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Response to Mill On the Floss by George Eliot

Assignment Seven

The Mill on the Floss, a tragic Bildungsroman (a novel about the moral and psychological
growth of the main character), tells the story of Maggie Tulliver, an intellectually precocious and
imaginatively gifted young girl— clearly modeled on Eliot herself—who grows up into young
womanhood in a small town in rural England. Her passionate emotional conflicts are
sympathetically and insightfully explored by the narrator, who at the same time provides us with
a remarkable true-to-life vision of Maggie’s world– her family, her social environment, and the
idyllic setting of nature she loves as a child. Maggie is adored by her father, the owner of the
“mill on the floss,” who admires her originality and intelligence, as well as her warm and
sympathetic nature. In contrast, her mother is constantly distressed by Maggie’s inability to
comply with the tribal rituals of her society. Her in- tense and conflicted ties to her brother, who
is very much her mother’s son (a Dodson) is also of crucial importance.

The first two books of the novel show how Maggie’s efforts to express herself are
thwarted by a normative environment that rejects her as wrong and disordered. Impetuous and
apparently willful in her ideas, she finds herself repeatedly in conflict with the expectations of
those around her. Her mother, brother, and aunts make her feel all wrong and constantly remind
her of how disappointing she is in comparison with her pert and well-kempt cousin Lucy. Her
mother and her sisters, shrill arbiters of social standards, stigmatize both her thick dark hair,
which refuses to curl as is the fashion, and her brown skin, a further sign of defectiveness, as
shameful physical attributes. With her intelligence and ardent imagination, Maggie feels there is
no place for her in a society preoccupied with property rights and pecking orders, especially in
light of its rigid view of the roles of men and women. She thus finds herself identifying with the
gypsies and witches on the books she reads, fiery dark women like herself, who are mistrusted
and feared by the social establishment.

In the early parts of the novel, Eliot fleshes out with characteristic wit and insight the
emotional conflict with which Maggie struggles throughout her young life. Eliot intended, in
these episodes, to set a pattern as a preliminary ground for the tragic action that follows. As we
move from one episode to the next, Maggie’s feelings become more chaotic and push her to
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attack both herself and others. In spite of the emotional conflicts and set backs of her daily life,
she remains nonetheless resilient, thanks in part to her father’s steadfast love and support, the
only member of the family who acknowledges her with genuine favor and warmth. He is always
there to take her side, to play the part of a loving and forgiving father while she plays that of a
“prodigal daughter.”1 Throughout, he remains a figure who offers her love and recognition, in
contrast with her mother and brother, whose standards of judgment are socially conventional,
and who are for the most part blind to her qualities and passions.

The conflict is dramatized in three episodes in the early part of the novel. I briefly outline
the three, but I confine my discussion to the “hair-cutting” episode, in which the identification
with the Ajax tragedy is made. In the first episode, Maggie causes great hurt to Tom, her brother,
who is away on a trip, when she forgets to care for his rabbits, and they die. This forgetting of
obligations to others, the result of a kind of dreamy self-absorption, foreshadows the end of the
novel when, blinding herself to the significance of the betrayal and of hurt she is causing others,
she elopes with Lucy’s fiance ́, Stephen Guest. When Tom comes home, she is eager to greet him
and have her affection returned, but when he discovers her fatal oversight, he rejects her angrily,
showing no sympathy for her plight and swearing, in spite of her heartfelt apologies and excuses,
to punish her.

Feeling guilty, hurt, and rejected, she angrily withdraws to a far corner of the house in the
hopes that she will be missed, and someone will come to fetch her. She fantasizes that her
brother will come at last with the offer of an olive branch, and that she will be forgiven and
reconciled. The emotional script here is a reconciliation fantasy. However, Maggie’s bitter sense
that she has been treated unjustly quickly proves weaker than her longing to be loved and
accepted (Eliot, 1981):“Her need of love …had triumphed over her pride. . . . It is a wonderful
subdue, this need of love—this hunger of the heart—as peremptory as that other hunger … the
face of the world” (pp. 37–38).

In the meantime, her father has intervened on her behalf and sent Tom to fetch her; she
rushes to meet him and sobs in his arms. The episode ends with Tom offering her cake, and the
two are united—a foreshadowing of the end of the novel when Maggie comes to Tom’s rescue
and the two are finally reunited, albeit in tragic circumstances. In the second episode (very
briefly because discussing it in detail elsewhere), Maggie, feeling ashamed of her appearance,
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impulsively cuts off her hair, feels magnified shame in recognizing the consequences, and then
becomes the object of shaming when she is forced to appear in front of her family. Again, her
father intervenes to save her from further humiliation. In the third episode, one afternoon on a
visit to her aunts, Tom is angry at her and becomes even more so when she awkwardly spills tea
on him. His anger is even more painful for her because the accident was caused by an impulsive
show of affection on her part. Characteristically, he decides to punish her, deliberately shutting
her out from playing with him and Lucy, whom she loves and whose conventional good looks
she admires (Eliot 53).

Tom thus wards off criticism (and possible self-criticism) by blaming and punishing
others; instead of acknowledging error and the shame and guilt that go with it, he avoids self-
accusation by projection. Feeling the injustice of her situation, Maggie’s hurt and shame turn into
anger and resentment, and she is described at this point—the image is evoked twice—as a little
Medusa. She turns on her cousin Lucy, whose apparent complacency now provokes her spite and
envy, and she pushes her into the muddy water. Alarmed at her own violence and loss of control,
she runs away in shame. She fantasizes that she is a gypsy princess who has been separated from
the proud and dark people who are her real family. She does indeed find a family of gypsies who
have settled for a while near St. Ogg’s. After feeding her, it is decided that one of them will
accompany her back home.

Furthermore, when she feels anger, it seems justifiable and is openly expressed. Unlike
her brother, she does not deny all shame and self-criticism by insisting on the absolute justice of
her actions, blaming others, and self-righteously punishing others for their errors and moral
wrongs. She shows a genuine capacity for empathy and is readily able to sympathize and identify
with others and their feelings. Her heart goes out to the plight of Philip Wakem, who is disabled
and hungry for love. Tom and Maggie, indeed, illustrate two different shame-driven reactions,
etched quite clearly in their attitudes in the aftermath of their father’s downfall. In response to
the rebuff of fate, Maggie withdraws, and to some extent attacks herself, adopting, in the end, a
strategy of renunciation. Tom, in marked contrast, avoids his own feelings of shame and
inadequacy by blaming others for the family’s downfall, using persecutory fantasies to attempt to
protect himself.
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Moreover “a dread resolve” begins to build in Maggie. Feeling angry and humiliated at
the constant ridicule caused by her failure to conform to social expectations, angry at those
around her, but also at herself for her “appearance,” she is pushed by her conflicting feelings to
act blindly and impulsively. The compulsive and delusional elements are clear here. However
confused her feelings may be at this point, her main aim is to be joyously released from painful
emotional conflict. Against the warnings of her brother, she snatches up a pair of scissors and
hastily cuts off her hair. The global aim of the action is simple—emotional release—but it
involves, in its determination, a number of motivational bonuses: It is a way of escaping shame,
a denial of the dark-haired, dark-skinned girl she is; it is an angry, punishing attack on the self
that others are always persecuting; and finally—this may be the most powerful unconscious
motivation—it is a resentful attack on others, an angry defiance of social authority that can only
draw more attention to herself and more ridiculing attack by others.

Almost immediately comes Maggie’s knowledge of the irrevocable nature of her action.
Tom laughs at her and advises: “O, my buttons, what a queer thing you look! Look at yourself in
the glass—you look like the idiot we throw our nut shells to at school.” At this (Eliot 64):
Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly of her own deliverance
from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it, and something also of the triumph she should
have over her mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action: she didn’t want her
hair to look pretty—that was out of the question—she only wanted people to think her a clever
little girl, and not to find fault with her. But now, when Tom began to laugh at her, and say she
was like the idiot, the affair had quite a new aspect. She looked in the glass, and still Tom
laughed and clapped his hands, and Maggie’s flushed cheeks began to pale, and her lips to
tremble a little” (Eliot 64).

Her sense of visibility and exposure are underscored here: Tom is looking at her and
laughing, and she then looks at herself in the glass—seeing herself as he sees her—while he
continues to stare and “ridicule” her. Instead of achieving her imagined goals—deliverance from
incessant fault- finding and teasing and triumphant revenge on her shamers—she finds herself
entrapped by an even more reduced image of herself, all the more poignant because it exposes
her as a blind and unconscious person who is not in control of her own actions. Shame and guilt
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follow; she feels silly and stupid—like a contemptible “idiot”—and she now faces even worse
ridicule and humiliation” (Eliot 67).

Here is the passage in which her state of mind and emotions are represented; the
identification of the feelings of a small girl in a rural English community of the early 19th
century with one of the most formidable warriors of Greek mythology has an undeniably
mocking or parodic quality about it. At the same time, the association is an important key to
Maggie’s personal tragedy, and a tragic perspective is clearly a serious part of Eliot’s agenda in
writing the novel—the adaptation of the emotional power of Sophoclean tragedy to the low
mimetic context of the novel. “The pride and obstinacy of millers,” she insists in a later passage,
with reference to the “downfall” of Maggie’s father, “and other insignificant people, whom you
pass un noticing on the road every day, have their tragedy too,” although it may be the “unwept,
hidden sort, that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record” (Eliot 197).

It is at the end of this same passage in the novel that Eliot (1981) introduces her eloquent
“defense” of the intensity and significance of affective life: Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish
seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken
friendships; but it was not less bitter to Maggie—perhaps it was even more bitter—than what we
are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. “Ah, my child, you will have
real troubles to fret about by-and-by,” is the consolation we have almost all of us had
administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been
grown up (Eliot 65)..

The language Eliot uses to describe Maggie’s state of mind evokes that structural
moment in tragedy that Aristotle calls an agnorisis, discovery or recognition: “Recognition, as
the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, bringing about either a state of
friendship or one of hostility on the part of those who have been marked out for good fortune or
bad. The most effective recognition is one that occurs together with reversal, for example, as in
the Oedipus” (Poetics,11). Tragic recognition—whether by the audience alone, or by the
character as well—occurs, in Frye’s (1957) words, at that “Augenblick or crucial moment from
which point the road to what might have been and the road to what will be can be simultaneously
seen” (p. 213). Maggie’s passionate impulse, which precipitates the tragic error (cutting her
hair), is immediately followed by “the sense of the irrevocable which was almost an everyday
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experience of her small soul,” the recognition “not only of [the] consequences” of one’s ac-tions
but also of “what would have happened if they had not been done”(Eliot, 65).

The allusion to Ajax that follows is to that precise structural moment in Sophocles’ play
when the Greek hero regains consciousness and recognizes the reality of what he has wrought
while in a state of madness and delusion; Maggie realizes that what she took, in her blindness, to
be the best thing to do—cut her hair or, later in her life, elope with Stephen Guest—is the worst.
In both cases, we have a dramatic reversal: What was thought to be good is now recognized as
evil, the revelation of the evil nature of one’s actions: “look what I’ve done,” and more
pertinently in terms of shame, “look who I really am, in spite of who I pretend to be.”

Ashamed of her hair (i.e., herself, who she is in her “dark” and passionate depths),
Maggie cuts it off suddenly in order not to be that stigmatized person and finds now that she has
simply confirmed that she is a girl out of control, who is driven by irrational and chaotic desires
frowned on in any decent society. Emotionally, for both Maggie—at the end of the novel— and
Ajax, tragic recognition brings with it unbearable shame, a mortification in which one’s view of
oneself is irreparably damaged.

Tecmessa’s description of her husband’s emotional state after the frenzy has passed is the
image to which Eliot (Eliot 65) alluded in her simile: “Shes at as helpless and despairing among
her black locks as Ajax among the slaughtered sheep.” She could not have chosen a more apt
simile, however dramatically different the two characters and situations may seem. Sophocles
used the description of a storm having swept him to this wreck (“Hail, dear sailors . . . see what
kind of a wave, sent up by a deadly surge, circles rapidly about me!” [ll. 348–353]). Victim of a
dark emotional storm, he is now the prisoner of the consequences of his own actions, hemmed in
by the shame he has made for himself. The grotesque disparity between his delusion and the
reality, between the glorious part he assumed for himself and the abject folly of his actions,
floods him with shame. He feels stripped of all dignity and honor; in the “honor society” in
which he lives, he feels suddenly drained of the very lifeblood of his survival, for as an
individual he can no longer hope to claim the recognition he seeks from those around him: “Do
you see that I, the bold, the valiant, the one who never trembled in battle among enemies, have
done mighty deeds among beasts that frightened no one? Ah, the mockery! What an insult I have
suffered!” (ll. 364–367).
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In the same way, the emotional impulse that “storms” through Maggie blinds her and
drives her impetuously to cut her hair—a rash action that now she must recognize in all its
humiliating consequences. In depicting the emotional conflict in Maggie—between her need for
assertion and her awareness of the claims of others—Eliot put the emphasis on her inability to
forsake either pole for the other without tragic consequences and yet, at the same time, the even
more stressful impossibility of enduring the emotional conflict. This explains, in both Maggie
and Ajax, the blindness of the act, the force of delusion here recalling the role in Greek myth of
Ate (Ruin), daughter of discord (Eris), who deludes all—the divine power of confusion or
madness that throws its net over mortals and leads them into tragic error—for all that one sees,
all that one wants to see at this point, is the hope of joyous release from conflict.

Maggie imagines the scorn and laughter of her family at her appearance. Her first
thoughts are of the severity of her aunts’ words and their staring “eyes” and the laughter and
ridicule she must face from Tom and her uncles, even from her father. Maggie’s actions: her fear
of appearing at dinner after cutting her hair and, later, her flight from home after angrily
thrusting Lucy into the mud. Maggie after the event, tortures herself with the thoughts of what
“would have been” if she had not acted as she did, or This baleful series of “ifs” evokes a tragic
sense of the inevitable and the irrevocable, what might have been and what now must be, the
potential glory of one’s life and now the irrevocable and bleak aftermath of the tragic act.

Maggie undergoes the anguish of tragic recognition, the anguish of seeing simultaneously
what might have been if she had not acted and what she has now irrevocably brought about
(Eliot, 1981): “If she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and Lucy, and had
the apricot pudding and the custard!” (p. 65). However parodic the tragic allusion may seem—a
little girl embarrassed by a silly haircut set against an epic hero’s downfall through madness sent
by a divine nemesis—her anguished consciousness is as genuine an emotional experience as that
of Ajax, and the narrator treats it as such. When she finally gathers the strength to appear
downstairs again, her fears of shame are confirmed. Uncle Pullet innocently draws attention to
her by teasing (Eliot, 1981): “Why, little miss, you’ve made yourself look very funny.”
“[P]erhaps,” the narrator observes, “he never in his life made an observation which was felt to be
so lacerating.” Aunt Glegg expressly shames her “in her loudest, severest tone of reproof”: “Fie,
for shame!... Little gells as cut their own hair should be whipped and fed on bread and water—
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not come and sit down with their aunts and uncles” (Eliot 68). (The phrase “for shame” is used
by her mother on three occasions earlier in the novel, once to reprove her for “asking questions
and chattering,” and twice in association with the state of her hair and dress.)

Uncle Glegg tries “to give a playful turn to the denunciation,” but only adds to the
humiliation: “Ay, ay . . . she must be sent to gaol, I think, and they’ll cut the rest of her hair off
there, and make it all even.” Finally, Aunt Pullet pityingly reminds her of the impossibility of
escaping the stigma of her dark hair and skin: “She’s more like a gypsy nor ever . . . I’s very bad
luck, sister, as the gell should be so brown—the boy’s fair enough. I doubt it’ll stand in her way
i’life to be so brown” (Eliot 68). Maggie’s reaction to this “chorus of reproach and derision” is a
feeling of anger, in “her first flush,” and a “transient power of defiance,” which soon evaporates.

Characteristically, it is her father’s soothing words and embrace—“Delicious words of

tenderness!”—that, as a balm for her shame (he does not laugh, as she first feared), bring about
reconciliation and forgiveness. However, she is not forgiven for what was done so much as she is
released for a moment from what she feels about herself—condemned, as she feels she is, to be a
ridiculous and silly little girl who will never be what she should. When her father, the constant
figure of reconciliation, welcomes his prodigal daughter back home after her flight to the
gypsies, he forbids the uttering of any “reproach” or even “one taunt from Tom, about this
foolish business of her running away to the gypsies” (Eliot, 1981, 115). This is the core pattern
of Maggie’s actions in the novel. It suggests a fascinating “father–daughter” complex in her
work, characterized by an emotionally deep identification with the father as both a subject of
desire, in Lacanian terms, and a nurturing figure who offers love and protection.

The “comedic” or antitypical version of the complex can be seen in Silas Marner, which
was written right after The Mill on the Floss: It is the story of a man who, betrayed most bitterly
in love and friendship, becomes a misanthrope and a miser, hiding away and isolating himself
from others; he is led back by providence when he is robbed of his hoard of gold and finds
abandoned in its place a golden-haired baby girl, whom he adopts as his daughter and who
restores him to the world of love and community. In

The Mill, the prodigal daughter pattern culminates in the tragic turn of the final episode,
when Maggie elopes with Stephen Guest and in so doing betrays the friendship and love of Lucy
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and Philip, the two friends closest to her. We see how Maggie, growing up, is unable to
transform into a creative tension and balance the central conflict of her life: the competing claims
of her loyalty to others and her hunger for love. As a passionate child, the hope of emotional
release pushes her on one occasion, in blindness, to cut her hair, so that she incurs the shame of
an afternoon and a day. As a passionate young woman, the same hope of release blinds her again,
and she is brought to sacrifice the claims of others as the price of being released for a moment
from an emotional conflict she cannot resolve.

Repentant afterward, she leaves Stephen and returns to St. Ogg’s. But there is now no
father to forgive her prodigality and shame, and she must fall on the meager mercies of a highly
judgmental society. At one point near the end of the novel, the wise and empathic Dr. Kenn, the
minister, an ideal father surrogate, seems at first to offer the hope for Maggie of a rescue and
reintegration through marriage—a possible resolution, however, that is only hinted at and only
proffered at all so that it can be suddenly plucked away. It is as though, at the end of the novel,
the narrator can find no way out for Maggie. The bridge has been burned that would lead back to
others. The deus ex machina of the flood seems the only way of solving the impasse of the novel.
Ajax takes his own life after shame has robbed him of his most vital being. Maggie is not a
suicide, but her tragic drowning in a bid to rescue her brother, however manipulated an ending to
the novel, is an analogous solution. It is the author’s drastic means of circumventing the fact that,
like her Greek counterpart, she can no longer find a place to be.