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A Reinterpretation of The Mill on the Floss

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

John Hagan
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Abstract

Recent interpretations of The Mill on the Floss distort the novel's emphasis in two principal ways. According to one, it is a tragedy of repression and regression; Maggie is responsible for her downfall because she is flawed by her acceptance of Kempis' philosophy of renunciation and by a fixation upon her father and brother, both of which fatally pull against her legitimate desire for wider fulfillment. According to the other interpretation, however, this desire is itself Maggie's flaw, whereas her acceptance of Kempis and her family devotion are good; thus, the main subject of the novel is not her downfall, but her spiritual development, which is climaxed by her two rejections of Stephen and her attempt to rescue Tom from the flood. Although both contain valid insights, neither of these readings is satisfactory, for each oversimplifies George Eliot's complex outlook, which presents Maggie's frustrations and her ultimate defeat as springing from both the fact that she has intense and legitimate desires for a full and rich life which Tom and Tulliver cannot comprehend, and the fact that she is, at the same time, bound to them by an equally legitimate, indeed noble, love which makes her renunciation of those desires morally necessary.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 87 , Issue 1 , January 1972 , pp. 53 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972

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References

1 William R. Steinhoff, “Intent and Fulfillment in the Ending of The Mill on the Floss,” in The Image of the Work, ed. B. H. Lehman et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1955), pp. 231–51; Jerome Thale, The Novels of George Eliot (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), Ch. ii; Bernard J. Paris, “Toward a Revaluation of George Eliot's ‘The Mill on the Floss,‘” NCF, 11 (June 1956), 18–31. See the substantially same interpretation in his book, Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Quest for Values (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1965); Reva Stump, Movement and Vision in George Eliot's Novels (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1959), Chs. v-vi; George Levine, “Intelligence as Deception : The Mill on the Floss,”PMLA, 80 (Sept. 1965), 402–09. Henceforth all page references to these works will be given in parentheses.

Many others have written on this novel, of course, and have written well (Barbara Hardy, W. J. Harvey, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, e.g.), but none offers as fully explicit and as closely argued an interpretation of Maggie's story as any of the critics I have just mentioned. The majority of commentators have been primarily concerned with discussing certain limited topics or evaluating the novel's esthetic strengths and weaknesses, while leaving their interpretations of its larger meanings unstated (apparently on the assumption that the central themes of the book are already commonly understood), and, at best, only sketchily to be inferred. In any event, so far as I can determine, most of these interpretations can be classed in one or another of the two groups I discuss.

2 The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Editions, 1961), pp. 286, 288 (see also pp. 293, 361). Henceforth all references to the text of the novel will be to this edition. For the convenience of those using another edition, Book and Chapter numbers in Roman upper and lower case type, respectively, will be included.

3 Since the novel's first appearance, of course, many critics have had difficulty in accepting this evaluation. My interest here, however, is solely in clarifying what George Eliot's position is, not in assessing its validity.