Mill on the Floss was written in 1860 in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, one year after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Marion Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot, was a contemporary of Charles Dickens. She was an extremely bright woman who grew up in a fundamentalist home, but broke with her family when she started reading German theological criticism. Marian found work as a journalist in London and eventually fell in love with fellow journalist George Lewes. Lewes was amicably separated from his wife, but divorce wasn't an option in those days. Marian and George lived as "common law" husband and wife for 25 years. During all this time, Marian's older brother Isaac disowned her because she had disgraced the family. Mill on the Floss was her second novel, written when she was 41, and was instantly popular.
This tale, with its autobiographical hints, traces the life of Maggie Tulliver from a small girl to young woman, and her relationships with her family and lovers. The Tullivers live by the fictional river Floss, in a mill that has been in the family for generations. Maggie is a precocious girl born at a time when intelligence was a hindrance in women. She is also passionate and sensitive, living at a time when neither of these characteristics fits with the growing middle class created by the Industrial Revolution. As a girl she is always chided for asking questions and not keeping the curls in her hair. She is routinely misunderstood and vents her frustrated emotions in ways that make things worse. Her brother Tom, on the other hand, is not intellectually perceptive at all, but has a crude cunning of how the world works and how to get on in business. This is later tempered by a desperate need to uphold the family honor, when father Tulliver goes bankrupt and loses the family mill.
The themes of Mill on the Floss wind their way like a river through the story. I was particularly drawn to two of them: the tension between passion and duty, and the call to compassion towards those who suffer. Maggie's home deprives her of much affection, yet her personality seeks passionate expression. This need is focused in her adoration of her brother, even though he is usually self-righteous and unkind towards her. Her awareness of his callousness is undermined by her deep need to be loved, and by the memories of a few times when Tom did soften towards her. Maggie's need is manipulated by her family to get her to act dutifully. This isn't done maliciously or overtly, but with the subtle unconsciousness with which families impress their central values on us.
Marian Evans has a keen insight into human psychology. I identified with Maggie's desire to live in truth and beauty, and how this would threaten her family's sense of status quo. Maggie deals with the guilt of this tension by trying to live in self-denial. When she was 13 she found a copy of Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ where he advocates total self-emptying. Not understanding the broader context, she mistakenly tries to use his technique to eliminate the tension in her life. It brings her peace, until she starts encountering life outside her home. She was trying to live a selfless, self-extending life unaware of how dull and loveless her life had been. When compassion and love cross her path, she is torn between a desire for becoming herself in relationship and a compulsive need to honor family oaths. Self-righteous Tom is oblivious to Maggie's struggle and sees her as emotionally weak instead of foolishly heroic.
The other stream of attraction for me was the call to compassion. Tom's callousness foreshadows the whole town shunning Maggie. Maggie becomes a young woman in obscurity, because of her family's social shame. Her father dies and she tries to help support the family by being a governess. She only has a few years of school and isn't included in the social circles. So when her rich cousin invites her for a summer holiday, Maggie is totally unprepared for the life of leisure, beauty and indulgence of society life. A starving part of her comes deliciously back to life. And the town people are unprepared for her unique beauty and unaffected nature. Her cousin's fiance falls in love with Maggie and she can't help but reciprocate. She tries in vain to repress and avoid it, but circumstances throw them together. She again is deeply torn between being happy and honoring obligations. Eventually she does manage to deny herself. This time the heroism is more obvious because she knows more clearly what she's giving up.
At this point the wrath of Victorian society descends on her, even though morally she took the higher ground. It's not only her family, but her society that expects perfection and her unattainable purity as a woman. Marian's voice as narrator enters in this part and draws disturbing parallels with the Good Samaritan. Her painting of the town clergyman as a reasonable, compassionate man shows a mature understanding of Christian community in Marian, in spite of having disassociated from formal religion. Reverend Kenn tries to encourage the village women to forgive Maggie, reminding them of their own shadows. But honor preceeds honesty in Society and Maggie has fallen by its impossible double standards. The fact that she was seduced by the village squire's son doesn't change her virtue or verdict. The Good Samaritan priest can't help her and she is doomed.
Reverend Kenn's words still confront us 130 years later. A preference for materialism and perfection sets us up to disown others who fall short in any age. Only by admitting our own weakness can we stand alongside anyone. Only with breaking from false bonds of duty can we reach a deeper love, which Maggie eventually does. She finds a way to honor both family and her lover, even though it brings great pain to herself. The noble nature of her soul, apart from manipulation and need, emerges. Maggie has pity on another outcast, Philip (shunned because of his hunchback). He must wrestle with his own struggle between love and neediness. Philip manages to reach the romantic ideal of spiritual love by seeing Maggie as his own soul. His latent self-pity is transformed into compassion for other sufferers, just as Maggie is transformed by her own suffering. The privileged in the story remain unchanged, except for those who open their hearts to the individual situation.
Marian makes a great statement about this:
All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance
to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious
complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to
lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine
promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.
And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that
are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking
that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method,
without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, and impartiality--without
any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes
from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and
intense enough to have created a wide fellow feeling with all that is
human.