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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susan Fraiman
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Abstract

The Mill on the Floss is divided between two sibling narratives. This essay argues that the effect of each and of the rivalry between them is a critique of the novel's nominal status as Bildungsroman. Shoving Tom Tulliver's story of self-culture off to the side and insisting on its moral insufficiency, Eliot displaces the classic apprenticeship from the center of her text; dramatizing Maggie Tulliver's difficulty in even entering this story, she stages the genre's tendency to preclude a female protagonist. Maggie's trouble with formation corresponds to Eliot's trouble with the novel of formation. Eventually I ask what the uncomfortable fit between The Mill and the Bildungsroman reveals not only about this work but also about this category; placing early-1970s formulations of the Bildungsroman in the context of emergent American feminist criticism, I indicate what some of the genre's ideological uses have been. Finally, the dialogic structure of The Mill may invite a more relational mapping of development and suggest retheorizing the novel of development as an instance of cultural debate about formation. (SF)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 1: Special Topic Literature and the Idea of Europe , January 1993 , pp. 136 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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