Allegorical Realism and the Figure of the Human in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch

Moore, Ben

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-26640-9_3

Ben Moore⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

This chapter explores the figure of the human in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1871), starting from the much-debated ending of The Mill on the Floss, which sees the heroine and her brother killed by a sudden and devastating flood. It argues that both novels are simultaneously realist and allegorical, and that Eliot’s vision of the human, which draws on her work translating Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841/1854), is ambivalent. There is a combination of drives in these novels, through which they strive by turns to centre and de-centre the human. Reading through recent debates around the Anthropocene, and through Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘natural history’, allows us to see that Eliot’s allegorical realism has the potential to help us in thinking through the perceptual and representational challenges raised by climate crisis.

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Notes

1.
Henry James, ‘The Novels of George Eliot’, The Atlantic Monthly 18.108 (October 1866), 479–92 (p. 490).
2.
Caroline Levine, ‘Victorian Realism’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. by Deirdre David (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), pp. 84–106 (p. 85).
3.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, 2nd Impression (New York: George W. Stewart, 1950), p. 45. Kathleen Blake summarises critical responses to the novel’s ending in ‘Between Economies in The Mill on the Floss: Loans versus Gifts, or, Auditing Mr Tulliver’s Accounts’, Victorian Literature and Culture 33 (2005), 219–37 (p. 231). Kyle MacAuley de-emphasises the flood but argues that ‘the entanglement of different types of water structures the novel at its deepest level’, in ‘George Eliot’s Estuarial Form’, Victorian Literature and Culture 48.1 (2020), 187–217 (p. 190). See also Adelene Buckland on the misreading of the ending as ‘catastrophist’ in Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 221–2.
4.
Renata Wasserman, ‘Narrative Logic and the Form of Tradition in The Mill on the Floss’, Studies in the Novel 14.3 (1982), 266–79 (p. 268).
5.
Emily Steinlight, ‘Why Maggie Tulliver Had To Be Killed’, in Rancière and Literature, ed. by Grace Hellyer and Julian Murphet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 164–82 (p. 172). See Georg Lukács, ‘Narrate or Describe?’, in Writer and Critic, ed. and trans. by Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1970), pp. 110–48.
6.
‘Why Maggie’, p. 179. For Steinlight’s de-emphasising of character see also Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).
7.
Middlemarch famously asks ‘why always Dorothea?’, and it is Lydgate in that novel who wishes to become ‘a link in the chain of discovery’. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), p. 242, p. 141. Further reference to this edition given in the main text as MM.
8.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007), p. 516. Further references to this edition given in main text as MF.
9.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 7.
10.
Archer, Jayne Elisabeth, Richard Marggraf Turley and Howard Thomas, ‘“Moving accidents by flood and field”: The Arable and Tidal Worlds of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss’, ELH 82.2 (2015), 701–28 (p. 702). On this transformation and its limits, see also Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), especially pp. 96–120.
11.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 16. On probability and the modern novel see also Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Leland Monk, Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993); Steven Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Maurice Lee, Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Paul Fyfe, By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
12.
Ghosh, p. 17.
13.
‘Why Maggie’, p. 179.
14.
Review of 7 April 1860 in MF, pp. 547–51 (p. 550).
15.
Bennett, p. 3.
16.
‘Why Maggie’, p. 179.
17.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’, Critical Enquiry 35.2 (2009), 197–222 (p. 201).
18.
George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, in The Westminster Review, vol. LXVI (July 1856), 51–79 (p. 56).
19.
For a detailed account of Benjaminian natural history, see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).
20.
Walter Benjamin, On the Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 2009), p. 167.
21.
Origin, pp. 177–8.
22.
Origin, pp. 179.
23.
George Eliot, ‘Brother and Sister’, Sonnet II, in The Mill on the Floss, pp. 541–6 (p. 542).
24.
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798’, in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 193–8, ll. 65–6.
25.
William Wordsworth, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th ed, Volume D: The Romantic Period, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2012), pp. 334–5, ll. 7–8.
26.
Eliot, ‘Brother and Sister’, p. 543.
27.
Eliot, ‘Brother and Sister’, p. 546; William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, in Norton Volume D, pp. 337–41, ll. 177–80.
28.
‘Moving accidents’, p. 720.
29.
Crutzen’s original article dated the origin of the Anthropocene to James Watt’s steam engine in 1784. Paul Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415.23 (2002), 23.
30.
Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 2.
31.
DeLoughrey, p. 9.
32.
Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Colombia University Press, 2016), p. 11.
33.
Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 10, quoted in DeLoughrey, p. 15.
34.
De Loughrey, p. 16.
35.
Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, trans. by W. Lough. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.
36.
‘Theses’.
37.
Etienne Balibar notes that there have been divergent readings of Thesis VI by Ernst Block, who sees Marx as redefining human essence, as the set of social relations, and Louis Althusser, who sees it as destroying the very concept of a human essence. He follows this with a detailed analysis of his own. Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, updated new edition, trans. by Chris Turner and Gregory Elliott, ‘Afterword: Philosophical Anthropology or Ontology of Relations? Exploring the Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach’ (London: Verso, 2017), epub.
38.
Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Chapter I, trans. by Saul K. Padover. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/.
39.
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, translated from the Second German Edition by Marian Evans (London: John Chapman, 1854), p. 12.
40.
Feuerbach, p. 13.
41.
Feuerbach, p. 13.
42.
Balibar, ‘Afterword’, epub.
43.
Feuerbach, p. 81.
44.
Feuerbach, p. 81.
45.
Jeremy Tambling, ‘Middlemarch, Realism and the Birth of the Clinic’, ELH 57.4 (1990), 939–60 (p. 952).
46.
Feuerbach, p. 19.
47.
Feuerbach, p. 20.
48.
Feuerbach, p. 30.
49.
Slavoj Žižek, p. 256.
50.
Žižek, p. 257.
51.
See for instance Timothy Morton, ‘Victorian Hyperobjects’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.5 (2014), 489–500.
52.
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), p. 391.
53.
The George Eliot Letters, Volume 1, ed. by Gordon Haight (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 29.
54.
‘The Natural History’, p. 54.
55.
Miguel Ramalho-Santos and Holger Willenbring, ‘On the Origin of the Term “Stem Cell”’, Cell Stem Cell 1.1 (2007), 35–8 (p. 35).
56.
Avrom Fleischman, ‘George Eliot’s Reading: A Chronological List’, George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Studies 54/55 (2008), 1–106 (p. 56).
57.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 161.
58.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 58.
59.
Haraway, p. 60. Haraway objects to the Anthropocene as a ‘tool, story, or epoch to think with’, partly because of its tendency towards the totalising myth-making and homogenising of space which DeLoughrey sees as the bad and imperialist form of allegory. Haraway instead prefers the terms ‘Capitalocene’ for formulating critique and ‘Cthulucene’ for generating new forms of thinking and relating. Haraway, p. 49, p. 51.
60.
Beer, pp. 156–68.
61.
Haraway, p. 33.
62.
Haraway, p. 60, p. 216 n4.
63.
Beer, p. 156, p. 157.
64.
Beer does comment on the web’s ‘entanglement’, recalling Darwin’s tangled bank at the end of On the Origin of Species, but does not frame this negatively. Beer, p. 167.
65.
Tambling, p. 953.
66.
George Eliot, Adam Bede (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 164–5.
67.
Feuerbach, p. 22.
68.
According to Leavis, ‘the supremely mature mind of Middlemarch is not yet manifested in The Mil on the Floss’. Leavis, p. 39.
69.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 145.

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University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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Moore, B. (2023). Allegorical Realism and the Figure of the Human in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. In: Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850-1895 . Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26640-9_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26640-9_3
Published: 21 March 2023
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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