Abstract
Maya Higashi Wakana illustrates that George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss is about the requirements of unconditional love, with Maggie assigned the role of moving the narrative forward. It is the intimacy between ideal readers and her text that functions to navigate—indeed, cultivate—an empathic understanding of the imperfect characters in the novel, both adults and children, all of whose behavior is controlled by “face” needs. By discussing Eliot’s characters in terms of “face” and its relation to giving, taking, and paying back, the author shows that human relationships in Eliot’s novel are deeply impacted by the dynamics such gestures generate and that all her characters, including the dog characters and the offensive Mr. Tulliver and Mrs. Glegg, are relevant to the novel.
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Notes
- 1.
Critics and experts recognize the difficulties involved in classifying intimacies. Philosopher John R. Scudder, Jr., and nursing expert Anne H. Bishop (2001) claim that the “deepest love relationships are not sexual or romantic but personal,” which is “often confused with romantic love” (23); critic Ellen Argyros (1999) contends that the “desire for sympathy, and for sympathetic discourse, can be read in part as a desire for that which brings one together with another, and which is therefore in its intention like the sex act” (3); Victor Luftig (1993) asks, “[H]ow can a story remain genuinely about friendship, rather than position friendship as a merely temporary stage on the way to something the story is more essentially about?” (13).
- 2.
In addition to the examples of Mr. Jeremy Tulliver and Mrs. Jane Glegg in this chapter is that of Mrs. Sophie Pullet and her “melancholy air” (Eliot [1860] 1980, 77), which keeps her encased in her perpetual, if somewhat theatrical, grief, which is strangely inviolate. Her melancholy mood defines her.
- 3.
René Rosfort and Giovanni Stanghellini (2009) also assert that “a given mood can develop into a character trait, that is, a permanent part of one’s sense of personal identity” (262).
- 4.
See Kathleen Blake’s (2005) essay on how the confusion between older and newer values of exchange contributes to the tragedies depicted in George Eliot’s work. I, however, argue that the confusion between what Blake calls “capitalism and a precapitalist economy of gift exchange” (219) is not unique to the temporal setting of Eliot’s novel, arguing also that confusion is accelerated by the fact that gifts and exchanges are different only in theory, not necessarily in fact. See Performing the Everyday (Wakana 2009, 14–16; 88; 160–61) for how the world of monetary exchanges conflates with that of nonmonetary ones.
- 5.
Theoretically, giving a gift is a one-way gesture requiring no reciprocal obligation, but as Jill Rappoport (2012) asserts, Victorian women’s “personal gift transactions expanded kinship circles, served as the bases for larger civic coalitions, and established both the reach and the limits of these alliances” (5). This, I claim, is no less true for men, and the phenomenon is not limited to the Victorians, either. Exchanging gifts is a form of communication and a means of forging relationships, because it inevitably involves a back-and-forth of giving gestures.
- 6.
As sociologist Robert B. Cialdini (1993) reminds us, “Not only do we want the same item more when it is scarce, we want it most when we are in competition for it” (213).
- 7.
For example, Susan Fraiman (1993) writes, “Anxious to lead Lucy, fire Luke, or patronize Bob, Tom defends his solitary state by demonstrating his (gender and class) superiority” (128).
- 8.
Barbara Hardy (1959) refers to the disadvantaged state the women in Eliot’s novel share as a “disability” or “handicap” (47). At King’s Lorton, Tom Tulliver is relegated to the realm of the disabled and handicapped, too—thanks to his disparaging attitude toward the weak and the disadvantaged, such as Maggie Tulliver and Philip Wakem.
- 9.
Avoidance and make-believe are the same strategies Mr. Tulliver employs after he loses the water rights case. In devising ways to not “look like a ruined man,” Mr. Tulliver thinks about how Mrs. Tulliver might ask for money from the Pullets (Eliot [1860] 1980, 171). As the narrator explains, people like Mr. Tulliver “can only sustain humiliation so long as they can refuse to believe in it, and, in their own conception, predominate still” (173).
- 10.
Citing Ellen Moers’s (1976) recognition that Maggie’s black hair symbolizes the difficulty she will encounter in fulfilling her conventional role as a woman (175), critic José Angel García Landa (1991) writes that Maggie’s dark and unmanageable hair “becomes an emblem of her irrepressible, mold-breaking vitality,” compared with the coiffed hair of Mrs. Tulliver and Maggie’s blonde cousin Lucy (44).
- 11.
Daniel M. Gross uses this phrase to describe the sociality of anger, as theorized by Aristotle.
- 12.
Lucy Deane is not so different from Maggie Tulliver. One of Lucy’s early gestures is that of looking at herself in the mirror, which the narrator explains as follows: “The desire to know that one has not looked an absolute fright during a few hours of conversation, may be construed as lying within the bonds of a laudable benevolent consideration for others” (Eliot [1860] 1980, 324; emphasis added). Lucy’s gesture could be understood as meant for the benefit of others—but the narrator seems to suggest otherwise. The narrator also explains that Lucy is agitated by the thought that “she is loved by the person of chief consequence in her small world” (324–25).
- 13.
See Dorene Internicola (2012), who quotes the words of the founder and executive director of the American School of Laughter Yoga, Sebastien Gendry: “We simulate to stimulate. We go through the motions of joy to create the chemistry of joy” (n. pag.).
- 14.
Talking is, or feels like, being. When Mrs. Tulliver laments the loss of her china, teapots, and linen, she is also expressing her narrative identity by talking. Eakin (2008) writes that because “narrative is not merely about self, but is rather in some profound way a constituent part of self,” which “calls our narrative identities into being,” “a mutually enhancing interplay between what we are and what we say we are” occurs (2; emphasis in original).
- 15.
Mr. Tulliver’s and Tom’s selves are invested in the farm at Dorlcote Mill. Mr. Tulliver “[feels] the strain of this clinging affection for the old home as part of his life, part of himself”; the “old premises” is “where he had run about when he was a boy, just as Tom had done after him” (Eliot [1860] 1980, 229).
- 16.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “man’s best friend” appears under the definition of “man” (“man’s best friend” def. c3) and directs readers to G. Poulett Cameron’s (1841) United Service Journal, where the term “man’s best friend” is found to describe “the noblest, the most attached animal in the creation, the dog” (58). Because dogs require feeding, which is an additional expense, and may bite—the rabies vaccine, for example, was not tried on humans until 1885 by Louis Pasteur (H. Williams 1904–1910, 240)—the Gleggs do not approve of them.
- 17.
I quote from the version Senator Robert C. Byrd included in his April 23, 1990 speech, 101st Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 136, pt. 6. See also Stanley Coren (2009, n. pag.).
- 18.
Although Eliot could not have known about Vest’s speech when she wrote The Mill, it nevertheless seems to summarize the sentiment people had for dogs by then.
- 19.
Argyros (1999), for example, writes that the words in Philip’s letter “read like an elegy” (114).
- 20.
Robert M. Polhemus (1990) understands the phrase “strong attraction” in Philip’s letter as being sexual: “That both [Philip and Maggie] recognizes [sic] and primly deplores [sic] the power of sex over lives, but notice that it is his [Philip’s] and not the narrator’s expression. She [Eliot] never can amount much enthusiasm for asexual ideals—or neurotic men—nor does she ever deny the appeal of sensuality for Maggie” (194). However, as this chapter demonstrates, it is not sexual infatuation per se that drives Maggie and Stephen’s intimacy to run its course to Mudport.
- 21.
Ganz (2008), for example, asserts, “[B]oth Philip and Lucy rely upon their [Maggie and Stephen’s] constancy and suffer as a result of their infidelity” (577).
- 22.
- 23.
Eliot’s organic concept of society, on which Sally Shuttleworth (1984) and Suzanne Graver (1984) elaborate, must be augmented by Eliot’s understanding of this powerful if less acknowledged institution of embarrassment, which regulates human behavior at all levels of social life. Works by scholars such as Stuart Schneiderman (1995) and Gregory Moore (2010) illustrate that “face” issues extend beyond the microsocial realm.
- 24.
James Eli Adams’s (1995) reminder that self-discipline, “a virtue open to all,” “perplexes the binaries of active and passive, of self-assertion and self-denial” (8) helps us understand why Thomas à Kempis’s teachings appeal to Maggie.
- 25.
According to Eakin (2008), we become conscious of our selves through the self-narratives we constantly make and remake: “Life course decisions … present themselves as choices of story lines, and they imply choices of identity as well” (147).
- 26.
Beyond music’s being a form of cultural heritage, with lyrics and melodies functioning to provide what Delia da Sousa Correa (2003) calls “emotional communication” (112), as Karen B. Mann (1983) asserts, “waves of sound” are “a medium rather than a limit” (61). Reading is also Maggie’s “opium” (Eliot [1860] 1980, 42). This tendency in Maggie persists after her father’s downfall, when she wonders why the “world outside the books was not a happy one” (205).
- 27.
Eliot (1885) wrote in her journal in April 1858, “[M]usic … stirs all one’s devout emotions, blends everything into harmony—makes one feel part of one whole which one loves all alike, losing the sense of a separate self” (17).
- 28.
- 29.
First Impressions is the title Austen initially intended for Pride and Prejudice.
- 30.
Even though ideal readers empirically know that moods have a power of their own, experts articulate this understanding succinctly. Moods are, in the words of Robert E. Thayer (1996), “a background feeling that persists over time” (5), which are, in the words of Noël Carroll (2003), “global rather than focal,” and are therefore “categorically different mental events than emotions” (528; 525).
- 31.
Maggie’s unconventional manner in the style of an Elizabeth Bennet, though more awkward—“She had a way of not assenting at once to the observations current in good society, and of saying that she didn’t know whether those observations were true or not, which gave her an air of gaucherie, and impeded the even flow of conversation” (Eliot [1860] 1980, 351)—her “clear, large gaze” (334), and her simplicity, beauty, and “pride of poverty that will not be ashamed of itself” (332) fascinate Stephen.
- 32.
Claims Georg Simmel (1997) , “One cannot take through the eye without at the same time giving. … Since this obviously occurs only during the direct look from one eye into another, the most complete reciprocity in the entire sphere of human relationships is achieved here” (112).
- 33.
Important work has been done in the area of nonthinking behavior in Eliot’s work and in Victorian literature in general, ranging from short references—such as Shuttleworth’s (1984) allusions to “unconscious processes,” “unconscious absorption,” and “dream state[s]” (69; 70; 73) and Stefanie Markovits’s (2006) statement, “Habit is its own reason for action” (93)—to longer works, such as Kristie M. Allen’s (2010) essay and Vanessa Ryan’s (2012) book, Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel.
- 34.
Water images in the novel, Philip dreaming that he is unable to save Maggie, and Mrs. Tulliver’s fear of Maggie drowning are three frequently noted examples.
- 35.
Joshua D. Esty (1996) is one of many critics who believe that Stephen and Lucy reunite: “Still, Eliot makes a belated concession to an integrative history by hinting, in a kind of epilogue, at the marriage between Stephen Guest and Lucy Deane” (152).
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Wakana, M.H. (2018). Unconditional Love in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. In: Performing Intimacies with Hawthorne, Austen, Wharton, and George Eliot. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93991-9_6
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