (p. 521) and after he kisses her arm at the dance (p. 561).
Maggie’s first meeting with Stephen recalls the first meeting with
Philip in the Red Deeps. Maggie is aware that Stephen thinks her
attractive; in this case she pretends to rebuff his compliment. Once
again, Eliot denies her heroine’s flirtatious behaviour: when Maggie
mentions that she has had to earn money by plain sewing, Eliot
comments, ‘but if Maggie had been the queen of coquettes she could
hardly have invented a means of giving greater piquancy to her
beauty in Stephen’s eyes’ (p. 487).
True to the pattern established in her relationship with Philip,
Maggie makes her choices about Stephen indirectly – by allowing
Stephen to appear to be making the decisions. For example, when it
becomes clear that neither Lucy nor Philip will be able to go along
on the planned boat ride, Maggie says to Stephen, ‘We must not go’
(p. 588). But when she asks Stephen to tell the man who is waiting
for them with the boat cushions, Stephen says, ‘What shall I tell
him?’ And ‘Maggie made no answer.’ Stephen then says, ‘Let us go’
134 PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE

at the same time he rises and takes her hand, thus relieving her of
the burden of openly making the decision for herself.
Maggie’s feeling for Stephen, however, is different from what she
had experienced for Philip. The relationship with Stephen satisfies
her underlying need to feel attached to a stronger person. When she
and Stephen return from the first boat ride, Maggie’s foot ‘slips’,
‘but happily Mr Stephen Guest held her hand and kept her up with
a firm grasp … It was very charming to be taken care of in that kind
graceful manner by someone taller and stronger than oneself.
Maggie had never felt just in the same way before’ (p. 492). And just
before the last boat ride, Maggie feels ‘that she was being led down
the garden … by this stronger presence that seemed to bear her
along without any act of her own will’ (p. 588). Maggie experiences
the sense of union with a powerful love object that is part of the
fantasy of infatuation.
Werman and Jacobs emphasise the ‘intense, irrational, and dream
like’ state of infatuation.16 After the first evening with Stephen,
Maggie feels ‘the half-remote presence of a world of love and
beauty and delight, made up of vague, mingled images from all the
poetry and romance she had ever read, or had ever woven in her
dreamy reveries’ (p. 495). When they walk in the garden, they are
‘in the same dreamy state as they had been in a quarter of an hour
before’ (p. 521). At the dance, Maggie says that the flowers seem to
be part of ‘an enchanted land’ (p. 560). When they go away in the
boat, they are enveloped in an ‘enchanted haze’ (p. 589). And on
the Dutch vessel, ‘Stephen’s passionate words made the vision of
such a life more fully present to her than it had ever been before;
and the vision for the time excluded all realities’ (p. 594).
Infatuation is a condensation of the narcissistic wish for the
infant’s blissful sense of union with the mother and the oedipal wish
to marry the parent of the opposite sex; it thus provides for a
female a means of being united in fantasy with both parents at the
same time. Maggie’s fantasies when she is with Stephen recall her
blissful childhood moments with Tom, her substitute for both
parents, at the ‘Round Pool’ when they would imagine that ‘they
would always live together and be fond of each other’. As a child
Maggie thought of sitting by the pool as ‘a very nice heaven’. She
would ‘look dreamily at the glassy water’ and feel as though nothing
could ‘mar her delight in the whispers and the dreamy silences’
(p. 93). The scene at the Round Pool, ‘deep … almost a perfect
round, framed in with willows and tall reeds’, a symbolic womb,17
 NARCISSISTIC RAGE 135

suggests Tom’s and Maggie’s ongoing need to be together with their

lost love object, their mother – a need temporarily met for Maggie
later in the dream-like infatuation for Stephen. And because the ‘tri-
angle between Stephen, Lucy, and Maggie is a recasting of the
Oedipal triangle’,18 Maggie is also able to be temporarily united in
fantasy with her father when she and Stephen elope.
Maggie’s interactions with Stephen repeat the pattern of her
cruelty to Philip. She encourages and rejects him in cycles. For
example, at the dance in Book VI, chapter 10, Maggie and Stephen
walk together feeling ‘that long grave mutual gaze which has the
solemnity belonging to all deep human passion’. When they pause to
look at some flowers, Stephen, overwhelmed by the strength of their
feeling, suddenly takes Maggie’s arm and ‘shower[s] kisses on it’.
Maggie, reacting with rage and humiliation, refuses to have anything
to do with him for the rest of the evening because she feels ‘Stephen
thought more lightly of her than he did of Lucy’ (pp. 561–2). In their
next scene (chapter 11), Stephen comes to see her while she is staying
at her aunt’s house and tries to persuade her to marry him. Maggie
seems on the verge of giving in to her impulses, but just as ‘his lips
are very near hers’, Maggie ‘opened her eyes full on his for an
instant, like a lovely wild animal timid and struggling under caresses,
and then turned sharp round towards home again’ (pp. 569–70).
When they are alone in the boat together, Maggie fails to notice that
they have drifted past the village where they had planned to stop.
When Stephen tries to persuade her to marry him before they return
home, Maggie feels ‘angry resistance’. She accuses him of wanting
‘to deprive me of any choice. You knew we were come too far – you
have dared to take advantage of my thoughtlessness. It is unmanly to
bring me into such a position’ (p. 591). The pattern repeats itself
again after they board the ‘Dutch vessel’, where Maggie paces ‘up
and down the deck leaning on Stephen’, yet soon realises ‘that the
condition was a transient one, and that the morrow must bring back
the old life struggle’ (pp. 594–5). The next day she tells Stephen she
cannot marry him, and finally Stephen, worn out and exasperated,
say, ‘Go, then – leave me – don’t torture me any longer – I can’t bear
it.’ Even then, Maggie ‘involuntarily … leaned towards him and put
out her hand to touch his’, but this time Stephen, not wanting to be
hurt again, ‘[shrinks] from it as if it had been burning iron’ (p. 606).
Maggie’s low self-esteem prevents her from disentangling herself
from her old patterns of behaviour. She is at the mercy of a repeti-
tion-compulsion which causes her to re-enact her sense of injury by
136 PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE

repeatedly injuring others. By getting involved with Stephen,

Maggie hurts everyone around her – Stephen, by repeatedly encour-
aging and rejecting him; Lucy, her long-term rival19 by taking away
her intended fiancé just when Lucy is being kind to her; Philip, by
failing to be clear about ‘the position they must hold towards each
other’, thus continuing to lead him on (p. 527); Wakem, who finally
consents to let Philip marry her, and then suffers embarrassment
when she goes away with Stephen (p. 632); Tom, whose happiness
over regaining the mill is destroyed by her flight with Stephen, and
who, it is implied, is already hurting from his own loss of Lucy to
Stephen (p. 501). Finally, she hurts all her other relatives, who will
suffer from the disgrace she brings on the family.
Yet Eliot’s portrayal of the flight with Stephen emphasises the
nobility of Maggie’s decision not to marry him. Maggie is implicitly
praised as she parts from Stephen for not thinking about ‘what
others would say and think of her conduct’ on the grounds that
‘Love and deep pity and remorseful anguish left no room for that’
(p. 606). Maggie’s superiority to the rest of the community is
implied through the words of Dr Kenn, who lets her know after her
return how harshly the community is judging her: ‘The persons who
are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as yours, are
precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you; because they
will not believe in your struggle’ (p. 626). At the end of the conversa-
tion with Dr Kenn, his thoughts shift to the narrator’s commentary
in the last two paragraphs of chapter 2, Book VII, in a defence of
Maggie’s struggle: ‘moral judgments must remain false and hollow,
unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to
the special circumstances that mark the individual lot’ (p. 487).
The relationship with Stephen, like the one with Philip, is not all
Maggie’s fault. Stephen repeatedly seeks her out and finally pres-
sures her into leaving with him. His ‘inward vision of her which
perpetually made part of his consciousness’ (p. 559) is evidence that
he is suffering from infatuation himself. Like Philip, Stephen’s
motives interact with Maggie’s. His involvement with her can be
seen as an outgrowth of his feelings of superiority over those around
him – an expression of power over the Tullivers, Lucy, Philip, and
even his own father.
Book VII opens with Tom as master at Dorlcote Mill: he has
fulfilled the family’s wish to own it again; but his success is spoiled
by Maggie’s disgrace upon her return from the failed elopement
with Stephen. From Tom’s point of view, it is a disgrace worse than
 NARCISSISTIC RAGE 137

death (p. 611). ‘You have disgraced us all – you have disgraced my
father’s name. You have been a curse to your best friends’ (p. 612).
Maggie attempts to repent and be reconciled to him, but Tom’s
refusal is final: he does not even want her under his roof. Mrs
Tulliver comes to her rescue, however, and they go to Bob Jakin’s
house together. Maggie goes through a period of extreme guilt in
the form of (belated) anxiety for Stephen, Lucy, and Philip (p. 621).
While she claims a desire for financial independence (p. 622), she
thinks of Dr Kenn, the Anglican clergyman she met at Lucy’s bazaar,
and ‘the momentary feeling of reliance that had sprung in her when
he was talking with her’. She determines to see him, despite her
knowledge that he is grieving over the recent death of his wife
(p. 623). She attempts reparation through her confession to him, a
new father figure.
Maggie’s Aunt Glegg offers her shelter at her house, but Maggie,
insisting on her ‘independence’, takes a position with Dr Kenn
instead, thus again establishing a connection with a strong male. But
in chapter 5, ‘The Last Conflict’, Dr Kenn, who has grown sensitive
to the local gossip and feels he should avoid even the ‘appearance of
evil’, has asked her to leave and offered to find her a position in
another town. Maggie suffers an overwhelming sense of abandon-
ment: ‘There was no home, no help for the erring’ (p. 646).
On the third day of her despair she receives another letter from
Stephen, who is still pleading for her love. She wavers, and then
burns the letter, but puts off writing him ‘the last word of parting’
until the next day (p. 649). Maggie is caught in a cycle which only
death can bring to an end. Conveniently, just as she wishes for
death, she feels the flood water at her feet.
Psychoanalytic interpretations of the flood ending, which has
been the focus of literary criticism of The Mill on the Floss because
of the novel’s sudden shift from a realistic to a symbolic mode,
emphasise Maggie’s need to be reunited with Tom, whom no other
man can replace. Smith, describing the relationship between Maggie
and Tom as incestuous, sees the flood scene as the symbolic consum-
mation of their passion. Emery sees many levels of meaning: the
flood represents the outpouring of Maggie’s repressed rage toward
Tom at the same time it fulfils oedipal and oral wishes (to be
reunited with both father and mother, for whom Tom is a substi-
tute), and finally, the wish to return to the womb (to be at one with
her mother and Tom), which is simultaneously a wish for death (p.
23). Tom is the focus of Maggie’s infantile attachments, from whom
138 PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE

she is unable to separate. Her unmet need to be accepted by her

parents creates her hunger to be attached to symbols of them (first
Tom, and then other men) in later life.
Kohut explains that narcissistic rage is ‘aggression mobilised in
the service of an archaic grandiose self and that it is deployed
within the framework of an archaic perception of reality’.20 In other
words, images of self and other in the person who suffers narcissis-
tic rage are confused and distorted. The most violent forms of nar-
cissistic rage arise in individuals in whom ‘the maintenance of
self-esteem – and indeed of the self – depends on the unconditional
availability of the approving-mirroring functions of an admiring
self-object, or on the ever-present opportunity for a merger with an
idealised one’.21 Maggie’s sense of self depends on her perception
of herself as attached to Tom, the symbolic substitute for her
parents – hence her ongoing need to seek reparation with him. The
flood ending brings Maggie and Tom permanently back together
through death.

Eliot’s friend Sara Hennell thought The Mill on the Floss

‘unfinished’ because of ‘[Eliot]’s intense sympathy with Maggie. …
In every word of the book … she could hear [Eliot]’s voice of ten
years before’.22 Many twentieth-century critics have also seen
Eliot’s over-identification with Maggie as a flaw in the novel.
Leavis refers to ‘a tendency toward the direct presence of the
author’ and to Maggie’s ‘lack of self-knowledge shared by George
Eliot’.23 Paris, essentially agreeing with Leavis, writes that Eliot
‘succeeds brilliantly’ in the characterisation of Maggie, but ‘fails to
interpret her correctly’.24 Hardy refers to the problem of ‘under-
distance’ of the narration toward the ending and to the relation
between personal need and artistic shaping at each stage of the
novel.25 Emery refers to a particular point at the beginning of
chapter 13 in Book VI, when Maggie and Stephen drift off
together, where ‘the narrator’s point of view [merges] with
Maggie’s’.26
The autobiographical nature of the novel is well known.
McDonnell is among the critics who have noted parallels between
the Maggie–Tom relationship and the relationship between Eliot27
and her brother Isaac, who although close in early childhood, had
rejected her as an adult because of her liaison with George Lewes.28
But there are also parallels in the patterns of Maggie’s and Eliot’s
young adult relationships with other men – relationships which
 NARCISSISTIC RAGE 139

involved dependence on men unavailable for marriage. In 1843, at

age twenty-four, Eliot became involved in a friendship with a much
older married man, Dr Brabant, whose wife became jealous and
insisted that she be put out of the house.29 After her father’s death
in 1849, she formed a friendship with François D’Albert Durade, a
forty-five year old married painter whose deformity calls to mind
Philip Wakem, and whom Eliot loved ‘as a father and brother’.30
Her involvement in 1851 with John Chapman, who already had a
wife and mistress, precipitated her departure from his household;31
McDonnell suggests that her infatuation for Chapman ‘may have
influenced her depiction of Stephen Guest’.32 In 1854, when Eliot
left England with Lewes, who was married but permanently sepa-
rated from his wife, they left for Germany by boat: ‘Like Maggie
and Stephen Guest aboard the Dutch vessel, [Eliot] paced up and
down the deck, leaning on George’s arm’.33 The series of relation-
ship with unavailable men perhaps suggests that Eliot’s ‘dependence
on the arm of man’34 was combined with aggression in the form of
defiance toward society’s values.
Eliot’s choice of Lewes, as Emery suggests, might have been a self-
perpetuation of her childhood sense of alienation from family and
society. The separation from family and past that the liaison pro-
voked served as an impetus for her fiction writing: it became ‘possi-
ble and even urgent for her to create’.35 The close attachment to
Lewes, which apparently fulfilled both oedipal and pre-oedipal
needs36 and which seems to have successfully replaced her child-
hood love for her brother Isaac, also provided her with the nurtur-
ing she needed in order to write. Eliot herself referred to their
‘Siamese-twin condition’.37 Throughout her fiction writing career,
she relied on Lewes’s unfailing encouragement and protection from
criticism.
Eliot’s failure to see Maggie as readers see her probably derives
from her own faulty self-perception. It can be argued that Eliot pro-
jects the idealised self-image of her youth on to Maggie. By rational-
ising Maggie’s behaviour with Philip, Stephen, and Dr Kenn, Eliot
justifies her own pattern of behaviour which culminated in her
choice of Lewes, and defends herself against her family’s and
society’s judgement. Her failure to separate her own life from her
heroine’s results in a work of art flawed by decreasing control over
the narrative as the novel approaches its deus ex machina ending.

From Literature and Psychology, 36: 1–2 (1990), 90–109.

140 PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE

NOTES
[This essay first appeared in the journal Literature and Psychology in 1990.
It falls within the confines of biographical criticism but also within the
mode of criticism based on the insights of Sigmund Freud, Heinz, Kohut,
Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and many others which take the text, as well
as the author, as a subject and in which events of the narrative are read as
symptoms, both real and metaphoric, of a psychic structure. As a psychoan-
alytic critic Johnstone thus reads The Mill in a similar way to that in which a
psychoanalyst reads the words of a patient. She argues that Eliot’s novels
illuminate her life, suggesting, for example, that in this novel, Eliot’s pre-
sentation of Maggie’s relationships with men can be read as her author’s
therapeutic confrontation with men in her own life: her brother Isaac
Evans, the painter, François D’Albert Durade, and the publisher John
Chapman. In her essay Johnstone also traces the paths that Maggie’s/Eliot’s
desire follows through a complex series of significant symbols and
metaphors. Eds]

1. See Laura Comer Emery, George Eliot’s Creative Conflict: The Other
Side of Silence (Berkeley, CA, 1976), p. 17 and p. 23.
2. Bernard Paris, ‘The Inner Conflicts of Maggie Tulliver’, in A
Psychological Approach to Fiction: Studies in Thackeray, Stendhal,
George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad (Bloomington, IN, 1974), p. 170.
3. Ibid., p. 171.
4. The page numbers in the text, unless otherwise indicated, refer to
the Viking Penguin edition of The Mill on the Floss (New York,
1979), p. 82.
5. Emery, George Eliot’s Creative Conflict, p. 16.
6. See Heinz Kohut, ‘Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage’, The
Psychoanalytic Study of Child, Vol. 27 (New York, 1973), p. 380. The
study that Kohut refers to is F. Alexander’s ‘Remarks about the
Relation of Inferiority Feelings to Guilt Feelings’, Psycho-Analysis, 19
(1938), 41–9.
7. Kohut, ‘Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage’, p. 379.
8. Emery also sees Maggie’s insistence on supporting herself as evidence
of her ‘unconscious anger’ toward Tom. ‘Maggie offends Tom by
seeking work too ostentatiously.’ Emery, George Eliot’s Creative
Conflict, p. 25.
9. Ermarth discusses the sexist social norms that Maggie has internalised
and which have caused her to be ‘self-effacing and dependent, buying
her identity at the price of her autonomy’ (p. 592). Steig shows how
the anal traits of the society, represented by the older generation of
 NARCISSISTIC RAGE 141

Dodsons, have affected Maggie’s ‘shame’, ‘self-doubt’, and ‘fantasy of

dominance’ (p. 40). Woodward shows how Maggie is ostracised from
the rigid community of women at St Ogg’s because she is ‘bold and
“unwomanly”’ (p. 47). See Elizabeth Ermarth, ‘Maggie Tulliver’s Long
Suicide’, Studies in English Literature, 14 (1974), 587–601; Michael
Steig, ‘Anality in The Mill on the Floss’, Novel, 5 (1971), 42–53;
Wendy Woodward, ‘The Solitariness of Selfhood: Maggie Tulliver and
the Female Community at St Ogg’s’, English Studies in Africa, 28
(1985), 46–55.

10. Emery writes that after Thomas à Kempis, ‘Maggie takes a distinctively
different attitude toward her impulses, especially rage … [W]hile
Maggie seeks peace the action of the novel becomes suddenly more
violent’ (p. 29). Emery is referring to Maggie’s ‘intense participation’
(in fantasy) in Tom’s verbal assault on Philip and in her father’s violence
toward Wakem (pp. 30–1). See Emery, George Eliot’s Creative Conflict.

11. Emery also sees the involvement with Philip as an aggressive action
against Tom, whose sense of triumph over repaying his father’s debts is
spoiled when he learns of the secret meetings. Ibid., p. 25.

12. Ermarth, ‘Maggie Tulliver’s Long Suicide’, p. 19.

13. Graver also writes about Stephen as representing the ‘good society’ in
the context of a discussion about ‘the shift in the portrait of Stephen
from privileged gentleman to romantic lover’ (p. 194), which she
believes is a flaw in the last section of the novel: ‘George Eliot evades
in the end what she earlier so forcefully confronts: the outer world
that frustrates and defeats Maggie’s desire for work, attainment, and
even marriage. Instead, the concerns of the novel move inward, in part
by forgetting how Stephen Guest and the narrow attitudes of good
society drove Maggie out of the world altogether into her ultimate
emphasis of want’ (p. 199). See Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and
Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley,
CA, 1984).

14. Emery, George Eliot’s Creative Conflict, p. 38.

15. David S. Werman and Theodore J. Jacobs, ‘Thomas Hardy’s The Well-
Beloved and the Nature of Infatuation’, International Review of
Psychoanalysis, 10 (1983), 447–56.

16. Ibid., p. 450.

17. Emery, also referring to the Round Pool as a symbolic womb, adds that
the wish to return to the womb is one of the structural elements which
unifies the novel. See Emery, George Eliot’s Creative Conflict, p. 10.

18. Ibid., p. 37.

142 PEGGY R. F. JOHNSTONE

19. Jane McDonnell in ‘“Perfect Goodness” or “The Wider Life”: The Mill
on the Floss as Bildungsroman’, Genre, 15 (1982), notes the ‘long-
smouldering revenge’ that is enacted in the Stephen–Maggie relation-
ship (p. 392).

20. Kohut, ‘Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage’, p. 385.

21. Ibid., p. 386.

22. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York, 1968), p. 335.

23. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York, 1950), p. 33 and p. 43.

24. Paris, ‘The Inner Conflicts of Maggie Tulliver’, p. 186.

25. Barbara Hardy, ‘Life and Art in The Mill on the Floss, in R. P. Draper
(ed.), The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner (New York, 1977), p. 173
and p. 179.

26. Emery, George Eliot’s Creative Conflict, p. 49.

27. The name George Eliot is used throughout the essay, even when, in
reference to her early life, her name was still Mary Ann Evans (until
1851), or Marian Evans (until 1856).

28. McDonnell in ‘“Perfect Goodness” or “The Wider Life’”, p. 381.

29. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, p. 50.

30. Gordon S. Haight, The George Eliot Letters, 7 Vols (New Haven, CT,
1954–5), Vol. 1, pp. 316–17.

31. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, p. 85.

32. McDonnell in ‘“Perfect Goodness” or “The Wider Life”’, p. 381.

33. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, p. 148.

34. Ibid., p. 52.

35. Emery, George Eliot’s Creative Conflict, p. 224.

36. Ibid., p. 223.

37. Haight, The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 3, p. 23.

 7

‘Light enough to trusten

by’: Structure and
Experience in Silas Marner
TERENCE DAWSON

Silas Marner (1861), always a favourite with readers, was until re-
cently considered too obvious and too lightweight to merit serious
critical discussion. In 1949, F. R. Leavis echoed the views of many
when he described it as ‘that charming minor masterpiece’, an
evident ‘moral fable’.1 In only one respect was the work seen as
unusual: it appeared to have no direct bearing on its author’s life.2
Ever since the mid-1950s, however, it has gradually gathered advo-
cates who have shown that it is not only as rich in ideas but also as
firmly rooted in George Eliot’s personal concerns as any of her
other works and, somewhat surprisingly, these two issues have been
increasingly seen as one.3 In 1975, Ruby Redinger explored the
theme of hoarding and concluded that ‘the transformation of gold
into Eppie justified George Eliot seeking and accepting money for
her writing’.4 Lawrence Jay Dessner looked at a wide range of para-
llels between the events of the novel and the author’s circumstances
at the time of writing, and noted that ‘fear of being abandoned, fear
of having one’s secret revealed, antagonism towards a brother, love
for a lost sister, concern for moral reputation [are all] common to
the fact and the fiction’.5 It was not until 1985, however, when
Sandra Gilbert argued that Eppie is the central character and that
the novel’s principal theme is the riddle of daughterhood, that
anyone specifically explored the implications for a woman of the

143
144 TERENCE DAWSON

relationship between Eppie and Silas. Through Silas, she affirms,

George Eliot was able to examine ‘the dispossession that she herself
had experienced as part of the empty pack of daughterhood’.6 The
common element in these otherwise different readings is that they
are all, and almost exclusively, concerned with themes. They have
established that many of the motifs at the heart of the text are perti-
nent to the situation in which Eliot found herself in 1860, but they
have not explained the novel’s structure as a whole. In the following
pages, I re-examine the narrative structures in order to illustrate that
this novel occupies a much more significant place in its author’s lit-
erary development than has been recognised.
On the surface, the main plot would seem to be about the regen-
eration of a middle-aged weaver through love and his reintegration
into the community in which he lives. Interlinked with this ‘story’ is
another, generally described as the story of Godfrey Cass, the local
squire’s eldest son, who turns over something of a new leaf in the
course of the events described. Faced by a novel in which there are
two distinct plots, the critic’s first task is to discover the connexion
between them. The most frequent definition of the relation between
the two stories in Silas Marner is that they are parallel, but move in
opposite directions.7 Not only is this view too vague to be helpful, it
is also misleading, for there is no similarity whatsoever between
Silas’s situation at the beginning and Godfrey’s at the end, or vice
versa. Nevertheless, the two plots are unquestionably related:
indeed, I shall argue that they show many more similarities than
have been identified to date.
In purely narrative terms, the main events of the novel would
seem to trace the parallel stories of the weaver and Godfrey Cass: I
do not wish to argue otherwise. But in psychological terms, because
the novel was written by a woman, one would expect it to reflect
and describe a woman’s experience. Such a view assumes that the
events of a novel are shaped by the nature of a dilemma uppermost
in its author’s mind at the time of writing. In 1860 Eliot, having
completed her preliminary studies for Romola, a novel about the
Florence of Savonarola, had fallen into one of her periodic fits of
depression. Just how much of this novel’s action she had sketched
when the idea of Silas Marner ‘thrust’ itself upon her so insistently
that she shelved her historical novel in order to write her tale about
the weaver of Raveloe we shall never know.8 All that is certain is
that Savonarola occupied a major place in her thoughts immediately
prior to the vision (the word is not too strong) of ‘a linen weaver
 STRUCTURE AND EXPERIENCE IN SILAS MARNER 145

with a bag on his back’ (p. 382) which provided the initial seed from
which Silas Marner quickly grew. If we can assume that a connexion
exists between George Eliot’s preoccupation with Savonarola, who
may be described as a ‘dark’ father-figure who influences Romola
for as long as she is attracted to the worthless Tito, and her own de-
pression, then one can read this vision of a benevolent father-figure
as a ‘compensatory’ urge which emerged, spontaneously, from her
unconscious in order to shake her out of her increasingly gloomy
thoughts. A primary aim of these pages is to argue that embedded in
the surface narrative of Silas Marner are numerous thematic con-
cerns which suggest that the events it describes are shaped by a psy-
chological dilemma pertinent to Eliot at the time of writing. My
intention is to show that the very structures of the text invite the
reader to read this novel as an expression of a woman’s psychologi-
cal concerns.
My first objective is to demonstrate that the events of Silas
Marner, not only those of the main plot but all the major events, in-
cluding such scenes as the wonderfully comic conversation in the
Rainbow Inn, can be shown to be directly related to a female char-
acter who functions as the ‘carrier’ of the author’s unconscious per-
sonality. This character, I shall show, is Nancy Lammeter, an
apparently minor figure hitherto almost completely ignored by
critics.9
The basis for this claim is derived from the analysis of the major
episodes of the novel, all of which reveal thematic parallels with the
dilemma of confronting Nancy. Even when she does not actually
feature in the episodes in question, or plays only a minor role in
them, the insistence with which their theme is related to her
amounts to evidence that the entire narrative constitutes a symbolic
representation of the dilemma facing her. My aim, then, is to
demonstrate that not only is the so-called sub-plot principally about
a process affecting Nancy, but so too is the entire novel: in other
words, to reveal that the interconnected plots of the novel tell one
story on two distinct ‘levels’ of fictional representation and to argue
that, in psychological terms, both pertain to Nancy. In the first
section, I look at the parallels between the two ‘plots’ to show that
the events in which Godfrey features can indeed be said to be told
from Nancy’s perspective. In the next, I identify the nature of the
dilemma confronting her by reference to some of Jung’s key con-
cepts.10 I then examine the relation between the Silas plot and the
way in which Nancy achieves a tentative resolution to this problem
146 TERENCE DAWSON

and, lastly, as my reading tacitly implies that the experience at issue

was highly relevant to the author, I briefly relate the conclusions to
George Eliot’s situation in 1860–61.
First, let us remind ourselves of the main stages of Silas’s story. At
the outset of the novel, he is living in complete isolation, nursing the
hurt of a wrong done to him some fifteen years previously by
William Dane and the arbitrary result of the drawing of lots by the
Lantern Yard brethren. On the day of Mrs Osgood’s birthday party,
his gold is stolen. A month later, he sees lying on his hearth a baby
girl, the sight of which awakens ‘old quiverings of tenderness’ in
him (p. 168). Sixteen years later, contrary to his fear that she might
abandon him, Eppie chooses to stay with him, and the novel ends
with her marrying Aaron. This pattern is remarkably similar to that
of Nancy’s story. At the time the novel opens, Nancy is privately
nursing the hurt of a wrong done her by Godfrey. On the night of
Mrs Osgood’s birthday party, Dunstan falls to his death in the
stone-pits, and some four weeks later, Molly dies while on her way
to claim recognition, thus making it possible for Nancy to marry the
man whom she loves. Fifteen years later, Godfrey, afraid that she
might want to leave him, reveals his past to her. To his surprise, she
forgives him and they consolidate their relationship.
These similarities are striking. Each plot begins with a contrast
between two men, one of whom is well-intentioned but weak (Silas,
Godfrey); the other, more dynamic but morally reprehensible
(William Dane, Dunstan). The men are either brothers or the very
best of friends (Silas and Dane are called ‘David and Jonathan’ by
the Lantern Yard brethren [p. 57]). In the ‘present’, Godfrey’s only
remaining possession is his horse, appropriately called ‘Wildfire’.
Even this he is prepared to sacrifice rather than admit to his mar-
riage with a barmaid, Molly Farren, because he knows that his
father would disinherit him for such a folly. In the ‘past’, when
William Dane falsely accuses Silas, the latter is literally cast out by
the community to which he belongs. Both stories are thus instigated
by a similar combination of factors. In each case, a more vital,
‘daring and cunning’ brother is endeavouring to steal the birthright
of a better but weaker brother (p. 87).
There is, however, a very considerable difference between the two
situations. Godfrey does not want his ‘degrading marriage’ with
Molly Farren brought to light; he is guilty of deceiving not only his
wife but also Nancy, whom he has continued to court. Silas, on the
other hand, does not commit the crime he is accused of. If there is a
 STRUCTURE AND EXPERIENCE IN SILAS MARNER 147

parallel between the events in the ‘present’ and those in the ‘past’, it
is between Silas and Nancy, who are equally blameless.
One notes that Godfrey’s conduct is constantly being excused. We
are asked to believe that he really is ‘a fine open-faced good-natured
young man’ (p. 73). The facts do not bear this out: he is secretive
and has behaved abominably towards both Molly and Nancy. He
deserved to be disgraced. Why, then, should he not be exposed?
Who stands to gain by his behaviour’s not being revealed? Most ob-
viously, of course, himself. One remembers that Nancy is proud and
could not stand knowing that Godfrey has been deceiving her. At
the end, he reminds her why he did not tell her about his marriage
with Molly Farren: ‘With your pride and your father’s, you’d have
hated having anything to do with me after the talk there’d have
been’ (p. 224). He is, of course, making excuses, but he is also prob-
ably right. Everything we learn about Nancy in Part 1 would corrob-
orate his assertion. If she reacts differently in Chapter 18, it is
because she has ‘changed’ by the time he reveals his past to her. In
other words, it is essential that Nancy does not learn of his affair
with Molly until she is ready to assimilate such information. Nancy
would like Godfrey to be exonerated from as much censure as possi-
ble, for he can be the man that she wants him to be only if his
shoddy behaviour is not a reflection of his own personality but has
been provoked by another character. Thus Dunstan’s function is
ambiguous. At one level of reading, he seeks to inculpate Godfrey,
whom he ‘traps’ into marrying a barmaid of whom he is ashamed
because he wants his older brother ‘turned out of house and home’
by their father (pp. 74, 80). But at another, Dunstan, by his very ex-
istence, serves to extenuate Godfrey’s guilt, and in this latter capac-
ity, no matter how paradoxical this may seem, Dunstan serves
Nancy’s interests.
I shall look more closely at the similarities between Dunstan and
William Dane in a moment. Meanwhile, it is worth noting those
between Molly and Sarah, each of whom is associated with the
stronger but morally reprehensible man: Molly becomes involved
with Godfrey through Dunstan, and Sarah marries William Dane.
The most striking feature that they have in common is their weak-
ness. Sarah slips into marriage with William Dane and is never men-
tioned again, and Molly is kept away from Raveloe, in a
neighbouring village called Batherley, where she slides into lau-
danum addiction until she finally succumbs to a longing for oblivion
(pp. 164–5). There is a clear parallel with Nancy’s situation. When
148 TERENCE DAWSON

Godfrey fails to propose to her, Nancy determines not to marry him

and withdraws to her own home. Molly’s isolation corresponds to
Nancy’s isolation, and Sarah’s preference for William Dane corre-
sponds to Nancy’s continuing interest in Godfrey after his behaviour
has become as hypocritical as that of William Dane. In thematic
terms, then, the fifteen years of Silas’s self-imposed isolation corre-
spond to the period of about three years of Nancy’s bitter doubts.
In corroboration of this, one notes the parallels between the ways
in which Silas and Nancy react to the various wrongs done to them.
They both ward off despair by devoting themselves to work. When
the lots pronounce against him, Silas ceases to trust in a ‘God of
lies’ (p. 61). To forget his pain, he abandons his home town, settles
in as isolated a community as possible, and devotes himself to his
work. Weaving, one of the dominant images of the novel, symbol-
ises the slow growth of a pattern through the patient interconnexion
of opposites. Similarly, when Godfrey fails to propose to her, Nancy
abandons all hope of marrying him. To forget her pain, she buries
herself in domestic duties: her hands ‘bore the traces of butter-
making, cheese-crushing, and even still coarser work’ (p. 147). Like
linen, butter and cheese are the products of patient toil. Thus, at
the outset of the events, both Silas and Nancy have been wronged,
and have reacted in a similar fashion. They are both leading isolated
and restricted lives, immersing themselves in transformative work
in order to forget their hurt.
Nancy is equally central to the crucial events which take place on
the evening of Mrs Osgood’s birthday party and Squire Cass’s New
Year party. Mrs Osgood is Nancy’s aunt: Godfrey’s relations play
virtually no part in the story. The night of her birthday party, we
learn that Godfrey is very pleased to see Nancy. The same evening,
Silas’s gold, which stands in lieu of a ‘purpose’ in his life and is the
visible symbol of his ‘hard isolation’ (p. 65), is stolen, causing him
for the first time since his self-imposed exile to become aware of a
‘lack’ in his life. A few moments later, the thief, Dunstan, disappears
from view (we subsequently learn that he has fallen to his death).
This not only frees Godfrey from the negative influence upon him
which Dunstan represents, but thereby opens the way for him to
make things up with Nancy. We know that Nancy is still deeply at-
tached to Godfrey: it is surely legitimate to infer that his pleasure in
seeing her causes Nancy to become conscious of the distance that
has grown between them – that is, of a ‘lack’ in her life. The theft of
Silas’s gold thus coincides with Nancy’s becoming dimly aware of
 STRUCTURE AND EXPERIENCE IN SILAS MARNER 149

how she too has ‘undergone a bewildering separation from a

supremely loved object’ (p. 166).
The parallelism between the two plots is even more apparent on
the night of Squire Cass’s New Year party. In the course of the festivi-
ties at the Red House, Ben Winthrop comments to Mr Macey: ‘Well, I
think Miss Nancy’s a-coming round again’ (p. 160). This remark not
only tells the reader that Nancy’s determination not to marry Godfrey
is not as firm as she would like people to believe (p. 143), but also, at
least in the eyes of one villager, lays the blame for the delayed engage-
ment not with Godfrey, but with Nancy. This is so contrary to one’s
assumptions about the situation that it requires attention. Only
Dunstan knows about Godfrey’s secret marriage. No one else suspects
Godfrey of anything other than coming under Dunstan’s influence (p.
73). Ben’s comment tells us that Nancy appears to have resolved to
end her self-imposed isolation by responding to Godfrey’s devotion.
The dance in the Red House coincides with two crucial events, one
occurring just outside the weaver’s cottage and the other inside. Molly
dies of laudanum intoxication and Silas discovers Eppie on the hearth
and begins to feel ‘old quiverings of tenderness’ for the first time in
several years (p. 168), thereby discovering a ‘purpose’ in life. Nancy’s
change of heart thus coincides not only with the death of a woman
who is an obstacle to her ambition to marry Godfrey but also with the
beginning of Silas’s redemption through love. Moreover, the phrases
used to describe Silas’s emotions are equally applicable to Nancy: she
also feels ‘old quiverings of tenderness’ towards Godfrey and thereby
discovers a new ‘purpose’ in her life. Thus, just as Nancy’s intimation
of Godfrey’s continuing affection for her, on the night of Mrs
Osgood’s birthday party, coincides with Silas becoming conscious of a
lack, so her ‘a-coming round again’ in her attitude towards Godfrey,
noticed by Ben on New Year’s Eve, coincides with the awakening of
Silas’s love for another human being. [ … ]
I have looked at some parallels between Silas’s story and Nancy’s
story. There is however one all-important difference. Silas is acted
upon. Things happen to him. He is expelled from the Lantern Yard
brethren. His money is stolen and he later discovers Eppie on his
hearth. He is not abandoned at the end. When he acts (for example,
when he decides to leave the Lantern Yard community, or to look
after Eppie) it is compulsively. Silas is never an agent. In contrast,
each of the main stages in Nancy’s story is characterised by a deci-
sion which she makes. Her isolation corresponds to her determina-
tion not to marry Godfrey. Her resolve then wavers, she warms to
150 TERENCE DAWSON

him once again; at exactly the same time (although she knows
nothing of this), she is liberated to marry him. At the end, when
provided with a reason which, earlier, would have been sufficient
for her to abandon him, she chooses to stay with him. The main
events in Nancy’s story correspond to her various attitudes and deci-
sions. She is an agent. In this section, I want to show, by means of
an analysis of the relation between Nancy and the other characters,
that all the events are directly related to her: the opening situation
offers a symbolic representation of a challenge facing her, and the
course of events described in the novel reflects how she reacts to it.
The surprising number of attributes that Nancy and Godfrey have
in common provides the most striking indication of the nature of
their relation one to the other. Priscilla chides Nancy for ‘sitting on
an addled egg for ever, as if there was never a fresh un in the world’
(p. 150). Godfrey is defined by his similar vacillation and moral
cowardice (p. 77). His father describes him as a ‘shilly-shally fellow’
and adds: ‘You take after your mother. She never had a will of her
own’ (p. 125). Nancy’s mother died when she was a small child, and
so too did Godfrey’s. Although Nancy is reluctant to admit she loves
him, she does not want to marry anyone else (pp. 224, 151), and
Godfrey constantly puts off declaring that he loves her, while con-
ceding that there is no other woman whom he wants to marry
(p. 125). One way of looking at the characteristics they have in
common is to maintain that they are drawn to one another because
of their similar backgrounds. Such an explanation is insufficient.
The parallels suggest rather that they ‘mirror’ one another: in other
words, that their relationship is conditioned by psychological
factors. Because the Nancy–Godfrey plot tells her story, one must
conclude that Nancy is drawn to Godfrey largely because he
‘personifies’ or ‘mirrors’ aspects of her own weakness. This, in turn,
implies that Godfrey is not so much an autonomous male character
as a type or, more specifically, an ‘image of a man’ to which she is
instinctively drawn.
According to Jung, just as every man has an inherent, albeit un-
conscious, mental image of the feminine that reflects his relationship
with women, so every woman has a similar image of the masculine
that mirrors her relationship with men. The image of a man encoun-
tered by a woman in her dreams and waking fantasies, personifying
her inner or unconscious attitudes towards men, he called the
animus.11 That Godfrey’s attributes so clearly mirror Nancy’s sug-
gests that he may be defined as an animus-figure.12 In short, not only
 STRUCTURE AND EXPERIENCE IN SILAS MARNER 151

do the events in which Godfrey features tell Nancy’s story, but this
story may be defined as essentially psychological. It is not so much
about two individuals as about the relation between a young woman
and her own inherent image of masculinity: her animus. Clearly, re-
garding the relation between Nancy and Godfrey in this light invites
one to read the novel not as a succession of episodes that represent a
real situation, but as a reflection of a psychological process in which
Nancy serves as the carrier of the author’s unconscious personality.
Read in this way, the elements that compose the initial situation
symbolise the impasse in which Nancy finds herself. At the time the
novel opens, both Nancy and Godfrey live in houses dominated by a
father-figure (The Warrens by Mr Lammeter, The Red House by
Squire Cass). Nancy’s sister, Priscilla, is entirely contained in her re-
lationship with her father, she is proud that she ‘features’ his family
and spurns all other men:
‘The pretty-uns do for fly-catchers – they keep the men off us. I’ve no
opinion of men, Miss Gunn – I don’t know what you have. And as
for fretting and stewing about what they’ll think of you from
morning till night, and making your life uneasy about what they’re
doing when they’re out o’ your sight – as I tell Nancy, it’s a folly no
woman need be guilty of, if she’s got a good father and a good home.
[ … ] As I say, Mr Have-your-own-way is the best husband, and the
only one I’d ever promise to obey.’
(pp. 148–9)

This is not the speech of a liberated woman; it is an expression of

Priscilla’s over-attachment to her father and a corresponding confu-
sion of ‘father’ and ‘home’ that prevent her from even contemplat-
ing a relation with a male ‘other’. Priscilla does not change: at the
end of the novel, she is as attached to her father as she was sixteen
years before. She thinks of him as unique and is correspondingly
scornful of other men: ‘But joyful be it spoken, our father was never
that sort o’ man’ (p. 213). She never distances herself from him.13
At the outset, in spite of her continuing love for him, Nancy has
turned her back on Godfrey and is living at home with her sister and
father: in other words, she has adopted her sister’s maxim. This
implies that Priscilla personifies an attitude which Nancy has
adopted in spite of its being detrimental to her happiness. Jung used
the term shadow to describe alter-ego figures of the same sex as the
dreamer which he or she encounters in dreams and waking fan-
tasies. The shadow personifies ‘the “negative” side of the personal-
ity, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide’ (CW,
152 TERENCE DAWSON

vii,
vii 103 n. 5). More specifically, it illustrates the way in which an
individual actually is behaving, even when he or she is utterly un-
conscious of acting in such a manner. Nancy would like to marry
Godfrey; instead, she is sitting at home pretending she has forgotten
him. If Priscilla personifies an aspect of Nancy’s character of which
she is unaware, then her opinion about men in general tells the
reader what Nancy is unconsciously afraid of: Nancy is worried at
what Godfrey might be doing when he is out of her sight. Given
that Nancy has no inkling of Molly’s existence, her fears must repre-
sent tendencies in her own character.
The corresponding events in the Silas plot not only corroborate
this claim, but also constitute a direct comment on what she is
doing. One remembers that it is on becoming engaged to Silas that
Sarah’s manner towards him ‘began to exhibit a strange fluctuation
between an effort at an increased manifestation of regard and invol-
untary signs of shrinking and dislike’ (p. 58). That is, as soon as
Sarah becomes engaged to him, she begins to have negative feelings
towards him. She is afraid of his epilepsy, and epilepsy may be
defined as an ‘absence’ from oneself. Silas’s ‘absences’ are equivalent
to Nancy’s feelings of emptiness when Godfrey goes away for ‘days
and days together’ (p. 73). We are told that everyone in Raveloe
thinks they would make ‘a handsome couple’ (pp. 73, 159–60), but
Nancy turns her back on him in much the same way as Sarah aban-
dons Silas. Imagining that Godfrey is unreliable, she retires to her
own home. Yet, although she pretends she does not want to marry
him, she continues to treasure some dried flowers for his sake
(p. 151). She cannot bring herself to forget him; later, she asserts
that there is no other man that she would ever have contemplated
marrying (p. 224). In other words, she has surrendered herself to
Godfrey, but only in her imagination. In reality, she is shunning
him. Silas Marner offers a vivid representation of how and why such
opposite tendencies arise.
The key to an individual’s conflicting tendencies is the nature of
his or her shadow-personality. I have defined Priscilla as Nancy’s
shadow, but an individual’s shadow is often multiple. Priscilla repre-
sents Nancy’s ‘personal’ shadow; Molly Farren can be defined as an
archetypal aspect of her shadow. The events surrounding Molly are
implausible in realistic terms, for it is equally improbable that a
young village barmaid should have had access to laudanum and that
Godfrey’s relation with her could have been kept secret for so long
in such small and tightly-knit communities as Raveloe and
 STRUCTURE AND EXPERIENCE IN SILAS MARNER 153

Batherley. The reason Godfrey’s interest in her must remain secret is

that Nancy could not bear its being disclosed. As Dunstan says to
Godfrey, ‘Miss Nancy wouldn’t mind being a second, if she didn’t
know it’ (p. 76). Even at the end, when Godfrey tells her about his
first marriage, she asks him not to tell either her father or Priscilla
about his affair with Molly (p. 236). None of the villagers learns of
it. In other words, she does not want to face the fact of Molly’s exis-
tence and, in psychological terms, whatever aspect of our personal-
ity we seek to repress belongs to our ‘shadow’. Molly can therefore
be defined as another, deeper or more archetypal aspect of Nancy’s
shadow. If Molly’s concealed existence corresponds to Nancy’s self-
imposed isolation, then her addiction to laudanum symbolises the
narcotic quality of Nancy’s fantasy surrender to Godfrey. She
personifies a deeply unconscious aspect of Nancy, whose unnatural
isolation and exaggerated fantasies about the man whom she loves
are psychologically destroying her.
Not surprisingly, it is Priscilla who provides an explanation of
why Nancy is doing this. Priscilla clings to the image she has of her
father; Nancy does the same. For, although we are told little about
Nancy’s relationship with her father, there is much we can deduce
about it. The narrator, describing Nancy’s attitude, tells us that her
father ‘was the soberest and best man in the countryside, only a little
hot and hasty now and then, if things were not done to the minute’
(p. 144). One remembers that Squire Cass also thinks of his family
as being the best in the neighbourhood, and he, too, easily loses his
temper (pp. 121, 123). Godfrey lives in constant fear of being cen-
sured and perhaps disinherited by his father. If he is an animus-
figure, it follows that his weakness (lack of confidence in himself)
can be ascribed to Nancy’s lack of confidence in herself owing to her
equal fear of being reproved by her father or of separating herself
from him. The doubts she entertains about Godfrey are therefore di-
rectly related to her over-attachment to her father. Thus, for Nancy
to ‘imagine’ Godfrey married to a woman who would degrade him
signals not so much a petty jealousy as a lack of confidence in her
own worth: compare her ‘perpetually recurring thought’: ‘“I can do
so little – have I done it well?”’ (pp. 214–15). Nancy, while isolating
herself from Godfrey, unconsciously thinks of herself as an unsuit-
able partner for such an eligible young man as Godfrey.
On the surface, everything pertaining to Nancy is ‘of delicate
purity and nattiness’ (p. 147); but the other elements which
compose the initial situation leave room to doubt whether this is
154 TERENCE DAWSON

the whole picture. They suggest that she is unconsciously projecting

her doubts and suspicions onto those around her, and even weaving
plots in order to disguise her fear of committing herself to Godfrey.
Indeed, so unconscious is she of this tendency that she ascribes it
not to any female character (any aspect of her female identity) but
to male characters: not only to Godfrey but also to Dunstan and
William Dane (aspects of her animus).
The connexion between Dunstan and William Dane needs little
insistence. Dunstan ‘traps’ Godfrey into a degrading marriage and
William Dane has ‘woven a plot’ in order to have Silas expelled
from the Lantern Yard brethren (pp. 80, 61). Just as Godfrey falls
easy prey to Dunstan’s blackmail because he does not have the
courage to stand up to his father, so Silas falls easy prey to William
Dane because he does not have the courage to stand up to the arbi-
trary decision of the Lantern Yard brethren. Indirectly, however,
this trait reflects something happening to Nancy, for Dunstan can be
defined as a destructive aspect of her animus that has undermined
Godfrey’s worth (that is, the worth of the true animus). He is, so to
speak, the ‘shadow’ of the animus. In the same way as Nancy has
adopted Pricilla’s views, so Godfrey has come under Dunstan’s neg-
ative influence. Thus, the quarrel between the two brothers can be
seen as a conflict between two components of a woman’s animus.
The question, then, becomes: ‘What reason does the text offer to
explain why Nancy should imagine men as behaving in this way?’
Surprisingly, the answer is provided by the two scenes which
feature groups of men, for they, too, can be shown to be related to
Nancy. The Lantern Yard brethren are defined by their manner of
arbitrarily judging a man by drawing lots. Although they are called
‘brethren’, they act towards Silas more like father-figures. According
to Jung, the animus may well be experienced as ‘rather like an as-
sembly of fathers or dignitaries of some kind who lay down incon-
testable, “rational”, ex cathedra judgments’ (CW, vii, vii 332). He
observed that a woman whose animus behaves in this way is prone
to act upon just such arbitrary opinions as she unconsciously ascribes
to all father-figures. One notes that Mr Lammeter is described as a
‘grave and orderly senior’ (p. 153), a phrase which could equally
apply to the Lantern Yard brethren who fill Silas with awe, and that
Nancy is described as having an opinion about everything: her opin-
ions ‘were always principles to be unwaveringly acted on. They were
firm not because of their basis, but because she held them with a
tenacity inseparable from her mental action’ (p. 216; see p. 148).
 STRUCTURE AND EXPERIENCE IN SILAS MARNER 155

Astonishingly, although the conversation at the Rainbow has oc-

casioned a great deal of critical interest, no one has ever offered a
reason why it should be entirely about Nancy’s father. It consists
almost exclusively of groundless and tenaciously defended opinions.
The butcher, the farrier, Mr Macey, Mr Tookey, and Mr Winthrop
all argue fiercely, each convinced that he alone knows what is right
(p. 97), and its most significant feature is that it is entirely about Mr
Lammeter: first, about his cows, then about his father’s arrival in
Raveloe, then about his unusual ‘Janiwary’ marriage, and finally
about the previous owner of his home. One need scarcely add that
this is not because he is a close friend of any of them: Mr Lammeter
lives a retired existence. A literal reading of the events leads to ob-
servations about either social life in an isolated community or typi-
cally masculine attitudes. But given the tendency I have noted in
Nancy, who is ‘as constant in her affection towards a baseless
opinion as towards an erring lover’ (p. 148), we can infer that the
villagers constitute yet another aspect of her animus. Thus, both
groups of men described in the novel are associated with arbitrary
opinionatedness. The Lantern Yard brethren offer an archetypal
representation of the consequences of such a tendency. The villagers
tell us that it stems from Nancy’s father.
The culminating tale in the extraordinary conversation at the
Rainbow is about the previous owner of The Warrens, and it pro-
vides the only lengthy description we are given of Nancy’s home.
Nancy is described as ‘slightly proud and exacting’ (p. 148). She is
interested only in ‘the young man of quite the highest consequence
in the parish’ and dreams of one day becoming ‘“Madam Cass”, the
Squire’s wife’ (p. 151). Her pride seems to come from her father.
Mr Lammeter, like Godfrey, ‘always would have a good horse’
(p. 213). Appearances matter to them. It is fitting, therefore, that the
previous owner of Nancy’s home was a jumped-up tailor with an
exaggerated concern with appearances. Determined to impress his
neighbours at no matter what cost, Mr Cliff (or Cliff, as he is usually
called) built and ran an enormous stables. He so bullied his son into
acting like a gentleman that the boy died and, mentally unbalanced,
he himself died soon after. The Warrens, where Nancy lives, is still
haunted by the sound of stamping horses and cracking whips, which
the terrified locals call ‘Cliff’s holiday’ (pp. 102–3). Nancy has a
similar determination to have her own way; Priscilla remarks how
Nancy behaved as a child: ‘If you wanted to go to the field’s length,
the field’s length you’d go; and there was no whipping you, for you
156 TERENCE DAWSON

looked as prim and innicent as a daisy all the while’ (p. 150). The
reference to ‘whipping’ is perhaps not entirely fortuitous. The tale
of Cliff’s holiday, with the stamping of horses and the cracking of a
whip, symbolises Nancy’s periodic fits of irrational, headstrong de-
termination, a tendency that has emotionally isolated her.
That the Lantern Yard brethren function as father-figures for
Silas, and the conversation in the Rainbow is entirely about
Mr Lammeter, suggest that Nancy’s problem with Godfrey stems
from her relation with her father. This corresponds exactly to Jung’s
views on the animus. He held that a woman who has little under-
standing about the nature of her own animus will very often develop
a tendency to express forceful and arbitrary opinions that ‘have the
character of solid convictions that are not lightly shaken, or of prin-
ciples whose validity is seemingly unassailable’ (CW, 55vii, 331).
Not surprisingly, such a tendency usually stems from an exagger-
ated attachment to her father in her childhood (CW, 55xiv, 232).
Thus, Mr Cliff’s relationship with his son may be read as a symbolic
representation of the psychological effect that Mr Lammeter has
had, unwittingly, upon Nancy. The son who dies is ‘equivalent’ to
the Godfrey on whom Nancy has turned her back. Cliff’s holiday is
a symbolic description of the irrational aggression which can take
possession of a woman and its origins in the foibles of a doting
father. The Lantern Yard’s arbitrary judgement of Silas symbolises
the manner in which a woman whose animus demonstrates wildly
conflicting tendencies might arrive at a decision of significance to
her. His expulsion is therefore an archetypal representation of
Nancy’s need to distance herself from the ‘assembly of fathers’ that
make up such a large part of her animus.
The surface narrative and the deeper structures implied by the
text thus produce radically different readings of the events. On the
surface, it appears that the reason for Nancy’s self-imposed isola-
tion is that her fiancé has jilted her, that the Lantern Yard brethren
are just a narrow-minded sect, and that the villagers represent the
conversation of rustics. A literal reading of the events can lead only
to the conclusion that we should not look too closely at the novel’s
coherence. A psychological analysis of both structures and themes
allows one to admire its coherence. It suggests that Godfrey’s irregu-
lar attentions correspond to Nancy’s fears that the two groups of
men described in the novel symbolise the reason for these fears: she
is still so attached to her father that she is reluctant to trust any
other man.
 STRUCTURE AND EXPERIENCE IN SILAS MARNER 157

Jung defined the condition in which a woman falls prey to her own
fantasies about her animus as animus-possession. By this term, he
meant to indicate that opinionatedness that can be shown to be condi-
tioned by her animus does not reflect a woman’s essential personality:
it merely signals a maladjustment in her notions about men (CW, 55vii
331; ix,
ix ii, 29). The situation at the outset of the novel, in which
Nancy is living in self-imposed isolation, in a home which is haunted
by the sound of stamping horses and cracking whips, thus symbolises a
‘loss’ of her true female identity. She has withdrawn into herself to the
point of being almost invisible, and Eppie (the other important female
character) is suffering from inadequate attention. In a novel written by
a woman, their situation is not only significant but also disturbing.
[…]
Silas’s discovery of Eppie on his hearth, and the unexpected birth of
his love for an abandoned creature, represent the renewal of Nancy’s
love for Godfrey. In other words, Eppie personifies an aspect of her
nature that Nancy had been denying (or, in psychoanalytic terminol-
ogy, repressing). Thus, if the rehumanisation of Silas corresponds to
Nancy’s warming again to Godfrey, then Eppie personifies Nancy’s
burgeoning love. This is why Eppie has and requires no depth of char-
acter: she is an archetypal image of a daughter-figure in an older
woman’s imagination. It is because Nancy’s difficulties stem directly
from her over-attachment to her father that Eppie’s education is en-
tirely entrusted to a symbolic foster-father. Silas’s growing devotion to
Eppie signals a process deep in Nancy’s unconscious, working towards
the correction of her self-doubts.
Had Godfrey acknowledged Eppie at his father’s New Year party,
Nancy would have withdrawn still further from society and become
another Priscilla: competent, no doubt, but never having had the
experience of a relationship. In other words, he would have taken
Eppie into the Red House, and she would have been left with only
the dried leaves that she treasures for his sake, longing to marry him
and have his child. The novel traces the ‘process’ she has to go
through before she is ready to overcome her tendency to long for
‘what was not given’ (p. 215). Her dilemma determines not only the
course of its two separate stories but also the nature of the intercon-
nexions between them. Silas’s redemption through love is a sym-
bolic representation of the way in which Nancy gradually
overcomes instinctive tendencies in her personality which might
have become detrimental to both her aims and her happiness.
[…]
158 TERENCE DAWSON

In psychological terms, the novel is not composed of two ‘plots’ of

equal value. It tells one story on two different levels of fictional repre-
sentation. It is about Nancy’s relation with Godfrey, which has been
made difficult as a result of an over-attachment to her father and a
corresponding tendency to suspect the worth of any other man. It tells
how Nancy gradually overcomes a self-destructive tendency to indulge
in unconscious fears, fantasies, and arbitrary decisions detrimental to
the happiness she desires. By working at her relationship with
Godfrey, she gradually overcomes those deeply-ingrained tendencies
in her character which could so easily have led her into increasing
emotional isolation and prevented her from making her peace with
Godfrey, as she so evidently wants to do. The novel traces the process
Nancy unconsciously goes through before she finally, albeit only tenta-
tively, comes to terms with her situation: she is (and in all likelihood
will remain) childless, but she now knows that the ‘partner’ in her own
imagination fully accepts their situation.
Although I have endeavoured to show that one can deduce
Nancy’s central function in the novel only from textual evidence,
the basis of my argument supposes that the dilemma facing Nancy
must also be relevant to George Eliot. There are, however, few
obvious parallels between Nancy and Marian Evans. The fictional
character is clearly not the carrier of the author’s conscious person-
ality, but the carrier of an aspect of her unconscious personality. A
good description of the distinction between these two concepts is
supplied by Edward Whitmont’s definition of the difference
between the ego and the dream-ego:

In any normal person’s dream the ‘I’ as identity-carrier may appear

altered and dissociated. It may seem to have lost the conscious ego’s
value and action capacities and to have taken on strange new ones;
the dream-ego frequently feels and acts in a way which is uncharac-
teristic of the waking ego, or it cannot act at all, as in the dream of
wanting to run away but instead standing paralysed on the spot.14

There is no reason why the pivotal character in a novel should re-

semble the author. But, just as the dream-ego’s behaviour will always
reveal an important aspect of the ego’s unconscious personality, so
too, in a novel, will the pivotal character’s reactions to the dilemma
facing him/her reveal an important aspect of its author. Nancy’s re-
actions have much in common with those of George Eliot.
Silas is about forty years old at the beginning of the novel, and
Nancy is about forty years old at the end – Eliot’s age at the time of
 STRUCTURE AND EXPERIENCE IN SILAS MARNER 159

writing. We know that the novelist’s early life was considerably af-
fected by her relation with her father.15 When Nancy separates herself
sufficiently from her father to set her hopes on Godfrey she is about
the same age as Marian Evans was in 1842, when her refusal to go to
church led to a violent quarrel with her father. In spite of this,
however, he continued to influence her greatly, even after his death.
Marian met G. H. Lewes in October 1851: he was still married, even
though he was no longer attached to his wife. She knew the indignity
of having to keep her affair with him secret – the parallel with Molly is
obvious; Nancy, one notes, suffered no less for her ‘secret’ love for
Godfrey. Her instinct to withdraw into herself and to cross-question
herself mercilessly was shared by her creator, who was unusually de-
pressed throughout 1860, occasioned at least in part by society’s con-
tinued refusal to accept her relation with Lewes. In spite of all the love
by which she was surrounded, and for all her literary success, she con-
tinued to be prey to an astonishing lack of confidence in herself.
Dessner and others have drawn attention to a great many parallels
between the life and the fiction.16 There is ample evidence to suggest
that the dilemma I have identified as confronting Nancy is comparable
to that which faced Eliot in 1860. Its ending represents a tentative res-
olution to an enormously painful personal experience that ‘thrust’
itself upon Eliot in 1860.
Perhaps the most significant feature of this reading, however, is
that it provides a substantial link between her previous and her sub-
sequent novels. Maggie Tulliver loses her chance of true happiness
when she rejects Stephen Guest and Romola is attracted to an op-
portunist who conceals both his character and Tessa from her: the
parallel with Nancy’s situation is self-evident. The vulnerability of
both Maggie and Romola stems from their relationships with their
respective fathers, relationships which prevent them from discover-
ing their own independent worth until they have forfeited any possi-
bility of the happiness they sought. All three works are centrally
concerned with a father’s unwittingly negative influence on a female
character: the same, one might add, could also be held for
Middlemarch. Thus, whilst in many ways surprising, this reading of
Silas Marner in effect re-places the novel in its context. As to why it
assumed the form it has, which seems to centre on two male charac-
ters, one can only speculate: for my part, as I maintained at the
outset, I believe that the figure of Savonarola so weighed upon
Eliot’s spirits that her creative imagination spontaneously produced
a ‘compensatory’ image whose purpose was to give her ‘light
160 TERENCE DAWSON

enough to trusten by’.17 If this was indeed so, Silas Marner is no less
therapeutic than her other novels.
This conclusion raises one further question, and one must touch
on it even though it cannot be satisfactorily resolved. To what extent
was Eliot conscious of the nature of the dilemma I have outlined?
We can never know, but that Nancy never fully realises the debt that
she, no less than Godfrey, owes to Silas signals that the ending rep-
resents but a tentative solution to the problem with which the novel
is concerned. Nancy may never again give way to such fears as occa-
sioned her initial withdrawal from life, but her author might.
Indeed, one notes that a considerable part of Felix Holt is a develop-
ment of the theme explored in Silas Marner, which would suggest
that Eliot only very partially integrated the lesson learned by Nancy
at the end of her tale about the weaver of Raveloe. One remembers
Mrs Transome’s bitter remark: ‘A woman’s love is always freezing
into fear. She wants everything, she is secure in nothing [ … ] God
was cruel when he made woman.’18 Silas Marner illustrates how a
woman who is uncertain of her feminine worth risks falling victim
to negative fantasies of her own devising and illustrates the psycho-
logical origin of Eliot’s own deep-rooted insecurity, succinctly ex-
pressed by Nancy’s ‘longing for what was not given’. It tells how a
woman whose love had frozen into fear unconsciously discovered a
‘light enough to trusten by’ that allowed her to achieve at least a
partial escape from her own self-doubts and a partial fulfilment of
her desires.

From Modern Language Review, 88:1 (1993), 26–45.

NOTES
[This essay is taken from Terence Dawson’s article ‘“Light enough to trusten
by”: Structure and Experience in Silas Marner’, which provides a useful in-
troduction to the novel and its critical history. As with Johnstone’s essay (6),
Dawson proceeds in the assumption that there is a direct relationship
between life and literature. Thus Dawson contends that Eliot’s novels as a
whole illuminate her life. In Silas Marner, the character of Nancy Lammeter
can be read as the ‘carrier’ of the author’s unconscious self. Dawson draws
heavily on the work of Carl Jung, notably his concept of the ‘animus’, the
mental image of the opposite sex held by an individual which affects his/her
relationships. Dawson is also interested in the structure of the novel, partic-
ularly in Eliot’s use of parallels, binary opposites and ‘shadow’ personalities,
the latter offering insights into why a particular character acts as s/he does.
 STRUCTURE AND EXPERIENCE IN SILAS MARNER 161

All quotations in the essay are taken from Silas Marner (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1967). Eds]

1. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 60.

2. W. J. Harvey, Victorian Fictions: A Guide to Research, ed. Lionel

Stevenson (Cambridge, MA, 1964), p. 296. See also R. T. Jones,
George Eliot (Cambridge, 1970), p. 31 and William E. Buckler
‘Memory, Morality, and the Tragic Vision in the Early Novels of
George Eliot’, in The English Novel in the Nineteenth Century: Essays
on the Literary Meditations of Human Values, ed. George Goodin
(Urbana, IL, 1972), p. 159.

3. The most important of these early re-evaluations of Silas Marner are:

Jerome Thale, ‘George Eliot’s Fable: Silas Marner’, in The Novels of
George Eliot (New York, 1959); Fred C. Thomson, ‘The Theme of
Alienation in Silas Marner’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 20 (1965),
69–84; Ian Milner, ‘Structure and Quality in Silas Marner’, Studies in
English Literature, 6 (1966), 717–29; David R. Carroll, ‘Silas
Marner: Reversing the Oracles of Religion’ in Literary Monographs 1,
ed. Eric Rothstein and T. K. Dunseath (Madison, WI, 1967), pp.
167–200, 312–14.

4. Ruby Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (London, 1976), p. 438.

5. Lawrence Jay Dessner, ‘The Autobiographical Matrix of Silas Marner’,

Studies in the Novel, 11 (1979), 251–82. Redinger’s and Dessner’s
findings have been questioned by Alexander Welsh in George Eliot and
Blackmail (Cambridge, MA, 1985), p. 167.

6. Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Life’s Empty Pack: Notes Towards a Literary

Daughteronomy’, Critical Inquiry, 11 (1985), 355–84 (p. 360).

7. John Preston, ‘The Community of the Novel: Silas Marner’,

Comparative Criticism, 2 (1980), 121; also Susan R. Cohen, ‘“A
History and a Metamorphosis”: Continuity and Discontinuity in Silas
Marner’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 25 (1983), 414.

8. See George Eliot’s Journal entry for 28 November 1860: ‘I am engaged

now in writing a story, the idea of which came to me after our arrival
in this house, and which has thrust itself between me and the other
book [Romola] I was meditating’, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon
S. Haight, 7 vols (London, 1954–56), III, 360.

9. A striking exception is Lilian Haddakin, who writes that Nancy is

‘vitally important in the rendering of “feeling and form” on the realis-
tic level’. She thereupon drops the point: see ‘Silas Marner’, in Critical
Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (London, 1970), p. 74.
162 TERENCE DAWSON

10. Interest in Jung has concentrated too much on his ideas about arche-
typal images (the ‘object’ of experience), and not enough on the need to
identify the ‘subject’ – the perceiving consciousness – of the experience
in question. Clearly, how one interprets a dream depends on the identity
of the subject whose dream it is. The same, I believe, is true of a novel.
11. C. G. Jung, The Collected Works, 20 vols (London, 1953–76), ix, ii, paras
29–33; hereafter cited as CW followed by volume and paragraph number.
12. The need to define him as such as self-evident. If one is reading the novel
in psychological terms, then one should be wary of assuming a one-to-
one relation between any character and a possible real-life original.
Godfrey certainly shares at least one major attribute of G. H. Lewes: de-
votion. But it would be mistaken to infer from this that Godfrey =
Lewes. The alternative is to view Godfrey as an image of masculinity
spontaneously produced by the author’s imagination, towards which
Nancy Lammeter is instinctively, almost irrationally, drawn.
13. One notes that at the end of the novel she is treating her father almost
as if he were a substitute child: see pp. 211–12.
14. Edward C. Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest (Princeton, NJ, 1978), p. 234.
15. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), esp. chs
2 and 100; or Jennifer Uglow, George Eliot (London, 1987).
16. Dessner, ‘The Autobiographical Matrix of Silas Marner’; see also
Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self.
17. One of Jung’s major theories was, of course, that the unconscious ‘com-
pensates’ the one-sidedness of the individual’s conscious attitude(s): for
example, ‘The unconscious processes that compensate the conscious
ego contain all those elements that are necessary for the self-regulation
of the psyche as a whole’ (CW, vii, 279; also 282–3; vi, 574–5).
18. George Eliot, Felix Holt, ed. Peter Coveney (Harmondsworth, 1972),
p. 488. For a discussion of parallels between Romola, Silas Marner, and
Felix Holt, see Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, ‘George Eliot’s Conception of
Sympathy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 40 (1985), 23–42.
 8

The Miser’s Two Bodies:

Silas Marner and the Sexual
Possibilities of the
Commodity
JEFF NUNOKAWA

I
What could be simpler than Silas Marner’s support for family
values? Forsaking her customary tact, Eliot fills the story with
simple maxims and paeans promoting a life with wives and children,
and emphatic caveats about a life without them. A faith in the family
she is elsewhere content confiding to the implications of her narra-
tive is here urged, and urged again, as conspicuous doctrine. Pulling
out the stops, Eliot pours her formidable but usually discreet didac-
tic energy into a straightforward channel of simple exhortation: ‘the
Squire’s wife had died long ago, and the Red House was without
that presence of the wife and mother which is the fountain of
wholesome love and fear in parlour and kitchen’;1 men without
women inhabit houses ‘destitute of any hallowing charm’ (p. 73)
and filled instead with the ‘scent of flat ale’ (p. 73); men without
women live in a region barren of the ‘sweet flowers of courtesy’ (p.
121); men without women dwell in a twilight zone of tedium vitae
whose only source of light is the memory of what is lost to them:

163
164 JEFF NUNOKAWA

pass[ing] their days in the half-listless gratification of senses dulled by

monotony … perhaps the love of some sweet maiden, the image of
purity, order, and calm, had opened their eyes to the vision of a life in
which the days would not seem too long, even without rioting; but the
maiden was lost, and the vision passed away, and then what was left to
them, especially when they had become too heavy for the hunt … ?
(p. 79)

The pains that patient Dolly Winthrop takes to teach the errant
weaver the work of raising a child are surely no greater than the
pains that Silas Marner takes to promote it. It is hard to imagine
how the difference between the wholesome delights of the semi-
traditional family life Silas Marner manages to sustain with his step-
daughter and the debilitating bleakness of his money love could be
remarked more blatantly or more often. The fine calibrations of a
moral scale able to weigh with utmost precision the specific densities
of characters as various as Mr Farebrother, Nicholas Bulstrode and
the Princess Halm-Eberstein are abandoned for the blunt dichotomy
of the primer when Eliot comes to assess the evil of the gold and the
goodness of the child:

The gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to

nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes
and hopes that forced his thoughts onward … to the new things that
would come with the coming years, when [she] would have learned
to understand how her father Silas cared for her … The gold had
asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and
blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom
and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away from his
weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday, re-awakening
his senses with her fresh life.
(p. 184)

Silas Marner’s commerce with his gold looks less dull in an earlier
description, where its deviation from the purity and order of tradi-
tional familial arrangements verges on forms of sexuality that both
Victorian and contemporary champions of those arrangements
apprehend as enemy number one:

It was pleasant to him to feel them in his palm, and look at their bright
faces … He handled them … till their form and colour were like the sat-
isfaction of a thirst to him; but it was only in the night … that he drew
them out to enjoy their companionship … at night came his revelry: at
night he closed his shutters, and made fast his doors, and drew forth his
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 165

gold. He … felt their rounded outline between his thumb and fingers,
and thought fondly of the guineas that were only half-earned by the
work of the loom as if they had been unborn children.
(pp. 65, 68, 70)

The pleasure that Eliot’s miser takes in this illicit atmosphere (‘only
in the night’; ‘at night came his revelry’, ‘at night he closed his shut-
ters, and made fast his doors’) resembles a condensed catalogue of
sexual deviance – incest, of course – the ‘rounded outlines’ which
are the object of his nocturnal fondlings are the bodies of his own
children ‘begotten by his labour’ – but also the range of perversions
that surround the ‘secret sin’ of masturbation. Eliot’s account of the
revelry of this ‘pallid, undersized’ man, isolated amongst full-bodied
strangers, reads like a case study of the solitary practice and enervat-
ing consequences of self-abuse imagined by nineteenth-century sex-
ology, consequences which range from bodily debilitation to
homosexuality. Intimations of solitary and more than solitary vices
are enfolded in the hard cash whose ‘rounded’ and ‘resistant out-
lines’ the miser fondles, outlines and ‘faces’ not only ‘his own’, but
also like his own.2 The miser’s self-love suggests one that dares not
speak its name, a love whose definition is glimpsed in the shadow of
Sodom (whose eponymic reputation was as active in the nineteenth
century as it is now) that hovers over ‘the city of Destruction’ from
which the miser is saved when the gold is replaced by the girl:

In the old days there were angels who came and took men by the
hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no
white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening
destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently
towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward;
and the hand may be a little child’s.
(pp. 190–1)3

What is remarkable about Eliot’s propaganda campaign on behalf of

familial propriety is less the lengths that she goes to in its prosecu-
tion, or even the alarming shapes that threaten it, than the
deficiency indicated by the very need for such a campaign in the first
place. Her frank efforts to propagate a preference for family ties, or,
more to our point here, her efforts to propagate an aversion for
other kinds of congress, marks a loosening in Silas Marner of the
quieter methods by which these things are usually inculcated in her
fiction; a loosening whose promiscuous consequences verge on the
166 JEFF NUNOKAWA

regions of perversity; a loosening that we will eventually return to

as a crisis of capital.

II
The appearance of impropriety that clings to the miser’s fondlings is
an affront to rules of proper bodily conduct, or more precisely, of
proper bodily contact; a flouting of restrictions imposed by a not
just Victorian standard of propriety on the body’s intercourse with
others, a challenge to the frequently informal bylaws charged with
the work of regulating sexual relations. Often dwelling outside the
annals of official or even explicit dictates, inhabiting instead ‘the
seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and
verbal manners’, the rules of bodily propriety are easier to observe
in their breach:4 like the sudden realisation of speed limits
prompted by the sound of a siren, proper distances between bodies
in and beyond the Eliot novel are typically measured by what
happens when those which should not, get too close; when inter-
course between a man and woman who are not married, or between
a man and another man, exceed correct or normal bounds: full scale
scandal explodes when Maggie Tulliver spends the night with
Stephen Guest, and when Arthur Donnithorne does more than that
with Hetty Sorrel; a scandal as intense as these is concentrated in
the parlour where Dorothea Casaubon:
saw, in the terrible illumination of a certainty which filled up all out-
lines, something which made her pause motionless, without self-
possession enough to speak. Seated with his back towards her on a
sofa which stood against the wall on a line with the door by which
she had entered, she saw Will Ladislaw; close by him and turned
towards him with a flushed tearfulness which gave a new brilliancy to
her face sat Rosamond, her bonnet hanging back, while Will leaning
towards her clasped both her hands in his and spoke in a low-toned
fervour.5
A fear of scenes like this one is present whenever bodies that
shouldn’t engage in such intercourse are left alone in the Eliot
novel. ‘[T]he terrible illumination of a certainty which filled up all
outlines’6 confirms a suspicion admitted earlier, when Dorothea
‘found herself thinking with some wonder that Will Ladislaw was
passing his time with Mrs Lydgate in her husband’s absence’;7 a sus-
picion like the one marked by the eyebrows raised when the
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 167

otherwise impeccable Daniel Deronda spends too much time alone

with Mrs Grandcourt: ‘After a moment’s silence, in which Sir Hugo
looked at a letter without reading it, he said, “I hope you are not
playing with fire, Dan – you understand me”’.8
The rumour of impropriety that Sir Hugo and Dorothea
Casaubon detect is not confined to unchaperoned intercourse
between unmarried men and women. It attends as well the closeted
interviews between men, such as those between Fred Vincy and
Peter Featherstone, who ‘would not begin the dialogue till the door
had been closed’.9 Mary Garth suspects that such ‘loitering’ costs
Vincy his ‘manly independence’;10 a perhaps related suspicion is cast
by the ‘peculiar twinkle’, in the eye of the old man: ‘When Fred
came in the old man eyed him with a peculiar twinkle, which the
younger had often had reason to interpret as pride in the satisfac-
tory details of his appearance’.11
And if the strictures governing body contact in Eliot are made
visible by their violation, their intensity is made vivid by all the care
that she takes to prevent their appearance in the first place. The
conduct book she keeps of the private interviews between Will
Ladislaw and Dorothea Brooke labours to demonstrate that no such
scene as that between Will and Rosamond occurs when these bodies
gather: ‘She gave her hand for a moment, and then they went to sit
down near the window, she on one settee and he on another oppo-
site’;12 ‘Will sat down opposite her at two yards’ distance’;13 ‘He
was standing two yards from her with his mind full of contradictory
desires and resolves’;14 ‘She moved automatically towards her
uncle’s chair … and Will, after drawing it out a little for her, went a
few paces off and stood opposite to her’.15
The eccentricity of all this detail widens if we consider that it is
delivered to the reader, who is privy to these private interviews, and
not, say, to Mrs Cadwallader, who might suspect closer contact
between Will and Dorothea from the other side of the closed door.
It is as if Eliot worries that our suspicion is sleepless enough to
imagine all the things she denies here going on in front of our faces;
as if she worries we might speculate, unless we are told otherwise,
that Dorothea gave Will her hand for much more than a moment; as
if she worries we would surmise, without explicit indication to the
contrary, that they stand or sit much less than two yards from one
another; as if she worries we would suppose, except for her denial,
that after drawing her chair, Will doesn’t walk ‘a few paces off’.
168 JEFF NUNOKAWA

Eliot compulsively lodges such affidavits in the minutia of inter-

views like these, little logbooks showing that bodies which may get
too close to one another don’t. Whatever Grandcourt sees when he
surprises Deronda and his wife alone, Eliot takes pains to show that
it is not what Dorothea sees when she comes across Will and
Rosamond: ‘What he saw was Gwendolen’s face … and Deronda
standing three yards off’;16 Grandcourt himself, when he is alone
with Gwendolen prior to their engagement, is ‘about two yards
distant’;17 even the somewhat ampler allowance of body contact
allotted to a betrothed couple is carefully measured: before they are
married, ‘[Lydgate] touched [Rosamond’s] ear and a little bit of her
neck under it with his lips’.18
Such precise accountings hold themselves accountable to a sense
of propriety always on the lookout for three feet on the floor. If
they sometimes seem to aspire to the condition of choreography,
they are always bending over backward to maintain for the bodies
that inhabit them a good reputation in the eyes of an unblinking
monitor of proper conduct. As with the neurosis which seems to
exaggerate, but actually clarifies the ordeals of civility, Eliot’s obses-
sive documentation of adherence to it reflects an endless demand
that bodies keep their proper distances. That such documentation,
while obsessive, is delivered without apparent thought, without any
sign of conscious intention, makes the conformity of the Victorian
novel to the rules of bodily propriety as automatic as our own. With
as little visible resolve as what is disclosed in the straightening of a
wrist or a walk, the duration of a handshake or the length, location
and depth of a kiss, the body everywhere bends to the rigours of
propriety, the body not more at home in the fiction of the nine-
teenth century than amongst the ways we live now.
Conducted unconsciously, the task of enforcing the rules of
bodily propriety draws upon the defensive industriousness we have
been trained to associate with what is unconscious. Eliot’s text
develops an elaborate network of impediments which assure the
conformity that it elsewhere documents in detail, tying hands that
shouldn’t wander, turning into marble forms not allowed to
embrace: ‘It was if [Deronda] saw Gwendolen drowning while his
limbs were bound’;19 ‘It had seemed to [Will Ladislaw] as if they
were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other’s
presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were
yearning’.20
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 169

The measures that Eliot’s text takes to prevent illicit intercourse

do not merely isolate the proscribed body; they do not merely
restrain the hand or the lips that would touch it. Such shapes are not
simply fettered and distanced, they are entirely altered or even
annulled as the meticulous labours of prohibition are aided by the
miracles of metamorphosis. The pressure of propriety has alchemi-
cal powers: Eliot substantiates her efforts to deny anything scan-
dalous about the intimacy between Ladislaw and Dorothea and
between Gwendolen and Deronda by converting the body forbidden
to the grasp into an object that one can see, but not touch.
Grandcourt may rest assured that his wife has avoided the extremi-
ties of adultery, not only because Deronda is ‘three yards off’ from
her, but also, and more importantly, because she is less a body
capable of receiving the licentious grasp than a painting capable of
compelling the admiring eye.21 ‘What he saw was Gwendolen’s face
of anguish framed black like a nun’s, and Deronda standing three
yards off from her with a look of sorrow.’22 Dorothea feels ‘help-
less’ to manifest her affection for Will because ‘her hands had been
tied from making up to him for any unfairness in his lot’.23 But even
if they weren’t tied, Dorothea wouldn’t lay her hands on Will
anyway, since all she wants to do is to look at him: ‘her hands had
been tied from making up to him for any unfairness in his lot. But
her soul thirsted to see him.’24
Eliot underwrites the distance she interposes between bodies that
shouldn’t touch by casting the relation between them as the two
dimensional communion of spectacle and audience. Or the body
that should not be ‘grasped’ is evacuated altogether:

The feeling Deronda endured in these moments he afterward called

horrible. Words seemed to have no more rescue in them than if he had
been beholding a vessel in peril of wreck – the poor ship with its many-
lived anguish beaten by the inescapable storm. How could he grasp the
long-growing process of this young creature’s wretchedness?25

Unchaperoned communion between a married woman and an

unmarried man is defined here as a kind of communication which
excludes any hands-on contact; as if that isn’t enough, what can’t
actually be grasped anyway is then put at more than arm’s length,
put at a distance as remote as a vessel on stormy waters seen from
the shore.
170 JEFF NUNOKAWA

Eliot’s accounts of the conduct of couples who shouldn’t touch

are sometimes less prolix than this, but seldom less busy abstracting
the prohibited body. Casaubon, for example, abandoning his wife
during their wedding tour, spends time ‘groping after his mouldy
futilities’ instead.26 That such precautions are doubled – physical or
grammatical (‘after’) distances are imposed which separate bodies
who are in any event incapable of touching or being touched – sug-
gests a now familiar anxiety: when it comes to physical intimacy, a
single layer of protection may not be enough.
As we might well know, a prophylactic urge to deform or make
disappear a body who appears susceptible to illicit embraces extends
beyond the work of George Eliot. Leaving aside for a moment
scenes and suppressions closer to home, recall the fate of David
Copperfield’s Steerforth when the plaintive wish that his ‘Daisy’ had
a sister puts into play a desire that it barely misses mentioning for
‘Daisy’ himself. The usual means by which homosexual appeal
between men is covered over even as it is constituted nearly disap-
pears here; the partition separating sanctioned from unsanctioned
male intercourse in the exchange between Copperfield and
Steerforth that we are about to encounter is narrowed to paper thin-
ness; the by now well-known female figure through whom a desire
between men is routinely routed reduced to a pretence as bare as the
‘friend’ whose troubles are really our own:27

The greater part of the guests had gone to bed as soon as the eating
and drinking were over; and we, who had remained whispering and
listening half-undressed, at last betook ourselves to bed, too.
‘Goodnight, young Copperfield,’ said Steerforth. ‘I’ll take care of
you.’
‘You’re very kind,’ I gratefully returned. ‘I am very much obliged to
you.’
‘You haven’t got a sister, have you?’ said Steerforth, yawning.
‘No,’ I answered.
‘That’s a pity,’ said Steerforth. ‘If you had one, I should think she
would have been a pretty, timid, little, bright-eyed sort of girl. I
should have liked to know her. Good night young Copperfield.’
‘Good night, sir,’ I replied.
I thought of him very much after I went to bed, and raised myself, I
recollected, to look where he lay in the moonlight, with his hand-
some face turned up, and his head reclining easily on his arm.28

And again, just as the possibility of illicit bodily contact gains point,
the body vaporises:
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 171

He was a person of great power in my eyes; that was, of course, the

reason of my mind running on him. No veiled future dimly glanced
upon him in the moonbeams. There was no shadowy picture of his
footsteps, in the garden that I dreamed of walking in all night.29

Where is Steerforth in the moonlit thoughts of the boy who admires

‘his handsome face turned up, and his head reclining easily on his
arm’ with an intensity given everything but a name? While the land-
scape of David’s dreamwork is pervaded by this ‘person of great
power’, his body is nowhere to be found there: ‘No veiled future
[even] dimly glanced upon him’; ‘there was no shadowy picture
[even] of his footsteps’.30
The line of causalities we have been tracing in the work of Eliot
and Dickens extends beyond the limits of the Victorian novel.
According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s revisionist history, the incli-
nation to conceal the male body freighted with homoerotic potential
takes on the global force of a systematic campaign in the war against
figuration waged by several generations of literary modernism; in
the urge towards abstraction that marks modernism, the strategy of
pre-emptive disappearance through which the likes of Steerforth,
Mordecai and Dorian Gray are disembodied expands to become the
general form of a comprehensive literary imperative:

Insofar as there is a case to be made that the modernist impulse

toward abstraction in the first place owes an incalculable part of its
energy precisely to turn-of-the-century male homo/heterosexual
definitional panic – and such a case is certainly there for the making,
in at any rate literary history from Wilde to Hopkins to James to
Proust to Conrad to Eliot to Pound to Joyce to Hemingway to
Faulkner to Stevens – to that extent the ‘figuration’ that had to be
abjected from modernist self-reflexive abstraction was not the figura-
tion of just any body, the figuration of figurality itself, but, rather,
that represented in a very particular body, the desired male body.31

The classic story of an absconded body that Sedgwick updates here

exhibits a distinct opposition between power and its victims, a
Manichaeanism implicit in any myth, or hypothesis of repression,
whether its culprit is a jealous god or the pressure of a homophobic
propriety. On one side there is the body; on the other, a conspiracy
to conceal the body. Displaced by plants or planets, or by non-
figurative literary landscapes on which nobody, and especially not
the proscribed physique, can be seen, the censored body is set
against the repressive forces that hide it. If the ruses of propriety
172 JEFF NUNOKAWA

that we have been assessing so far cast the prohibited body out of
sight, they stop short of infecting that body. Thus the Foucauldian
formation that Sedgwick elsewhere discovers, a ‘gay male rhetoric
… already marked and structured and indeed necessitated by the
historical shapes of homophobia’,32 has nothing at all to do with the
concealed corpus that she disinters in the passage I quoted before,
the body abstracted by a homophobia concerned only to repress,
rather than to constitute or contaminate it, the body that thus
retains an illicit purity even when it is spirited away.33
It would be imprudent, if not simply impossible, to deny the
enduring and practically pervasive vitality of the urge to hide this
body. The habit of abstraction that stretches beyond the Victorian
novel, beyond literary modernism into most contemporary spheres
of representation introjects, and thus pre-empts, the efforts of an
external censor to expunge the body seemingly ready to offer or to
receive the wrong kind of touch. Bodies not transformed by the
artful wands of sublimation are subject instead to the simpler inter-
ventions of a Mrs Grundy or a Jesse Helms.
But even side by side with the perennial effort to censor the pro-
scribed body, the forces of propriety are conducted as well, and
sometimes even better, through other, more invasive operations;
when these forces do not dissolve and displace the body that seems
capable of inviting or offering the wrong kind of touch, they take up
residence there. The forces of propriety infiltrate the physique they
decline to erase – as anybody knows, who has escaped the demand
for concealment only to feel in its place a sense of unease never
quite overcome. It is this deeper collaboration between propriety
and the endangered and dangerous body that we turn to now.

III
The boundaries of propriety are felt along the pulse: no less than
the novels they inhabit, the body in Eliot appears to absorb the rules
governing its conduct. If Eliot’s text takes and gives notice of these
rules in the spectacle of their violation, or in the immense and
minute stratagems it enlists for avoiding this spectacle, the body sit-
uated there registers the demands of propriety in the form of sensa-
tion and perturbations that arise when they are transgressed,
sensations and perturbations as slight and decisive as the usually
barely noticeable aches and pangs and tics that mark our own fear
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 173

that we have erred from the rigours of the social order. Well before
Adam Bede punishes Arthur Donnithorne for what he does with
Hetty Sorrel, even as ‘[h]is arm is stealing round her waist’,
Donnithorne feels the consequence of this act in the form of a vague
but effective unease: ‘already Arthur was uncomfortable. He took
his arm from Hetty’s waist’.34 When, during his courtship with
Gwendolen, Grandcourt exceeds even slightly the ‘limit of an
amorous homage’ (‘One day indeed … he had kissed not her cheek
but her neck a little below her ear’), she suffers distress:
‘Gwendolen, taken by surprise, had started up with a marked agita-
tion which made him rise too’.35
Such discomfort and agitation is most visible when it attends the
scene in Eliot that comes closest to asserting an illicit desire between
men, the nervous drama of intimacy between Daniel Deronda and
Mordecai. Just as the rules regarding bodily propriety are observed
in the Eliot novel only when they are violated, or in danger of being
violated, the homosexuality that never quite surfaces as explicit
theme is embodied in a homophobic unease – the aversion inspired
by Mordecai’s ‘spasmodic grasps’, ‘eager clasps’, his ‘thin hand
pressing [Deronda’s] arm tightly’: ‘Deronda coloured deeply, not
liking the grasp’; ‘Daniel [rose], with a habitual shrinking which
made him remove his hand from Mordecai’s’.36
Deronda’s aversion desists only when the hands that Mordecai
lays on him are disembodied; only when the clutch of Mordecai’s
fingers gives way to the ‘clutch of his thought’;37 ‘a yearning need
which had acted as a beseeching grasp’; a ‘tenacious certainty’ that
acts as ‘a subduing influence’ on Deronda.38 This sublimating tide
reaches its height near the end of the novel when the press of the
flesh that everywhere marks the intercourse between Deronda and
Mordecai is cast as the mere expression of a metaphysical commu-
nion, safely routed through a female vessel: ‘The two men clasped
hands with a movement that seemed part of the flash from
Mordecai’s eyes, and passed through Mirah like an electric shock.’39
The discomfort that such abstraction works to attenuate arises
again in the ‘strongly resistant feeling’ Deronda experiences when,
at the Synagogue, while he is ‘moving away with the rest’, the body
next to his unexpectedly breaks ranks:
he had bowed to his civil neighbour and was moving away with the
rest – when he felt a hand on his arm, and turning with the rather
unpleasant sensation which this abrupt sort of claim is apt to bring,
he saw close to him the white bearded face of that neighbour. …
174 JEFF NUNOKAWA

Deronda had a strongly resistant feeling: he was inclined to shake off

hastily the touch on his arm.40

Deronda’s civil neighbour is excessively so: the very remarking of

his closeness marks it as too close, just as the abruptness of the hand
on the arm betrays its deviation from normality. While we are prob-
ably inclined to dismiss Deronda’s reaction to this as an instance of
his often remarked priggishness, Eliot herself casts the ‘strongly
resistant feeling’ that arises for him in the face of even an apparently
slight eccentricity from the conventions of bodily contact as a
general response: everyone is apt to experience the ‘unpleasant sen-
sation which this abrupt sort of claim … bring[s]’. Eliot’s penchant
for declaring the situation of particular characters a universal condi-
tion is quite superfluous here: Deronda’s sensations are merely the
socially arranged reflex of the male subject when another man’s
body gets even a little too close, the male subject, it hardly seems
necessary to say, not limited to the literature of the nineteenth
century. After all, such responses could not be more familiar; they
are common to everybody who is subject to a sense of bodily propri-
ety no less active here and now than in the Victorian novel. The dis-
comfort that Arthur Donnithorne experiences and the agitation that
Gwendolen Harleth suffers are well known to anyone for whom
sexual guilt or sexual threat has ever taken form as a feeling of
unease; the aversion that Deronda senses when others of his own
gender get too close is the experience of every man, in and beyond
the Victorian novel.
But if these allergic reactions are only too familiar to a culture of
unease as much our own as George Eliot’s, their precise identity,
and the nature of the subject who suffers them, remains mysterious.
Eliot’s profile of these things is too shapeless to conform to a simple
physical or physiological definition; too vague to be solely attrib-
uted to the body. (‘[A]lready Arthur was uncomfortable’;
‘Gwendolen, taken by surprise, had started up with a marked agita-
tion which made him rise too’; ‘Deronda [did] not lik[e] the grasp’;
‘Daniel [rose], with a habitual shrinking which made him remove his
hand from Mordecai’s’; ‘Deronda had a strongly resistant feeling’.)
It’s not exactly or exclusively the body that shrinks habitually
from a deviant touch; it’s not exactly or exclusively the body that is
agitated or uneasy when a hand or a kiss steals past a limit at once
informal and excruciatingly precise. Nor is it exactly or exclusively
the mind that suffers these things. The amorphous experience
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 175

marked by Donnithorne’s discomfort, or Gwendolen Harleth’s agi-

tation, or Deronda’s ‘strongly resistant feeling’ or ‘rather unpleasant
sensation’ is confined neither to the province of the body nor the
spirit. To be subject to such ambiguous unease is to be a subject for
whom the labours of apprehension and the pains of the body are
utterly confused; a subject for whom the disturbances of the mind
melt into the diseases of the flesh; a subject for whom the laws of
propriety make two kinds of sense; a subject in whom a spirit that
knows the laws and a body that feels them are so mingled that they
cannot be distinguished. The subject susceptible to the forces of pro-
priety, the subject whom these forces are able not merely to repress
but to infiltrate, consists not of a body or a mind; it is instead a
hybrid formation where these strains are crossed.
The conflation of abstract consciousness and bodily experience
drives to the point of identity terms usually more loosely linked by
an atmosphere of analogical suffering especially dense in the Eliot
novel. What, for the very fact of its frequency, might pass for the
usual, even inevitable analogy between physical and metaphysical
disease takes on the consistency of an anagogical system in the
world of George Eliot: ‘Notions and scruples were like split needles,
making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating’;41
‘Will’s reproaches … were still like a knife-wound within her’;42
‘This man’s speech was like a sharp knife-edge drawn across her
skin’;43 ‘His words had the power of thumbscrews and the cold
touch of the rack’;44 ‘he’s got a tongue like a sharp blade, Bartle
has’;45 ‘as soon as he took up any antagonism, though only in
thought, he seemed to himself, like the Sabine warriors in the mem-
orable story – with nothing to meet his spear but flesh of his flesh’.46
The subject of mental duress in Eliot is everywhere haunted by a
body in pain, a phantom partner in suffering such as the one that
Maggie Tulliver devises to represent all her struggles:
a large wooden doll … which once stared with the roundest of eyes
above the reddest of cheeks … was now entirely defaced by a long
career of vicarious suffering. Three nails driven into the head com-
memorated as many crises in Maggie’s nine years of earthly struggle.47

Such chambers of torture can be found anywhere in an Eliot novel;

a parallel universe of physical unease, ranging from medieval
extremities of agony, to blander or subtler discomfort, hovers, like
the roar on the other side of silence, over the ordinary world of
abstract distress. The rhyme between apprehension and sensation,
176 JEFF NUNOKAWA

‘knowledge’ and ‘feeling’, praised by two Eliots48 as the touch of

the poet, is not the mark of any single class of consciousness; it is a
universal facility in the works of at least one of them. An honour-
destroying revelation ‘enters like a stab into Bulstrode’s soul’, and is
felt as much by his wife who ‘needed time to get used to her
maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life’.49 Less apocalyptic
apprehensions are no less linked to bodily trauma; even the normal
disappointments of maturity are shadowed by the ruin or amputa-
tion of the body: ‘life must be taken up on a lower stage of expecta-
tion, as it is by men who have lost their limbs’.50
What such comparisons offer with one hand they take away with
the other. It is of course in the nature of analogies to confirm the
difference between the terms they draw together, and the corre-
spondence that Eliot habitually proposes between physical and
metaphysical pain is no exception to this rule. Such analogies work
like the endlessly newsworthy discovery that psychological stress
takes tolls on the body ranging from colds to cancer; like the less
positivist intuition that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or the push and shove of daily life have more than figurative force;
like any incidental lifting of what one theorist of the body’s pains
calls ‘a Cartesian censorship’, a ‘rigorously enforced separation in
the subject between psyche and soma’.51 The usual link between
abstract and bodily discomfort in the Eliot novel depends upon and
reinforces their fundamental distinction.
But in the subject who suffers for even the smallest sins of impro-
priety, all differences between mind and body are abolished; in this
conventional character, the partial unity of psyche and soma accom-
plished by analogy gives way to the more astonishing achievement
of incarnation. If this character calls to mind a supernatural con-
junction, a word made flesh, it may be as usefully classed amongst
the more mundane annals of social reproduction. The subject whose
ambiguous sensations enforce the rules of propriety in the Eliot
novel joins ranks with an array of others anatomised by contempo-
rary investigations of the body’s social construction; the figure, for
example, whom Pierre Bourdieu describes as the embodiment of the
metaphysical imperatives of a social order:

If all societies … that seek to produce a new man through a process

of ‘deculturation’ and ‘reculturation’ set such store on the seemingly
most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal
manners, the reason is that, treating the body as a memory, they
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 177

entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e. mnemonic, form the

fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture. The
principles em-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of con-
sciousness, values given body, made body by the transubstantiation
achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy, capable of
instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political phi-
losophy, through injunctions as insignificant as ‘stand up straight’ or
don’t hold your knife in your left hand.52

The incorporation that Bourdieu describes here, the figure in whom

the ‘fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture’
are ‘made body’ is like the subject that a range of feminist theory
has in mind when it construes the sexed body as the incarnation of
an abstract gender system; it is like the subject at the centre of
Michel Foucault’s investigations of modern power formations, a
body who incorporates the discursive marks of the disciplinary pro-
cedures and sexual identifications that inhabits the brave new world
he charted.53
These various subjects of social discipline are too various to admit
any effort to lock them into step with one another. The embodi-
ments featured in recent speculations on the social uses of the flesh
cannot be neatly collated with the figure who is subject to the rules
of bodily propriety in the Eliot novel: the terms of mind and body
that are drawn together in these figures are too disparate to allow it.
But both the body made to bear the discipline of a social order and
the composite subject made to feel it are beings at the same time
carnal and abstract. In every case, the subject’s capacity to absorb
the various definitions and demands of the social order depends
upon his capacity to be at once spirit and flesh.
It is this conjunction, the one that characterises the subject of
social discipline in and beyond the Eliot novel, that is undone by the
miser’s passion in Silas Marner. We turn now to consider how the
miser’s commerce eludes both the pattern of abstraction which pre-
vents violations of the rules of proper conduct in the Eliot novel
from appearing in the first place, and, more crucially, the subjective
aversions which typically arrest them when they do. We turn now to
consider how the miser’s fondlings, his revelry with the ‘bright
faces’ and ‘rounded outlines’ of his coins supply both an object and
a subject capable of resisting what normally thwarts the illicit
embrace: we turn now to consider how a certain love of money
serves the interests of perversity by baffling all the forces of
propriety.
178 JEFF NUNOKAWA

IV
In Silas Marner, the love of money becomes the means of indemnify-
ing the subject and object of improper passion against the sense of
aversion that normally attacks it, and the force of abstraction that
normally eclipses it. In the miser’s love, the hybrid subject who is
vulnerable to the demands of propriety in the Eliot novel dissolves,
and when it does, the social discipline made solid in such a subject
melts into air. In the miser’s love, the character capable of sensa-
tions at once physical and metaphysical is dismantled, and replaced
by a subject entirely corporeal, and therefore immune to the amor-
phous sensations by which the body’s correct conduct is enforced.54
To chart the avenue of simplification by which Silas Marner
eludes the dictates of propriety, we need first to notice how the
miser and his money work to form one another. In a condensed
version of the labour theory of value, according to which the com-
modity’s worth reflects the bodily effort reposited there, both Silas
Marner and Silas Marner cast the miser’s money as the reproduction
of his own body – either his children, or his clones: ‘The crowns and
half crowns that were his own earnings’ are ‘begotten by his labour’
(p. 70); ‘He … thought fondly of the guineas that were only half
earned … as if they had been unborn children’ (p. 70); ‘It was pleas-
ant to feel them in his palm, and look at their bright faces, which
were all his own’ (p. 65).55 And, conversely, if the money is the re-
embodiment of Silas Marner, he, in turn, is the re-embodiment of
the coins: ‘like all objects to which a man devotes himself, they had
fashioned him into correspondence with themselves’ (p. 92).
The body with which Silas Marner comes to correspond is invul-
nerable to sensation of pain or bitterness or unease for the simple
reason that it is invulnerable to any sensation at all. ‘[H]idden away
from the daylight’, the gold is ‘deaf to the sound of birds’ – as well
as to every other sound; ‘[it] starts at no human tones’ (p. 184) –
nor does it start at any other tones. Like Dolly Winthrop’s child
who ‘looked like a cherubic head untroubled with a body’ (p. 139),
the coins are untroubled by a body, or, more exactly, untroubled as
a body, by any sensation – not only those arranged by ‘the sound of
birds’ or ‘human tones’, but also the more complex ones that cause
Silas Marner’s fiancée to ‘shrink’ with aversion from him: ‘didn’t
the gold [just] lie there after all?’ (p. 93).
Silas Marner identifies with the coins he adores by assuming a
version of their insensibility: ‘The gold had asked that he should sit
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 179

weaving longer and longer deafened and blinded more and more to
all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his
web’ (p. 184). Just as his money is cast in his image, the miser himself
is reformed in the shape of his money. This reciprocity replenishes
the relation between labourer and artifact whose diminution Elaine
Scarry mourns as the cost of ‘the capitalist economic system’:

The large all-embracing artifact, the capitalist economic system, is

itself generated out of smaller artifacts that continually disappear and
reappear in new forms: out of the bodies of women and men, mater-
ial objects emerge; out of material objects commodities emerge; out
of commodities, money emerges; out of money, capital emerges. …
In its final as in its first form, the artifact is a projection of the human
body; but in its final form, unlike its first, it does not refer back to the
human body because in each subsequent phase it has taken as the
thing to which it refers only that form of the artifact immediately pre-
ceding its own appearance. … The overall work of its successive
forms is to steadily extend the first consequence (capital is, like the
solitary pair of eyeglasses or any other made object, the projected
form of bodily labour and needs) and to steadily contract the second:
each new phase enables the line of reciprocity to pull back further
and further from its human source until the growing space between
the artifact and its creator is at last too great to be spanned either in
fact or in an act of perception.56

All that Elaine Scarry declares lost on the path of abstraction

arranged by the ‘capitalist economic system’ is restored in the
miser’s world, congested with the full complement of two-way
traffic between the labourer and even his most attenuated issue. Not
only does the miser’s money return to him in an ‘act of perception’,
but ‘in fact’: no less than the body that wears them is transformed
by eyeglasses, Silas Marner is changed by the money he adores.
But there is more than one difference between the eyes given sight
by the artifact of labour that Scarry mentions, and the miser made
blind by the tokens of his work. While the artifact that Scarry envi-
sions reforms the body, the coins effect the complex character we
have noticed before, the character in whom the body and mind are
merged. The miser’s blindness is not of the eyes: when Silas Marner
takes on the insensitivity of the coins, he is stripped not of his
senses, but rather his sensibility. Here, the composite character who
experiences the aversions that arise when the rules of propriety are
violated is reduced to the miser’s ‘shrunk[en]’ frame (p. 69). A dis-
tinction that the novel admits in the difference it stages between
180 JEFF NUNOKAWA

natural and adopted fathers appears again when the miser’s physical
senses are parted from metaphysical ones; the doors of perception
are cleansed of their abstract dimensions, extricated from the facul-
ties of metaphysical apprehension with which they are usually
entangled.
And as the miser falls to sleep in spirit, he awakens to a utopian
erotics of pure sensation: ‘now when all purpose was gone’, the
‘habit of looking towards the gold and grasping it with a sense of
fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of
desire’ (p. 65). The ‘thrill of satisfaction’ that the coin provides con-
sists entirely of its ‘touch’; the miser’s ‘phantasm of delight’, drawn
down from the realm of spirit where phantasms dwell normally, is
now no more than the simple matter of ‘feeling’ (p. 68) and ‘han-
dling’ (p. 129) the coins. Just as his ‘life’ ‘narrows and hardens into
a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that has no relation to
any other being’ (p. 68), his ‘revelry’ (p. 70) of ‘immediate sensa-
tion’ (p. 68) has no relation to anything other than itself.
The miser, now an entirely sensuous being, is no longer a subject
in whom the physical and the metaphysical are merged, the subject
who is subject to the rules of propriety in and beyond the Eliot
novel. A body-wholly-body, the miser is ready to enjoy the revelry
that we noticed earlier, a perverse pleasure that would sicken others,
and again, not just in the work of George Eliot. And if the influence
that the coins exert on the miser renders him immune to the disci-
plinary aversions to which subjects are generally susceptible when
they cross the borders of propriety, the reciprocal projection, which
casts the coins as the issue of his body, renders it such a transgres-
sion in the first place. Silas Marner’s fairy-tale telling of the labour
theory of value reverses the defensive bias by which bodies that
should not be touched are abstracted in the Eliot novel. That the
‘rounded outlines’ the miser handles and feels are those of a body is
the outcome of a current countering the general tide in the Eliot
novel, a tide which draws the desire to touch back into the safety
zone of disembodiment.
All of this perversity is dispelled when the miser’s money disap-
pears, and his step-daughter arrives on the scene. The therapy
administered by the girl who replaces the coins reattaches the sensi-
bility from which the miser is freed by the ministrations of the gold,
‘reawakening his senses with her fresh life’: ‘as her life unfolded, his
soul, long stupefied in a cold narrow prison, was unfolding too, and
trembling gradually into full consciousness’ (pp. 184, 185). Through
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 181

his life as a father, Silas Marner’s feelings are freighted now with
metaphysical capacities; his delight in Eppie consists not simply in
sensing her, but also in sensing the need to sense her: ‘I’d got to feel
the need o’ your looks and your voice and the touch o’ your little
fingers’ (p. 226). The abstractions of sensibility are affianced again
to the physical senses when Silas Marner leaves off the love of gold,
and takes up the love of a girl. While the miser ‘feels’ the gold in
one sense only, the ‘senses’ that are reawakened under the influence
of Eppie are doubled, consisting not only of the capacity to appre-
hend matters of the senses, ‘the old winter-flies that came crawling
forth in the early spring sunshine’ (p. 184), but also of the capacity
to apprehend things metaphysical.
While the miser’s revelry accompanies the divorce of his senses
from abstract sensations, the weaver’s respectability emerges with
their remarriage; with this remarriage, the normal, the normalised
subject reappears. Silas Marner forsakes the eccentricities that ren-
dered him a stranger in a strange land; ‘making himself as clean and
tidy as he could’ (p. 183) he enrols in a remedial course on familial
respectability, entrusting both Eppie and himself to the dictates of
chapel and hearth. ‘He had no distinct idea about the baptism and
the churchgoing, except that Dolly had said it was for the good of
the child’ (pp. 183–4).
Silas Marner’s ‘new self’ (p. 201) is subject to a restraint quite
absent for the old one, a reluctance to lay a hand on the body that
he considers his ‘own child’. The sense of propriety that slept while
the miser fondled ‘rounded outlines’ ‘all his own’ returns here with
a force sufficient to make even the prospect of wholesome body
contact unbearable to him. Silas Marner is compelled to refuse the
measures which Dolly Winthrop or George Eliot name, or fail to
name, with a compunction matching his own: ‘Dolly Winthrop told
him that punishment was good for Eppie, and as for rearing a child
without making it tingle a little in soft and safe places now and then,
it was not to be done’ (p. 185). The squeamishness manifested in a
circumlocution that avoids even the mention of touching the body
appears again when the miser declares that he must avoid any disci-
pline that involves its practice: ‘“She’d take it all for fun,” he
observed to Dolly, “if I didn’t hurt her, and that I can’t do”’
(p. 188). After its brief interruption, the regime that enforces the
restrictions imposed on touching proceeds now with no end in sight.
The laying on of hands that was to ‘frighten [Eppie] off touching
things’, is eschewed for other methods to prevent such contact: Silas
182 JEFF NUNOKAWA

Marner, subject now to the restraint he is charged with imposing,

must do what Eliot does with the measures of distance she takes to
prevent the illicit touch of bodies, ‘must do what [he] can to keep
’em out of her way’ (p. 188).
Silas Marner takes decisive steps to seal off the channel which
enabled the miser’s exemption from propriety, steps to stop the
intercourse of gold and bodies that produced both a physique able
to avert those sensations, and a physique that would allow them to
be incited in the first place. The novel puts an end to the intercourse
between gold and bodies that makes Silas Marner a purely sensuous
subject, and which casts the money he hoards as a shape susceptible
to an illicit touch. At first, the miser’s ‘blurred vision’ confuses the
gold with the girl, ‘but instead of hard coin with the familiar resist-
ing outline, his fingers encountered soft warm curls’ (p. 167). The
correction which takes form here as a tactile proof that even the dis-
solute miser can understand, is expanded as the novel progresses,
driving a deeper difference between the gold and the body: not only
is the weaver wrong to suppose that the gold is the girl, he is wrong
to imagine that the gold becomes the girl. A story of metamorpho-
sis, in which gold is transformed into a body, and thus able to pre-
serve its character in translation, gives way to a story of substitution,
in which the body merely replaces the gold. This fading of the
rumour of transubstantiation takes place in Silas Marner’s mind: at
first, ‘he could have only said that the child was come instead of the
gold – that the gold had turned into the child’ (p. 180); finally
though, he succumbs to the force of disenchantment, teaching Eppie
that he ‘had taken her golden curls for his lost guineas’ (p. 204).
While this account puts both the models of metamorphosis and sub-
stitution into play, it consigns the first to the miser’s own dubious
perceptions – his taking gold curls for lost guineas is almost indistin-
guishable from mistaking gold curls for lost guineas – while granting
the second the irresistible power of fact.
Eliot works overtime to discredit the affiliation between money
and bodies; the differences that the miser encounters are the subject
of the homily that we have encountered before:
The gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading
to nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of
changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward … to the new
things that would come with the coming years, when [she] would
have learned to understand how her father Silas cared for her. … The
gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deaf-
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 183

ened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony
of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away
from his weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday, re-
awakening his senses with her fresh life.
(p. 184)

With an economy we are entitled to expect from a novelist whose

words, no matter how many, always do as much as they can, Eliot
encourages family values, and discourages the condition that dis-
rupted them. However briefly: others have laboured even more con-
sistently to sustain a familial, a familiar regime of propriety whose
profits and whose losses have only accrued with the passing of time.

From Victorian Studies, 36:3 (1993), 273–92.

NOTES
[This extract is one of two explicitly socio-political approaches to Silas
Marner reproduced in this volume (see Jim Reilly’s discussion of the novel,
which follows). The essay, which first appeared in Victorian Studies in 1993,
forms part of Jeff Nunokawa’s full-length study, The Afterlife of Property:
Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (1994). In addition to exploring
the ways in which nineteenth-century novelists exploit fears about the insta-
bility of property, Nunokawa considers the ways in which the nineteenth-
century novel plot often turns on the domestic consequences of economic
failure. Some inalienable property is needed to offset the idea that anything
can be commodified and as Nunokawa points out, that ‘secure state’ is
invariably the character of the heroine. Nunokawa foregrounds Silas
Marner’s anxieties about the kinds of alienation caused by money and capital
alongside Eliot’s stress on the virtues of family values and the role of Eppie
in promoting them. Thus in Nunokawa’s reading of the novel, the story is
one of ‘metamorphosis’, a transformation from solitary hoarder and mastur-
bator to cleansed family man and consumer. It is through Eppie’s fortuitous
arrival that the ‘normalised subject reappears’. All quotations in the essay are
taken from The Mill on the Floss (New York: Penguin, 1985). Eds]

1. George Eliot, Silas Marner (New York, 1985), p. 72. All further refer-
ences contained in the text.
2. On the nineteenth-century construction of homosexuality as a desire
defined by the similarity, even the identity, between its subject and
object, as a construction which displaces the older notion of inversion,
which involved no notion of similarity or sameness between these
terms, see Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain,
from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (New York, 1979), pp.
184 JEFF NUNOKAWA

23–32. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s assessment of the current

hegemony of this construction: ‘homosexuality … is now almost uni-
versally heard as referring to relations of sexuality between persons
who are, because of their sex, more flatly and globally categorised as
the same’. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet
(Berkeley, CA, 1990), pp. 158–9.
3. While ‘the City of Destruction’ alludes most immediately to Pilgrim’s
Progress, behind that is Sodom. Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek
Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England (Berkely, CA, 1985),
surveys the ways in which the Biblical account of Sodom and
Gomorrah was invoked in the nineteenth century to define and wage
war against homosexual activity (pp. 13–15; 258; 275–6; 278–9; 348).
See also Sedgwick, Epistemology, 127–8; Robert J. Corber,
‘Representing the “Unspeakable”: William Godwin and the Politics of
Homophobia’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1 (1990), 85–101;
A. D. Harvey, ‘Prosecutions for Sodomy in England at the Beginning of
the Nineteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), 939–48.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice
(London, 1977), p. 94. This is of course not to say that such rules are
exclusively implicit; they are grasped as well by the formal mechanisms
of social power. For a discussion of nineteenth-century legal prosecu-
tion of homosexuality see note 3; for a potent contemporary example
of the legal codification of homophobia, see the majority opinion of
the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986).
5. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York, 1988), p. 355.
6. Ibid., p. 634.
7. Ibid., p. 355.
8. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (New York, 1988), p. 389.
9. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 89.
10. Ibid., p. 213.
11. Ibid., p. 89.
12. Ibid., p. 442.
13. Ibid., p. 298.
14. Ibid., p. 445.
15. Ibid., pp. 514–15.
16. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 521.
17. Ibid., p. 255.
18. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 289.
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 185

19. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 389.

20. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 444.
21. None of this of course denies the erotic investment of the visual that
has concerned psychoanalytic theory. See Sigmund Freud’s discussion
of scopophilia in his ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, in the Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24
vols, trans. James Strachley (London, 1957), Vol. 14, 109–40, and
Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality (London, 1953); and Laura Mulvey,
‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16:3 (1975), 6–18. My
concern is to notice that the body’s displacement by spectacle in the
Eliot novel averts the hazards of impropriety, rather than averting the
matter of sexuality altogether.
22. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 521.
23. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 440.
24. Ibid.
25. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 521.
26. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 168.
27. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Drive (New York, 1985).
28. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (New York, 1985), p. 140.
29. Ibid., p. 140.
30. Ibid.
31. Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet, p. 167.
32. Ibid., p. 165.
33. For a critique of such accounts, see Michel Foucault, The History of
Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley (New
York, 1980), pp. 15–49.
34. George Eliot, Adam Bede (New York, 1988), p. 183.
35. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 275.
36. Ibid., pp. 487, 433, 327, 327, 429.
37. Ibid., p. 411.
38. Ibid., p. 431.
39. Ibid., p. 640.
40. Ibid., p. 311.
41. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 18.
186 JEFF NUNOKAWA

42. Ibid., p. 652.

43. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 512.
44. Ibid., p. 582.
45. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 213.
46. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 307.
47. George Eliot, Mill on the Floss (New York, 1980), pp. 78–9.
48. ‘To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern no shade of quality
escapes it … a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into
feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge’ (Eliot,
Middlemarch, p. 183); See also T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in
The Sacred Wood (London, 1920).
49. Eliot, Middlemarch, pp. 568, 614.
50. Ibid., p. 533.
51. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, CA, 1988), pp.
147, 148.
52. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 94.
53. For lucid critical accounts of feminist theorisations of sex as the incar-
nation of gender, see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism,
Nature and Difference (New York, 1989), pp. 39–72; Judith Butler,
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York,
1990), and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (New York, 1979) and History of Sexuality. Such unifications of
body and mind may be noticed at times to work like the analogies we
have considered in the Eliot novel to maintain the distinction between
these terms even as it remarks the suspension of that distinction. The
embodiment of social principles may be read as an event, where what is
fundamentally or primordially abstract is made flesh.
54. For other accounts of intercourse between sexuality and capital, see
Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism
(Berkeley, CA, 1987), pp. 29–58; 113–36.
55. The various permutations of the labour theory of value all involve
complications which, even apart from the obvious reason for doing so,
would reject the conception of the miser’s money as his biological issue
or his reincarnation. But in its deviation from the contemporary litera-
ture on the relations between the body and economic value, Silas
Marner describes an important current within it. The condensation of
the labour theory of value, the conception of the coins that the miser
earns not as the abstract effect or measure of his work, but rather as
‘unborn children’, the confusion of the earnings that he ‘begets’ by his
labour as the issue begotten through another kind of labour, enacts a
 THE MISER’S TWO BODIES 187

compulsion to incarnate that appears in a wide range of Victorian

thought. Catherine Gallagher notes that the major political economists
of the nineteenth century, as well as their critics, not only regarded
labour as the source of wealth, but also, when calling for a recognition
of the superior value of commodities that serve to replenish the body
‘accord a privileged position to the commodities that are most easily
turned back to flesh’. See Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Bio-Economics of
Our Mutual Friend’, in Michel Feher (ed.), Fragments for a History of
the Human Body, Part Three (New York, 1989), p. 351. The urge to
restore the commodity to the body is, according to Gallagher, mani-
fested as a more radical identification of these terms in Our Mutual
Friend. Here, Gallagher argues, the commodity and the body are
revealed to be the same thing. An analogous identification appears in
Silas Marner when the miser casts his money in the shape of a body.
For a survey of the history of the labour theory of value, see Maurice
Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith
(Cambridge, 1973).
56. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the
World (New York, 1985), pp. 256–60. As Scarry herself acknowledges
elsewhere in The Body in Pain, her reading of the Marxist scenario may
be taken to literalise excessively the presence of the body of labour in
the object of labour (pp. 245–6). To that extent, The Body in Pain par-
ticipates in, rather than merely describes the bias towards embodiment
available in a variety of nineteenth-century considerations of economic
value, such as Silas Marner.
 9

‘A report of unknown
objects’: Silas Marner
JIM REILLY

If men no longer had to equate themselves with things, they would

need neither a superstructure of things nor an invariant picture of
themselves, after the model of things.
(Adorno, Negative Dialectics)

Thus all physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the
simple alienation of all these senses, the sense of having. Man’s
essence had to be reduced to this absolute poverty, so that it might
bring forth out of itself its own inner riches.
(Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of l844)

Describing Silas Marner to Blackwood during its composition in

1861 Eliot commented that ‘it sets in strong light the remedial
influences of pure, natural human relations’.1 Many natural things
set in strong light are merely seen to wither, but let that pass. She
could not have addressed a more pertinent issue nor undertaken a
more urgent literary task. A great topic in British letters for at least
the preceding two decades had been the contemporary extirpation
of precisely the ‘pure, natural human relations’ that Silas is, in this
statement at least, intended to assert. Dombey and Son2 is a
thwarted Silas Marner in which the emotionally enervated Mr
Dombey, unlike Eliot’s protagonist, tragically misses his opportunity
for redemption through a relationship with a loving daughter. In
line with this crucial negation, the novel poses the issues of ‘pure,
natural human relations’ more sceptically. ‘Was Mr Dombey’s

188
 ‘A REPORT OF UNKNOWN OBJECTS’ 189

master-vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an unnatural characteris-

tic? It might be worthwhile, sometimes, to inquire what Nature is,
and how men work to change her, and whether, in the enforced dis-
tortions so produced, it is not natural to be unnatural.’3 Here is the
great question posed by Dickens’s oeuvre, and one which could not
be more relevant to nineteenth-century experience: whether it is not
now ‘natural to be unnatural’. Silas Marner poses a comparable ques-
tion on its opening page as the inhabitants of Raveloe ponder ‘how
was a man to be explained’ and the novel constitutes Eliot’s answer.
In approaching a novel so evidently engaging with a contempo-
rary construction of identity in its new, bourgeois form it might be
well to take soundings from the prevailing discourse, and its critics.
In the same year Dombey and Son asks whether it is not now natural
to be unnatural, Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto
(1848) pour scorn on those twin bourgeois illusions, ‘Human
Nature’ and the ‘individual’. The former ‘belongs to no class, has no
reality, and exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy’
and the latter only really means the middle-class owner of property
(male, of course, married women owned no property) and even his
individuality is, under capitalism, an illusion. ‘In bourgeois society
capital is independent and has individuality while the living person
is dependent and has no individuality.’4
As Engels had put it in the chapter of The Condition of the
Working Class in England (1844) ‘The Great Towns’, the contempo-
rary social formation is exemplified by crowded urban streets where
people hurry past
as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one
another … while it occurs to no man to honour another with so
much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of
each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive,
the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited
space. And, however much one is aware that this isolation of the indi-
vidual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our
society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-
conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolu-
tion of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate
essence, and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried
out to its utmost extreme.5

It was the ‘shock’ of such arbitrary and alienating urban encounters

which Benjamin found in Baudelaire and regarded as the exemplary
modern experience.6 These alienated and alienating conditions are
190 JIM REILLY

momentarily glimpsed in Silas Marner as an apprehensive Silas and

Eppie return to the ‘great industrial town’ attempting to locate the
religious community of Silas’s youth but encountering only ‘the
noise, the movement, and the multitude of strange indifferent
faces’.7 In A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Dickens equates with devas-
tating absoluteness the urban scene, a recessive, monadic individual-
ity and death.

My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my

soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the
secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in
mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through
which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabi-
tants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?8

In such nineteenth-century townscapes is formed the individuality

which is a synonym of alienation posited by Adorno: ‘The individ-
ual owes his crystallisation to the forms of political economy, partic-
ularly those of the urban market … If today the trace of humanity
seems to persist only in the individual in his decline, it admonishes
us to make an end of the fatality which individualises men only to
break them in their isolation.’9
The immediate discursive context for Silas Marner (1861) is the
particular urgency with which bourgeois writing at the end of the
1850s and beginning of the 1860s sets out to effect this ‘crystallisa-
tion’, to engineer this ‘fatality which individualises men’. A number
of key non-fiction texts appear at this juncture. J. S. Mill’s On
Liberty (1859) is a sacred text of nineteenth-century bourgeois indi-
vidualism and his intellectually scrupulous project – Hardy called
him ‘personified earnestness’ – is, in essence, the intellectual big
brother – more reflective, less brazen – of that year’s other best-
selling entrepreneurial handbook, Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. Given
these works’ explicit individualism it is easy to imagine that such a
context made it possible for bourgeois readers to assimilate
Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) to the prevailing competitive
ethic even before the formulation of the inevitable banalisation
‘social Darwinism’. Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance
in Italy (1860, English translation 1878) famously discovers in the
Renaissance the birth of the individual which ‘led the individual to
the most zealous and thorough study of himself under all forms and
under all conditions’.10
 ‘A REPORT OF UNKNOWN OBJECTS’ 191

Mill’s work is at least honest enough to writhe within its own self-
cancelling contradiction as a bourgeois critique of a bourgeois reality.
In the famous chapter ‘On Individuality as one of the Elements of
Well-Being’ he calls for a humanising regeneration of a society char-
acterised by individualist competition through increased individual-
ism. ‘It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual
in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the
limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human
beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation.’11
A devastating analysis did Mill but know it: human subjects under
capitalism are rendered, like Arnold’s statuary, impotent, alienated,
objectified and are furthermore fooled, by analyses such as Mill’s,
into an aesthetic appreciation of their own degraded condition as ‘a
noble and beautiful object of contemplation’. The shift from plural
to singular is telling. While arguing for a healthily multiplying plu-
rality of subjects Mill’s own prose works grammatically to an
opposed end, resolving ‘human beings’ into the smooth totality of
the lone ‘object’. One can at least respect Mill’s impotent humanist
protest at the dehumanising tendency of contemporary labour,
however muddled it is in hailing the problem as its own solution.
‘Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to
do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to
grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of
the inward forces which make it a living thing.’12 Hardy’s admira-
tion for Mill was immense and he had a complex relation to this key
chapter. In the Life he tells how, like all students of the 1860s, he
knew the piece almost by heart and that he re-read it throughout his
life in moments of despondency. But when Sue in Jude the Obscure
quotes Mill’s words to Phillotson, it is in terms of a negation. She
would so love to live out its vision of individual free-growth, but
cannot. ‘Why can’t you act upon them? I wish to always.’13
There were harsher voices than Mill’s. Ruskin had anticipated his
concerns over the dehumanising subjection of workers to the
processes of industrial labour in The Stones of Venice (1851). After
extensive complaint on apparently purely aesthetic grounds – mass-
produced products are drearily uniform – he finally exposes the self-
serving politics behind bourgeois concern over the degrading
mechanisation of labour:

It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which,

more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the
192 JIM REILLY

nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling …

the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this
day. It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in
the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to
wealth as the only means of pleasure.14

So from a bourgeois perspective the dehumanisation of labour is

more urgently a political danger than it is a humanitarian/ethical
concern. The revolutionary potential within this alienation was the
subject of the period’s most penetrating analysis, but one that was to
remain long silent. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
of 1844, unpublished until 1932, Marx details the ways in which
the modern industrial worker’s alienated relation to the products of
manufacture result in his own objectification. Silas, the misanthropic
weaver who becomes a function of his labour rather than vice versa,
alienated from his Raveloe community, filled with a strange distrust
of the natural world, shrivelled and distorted to the status of an
object, is clearly a fellow of the alienated, commodified worker of
Marx’s analysis. Feuerbach’s humanism was still a powerful
influence on Marx at this early point in his writings and for those
sceptical about this posited congruence between Marx and Eliot one
can at least suggest that she too, who in 1854 had translated Das
Wesen des Christenthums, was working through her own relation to
these influences. Their characterisations are really strikingly congru-
ent, as is best illustrated by simply placing passages side by side.

The worker is distorted and devalued in proportion to the form and

value he gives to the product:

Marx: the more values he creates the more valueless and worthless
he becomes, the more formed the product the more deformed the
worker … 15
Eliot: His gold, as he hung over it and saw it grow, gathered his
power of loving together into a hard isolation like its own. (p. 92)
Eliot: Strangely Marner’s face and figure shrank and bent them-
selves into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life,
so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or a
crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart. (p. 69)

His labour objectifies, commodifies him:

Marx: The depreciation of the human world progresses in direct
proportion to the increase in value of the world of things.
 ‘A REPORT OF UNKNOWN OBJECTS’ 193

Labour does not only produce commodities; it produces itself and

the labourer as a commodity and that to the extent to which it pro-
duces commodities in general.16
Eliot: The light of his faith quite put out, and his affections made
desolate, he had clung with all the force of his nature to his work
and his money; and like all objects to which a man devotes himself,
they had fashioned him into correspondence with themselves. His
loom, as he wrought in it without ceasing, had in its turn wrought
on him … (p. 92)

He is alienated from the natural world:

Marx: The relationship of the worker … to the sensuous exterior

world and to natural objects [is] as to an alien and hostile world
opposed to him.17
Eliot: his inherited delight to wander through the fields in search of
foxgloves and dandelion and coltsfoot, began to wear to him the
character of a temptation. (p. 57)
Eliot: his steps never wandered to the hedge-banks and the land-
side in search of the once familiar herbs; these too belonged to the
past, from which his life had shrunk away … (p. 70)

He is further alienated from his fellows, and even from himself:

Marx: An immediate consequence of man’s alienation from the

product of his work, his vital activity and his species-being, is the
alienation of man from man. When man is opposed to himself, it is
another man that is opposed to him … one man is alienated from
another as each of them is alienated from the human essence.18
Eliot: he listened docilely, that he might come to understand better
what this life was, from which, for fifteen years, he had stood aloof
as from a strange thing, wherewith he could have no communion
… (p. 190)
Eliot: So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his
guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening
itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfac-
tion that had no relation to any other being. (p. 68)

Of course Silas Marner effects Silas’s disenchantment from alien-

ation, but the socialised alternative the novel offers is not unequivo-
cally appealing. His guide is the spinner of nauseatingly acquiescent
homespun wisdom and repressive ‘good sense’, Dolly Winthrop,
whose counsel Silas at first finds incomprehensible. ‘Her simple view
194 JIM REILLY

of life and its comforts, by which she had tried to cheer him, was
only like a report of unknown objects which his imagination could
not fashion’ (p. 68). Dolly’s homely philosophy perpetuates the dual
forms of tyranny and subservience; she advocates punishing children
by locking them in the coal-hole and reveres as ‘good words’
because she has seen them in church, the letters, IHS, she prints on
all her baking but cannot herself read. James Kavanagh applies Jane
Gallop’s term ‘phallic mother’ to Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights
(1848), ‘the [female] figure who wields the phallic tools of the sym-
bolic order, of language and culture … she becomes an agent of
patriarchal law’.19 Dolly Winthrop would be a less equivocal candi-
date. Her labour, like Silas’s, is inscribed with the uncomprehended
signs of authority which not only her baking but her discourse end-
lessly disseminates and prepares for consumption. Her catch-phrase
is ‘I wouldn’t speak ill o’this world, seeing as them puts us in it
knows best’ and, like Ladislaw counselling Dorothea into ‘a sturdy
neutral delight in things as they were’, she ushers Silas into the
acquiescent conservatism which this culture extracts as the price of
admission: ‘a humble sort of acquiescence in what was held to be
good, had become a strong habit of that new self which had been
developed in him … he had come to appropriate the forms of
custom and belief which were the mould of Raveloe life …’ (p. 201)
Objectification is certainly the theme of a novel which is essen-
tially a long permutation on the term ‘object’: alienated amidst a
world of ‘unknown objects’ Silas at first suffers, in the loss of his
gold, ‘a bewildering separation from a supremely loved object’ to be
blessed with a human replacement in the shape of Eppie, ‘an object
compacted of changes and hopes’ (p. 201; p.166). Silas’s relations to
objects are intense. His beloved water pot, which in an odd incident
he accidentally breaks but keeps the reassembled pieces, exemplifies
the object which, its use-value and sympathy to human purposes
shattered, takes on a purely symbolic, fetishistic status.

It had been his companion for twelve years … always lending its
handle to him … its form had an expression of willing helpfulness …
Silas picked up the pieces and carried them home with grief in his
heart. The brown pot could never be of use to him any more, but he
stuck the bits together and propped the ruin in its old place for a
memorial.
(p. 184)
 ‘A REPORT OF UNKNOWN OBJECTS’ 195

Essentially a funerary artefact, the ‘memorial’ pot is the mourning

sign of a lost intimacy between man and the object. Let us register
for future reference the historical resonances of that term ‘ruin’.
Silas is not alone in Eliot’s oeuvre as the anal hoarder of death-
tainted, fetishised objects detached from use-value. The Dodson
sisters outdo each other in obsessive fussing over the quality of their
respective trousseaux – linen, china and furniture which become a
source of anxiety to Mrs Tulliver greater than her husband’s paraly-
sis. Sister Glegg has an expensive, once-worn bonnet as the particu-
lar object of her commodity fetishism which, unswathed from its
tissue shroud, is displayed to envious relatives in a scene of ‘funereal
solemnity’. A more literal death-taint lingers over Nancy Cass’s
drawer full of baby clothes, ‘all unworn and untouched’, which she
has preserved for fourteen years after a stillbirth. She has been wont
to visit the little collection in a poignant reworking of the image of
Silas daily poring over his gold but where the hoard represents
absence rather than plenitude. Mr Transome in Felix Holt tends his
collection of ‘dried insects’ and mineralogical specimens in shallow
drawers, occupying himself in continual schemes for their rearrange-
ment. Romola’s father Bardo collects antiquities and ancient manu-
scripts, ‘lifeless objects’– most antiquities that survive to be collected
are tomb-furnishings – which oppress Romola with a ‘sad dreari-
ness’, ‘the parchment backs, the unchanging mutilated marble, the
bits of obsolete bronze and clay’ (Romola, p. 98). [ … ] No aspect of
reality seems immune from being accumulated into little hoards of
death-objects, corpse-collections turned capital. In confirmation of a
comment of Macherey’s that the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie
turn history into their private property or, as Marx puts it, history is
currently rendered ‘a collection of dead facts’, 20 even history is here
accumulated as one such death-hoard. In fact the whole of Western
culture had appeared to Dorothea under precisely this guise, as a
stash of corpse-capital, a ‘funeral procession with strange ancestral
images and trophies gathered from afar’.
This centrality to the nineteenth century of the notion of collect-
ing of which Silas Marner particularly is an analysis and a prophecy
is worth pausing over. In a withering attack on Lukács for using his
study of nineteenth-century fiction to indulge his own fetishism of
the object, Brecht indicates the centrality of such fetishism for the
nineteenth century and its determining role in the construction of
identity. Lukács had been stating his admiration for Balzac; Brecht
196 JIM REILLY

points out that Balzac was himself an obsessive collector and that his
narratives ‘follow possessions (fetishism of objects) through genera-
tions of families and their transference from one to the other’.
Collecting and competition are primary means of the nineteenth
century’s construction of identity.
In the primeval forest of early capitalism individuals fought against
individuals, and against groups of individuals; basically they fought
against ‘the whole of society’. This was precisely what determined
their individuality. Now we are advised to go on creating individuals,
to recreate them, or rather to create new ones, who will naturally be
different but made in the same way. So? ‘Balzac’s passion for collect-
ing things bordered on monomania’. We find this fetishism of objects
in his novels, too, on hundreds and thousands of pages. Admittedly
we are supposed to avoid such a thing. Lukács wags his finger at
Tretyakov on this account. But this fetishism is what makes Balzac’s
characters individuals. It is ridiculous to see in them a simple
exchange of the social passions and functions which constitute the
individual. Does the production of consumer goods for a collective
today construct individuals in the same way as ‘collecting’? Naturally
one can answer ‘yes’ here too.21
It becomes characteristic of the novel in English from the 1860s on
to centre on the fascination exerted by desired but functionless
objects. It is a commonplace for novels to be named after, and for
their plots to revolve around, some supremely desired artefact. In
Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) an elaborate sensation-plot
of thefts and deceptions is generated by an Indian diamond plun-
dered from a Hindu temple, bearing a curse and pursued around
the world by its former Brahmin protectors. Anthony Trollope’s The
Eustace Diamonds (1873) also ponders, in a rather inert and literal-
minded way, the status of objects and the legitimacy of ownership.
The heroine pretends that the Eustace heirlooms of the title, given
her by her husband, have been stolen and thus attempts to keep
them from the acquisitive Eustace family. Henry James’s The
Golden Bowl (1904) circles, Balzac-like, the artefact of the title,
human desires and destinies twining themselves around, and imaged
in, the exquisite yet flawed objet-d’art. One feels James is elaborat-
ing hints from Daniel Deronda, that most Jamesian of Eliot’s novels,
where first Gwendolen’s pawned turquoise necklace and later the
ring Daniel has valued take on developing plot functions Eliot had
not previously used objects to generate.
James is perhaps the author of the fetishised art-object par excel-
lence. The milieu he brings for the first time into the purview of
 ‘A REPORT OF UNKNOWN OBJECTS’ 197

fiction is that specific to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a

world of culture-fetishising new wealth populated by connoisseurs,
aesthetes, collectors and critics, the haunters of auction-houses,
antique-shops, palaces and museums. Here is first registered in the
novel the commodification of the artwork Adorno analyses as a
defining characteristic of capitalism in its world-monopoly phase,
where artworks are shrivelled to the status of commodities and
where commodities – through advertising or grandiose World Fairs
and exhibitions where they are displayed like, or alongside, works
of art – are swathed in an aesthetic allure. Here is an exhibition and
museum culture in which Americans travel the European Old World
trawling for, as another James novel title has it, ‘spoils’. This is what
Adam Verver does in The Golden Bowl. He is scouring Europe for
objects to bring back to American City and install in his Palace of
Art, a ‘museum of museums which ‘was positively civilisation, con-
densed, concrete, consummate’.22 We find in James also exactly
what Brecht observes in Balzac – an equation between possession
and identity so that, in accumulating possessions, James’s almost
invariably wealthy characters foster a sense of identity inseparable
from ownership. There is a provocative exchange in The Portrait of
a Lady (1881) – yet another novel named after an aesthetic object –
between Isabel Archer and Madame Merle on precisely this point.
Wearied of her house, wealth and position Isabel asserts that these
things do not define her and that nothing that belongs to her is any
measure of her. ‘I don’t know if I succeed in expressing myself but I
know that nothing else expresses me.’ Madame Merle disagrees. For
her there is a precise equation of ownership, status and selfhood and
she poses some pertinent questions.

‘What shall we call our “self”? Where does it begin? Where does it
end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us – and then it
flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I
choose to wear. I’ve a great respect for things! One’s self – for other
people – is one’s expression of one’s self, and one’s house, one’s fur-
niture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps –
these things are all expressive.’23

The unresolved dialogue brilliantly encapsulates schisms within the

fraught identities of James’s own characters, torn between the
notion of a romantic essentialism and an actual alienating refraction
of identity through the signs of class and possession. Isabel and
Madame Merle merely voice the opposed aspects of a single impos-
198 JIM REILLY

sible position. It is precisely the annihilating perversity of identity

under late capitalism that the subject’s infatuation with itself and
the fetishism of the object find their correlatives in each other.
Human beings thus become the ‘subjective-objective reality, a
divided thing hinged together but not strictly individual’ Lawrence
analyses as the repulsive but all-too truthful characterisations of
Galsworthy – he must have The Man of Property (1906) particularly
in mind. The Forsytes have ‘lost caste as human beings’. Entirely
subject to the ‘money-sway’, they have violated their essential
human ‘naïveté’ and consequently sunk to the level of the ‘social
being’ in whom money ‘goes right through the centre and is the
controlling principle’.24
Adorno analyses the museum culture and its construction of alien-
ated identities with repugnance in Prisms. He discusses the opposed
responses to museums of ‘the two most knowledgeable men to have
written about art in recent times’, Valéry and Proust. Valéry loathes,
Proust loves, museums but both reactions stem from a shared obser-
vation that museums are the mausoleums of their contents. Adorno
cites Valéry’s repulsion from the crammed, eclectic Louvre described
in ‘Le problème des musées’ – one that recalls Dorothea’s sense of
the oppressive disorder of Rome and the ‘titanic … struggling’ of its
artworks as well as Brecht’s profound equation of collection and
competition. ‘Cold confusion’, he says, ‘reigns among the sculptures,
a tumult of frozen creatures each of which demands the non-exis-
tence of the others, disorder strangely organised.’ Of course Adorno
is quick to find in the struggling chaos of the museum a metaphor for
the anarchical production of desirous commodities in a fully devel-
oped bourgeois society. Perhaps more strikingly, Valéry himself
makes the same equation by comparing the museum to ‘the accumu-
lation of excessive and therefore unuseable capital’.25
The Proust argument is more complex: it is precisely the degree
of alienation afforded by the museum which, by prising the artwork
from any pre-existent context, makes it available for the individual’s
appropriation as an element within the transforming fabric of
memory. The death-struggle amongst artworks Valéry perceives in
the museum is for Proust a source of beauty, as objects submit them-
selves to the mingled ravages and affirmations of time.

Valéry and Proust … agree even to the point of recognising some-

thing of the mortal enmity which exists among works and which
accompanies the pleasure of competition. Far from recoiling before
 ‘A REPORT OF UNKNOWN OBJECTS’ 199

it, however, Proust affirms this enmity as though he were as German

as Charlus affects to be. For him competition among works is the test
of truth. Schools, he writes at one point in Sodom and Gomorrah,
devour each other like micro-organisms and ensure through their
struggle the survival of life.26

These meditations might strike the reader as somewhat untimely in

their application to Silas Marner […] Silas Marner – bucolic, fabular,
homespun, warmly humanist – would seem to belong to another
register altogether and to carry no whiff of the coming art-fetishis-
ing ‘decadence’ of a rabid commodity culture. Silas Marner, Sodom
and Gomorrah and late, exquisite James make, I will admit, a
provocative comparison even if Proust’s characters are fond of
reading and translating Eliot and Isabel Archer has been brought up
on her. If Daniel Deronda is Eliot’s most Jamesian novel, Silas
Marner would appear to be her least. In fact Silas so precisely
negates such a world as to be suspiciously disingenuous. To negate
precisely a given form – as a sculptor’s mould does, or a photo-
graphic negative – can be the means of its faithful reproduction.
Silas is the anticipatory negative of a rabid, commodified, fetishistic,
anti-humanist world. Thus Silas’s revered broken pot is a humble
ancestor of James’s also cracked and fetishised golden bowl and the
miserly Silas himself has been a (barely) living embodiment of the
culture Valéry observes which, in its museums and elsewhere,
requires ‘the accumulation of excessive and therefore unuseable
capital’. Readers will readily agree that Silas has mythic qualities,
myths being those troublesome, indeterminate entities of
Middlemarch. But why does one need a humanist myth unless every-
thing it wishes to assert is under threat? If Silas is a myth it is so in
the terms of Benjamin’s dictum that while there is a beggar, there
will be a myth. In other words myths are required to mask social
tensions and oppressions for which they offer purely illusory
resolutions.
The equation of the museum and the mausoleum analysed by
Adorno, Valéry and Proust is continuous with the argument of
Lukács that the nineteenth century is itself ‘a charnel house of long-
dead interiorities’. As Lukács describes it – and the Dickens of
Dombey and Son had anticipated the analysis – the nineteenth
century displaces nature by a charnel-house ‘second nature’ of
human manufacture.
200 JIM REILLY

This second nature is not dumb, sensuous and yet senseless like the
first: it is a complex of senses – meanings – which has become rigid
and strange, and which no longer wakens interiority; it is a charnel-
house of long-dead interiorities; this second nature could only be
brought to life – if this were possible – by the metaphysical fact of
reawakening the souls which, in an early or ideal existence, created or
preserved it; it can never be animated by another interiority.27

Here, in a somewhat mystified form, are all the Eliot cruces. Silas is
in desperate need to be ‘brought to life’, to experience the wakening
of his ‘interiority’, the ‘metaphysical act of awakening’. Silas Marner
is the Benjaminesque myth of that awakening. The novel offers an
image of precisely what Lukács describes as what this period has
made unattainable, the rescue from the ‘charnel-house of dead inte-
riorities’ through the blessed ‘act of reawakening’ as one is ‘ani-
mated by another interiority’. Eppie, the golden-haired child who
tottering into Silas’s cottage after the theft of his gold seems its
miraculous human replacement, is that other, animating interiority.
‘As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was
growing into memory: as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied
in a cold narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually
into full consciousness’ (p. 185).
Eppie, in a phrase worth pondering in this context, is described as
the antithesis of an object or, more contradictorily, as an object
inspired with non-objective qualities: ‘an object compacted of
changes and hopes’.

Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in

close-locked solitude – which was hidden away from the daylight,
was deaf to the songs of birds, and started to no human tones – Eppie
was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking
and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movements …
Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his
thoughts onward, and carried them far away from their old eager
pacing towards the same blank limit …
(p. 184)

Two interdependent indices of growth mark Silas’s progress in

deserving, and achieving, his disenchantment from alienation; the
slow shift in his vocabulary whereby he comes to call Eppie ‘her’
rather than ‘it’ and the commensurate erosion of his conception of
her as his private property. This latter however is never fully extri-
cated from the narrative’s own fabular equation of the daughter with
 ‘A REPORT OF UNKNOWN OBJECTS’ 201

her father’s treasure, a motif given emphatic stress also in the con-
temporaneous Romola. These are two novels giving utterly opposed
readings of what it means for a daughter to be her father’s wealth.
Eppie is an exemplary nineteenth-century heroine in having an
essentially domestic function. Herself a human object miraculously
disenchanted from her objectification, she revokes the alienation
from the natural which has been Silas’s burden and re-establishes
him in his ‘parental home’. ‘Estrangement from nature (the first
nature), the modern sentimental attitude to nature, is only a projec-
tion of man’s experience of his self-made environment as a prison
instead of as a parental home.’28 The Lukácsian formulations derive
from Hegel as, in some sense, does Marx’s own analysis of alien-
ation. For Hegel alienation is a facet of the wider contemporary
need to feel at home within our own history, and art has the
Eppiesque function of ushering us into this domestic/historical idyll.
The historical is only then ours … when we can regard the present in
general as a consequence of those events in whose chain the characters
or deeds represented constitute an essential link … For art does not
exist for a small, closed circle of the privilegedly cultured few, but for
the nation as a whole. What holds good for the work of art in general,
however, also has its application for the outer side of the historical
reality represented. It, too, must be made clear and accessible to us
without extensive learning so that we, who belong to our own time
and nation, may find ourselves at home therein, and not be obliged to
halt before us, as before some alien and unintelligible world.29
A novel both brave and defensive, Silas Marner first depicts, then
denies the truth of nineteenth-century conditions before which Silas
is ‘obliged to halt … as before some alien and unintelligible world’ –
‘this life … from which … he had stood aloof as from a strange
thing, wherewith he could have no communion’. Its very last line
conjures the opposed possibility Hegel posits as the necessary con-
temporary message of art, the reassurance that we have a home in
history. ‘O father,’ said Eppie, ‘what a pretty home ours is! I think
nobody could be happier than we are.’
From Jim Reilly, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy,
Conrad and George Eliot (London, 1993), pp. 83–97.

NOTES
[This excerpt is taken from Jim Reilly’s full-length study, Shadowtime
(1993), which considers the work of Eliot, Hardy and Conrad in the
202 JIM REILLY

context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates about history and his-

torical representation and includes readings of Romola and Daniel Deronda,
as well as Silas Marner. A central part of Reilly’s argument is that Victorian
historical discourses are caught up in the innovative and repetitious logic of
Vergegenstandlichung (‘objectification’, ‘commodification’). Characters in
works by these novelists all find themselves enmeshed within capitalism so
arrogantly monumental as to suffer the existence of no ‘outside’ and no
‘outsider’. Indebted to Marxist and post-Marxist readings of history, Reilly
suggests that Silas Marner can be seen as an attempt by Eliot to engage with
contemporary post-industrial concerns about the nature of greed, acquisi-
tion and alienation. He locates Silas Marner firmly within its own time,
drawing explicit links between Karl Marx and Eliot’s modes of thought,
and also within literary historiography generally, seeing in Eliot’s critique of
commodification and the lure of objects the kind of concerns that would be
replayed by Wilkie Collins and Henry James amongst others. All quotations
in the essay are taken from The Mill on the Floss (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973). Eds]

1. Gordon S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters (New Haven, CT,
1954–5), Vol. 4, p. 87.
2. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (Harmondsworth, 1984).
3. Ibid., p. 737.
4. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford, 1977), pp.
241, 233.
5. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England
(Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 69.
6. See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of
High Capitalism (London, 1975).
7. George Eliot, Silas Marner (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 239. All further
references are contained in the text.
8. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 44.
9. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London, 1974), pp. 148, 150.
10. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
(Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 198.
11. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 127.
12. Ibid., p. 123.
13. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (London, 1982), p. 244.
14. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Works, ed. E. T. Cook and
Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1904), Vol. 10, p. 194.
 ‘A REPORT OF UNKNOWN OBJECTS’ 203

15. Marx, Selected Writings, p. 79.

16. Ibid., p. 78.
17. Ibid., p. 81.
18. Ibid., p. 83.
19. James Kavanagh, Emily Brontë (London, 1985), pp. 39–40.
20. Marx, Selected Writings, p. 165.
21. Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg
Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic
Debate with German Marxism, trans. Ronald Taylor (London,
1988), p. 78.
22. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 124.
23. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 253.
24. D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism (London, 1969), p. 121;
p. 120.
25. Theodor Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge, MA, 1983), p. 183; p. 176; p. 177.
26. Ibid., p. 179.
27. George Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (London, 1978), p. 64.
28. Ibid., p. 64.
29. In Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London, 1962), pp. 57–8.
 10

Silas Marner:
A Divided Eden
SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

In her ‘legendary tale’, Silas Marner, George Eliot again addresses the
issue of historical continuity. Like the earlier Adam Bede, however, the
novel seems to evade the challenge of social change and disruption.
Against the flow of history, the plot moves backward in time: the
dweller from the industrial city is finally incorporated into the world
of ‘Merry England’, ‘never reached by the vibrations of the coach-
horn, or of public opinion’.1 Just as Dinah left the harsh world of
Stoniton for Hayslope, so Silas leaves the industrial life of Lantern
Yard for the rural village of Raveloe which, like Hayslope, stands
‘aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan earnestness’
(p. 33). In Adam Bede George Eliot emphasised the continuity of this
process of change: Dinah seemed to evolve, without undue stress, into
her natural form of matron. In Silas Marner, however, following the
pattern of The Mill on the Floss, she dramatises the conflict and dis-
continuity of the historical process. Maggie experienced the ‘clash of
opposing elements’ and was forced into temporary exile; Silas is
abruptly cast out from his friends, work, and home.
George Eliot explores the same themes in Silas Marner and The
Mill, but this time she reverses the structural pattern of the earlier
novel. Opening with an evocation of the Eden of Maggie’s child-
hood, The Mill on the Floss plots the growing division between
Maggie’s past and present life, which only the concluding catastro-
phe of the flood resolves. Silas Marner, by contrast, opens with a
catastrophe which establishes an absolute and immediate break

204
 SILAS MARNER: A DIVIDED EDEN 205

between Silas’ past and future existence. Through his later relation-
ship with Eppie, however, we trace the gradual restoration of histor-
ical continuity to his life, until he attains the final plenitude in which
both the past and the realm of historical change seem to be erased.
The conclusion of Silas Marner, like that of Adam Bede, confirms
historical stasis. The fenced-in garden of Silas’ cottage, to which the
‘four united people’ return, symbolises, as in Medieval iconography,
their Eden, a world where history and change are excluded.
Surrounded by the flowers which ‘shone with answering gladness’,
they have in fact attained the ‘daisied fields’ of Maggie’s heaven.
The structural pattern of Silas Marner suggests that George Eliot
adopted, in this novel, a more positive attitude towards ideas of his-
torical development than in her previous work; yet, as the plot’s
movement backward in time reveals, she did not fully resolve her
ambivalent responses. In Silas Marner, as in The Mill on the Floss,
she interrogates theories of organic continuity in history, and, to
this end, she explores, in each work, the relations between theories
of social and psychological formation. The Mill on the Floss offered
two models of history, based on two different patterns of psychol-
ogy: the linear development of consciousness, and the atemporal
unconscious. The two determining moments in Maggie’s life both
belonged to this latter model. When she drifted away with Stephen,
and when she attempted to rescue Tom from the flood, Maggie
relinquished conscious control of her actions, lapsing into the realm
of the unconscious. In both cases her behaviour violated the psycho-
logical pattern associated, in contemporary theory, with linear theo-
ries of social progress; that of a rational actor, responsibly directing
her actions in light of her knowledge of the ‘law of consequences’.2
This break from a linear model of psychology is accentuated in Silas
Marner.3 During the two determining moments of Silas’ life he is in
a state akin to death, suffering from a cataleptic fit. On each occa-
sion, when he is framed by William Dane, and when Eppie enters
his life, he is entirely without responsibility for his actions. As Eppie
wanders into his cottage Silas stands by the door ‘arrested … by the
invisible wand of catalepsy’ (p. 169). The reference to the magic
wand highlights the disruptive function of Silas’ disease. Despite the
increased interest in abnormal states of consciousness in the mid-
nineteenth century, catalepsy still remained a mystery to psycholo-
gists.4 Inexplicable, and uncontrollable, catalepsy seemed to suggest
the eruption of chance, rather than the operation of uniform law.
George Eliot’s treatment of Silas’ malady confirms this reading.
206 SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

Once Silas’ senses return, after one of his fits, he remains

‘unaware of the chasm in his consciousness’ (p. 169). The term
chasm, which recalls the ‘sudden chasm’ (p. 117) created in Silas’
life by the loss of his gold, suggests an image of history based on the
premises of catastrophism, rather than on uniformitarian theory.
Both Silas’ social and psychological life conform to these premises:
the breaks in his consciousness parallel the discontinuity of his social
history. Powerless to control either the workings of his own mind,
or the machinations of others, he is abruptly thrust out of Lantern
Yard, forced to start an entirely new life. His cataleptic fits func-
tion, indeed, as one symptom of a more inclusive powerlessness.
Like Maggie’s lapses into the unconscious, and The Mill’s conclud-
ing flood, Silas’ catalepsy suggests George Eliot’s uncertain alle-
giance to ideas of uniformitarian development.
George Eliot’s contemporaries were quick to note the internal
conflicts within her work. Thus E. S. Dallas objected to Silas’ trances
since they ‘render[ed] him a singularly unaccountable being’.5 The
pleasure of fiction, Dallas argued, ‘depends mainly on our being able
to count upon the elements of human character and to calculate
results’. Thus, if an ‘imbecile’ is brought forward, ‘it involves the
introduction of chance and uncertainty into a tissue of events the
interest of which depends on their antecedent probability’.6 Dallas’
theory of narrative progression and psychological development is
based upon uniformitarian principles. The enjoyment of narrative,
he believed, is founded on the comforting rehearsal of rational
history in which continuous order can always be discerned.
Predictability is thus the key to social and psychological order.
Unconscious trances clearly constitute a threat since they introduce
elements not subject to control.
Dallas jibbed at Silas’ fits because they seemed inconsistent with
the dominant moral of the tale:
As in one fit of unconsciousness he lost his all, so in another fit of
unconsciousness he obtained a recompense. In either case he was
helpless, had nothing to do with his own fate, and was a mere feather
in the wind of chance. From this point forward in the tale, however,
there is no more chance – all is work and reward, cause and effect,
the intelligent mind shaping its own destiny. The honest man bestows
kindness upon the child, and reaps the benefit of it in his own increas-
ing happiness, quickened intelligence, and social position.7
Chance and the unconscious are balanced against continuity and
control, values which Dallas associates with the smooth functioning
 SILAS MARNER: A DIVIDED EDEN 207

of economic and social life. Coopting the authority of science to

support his arguments, he presents work and reward as synonymous
with the principles of cause and effect. His model of society is that
of the capitalist economy; each individual in control of his own
destiny, freely pursuing his own interest. In personal life, as in the
market place, honest investment will reap a merited reward. The
idea of orderly sequence within individual life stands as a model for
the larger movement of social history.
Despite the fact that Silas’ life is dominated more by chance than
by rational order and control, George Eliot does, as Dallas correctly
observes, draw the moral framework of her novel from these latter
values. In accordance with her practice in Adam Bede (and, indeed,
in all her later novels) she condemns those who subscribe to a belief
in chance. Thus the inadequacies of Lantern Yard as a social and
religious community are revealed by its members’ superstitious trust
in the drawing of lots. The novel’s two greatest villains, William
Dane and Dunsey Cass, are distinguished by their faith in their own
luck and the workings of chance; both, as Joseph Wiesenfarth has
argued, ‘believe in their election to fortune’.8 Godfrey Cass is simi-
larly tainted by this belief. He is roundly castigated by the narrator
for clinging to the hope that chance might release him from the con-
sequences of his unfortunate marriage. ‘Favourable Chance,’ the
narrator gravely observes, ‘is the god of all men who follow their
own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in’ (p. 112).
In adhering to a model of history which permits the intrusion of
chance and randomness, Godfrey violates the moral, social and eco-
nomic assumptions underpinning the Victorians’ faith in uniformi-
tarian law. Godfrey’s beliefs are quickly linked to the realm of
economic activity: to the self-deluding dreams of those who live
outside their income, or ‘shirk the resolute honest work that brings
wages’, or, in an even more explicitly directed social commentary,
attempt to move up the social ladder. Thus the narrator observes,
‘Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of
a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will
infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in
as the mighty creator of success’ (pp. 112–13). Social mobility, like
the worship of chance, poses a threat to a ‘naturally’ ordained social
order. Referring to this mode of worship the narrator concludes,
‘The evil principle deprecated in that religion, is the orderly
sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind’
(p. 113). Ideas of economic and social order are here firmly
208 SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

grounded in a theory of natural, organic, historical growth. Yet, the

narrator’s declared allegiance to theories of orderly sequence and
moral responsibility in action is clearly undercut by the determining
role played within the novel by chance and the loss of rational
control. Like its predecessor, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner
actually offers two conflicting models of history, one based on ideas
of continuity, moral order, individual responsibility and control,
and another which stresses gaps and jumps in historical develop-
ment, chance, individual powerlessness, and self-division.
Although Silas Marner is cast within an apparently simple mould,
George Eliot brings to her analysis of the issues of organic develop-
ment in this work all the complexity of her previous fiction.
Through its legendary form she examines in concrete detail Strauss’
and Feuerbach’s theories of the mythic imagination, and Comte’s
theory of the three stages of human evolution, from the fetishism of
the polytheistic stage through to the rational thought of positivism.9
The fictional mode of the work actually functions as a commentary
upon the stage of development attained by the Raveloe villagers.
George Eliot’s treatment of the villagers’ initial reactions to Silas,
and their discussions in the Rainbow and responses to the ‘evidence’
surrounding the robbery, reveals her interest in the processes of
mythological thought, and the forms of rationality current in man’s
various developmental stages. Like Comte, she brings to her work a
profound respect for the processes of history, a firm belief that each
stage is directly linked to its predecessors.10 Thus Silas’ love of his
brick hearth is treated tenderly and sympathetically: ‘The gods of
the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that
fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots’ (p. 212). In Silas Marner
George Eliot explores the various historical roots of man’s behav-
iour, examining the development of an individual life within the
perspective of a larger evolutionary framework. Her aim in return-
ing to the primitive life of Lantern Yard and Raveloe is ‘to enter
into that simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the
feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection’ (p. 18), and
to offer, in accordance with Comtean theory, a full account of the
ways in which the characters evolved through interaction with their
surrounding social medium.11 As a Victorian reviewer observed, ‘It
is impossible to dissociate any of the characters from the village in
which they were born and bred – they form an organic whole with
Raveloe.’12
 SILAS MARNER: A DIVIDED EDEN 209

In translating this theory of social organicism into its full psycho-

logical consequences, however, George Eliot encounters problems
similar to those that emerged in The Mill on the Floss. Her analysis
of the psychological effects of Silas’ sudden displacement recalls nar-
rative discussions of the devastating personal impact of the
Tullivers’ bankruptcy:13
Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, some-
times find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life,
on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys
and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly trans-
ported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of
their history, and share none of their ideas – where their mother
earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those
on which their souls have been nourished.
(p. 20)
Silas, like Mr and Mrs Tulliver, loses his sense of identity once his
familiar surrounding medium is transformed. He can neither orient
himself within the strange world of Raveloe, nor relate to his own
past history. He retains no sense of self distinct from his relationship
to his environment. As in The Mill on the Floss, the theory of psy-
chology drawn from notions of organic development and historical
continuity actually subverts the idea of a unified, rational actor.
Once displaced from Lantern Yard, Silas undergoes the ‘Lethean
influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its
symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it
is linked with no memories’ (p. 20). As in his cataleptic fits he enters
into a trance-like state, becoming incapable of ordering or imposing
continuity on his life. His experience contradicts the accepted
psychological pattern outlined here by Alexander Bain in his obser-
vation that ‘The unbroken continuity of our mental life holds
together the past and the present in a sequence that we term Order
in Time’. For Bain, this mental continuity was both a measure and a
guarantee of social order; he relates the linear sequence of the mind
directly to ‘the sequences of nature, or the order of the world’.14
George Eliot’s analysis of Silas’ loss of personal identity effectively
challenges such dominant assumptions of social and psychological
continuity. Silas’ faith in a benign, God-given order was shattered
when the drawing of lots declared him guilty. George Eliot’s explo-
ration of his ensuing experience suggests that ideas of essential order
in the social and psychological realms are also open to doubt.
210 SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

The portrait of Silas follows the psychological theory of Lewes

who differed pre-eminently from Bain and other contemporaries in
his belief that the mind had no controlling ego, no ‘unity of the
executive’.15 Mind, he argued, like organic life, comprised the
processes of interaction between the organism and medium, thus
‘psychical Life has no one special centre, any more than the physical
Life has one special centre: it belongs to the whole, and animates the
whole’.16 The operations of the mind were not unified and directed
by a rational ego, there was no essential self to impose order on
incoming sensations, thus mental history need not constitute a linear
continuum. In pursuing the psychological implications of Comte’s
theory of dynamic interaction Lewes and George Eliot undercut
Comte’s determining social and moral assumptions. Eliot’s image of
the relationship between the individual and surrounding society is
not one of simple reflection, where psychological continuity reflects
social continuity. Neither the individual nor society possess intrinsic
coherence. In Silas Marner George Eliot develops the psychological
insights of The Mill on the Floss to create a masterly study of the
growing disjunction between Silas and his surrounding world. Far
from reinforcing an idealistic picture of social life, the novel actually
anticipates, in its opening sections, the later Daniel Deronda, with its
pessimistic vision of the conflict, and lack of communication that
can actually characterise social interdependence.
Following the premises of Lewes’ psychological theory, George
Eliot traces the internal effects of Silas’ alienation. She reveals how,
within the rural world of Raveloe, he is reduced from human status to
a ‘spinning insect’, until he finally takes on the qualities of an object:

he had clung with all the force of his nature to his work and his
money; and like all objects to which a man devotes himself, they had
fashioned him into correspondence with themselves. His loom, as he
wrought in it without ceasing, had in its turn wrought on him, and
confirmed more and more the monotonous craving for its monoto-
nous response. His gold, as he hung over it and saw it grow, gathered
his power of loving together into a hard isolation like its own.
(p. 63)

As his own creativity is drawn from him in his increasing subjection

to his loom and his gold, Silas endows these alienated self-images
with his own active powers. Clearly he is no rational actor in charge
of his sensual steed; indeed, he is unable to establish any hierarchi-
cal differentiation between human, animal or even object life. The
 SILAS MARNER: A DIVIDED EDEN 211

pattern of his life conforms not to the Comtean theory of evolution

from fetishism to rationality, but rather to the ‘fetishism of com-
modities’ described by that other great nineteenth-century historian,
Marx. In the monetary system, Marx observes, ‘gold and silver,
when serving as money, did not represent a social relation between
producers, but were natural objects with strange social properties’.17
Gold, for Silas, takes on these strange social properties. His rela-
tions with his fellow villagers become for him a mere function
through which he can acquire more coins. Reduced into a ‘constant
mechanical relation to the objects of his life’ (p. 29) he looks, for
the last vestiges of human contact, towards his gold. Whilst lavish-
ing his loving attention on his piles of coins he ‘thought fondly of
the guineas that were only half earned by the work in his loom, as if
they had been unborn children’ (p. 31). He comes, indeed, to
believe that his coins are ‘conscious of him’ (p. 27). Social relations
for Silas are displaced entirely into the realm of objects.
This powerful analysis of Silas’ growing alienation inverts organi-
cist theories of historical development. Comte believed that the evo-
lution of society from homogeneity to heterogeneity would
necessarily bring greater social solidarity. As the division of labour
increased, and social interdependence developed, feelings of sympa-
thy would arise, and altruism would supplant the more primitive
emotions of egoism. Silas’ presence in Raveloe signals a new
increase in the division of labour, but he does not create a growing
solidarity within the community. He evokes hostility, not altruism,
from his neighbours, whilst he himself is precipitated into isolation
and egoism, and an ever-narrowing range of response.
George Eliot’s critical vision of Raveloe society is not sustained,
however. Halfway through the novel the pattern of Silas’ life is
reversed with the arrival of Eppie. Unlike Maggie, Silas is permitted
to grow, in the midst of life, into organic community with his neigh-
bours. The change appears little short of miraculous. Like the con-
cluding flood of The Mill on the Floss it suggests a disruption of
uniform law. As Strauss argued in The Life of Jesus, ‘no just notion
of the true nature of history is possible without a perception of the
inviolability of the chain of finite causes, and of the impossibility of
miracles’.18 Yet, although Eppie is compared to the angels who led
men away from the city of destruction (p. 201) there are in fact no
miracles involved in Silas’ restoration; George Eliot takes care to
ensure that the natural chain of causation is not broken. In accor-
dance with her design, the novel reveals ‘the remedial influences of
212 SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

pure, natural human relations’.19 To achieve this end she turns,

perhaps surprisingly, to the principles of physiological psychology
which had sustained the analysis of Silas’ growing alienation.
Although Lewes’ theories, in their ultimate implications, undercut
ideas of ordered social or psychological development, the original
impetus behind his work was to affirm the reign of order through-
out the physical and social realms. George Eliot’s fiction is charac-
terised by a similar duality; she employs the principles of
physiological psychology initially to challenge, and ultimately to
affirm conceptions of organic unity and continuity.
In accordance with physiological principles George Eliot makes
Silas’ first response to Eppie one of memory:

Could this be his little sister come back to him in a dream …?

… It was very much like his little sister. Silas sank into his chair pow-
erless, under the double presence of an inexplicable surprise and a
hurrying influx of memories.
(p. 170)

Eppie does not disrupt the continuity of Silas’ life but rather stimu-
lates the dormant channels of his mind. George Eliot’s analysis in
this crucial passage conforms to Lewes’ conception of the mind as
an ‘aggregate of forces’ and to his theories of unconscious associa-
tion. Thus the sight of the child stimulates within Silas a whole
chain of associated memories: ‘a vision of the old home and the old
streets leading to Lantern Yard – and within that vision another, of
the thoughts which had been present with him in those far-off
scenes’ (p. 170). Silas’ sequence of memory illustrates the ‘law of
attractions’ defined here by Spencer: ‘that when any two psychical
states occur in immediate succession, an effect is produced such that
if the first subsequently recurs there is a certain tendency for the
second to follow.’20 The physical processes of unconscious associa-
tion establish continuity in personal life, a continuity which, Spencer
believed, was then passed on to future generations through the
physiological inheritance of ‘modified nervous tendencies’.21
Physiological structure seemed, to Spencer, to guarantee progressive
social evolution.22
Although George Eliot did not entirely share Spencer’s ebullient
social optimism, she did attribute a key role to physiology in Silas’
recovery. The physiological unity of mind, represented by his
unconscious association of ideas, allows him to heal the breach in
 SILAS MARNER: A DIVIDED EDEN 213

his social experience. Through his relationship with Eppie he grows

once more into union with his neighbours, and into a sense of conti-
nuity with his past. Eppie’s progressive development is mirrored in
Silas as the underlying continuity of his history is gradually revealed:
‘As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was
growing into memory: as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied
in a cold narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually
into full consciousness’ (pp. 193–4). The term ‘full consciousness’ is
here replete with meaning: it implies not only an integrated sense of
self based on continuous memory, but also an open, accepting
awareness of surrounding social life. Under the influence of Eppie
Silas moves beyond the ‘ever-repeated circle’ of thought established
by his gold to look for links and ties with his neighbours. He learns
to channel his previously inert feelings into ‘the forms of custom
and belief which were the mould of Raveloe life; and as, with
reawakening sensibilities, memory also reawakened, he had begun
to ponder over the elements of his old faith, and blend them with
his new impressions, till he recovered a consciousness of unity
between his past and present’ (p. 213). Silas grows simultaneously
into organic unity within his social and psychological life; isolation
and personal disruption are replaced by integration.
Silas’ change appears, on the surface, to be a dramatic transforma-
tion; but, in charting its course, George Eliot employs the same the-
oretical premises that lay behind her earlier analysis. Throughout
the novel she examines both social and psychological life in the light
of Lewes’ and Spencer’s theories of channelled energy. The great
attraction of physiological psychology for these thinkers lay in the
fact that it allowed them to extend to the mind the principles they
saw operating in the social and physiological organism. They
employed in their work a single vocabulary of channelled energy to
describe the three different spheres of physiological, mental, and
social life. George Eliot readily adopted these theories, since they
allowed her to integrate her analysis of the different levels of
organic life.
In her study of the effects of the Lantern Yard religion on Silas’
mind George Eliot draws together the concepts of external cultural
channels, and internal pathways of the mind. Thus Silas accepted
the religious explanation of his fits since ‘culture had not defined
any channels for his sense of mystery, and so it spread itself over the
proper pathway of inquiry and knowledge’ (p. 11). The image of the
force of mystery irresistibly spreading over the ‘proper pathway of
214 SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

inquiry and knowledge’ is in accordance with Lewes’ Law of

Sensibility that ‘No sensation terminates in itself’. Once aroused, a
sensation must necessarily receive issue. The customs of Lantern
Yard formed, for Silas, ‘the channel of divine influences’ (p. 21).
Following his expulsion from these accustomed channels of expres-
sion, his social disruption is replicated internally in the physiological
structure of his mind: ‘Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment,
now its old narrow pathway was closed, and affection seemed to
have died under the bruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves’
(p. 23). This sensitive description of Silas’ psychological confusion is
based on the physiologically precise idea of energy diverted from its
usual, defined channels of discharge. It conforms to Lewes’ theories
concerning the contrast between the ease felt in accustomed action,
and the difficulties of acquiring new patterns of behaviour:

In learning to speak a new language, to play on a musical instrument,

or to perform any unaccustomed movements, great difficulty is felt,
because the channels through which each sensation has to pass have
not become established; but no sooner has frequent repetition cut a
pathway, than this difficulty vanishes.23

These principles lie behind George Eliot’s analysis of Silas’ alien-

ation. His growing subjection to the numbing activity of weaving
and the counting of gold is explained in terms of the ease felt in a
habitual action for ‘Do we not wile away moments of inanity or
fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until
the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?’ (p. 27).
This suggestion conforms to Lewes’ theory that once frequent repe-
tition has cut a pathway actions become so automatic that ‘if once
commenced, they must continue’.24 In hoarding his gold, marking
the periods of his existence only by the acquisition of his guineas,
Silas’ life was ‘narrowing and hardening itself more and more into a
mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any
other being’ (p. 28). While the physical image of pulsation accu-
rately portrays the nature of Silas’ life it also suggests, in moral
terms, its inadequacies: Silas’ reduction from a social to a purely
physical being. The physical description in fact reinforces the moral
analysis.
George Eliot did not employ physiological theory solely for the
sake of descriptive accuracy. Its integrated vocabulary allowed her
to shift easily between different levels of analysis, combining intri-
cate psychological analysis with wider social and moral conclusions.
 SILAS MARNER: A DIVIDED EDEN 215

Thus throughout the novel she transposed physiological concepts

into vivid metaphorical images to highlight their social and psycho-
logical implications.25 Silas’ lack of interest in the hedgerows he had
once loved is expressed in the following poetic terms:
these too belonged to the past, from which his life had shrunk away,
like a rivulet that has sunk far down from the grassy fringe of its old
breadth into a little shivering thread, that cuts a groove for itself in
the barren sand.
(p. 31)

The description is extraordinarily rich and evocative. From the

hedgerow banks, which offer both a literal and symbolic image of the
changes in Silas’ life, it moves to the idea of river banks, and to the
contrast between the lush fertility of a full river, and the stark,
desert-like conditions of a drought. The passage, with its shift from
an historical to a physiological definition of life, captures brilliantly
the qualitative changes in the nature of Silas’ existence. Reduced to a
‘shivering thread’, Silas clearly possesses no control over the condi-
tions of his life. Behind these striking natural images lies the physio-
logical premise that streams of sensation, once displaced from their
accustomed channels, only carve a new pathway with great difficulty.
It is the ‘peculiar characteristic of vigorous intellects’, Lewes notes,
‘that their thoughts are ever finding new pathways instead of moving
amid old associations’.26 Silas, however, has not the vitality to affect
this change. Thus, in a variation on the earlier image ‘his soul was
still the shrunken rivulet, with only this difference, that its little
groove of sand was blocked up, and it wandered confusedly against
dark obstruction’ (p. 132). The ‘fountains of human love and faith’
in his mind are locked up, unable to find a channel of release. The
terms are still those of physiological psychology, but with the rela-
tively simple addition of the word ‘soul’, the physical description
takes on extensive moral and social implications.
Eppie, of course, functions as the catalyst for the release of Silas’
energy. Her appearance does not mark, however, the first time that
Silas’ memories have been awakened. George Eliot charts both the
shrinking current of Silas’ life, and the movements within his uncon-
scious which lead to his later change. Early in his residence in
Raveloe, the sight of Sally Oates suffering from dropsy had recalled
memories of his mother and stimulated him to aid her: ‘In this office
of charity, Silas felt, for the first time since he had come to Raveloe,
a sense of unity between his past and present life.’ But suspicion and
216 SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

misunderstanding prevented its growth. Indeed, in precise physio-

logical terms, the incident ‘heightened the repulsion between him
and his neighbours, and made his isolation more complete’ (pp. 25,
26). But the precedent for his response to Eppie has been set. In
telling the story of his robbery in the Rainbow, and in coming to
terms with his false accusation of Jem, Silas also experienced awak-
ened memories of his past though, as the narrator observes, ‘Our
consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us
any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the
sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud’ (p. 86). The
passage, with its vivid organic images, prepares the reader for Silas’
future development. By establishing a differential time scale between
apparent social history and the hidden life of the unconscious, it
suggests how Silas’ fragmentary existence will once more be brought
into union. The appearance of a figure who could release his
blocked emotion and reopen the channels of his mind leads
inevitably to the restoration of social and psychological unity. The
apparent discontinuity of his life is discounted by the stable physio-
logical structure of his mind. History, as the moral critique of
Godfrey implied, is cumulative.
Analysis of the physiological underpinnings of George Eliot’s
figurative language reveals the extraordinary complexity of her
work. Each word and phrase was related to her larger purpose as
she attempted to resolve, in concrete terms, the social issues raised
by organicism.27 The satisfying conclusion of Silas’ life, however,
was only possible because the shared vocabulary of organic social
and psychological theory allowed George Eliot to elide these two
distinct levels of analysis. Spencer and Lewes turned to physiological
psychology for scientific validation of their belief in the hidden
order of the world, and George Eliot, in this novel, follows their
example: she employs physiology to reinforce the moral structure of
her tale. In focusing on Silas’ physiological growth into unity,
however, she excludes reference both to his disruptive fits, and to
the wider social context of his life. Ultimately, his isolation there-
fore appears as less a product of the social relations in Raveloe than
an accident of personal circumstance, to be resolved on an individ-
ual level. This perspective is at odds, however, with the wider social
analysis offered in the rest of the novel, notably in the history of
Godfrey which runs in direct counterpoint to that of Silas.
After the arrival of Eppie the novel appears to move swiftly
towards a happy ending. The wedding, set in the season of eternal
 SILAS MARNER: A DIVIDED EDEN 217

renewal ‘when the great lilacs and laburnums in the old-fashioned

gardens showed their golden and purple wealth above the lichen-
tinted walls’ (p. 270) and confirmed by the, for once, unanimous
approval of the Raveloe chorus, certainly seems to validate the
organic social ideal. The social harmony is marred, however, by the
absence of Godfrey Cass; whilst forward movement of the plot is
balanced by the less positive model of history suggested by the
destruction of Lantern Yard. Following his ‘resurrection’ by Eppie,
Silas had turned once more to a belief in the providential govern-
ment of history. Inspired by her to a sense of ‘presiding goodness’
(p. 213) he came to believe that his earlier expulsion from Lantern
Yard must have been due to some error. He returned, therefore,
with Eppie to Lantern Yard to see Mr Paston ‘a man with a deal o’
light’, in the hope that the minister would be able to illuminate the
historical process: why the ‘drawing o’ the lots’ did not vindicate
Silas’ belief in an ordered universe but rather seemed to endorse the
rule of chance. In place of the light and order he expected to find,
however, he discovered only darkness and destruction: ‘Here and
there a sallow, begrimed face looked out from a gloomy doorway at
the strangers’ (p. 268). Into this gloom, so reminiscent of Eppie’s
origin, Lantern Yard had vanished, to be replaced by a factory,
symbol of the industrial changes which, like Molly’s dark history,
had no discernible impact on Raveloe life. Silas failed to find order
or meaning in history. Lacking historical illumination he was left in
darkness: ‘It’s dark to me Mrs Winthrop, that is; I doubt it’ll be
dark to the last’ (p. 269). Through Eppie he found ‘light enough to
trusten by’, but not the light of historical reason he had sought.
Silas’ failure highlights the internal conflicts in the novel. The tale
is no simple endorsement of organicist theories of social develop-
ment. As the stress on moral responsibility is balanced by the seem-
ingly uncontrollable nature of Silas’ fits, so Silas’ growth into
psychological continuity is offset by the seeming recalcitrance of
social history; its refusal to conform to a pattern of ordered devel-
opment. The dark vision of the ‘great manufacturing town’ where
the jail hides the sky suggests that the novel’s Edenic conclusion can
only be achieved by moving backwards in history to the pre-
industrial landscape of Raveloe. Yet even here, it is questionable
whether the life of a rural idyll could be attained. George Eliot’s
portrayal of Raveloe is marked by the same duality that charac-
terises the rest of the tale. On the one hand it appears a land of
Edenic bounty, with ‘orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty’
218 SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

(p. 21). Protected, like Hayslope, by nature ‘it was nestled in a snug
well-wooded hollow’, and centred round a ‘fine old church’ (p. 7).
These images of a natural, harmonious existence are, on the other
hand, offset by descriptions of the peasantry’s lives as ‘pressed close
by primitive wants … To them pain and mishap present a far wider
range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagina-
tion is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is
all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear’
(p. 6). The image is a grim one indeed, but, throughout the novel,
George Eliot offers no direct representation of this poverty and fear.
This reluctance to portray the darker side of Raveloe experience
suggests George Eliot’s own ambivalent response.
The bald references to the poverty and misery of Raveloe life are
balanced by the detailed celebration of the organic community of
the feudal order. Thus the loving attention lavished on Miss Nancy’s
arrival at Squire Cass’, the feast and the New Year’s Eve dance
seems to confirm for the reader, as for the assembled community of
villages, the ‘fitness of things’: ‘That was as it should be – that was
what everybody had been used to – and the charter of Raveloe
seemed to be renewed by the ceremony’ (pp. l56–7). This ritual of
renewal is disrupted, however, by the arrival of Silas with Eppie in
his arms. For Godfrey, Silas seemed ‘an apparition from that hidden
life which lies, like a dark by-street, behind the goodly ornamented
facade that meets the sunlight and the gaze of respectable admirers’
(p. 174). The dark by-streets are not confined to the manufacturing
town of Silas’ past, but intrude even upon the gay procession in the
White Parlour ‘where the mistletoe-bough was hung, and multitudi-
nous tallow candles made rather a brilliant effect, gleaming from
among the berried holly-boughs, and reflected in the old-fashioned
oval mirrors fastened in the panels of the white wainscot’ (p. 156).
The villagers’ own belief in a harmonious natural order, celebrated
here in these images of brilliant festivities, is shown to be founded
on an illusion. In place of the villagers’ affectionate respect for the
gaiety of their superiors’ lives, we should perhaps substitute the nar-
rator’s vision of our rural forefathers, ‘men whose only work was to
ride round their land, getting heavier and heavier in their saddles,
and who passed the rest of their days in the half-listless gratification
of senses dulled by monotony’ (p. 44). George Eliot no longer
endorses the social vision of Adam Bede. Although the earlier novel
had condemned Arthur’s abuse of his social position and responsi-
bilities it had not questioned the fundamental desirability of the
 SILAS MARNER: A DIVIDED EDEN 219

hierarchical social system. Silas Marner, however, portrays the life of

the squirearchy as intrinsically negative and unproductive. Even the
‘order and purity’ of a Nancy Lammeter cannot, it seems, bring fer-
tility to a form of life which is essentially barren.
The significant absence of Godfrey Cass from the concluding
scene suggests that the final harmony is attained only by excluding
the murkier side of Raveloe life. Godfrey’s history reveals the petty
and even sordid nature of experience within this rural community.
In Adam Bede George Eliot had portrayed seduction and even
murder, but had not even hinted at the form of life she now reveals
through Godfrey’s backstairs marriage, Molly’s death from opium
addiction and Dunsey’s blackmail and theft. Silas and Godfrey, as
critics have pointed out, undergo a similar pattern of experience;
both are victims of a scheming brother who plots their overthrow.28
There is a crucial difference, however, in the mode of presentation.
Whilst William Dane is only sketchily presented, we see Dunsey
Cass in all his taunting, menacing glory. George Eliot offers the facts
of Dane’s treachery without exploring fully its causes or motiva-
tions, but in dealing with Dunsey she reveals, in careful detail, how
the social conditions of the Casses’ lives contribute to his behaviour.
His malignancy is not an individual aberration but a direct product
of his social environment. Even more clearly than in Lantern Yard,
evil seems to be endemic to the structure of Raveloe life.
Throughout the novel George Eliot brings to her representation
of Godfrey this same clear-eyed vision. In the parallel structure of
the plot, Silas’ 15 barren years are re-enacted in Godfrey’s barren
marriage, and Godfrey’s loss of Eppie becomes, as U. C.
Knoepflmacher has observed, Silas’ strange gain’.29 There exists,
however, a disturbing disparity between the two stories. Whilst
Silas’ fall and later redemption are originally brought about by
chance, Godfrey’s life is rigorously governed by the operation of
uniform law. Though Godfrey, like Dunsey, cares initially, ‘more
for immediate annoyances than for remote consequences’ (p. 52), he
comes to learn that an individual must bear responsibility for all his
deeds. He becomes, indeed, a living exemplum of George Eliot’s
doctrine of the ‘inexorable law of consequences’. Like Arthur
Donnithorne, Godfrey takes comfort initially in casuistry. As Arthur
had hoped that good could come out of evil, so Godfrey trusts that,
if events turn out better than a man expects ‘is it not a proof that his
conduct has been less foolish and blameworthy than it might other-
wise have appeared?’ (p. 183). The narrative decisively rejects such
220 SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

moral relativism. Godfrey’s childless marriage, and the recovery of

Dunsey’s body, function as moral symbols of the workings of inex-
orable law.
Whilst Silas receives the unexpected gift of Eppie, Godfrey is
treated with all the harshness of ‘unrecompensing law’. Arthur,
despite his crimes, had been welcomed back at the close of Adam
Bede into the community of Hayslope. Godfrey, however, learns
that there are some debts that cannot be paid: ‘While I’ve been
putting off and putting off, the trees have been growing – it’s too
late now’ (p. 262). The implicit moral recalls the concluding obser-
vation in The Mill on the Floss: ‘Nature repairs her ravages – but not
all.’ In both novels this image of historical attrition stands in direct
contrast to a more optimistic social vision. Silas Marner ends with
Eppie’s joyful exclamation ‘I think nobody could be happier than
we are.’ But, as in The Mill, this joy is only to be attained at a
certain cost. Maggie lost her life; Silas and Eppie lose part of their
past. Silas no longer looks to integrate Lantern Yard within his
present life, whilst Eppie, in an ideologically significant gesture,
denies Godfrey’s paternal claims, thus violating the natural chain of
biological continuity.
Although strong arguments have been made for the satisfying
nature of Silas Marner’s conclusion, its symmetry seems marred.30
Godfrey fails to take account of the unity of the historical process
and is duly punished; Silas is unaccountably blessed by chance and
learns, in consequence, to relinquish his quest for order and
meaning in history. He learns, instead, to trust; but, such a position
implies a passivity directly at odds with the ideal of active, far-
sighted responsibility for action, inculcated elsewhere in the novel.
Trust, indeed, is a viable stance only within a harmonious order, a
society without conflict; it would not have resolved the dilemmas of
Maggie’s life. Silas, unlike Maggie, is spared the conflict of irrecon-
cilable claims, but the dual representation of Raveloe life puts into
question the quality of his Eden.
The celebration of plenitude which concludes Silas Marner is
based, like the flood in The Mill on the Floss, on an evasion of the
preceding attempt to find within history an ordered process of
growth. Like the earlier novel, Silas Marner offers two models of
history. Order, continuity and control are set against chance, dis-
ruption and powerlessness: the fairy tale elements are balanced by
the darker history of Molly or Dunsey, and the stress on moral
responsibility is offset by the seemingly uncontrollable nature of
 SILAS MARNER: A DIVIDED EDEN 221

Silas’ fits. These divisions within the novel reveal George Eliot’s
ambivalent responses to theories of organic development. Clearly, it
was no longer possible for her to resolve the issues raised by organi-
cism by turning to the life of ‘Merry England’. Thus in her next
novel she abandoned her accustomed English setting, choosing to
dramatise these questions in the idealised form made possible by the
temporal and cultural distance of Renaissance Italy.

From Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century

Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge, 1984),
pp. 79–95.

NOTES
[This essay is taken from Sally Shuttleworth’s book George Eliot and
Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (1984), which
explores the interaction between the discourse of science and literature. New
Historicism is well suited to such a project since it aims to situate the novel in
its historical context and investigate the ways in which the ideological divi-
sions and tensions of a period are manifest in the inconsistencies of the text.
Shuttleworth argues that Eliot is firmly anchored in the theoretical thought of
the period and tries to show how ‘scientific ideas and theories of method
affected not only the social vision but also the narrative structure and fictional
methodology’. Shuttleworth also records the developments in Eliot’s scientific
thought from Adam Bede to Daniel Deronda. Thus in her highly original
account of The Mill on the Floss she stresses the narrator’s ‘Proust-like sub-
mergence into the world of unconscious memory’. In the excerpt produced
here, a close reading of Silas Marner shows Eliot employing ‘physiological
theory’ articulated by G. H. Lewes and others. Eds]

1. George Eliot, ‘The Lifted Veil’, Silas Marner and ‘Brother Jacob’,
Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh, 1878–80), Ch. 1, p. 7. All references to
this edition of the tale will be cited hereafter in the text.
2. Thus Lecky, Mackay, Comte and Spencer all associated social
progress with the increasing growth of rational control. Spencer,
indeed, placing these evolutionary beliefs on a physiological basis,
argued that the ‘ever advancing consensus’ of the mind exemplified
the universal Law of Progress governing all natural and social devel-
opment (Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology [London,
1955], p. 485).
3. Knoepflmacher similarly links Maggie’s passivity in Stephen’s boat to
Silas’s paralysis which leads to his victimisation by William Dane.
Although my conclusions concerning the symmetry of Silas Marner
222 SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

differ from those of Knoepflmacher, I am indebted to his discriminating

analysis of the ways in which this tale ‘is a reaction to, as well as a con-
tinuation of, The Mill on the Floss’. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s
Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley, CA, 1968) pp. 229, 227.

4. Catalepsy, as Oswei Temkin has shown in The Falling of Sickness

(Baltimore, MD, 1971), was confused with forms of epilepsy from
ancient times onwards, and the Victorians seemed no nearer than their
predecessors to finding an explanation for its occurrence. Although
catalepsy was a common term in mid-century psychological discussions
(occurring, for example, in the works of Carpenter and Spencer), it was
usually introduced as an inexplicable phenomenon. I have been unable
to trace any detailed discussion of its causes. Its inexplicable nature
seems, indeed, to persist to this day. Thus Robert Simon concludes his
technical discussion of Silas’s malady with the observation that
‘Narcolepsy is a baffling illness that defies elucidation by the disciplines
of neurology and psychiatry. The precise etiology of this malady remains
a mystery today as during the lifetime of Eliot, Melville and Poe.’ See
Robert Simon, ‘Narcolepsy and the Strange Malady of Silas Marner’,
American Journal of Psychiatry, 123 (November, 1966), 601–2.

5. Unsigned review in The Times, 29 April 1861 in David R. Carroll (ed.),

The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), p. 182.

6. Carroll (ed.), The Critical Heritage, p. 182.

7. Ibid., pp. 183–4.

8. Joseph Wiesenfarth, ‘Demythologizing Silas Marner’, English Literary

History, 37 (1970), 236.

9. Carroll’s formative study reveals how profoundly George Eliot was

influenced by the doctrines of Feuerbach in her writing of Silas
Marner. James McLaverty traces the impact of Comte on the novel in
‘Comtean Fetishism in Silas Marner’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 36
(1981), 318–36.

10. Comte distinguished his theory from that of earlier historians accord-
ing to the respect with which he treated the past stages of history: ‘For
that spirit consists in the sense of human continuity, which had hith-
erto been felt by no one, not even my illustrious and unfortunate pre-
decessor Condorcet.’ See Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity or
Treatise on Sociology Instituting the Religion of Humanity, trans. J. H.
Bridges, Frederic Harrison, E. S. Beesly, Richard Congreave (London,
1875–7), vol. I, p. 50.
11. See Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters (New Haven, CT, 1954–78)
IV, pp. 96–7 for George Eliot’s description of her aims.
 SILAS MARNER: A DIVIDED EDEN 223

12. Unsigned review, Westminster Review, 76 (July 1861), 280–2,

reprinted in Carroll (ed.), The Critical Heritage, pp. 186–8.

13. See the discussion of ‘our instructed vagrancy’ (Bk VI, ch. 9, I, p. 414).

14. Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (New York, 1876),
p. 534, p. 537.

15. Summarising his objections to Lewes’s theories Bain concluded: ‘It

seems to me, therefore, that what determines the unity of conscious-
ness, as showing which local currents have found means to activate the
collective currents, is the unity of the executive.’ Ibid., p. 591.

16. George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life (London,

1859–60),Vol. II, p. 5.

17. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford, 1977), p.
442.

18. David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, trans.
Marian Evans (London, 1846), Vol. I, p. 64.

19. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, III, p. 382. To John Blackwood,
24 February 1861.

20. Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, p. 532.

21. Ibid., p. 526.

22. Spencer’s theories of progressive social evolution were founded on the

premise that unconscious association formed the basis of the individual’s
adaptation to the environment, and thence of the race’s progressive
development as these ‘forms of thought’ were transmitted to offspring.
Since relations to the environment once established are, he argues,
‘uniform, invariable, incapable of being absent, or reversed, or abolished,
they must be represented by irreversible, indestructible connections of
ideas’ (ibid., p. 580). The physiological unity of mind is taken as a guar-
antee of essential social continuity and development. George Eliot also
believed, in a more moderate way, that physiology played a role in social
evolution. Thus she was vehemently opposed to Buckle’s theories in
History of Civilization in England for he held that ‘there is no such thing
as race or hereditary transmission of qualities’. Haight (ed.), The George
Eliot Letters, II, p. 415. Without this physiological transmission of experi-
ence, she believed, there could be no intrinsic moral advance in history.

23. Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, II, p. 58.

24. Ibid., p. 58.

224 SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH

25. Her procedure in this matter does not represent a departure from
scientific precision, but rather an extension of the principles of linguis-
tic analogy that lay behind the development of physiological psychol-
ogy. In founding their science, physiological psychologists did not
create an entirely new vocabulary but rather drew on existing terms
like current, channel, or groove, that often carried with them concealed
assumptions concerning the formation of the natural and social worlds.
26. Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, II, p. 59.
27. In her letter to R. H. Hutton concerning the writing of Romola,
George Eliot observed, ‘I believe there is scarcely a phrase, an incident,
an allusion, that did not gather its value to me from its supposed sub-
servience to my main artistic objects’. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot
Letters, IV, pp. 96–7.
28. For detailed analysis of the parallels between the lives of Godfrey and
Silas see David R. Carroll, ‘Silas Marner: Reversing the Oracles of
Religion’, Literary Monographs, 1 (1967), 165–200, Knoepflmacher,
George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism, Joseph
Wiesenfarth, ‘Demythologizing Silas Marner’, English Literary History,
37 (1970), 226–44, and Bruce K. Martin, ‘Similarity within
Dissimilarity: The Dual Structure of Silas Marner’, Texas Studies in
Language and Literature, 14 (1973), 479–89.
29. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism,
p. 250.
30. Thus Knoepflmacher sees in Silas Marner a ‘reconciliation through
fable’. He concludes that ‘In Silas Marner it is the “glue” of George
Eliot’s artistry which resolves the conflicts that had divided her previ-
ously’, Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of
Realism, p. 254. Although the two disparate perspectives are finely bal-
anced within the structure of the novel, I would argue they are not
ultimately resolved. George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism,
p. 160–1.
Further Reading
George Eliot recorded her experiences of writing fiction in her letters and
journals. Both provide evidence of ambitions for her novels, her dealings
with publishers, her anxieties about public criticism, her strengths and
weaknesses as a writer and the influence of G. H. Lewes. Students might
start their survey of Eliot criticism with the following works:
Gordon S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, 9 Vols (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1954–5, 1978).
Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (eds), The Journals of George Eliot
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Joseph Wisenfarth (ed.), George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–79
(Virginia: Virginia University Press, 1985).

A perspective on the history of George Eliot criticism is of particular inter-

est to students concerned with the realist fictional tradition, with the anti-
Victorian reaction of the early twentieth century and also with the
implication of gender in literary studies. There are several collections,
which provide useful information, and the first chapter of Kirsten Brady’s
study is particularly striking:
Kirsten Brady, George Eliot (London: Macmillan Press – now Palgrave,
1992).
David Carroll (ed.), George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1971).
Ronald Draper (ed.), The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, Casebook
Series (London: Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1977).
Stuart Hutchinson, George Eliot: Critical Assessments, 4 Vols (London:
Croom Helm, 1996).
Karen L. Pangallo, Critical Responses to George Eliot (London: Greenwood
Press, 1994).
J. Russell Perkin, A Reception History of George Eliot’s Fiction (London:
AMI Press, 1990).

225
226 FURTHER READING

BIOGRAPHY
There are many biographies on Eliot. Among the most useful are:
Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996).
J.W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life as related in her Letters and Journals, 3 Vols
(Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1885).
Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1968).
Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate,
1998).
Ruby Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (London: Random House,
1975).
Jenny Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1987).

CRITICAL WORKS
Several critical studies place George Eliot’s fiction in its historical context.
Many of the works listed below are written from a feminist perspective.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narratives in Darwin, George
Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1983).
Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot,
Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
David Carroll, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Simon Dentith, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1982).
Elizabeth Deedes Ermath, George Eliot (Boston: Twayne, 1985).
Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory
and Fictional Form (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
Josephine McDonagh, George Eliot (Plymouth: Northcote, 1997).
Diana Postlewaite, Making It Whole: A Victorian Circle and the Shape of
their World (Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 1984).
Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Alexander Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985).

The contextual study can be expanded through the examination of the rela-
tion of George Eliot’s work to various literary and artistic conventions and
traditions:
Felicia Bonaparte, ‘Carrying the word of the Lord to the Gentiles: Silas
Marner and the translation of scripture into secular text’, Religion and
Literature, 23:2 (1991), 39–60.
Mary Ann Doody, ‘George Eliot and the Eighteenth Century Novel’,
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 (1980), 260–91.
Beryl Gray, George Eliot and Music (London: Macmillan Press – now
Palgrave, 1989).
 FURTHER READING 227

Joseph Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Myth Making Publisher (Heidelberg:

Carl Winter, 1977).
Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen Eliot and Lawrence (Princeton
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

George Eliot’s life and novels have always proved of interest for psychologi-
cal examination. Recently the speculations of nineteenth-century critics
have been superseded by more complex readings:
Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Mary Jacobus, ‘Hysterics Suffer Mainly from Reminiscences’, in Reading
Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), pp. 246–74.
Dianne Sadoff, Monsters of Affection, Dickens, Eliot and Brontë on
Fatherhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

The rise of feminist criticism has been one of the most important factors in
the re-evaluation of George Eliot’s work in the last thirty years. Eliot is a
controversial figure with critics divided over her status as a feminist
heroine, her attitude to the ‘woman question’ and whether her heroines are
exemplars of female assertion:
Nina Auerbach, ‘The Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie Tulliver’,
Nineteenth-Century Fiction , 30 (1975), 150–71.
Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986).
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1979).
Nancy K. Miller, ‘Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s
Fiction’, PMLA , 96:1 (1981), 36–48.
Diana Postlewaite, ‘Of Maggie, Mothers, Monsters and Madonnas: Diving
deep in The Mill on the Floss’, Women’s Studies , 20:3–4 (1992), 303–19.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1977).
Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925)

Finally, three recent essays draw heavily on historicist approaches:

Jules Law, ‘Water Rights and the ‘“Crossing o’ Breeds”: Chiastic Exchange
in The Mill on the Floss’, in Linda Shires (ed.), Rewriting the Victorians:
Theory, History and the Politics of Gender (London: Routledge, 1992).
Margaret Homans, ‘Dinah’s Blush, Maggie’s Arm: Class, Gender and
Sexuality in George Eliot’s Early novels’, Victorian Studies , 36:2 (1995),
155–78.
K. M. Newton, ‘Victorian Values and Silas Marner’, in Gary Day (ed.),
Varieties of Victorianism (London: Macmillan Press – now Palgrave,
1998), pp. 110–25.
Notes on Contributors
Terence Dawson lectures at the University of Singapore. He has published ar-
ticles in journals such as Modern Language Review, George Eliot Fellowship
Review, New Comparsion and Seventeenth-Century French Studies.
Joshua D. Esty is Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois (Urbana-
Champaign). He has published essays on T. S. Eliot, James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett and is completing a book entitled A
Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England.
Susan Fraiman teaches English at the University of Virginia. She is the
author of Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of
Development (1993) and has published in Critical Inquiry, PMLA,
Feminist Studies and ALH. She is currently working on Cool Men and
the Second Sex: Reading Left Intellectuals.
Mary Jacobus is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge (previ-
ously Anderson Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Cornell
University). Her books include Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference
(1989), First Thing: Essays on Literature, Art and Psychoanalysis (1986),
and Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (1999).
Peggy R. F. Johnstone has published a number of articles on George Eliot’s
fiction in journals such as Literature and Psychology, Mosaic and
University of Hartford Studies in Literature.
José Angel García Landa has published articles in journals such as Papers in
Language and Literature.
J. Hillis Miller is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the
University of California, Irvine. His books include The Form of Victorian
Fiction (1968), Thomas Hardy (1970), Fiction and Repetition (1982) and
The Ethics of Reading (1987).
Jeff Nunokawa teaches English at Princeton University. He is currently
finishing a book about the fantasy of manageable desire in the work of
Oscar Wilde.
Jim Reilly lectured at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of
London. His publications include Shadowtime: History and

228
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 229

Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot (1993) as well as

contributions to Joseph Conrad (1996), Literature and Culture in Britain,
1: 1900–1929 (1993).
Sally Shuttleworth is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of
Sheffield. She is the author of George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century
Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (1984) and Charlotte Brontë
and Victorian Psychology (1996), and editor of numerous volumes includ-
ing Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts (1998) with
Jenny Bourne Taylor.
Index

Abel, Elizabeth, 36, 45 Carlyle, Thomas, 45

Abrams, Meyer, 69 cataleptic fits, 205–6, 209
Adorno, Theodore, 188, 190, 197, Chapman, John, 5, 139
198, 199 Chopin, Kate, 114
Allen, Grant, 3 Christ’s parable of the sower, 65,
ambiguous unease, 174–5 67
animus-figures, 150–1, 154, 156, Cixous, Hélène, 83
157 Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone,
Aristotle: Poetics, 93; Rhetoric, 196; The Woman in White, 77
59–60, 64 Communist Manifesto, The, Karl
Arnold, Matthew, 22 Marx and Friedrich Engels,
artefact and identity, 196–9 189
Ashton, Rosemary, 24 Comte, Auguste, 24, 25, 78, 208,
Auerbach, Nina, 33 210, 211
Austen, Jane: Emma, 46, 107; Conrad, Joseph, 22
Northanger Abbey, 42 Corinne, ou l’Italie, Mme Anne
Louise de Staël, 76, 77, 78, 81
Bain, Alexander, 25, 209 Craik, Dinah, 26
Baldick, Chris, 16 Cross, John: creates George Eliot’s
Balzac, Honoré de, 195–6, 197 image of rectitude, 1, 16;
Beauvoir, Simone de 6–7 George Eliot’s Life, 1, 17
Beer, Gillian, 4
behavioural ideology, 74–6, 79–80 Dallas, E. S., 19, 206–7
Benjamin, Walter, 189, 199 Darwin, Charles, 18–19, 190
Bildungsroman, 7–8, 8–9, 15, Dawson, Terence, 19–20, 143–62
33–50, 101, 106–7, 110–12, De Man, Paul, 69
114, 116 deconstruction, 9–11, 57–70
Blackwood, John, 19, 38 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 68, 70
bodily propriety, 166–75, 181–2 Dessner, Lawrence Jay, 143
Bourdieu, Pierre, 176–7 Dickens, Charles: A Tale of Two
Brabant, Dr Robert, 139 Cities, 190; David Copperfield,
Braddon, Mary, 26 38, 42, 45, 46, 170–1;
Brecht, Bertolt, 195, 197, 198 Dombey and Son, 21, 23,
Bright, John, 22 188–9, 199; Little Dorrit, 21
Broderip, W. J., 92 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 35, 45
Brontë, Emily, 194 Dunham, Robert, 18
Buckley, Jerome, 35, 36, 38–9, 40, Durade, François, 139
107; Season of Youth, 44–7
Burckhardt, Jacob Christopher, 190 Eliot, George:
Burke, Kenneth, 66 biographies: George Eliot: A
Burney, Fanny, 39, 48 Biography, Gordon S.
Byatt, A. S., 7 Haight, 24; George Eliot: A
Byron, Lord George Gordon, 45 Life, Rosemary Ashton, 24;

230
 INDEX 231

George Eliot’s Life as Related Gallagher, Catherine, 22

in her Letters and Journals, Gallop, Jane, 3, 194
John Cross, 1, 17 Galsworthy, John, 198
appearance mocked, 2; body Geuss, Raymond, 69
language, 3; depicts rural Gilbert, Sandra, 34, 87, 143
myth, 18–19, 102, 104, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 45,
163–4, 199, 204, 217–18; as 107; Wilhelm Meister’s
pompous moralist, 1; Apprenticeship 34, 35, 38,
publications listed, 4–5; 45
quarrel with father, 159; Goodman, Charlotte, 38, 39, 40
relationship with G. H. Gosse, Edmund, 1–2
Lewes, 17, 159; and social Graff, Gerald, 69
transition, 16–17 Gubar, Susan, 34, 87
translations, 5: Das Wesen des
Christenthums, 192; writes Hagan, John, 32
for Westminster Review, 5 Haight, Gordon S., 24,31
writings: Adam Bede, 21, 64, Hardy, Barbara, 32, 138
173, 204; Daniel Deronda, Hardy, Florence Emily, 191
21, 167, 168–9, 173–4, 196, Hardy, Thomas, 22, 190, 191
210; Felix Holt: The Radical, Hegel, Georg, 35, 65, 114, 201
22, 160, 173, 195; Heilbrun, Carolyn, 47
Impressions of Theophrastus Henley, W. E., 1
Such, 5; Middlemarch, 2, 63, Hennell, Sarah, 138
65, 103, 114, 159, 166–7; Hillis Miller, J., 9–11, 57–72
Mill on the Floss, 6–18, Hirsch, Marianne, 33, 36
19–20, 31–50, 57–70, historicism, 22–4, 102–16,
73–81, 83–98, 101–17, 188–201
122–39; Romola, 144–5, homosexuality, 165, 170–1, 173
195, 201; Silas Marner, Howe, Susanne, 34, 35, 44
18–24, 143–60, 163–83, Hutton, Richard Holt, 6
188–201, 204–21
Eliot, T. S., 74, 176 illicit sex, 165–7, 169–72
Ellmann, Mary, 47 individuality, alienation of, 189–93
Emery, Laura Comer, 122, 123, infatuation, 132–3, 134–5
138 Irigaray, Luce, 13, 14, 83, 83–4,
Empson, William, 66 85–7, 96, 97, 98
Engels, Friedrich, 189
Ermarth, Elizabeth, 5, 33, 47, 124 Jacobs, Theodore J. 132, 134
Esty, Joshua, 14–16, 101–21 Jacobus, Mary, 13–14, 34, 83–100,
109
female stereotypes, 75, 76, 76–7, James, Henry: The Golden Bowl,
78, 81 23, 196, 197, 199; The Portrait
feminist criticism, 4, 7–8, 8–9, of a Lady 197–8
13–14, 32–5, 47–50, 83–100 Jameson, Fredric, 35, 39–40
Feurbach, Ludwig, 5, 24, 192, 208 Jauss, Hans Robert, 3
Foucault, Michel, 20, 21, 177 Jeffries, Stuart, 7
Fraiman, Susan, 7–9, 31–56, 101, Johnson, Barbara, 9, 97
107 Johnstone, Peggy R. F., 13, 17–18,
Freud, Sigmund, 84 122–42
232 INDEX

Joyce, James, 45 Miller, Nancy K., 13, 14, 34, 77,

Jung, Carl Gustav, 145, 150, 151, 80, 85, 87–8, 96, 109
154, 156, 157 Millett, Kate, 47
mimesis, 86, 97
Kavanagh, James, 194 Moers, Ellen, 47, 77–8
Knoepflmacher, U. C., 32, 219 Moretti, Franco, 107, 115
Kohut, Heinz, 124, 138 Ms Magazine, 47
Murry, Ann, 38
labour, dehumanising of workers,
191–3 national identity, 16, 101, 103–4,
Landa, José Angel García, 11–13, 106
73–82 Newton, Judith Lowder, 36
Langland, Elizabeth, 36 Newton, Ken, 18
laudanum, 147, 149, 152, 153 Nunokawa, Jeff, 20–1, 163–87
Lawrence, D. H., 7; Sons and
Lovers, 42, 45, 198 object collecting, 194–7
Leavis, F. R.: rehabilitation of Oliphant, Margaret, 17, 24
George Eliot, 4, 16, 113, 138;
The Great Tradition, 3, 31, Paris, Bernard J., 32, 122, 138
143 physical and metaphysical pain,
Leavis, Q. D., 18 175–6
Lentricchia, Frank, 69 physiologically based theories, 25,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 114 204–21
Levine, George, 32 Plato: Gorgias, 59–60; Phaedrus,
Lewes, George, 5, 139, 216; 57–9, 60
philosophy, 24, 25, 210, 212, poststructuralism, 13–14
213–14, 215; The Problems of Proust, Marcel, 7, 198–9, 199
Life and Mind, 5 psychoanalysis, 17–18, 19–20,
Linton, Eliza Lynn, 3 122–39, 144–60
London Quarterly Review, 17
Lukács, Georg, 64, 112, 116, 195, Redinger, Ruby, 143
199, 200 Reilly, Jim, 22–4, 188–203
rhetorical reading, 61–70
McCarthy, Justin, 1 Rich, Adrienne, 47
McDonagh, Josephine, 16 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 48
McDonnell, Jane, 138, 139 Ruskin, John, 6; The Stones of
Mann, Thomas, 45 Venice, 23, 191
Manzoni, Alessando, 39–40
Marx, Karl: Capital, 23, 24; Sammons, Jeffrey, 45, 48
Economic and Philosphical Scarry, Elaine, 179
Manuscripts, 23, 188, 192, Scott, Sir Walter, 112, 116, 126
192–3, 201, 211 Scrutiny, 3–4
Marxism, 73, 74, 79–80 Searle, John, 69
maxims, 88–91 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 171, 172
Meredith, George, 66 semiotic constructs, 11–12, 73–81
Miles, David, 35, 36, 47–8 Semmel, Bernard, 16–17
Mill on the Floss, The (BBC film), 7 sexuality and economics, 20–1,
Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, 190, 164–70
191 shadow personalities, 151–2, 152–3
 INDEX 233

Shaffer, Elinor, 4 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 15

Showalter, Elaine, 9, 114; A Trollope, Anthony, The Eustace
Literature of Their Own, 33, Diamonds, 196
47
Shuttleworth, Sally, 4, 24–5, uniformitarian progress, 207–8
204–24
Smiles, Samuel, Self–Help, 23, 190 Valéry, Paul Ambroise, 198, 199
Smith, Barbara, 47 Voloshinov, V. N., 11, 73, 74
social change, 15–16, 101–2, 105,
107–11 Walker, Alice, 48
Spacks, Patricia 33, 47 Watts, Ian, 35
Spencer, Herbert, 24, 25, 212, 213, Werman, David S., 132, 134
216 Westminster Review, 5
Spender, Dale, 12 Whitehead, Alfred North, 66
Steig, Michael, 124 Whitmont, Edward, 158
Steinecke, Hartmut, 35 Wiesenfarth, Joseph, 18, 207
Steinhoff, William R., 32 Williams, Raymond, 104, 113
Stephen, Leslie, 25, 31 women’s writing, 47–8, 83, 84–7
Strauss, David Frederich, 5, 24, Wood, Ellen, 26
208, 211 Woodward, Wendy, 124
Stump, Reva, 32 Woolf, Virginia: admiration of
Sukenic, Lynn, 78 George Eliot, 2, 3; centennial
essay on George Eliot 2, 91;
Taylor, Frances, 15 Jacob’s Room, 46; To the
Thale, Jerome, 32 Lighthouse, 46–7, 48
Thomas à Kempis, 94, 95, 96, 97, Wordsworth, William: Essays on
126 Epitaphs, 65; The Prelude, 42,
Times Literary Supplement, 2 45