Abstract
In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver’s unresolved childhood rage, which results from her sense that she is devalued by her family and society, is transformed into her adult misuse of sexual power in her relationships with Philip, Stephen, and Dr Kenn. Her creator, George Eliot, rationalises Maggie’s behaviour with men and even turns her into an idealised heroine in the last section of the book. Eliot’s apparent inability to see the aggression in her heroine’s actions seems to derive in part from the autobiographical nature of the novel and possibly reflects the patterns of her own relationships with men in her young adult life.
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Notes
See Laura Comer Emery, George Eliot’s Creative Conflict: The Other Side of Silence (Berkeley, CA, 1976), p. 17 and p. 23.
Bernard Paris, ‘The Inner Conflicts of Maggie Tulliver’, in A Psychological Approach to Fiction: Studies in Thackeray, Stendhal, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad (Bloomington, IN, 1974), p. 170.
See Heinz Kohut, ‘Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage’, The Psychoanalytic Study of Child, Vol. 27 (New York, 1973), p. 380.
The study that Kohut refers to is F. Alexander’s ‘Remarks about the Relation of Inferiority Feelings to Guilt Feelings’, Psycho-Analysis, 19 (1938), 41–9.
Ermarth discusses the sexist social norms that Maggie has internalised and which have caused her to be ‘self-effacing and dependent, buying her identity at the price of her autonomy’ (p. 592). Steig shows how the anal traits of the society, represented by the older generation of Dodsons, have affected Maggie’s ‘shame’, ‘self-doubt’, and ‘fantasy of dominance’ (p. 40). Woodward shows how Maggie is ostracised from the rigid community of women at St Ogg’s because she is ‘bold and “unwomanly”’ (p. 47). See Elizabeth Ermarth, ‘Maggie Tulliver’s Long Suicide’, Studies in English Literature, 14 (1974), 587–601;
Michael Steig, ‘Anality in The Mill on the Floss’, Novel, 5 (1971), 42–53;
Wendy Woodward, ‘The Solitariness of Selfhood: Maggie Tulliver and the Female Community at St Ogg’s’, English Studies in Africa, 28 (1985), 46–55.
Graver also writes about Stephen as representing the ‘good society’ in the context of a discussion about ‘the shift in the portrait of Stephen from privileged gentleman to romantic lover’ (p. 194), which she believes is a flaw in the last section of the novel: ‘George Eliot evades in the end what she earlier so forcefully confronts: the outer world that frustrates and defeats Maggie’s desire for work, attainment, and even marriage. Instead, the concerns of the novel move inward, in part by forgetting how Stephen Guest and the narrow attitudes of good society drove Maggie out of the world altogether into her ultimate emphasis of want’ (p. 199). See Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley, CA, 1984).
David S. Werman and Theodore J. Jacobs, ‘Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved and the Nature of Infatuation’, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 10 (1983), 447–56.
Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York, 1968), p. 335.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York, 1950), p. 33 and p. 43.
Barbara Hardy, ‘Life and Art in The Mill on the Floss’, in R. P. Draper (ed.), The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner (New York, 1977), p. 173 and p. 179.
Gordon S. Haight, The George Eliot Letters, 7 Vols (New Haven, CT, 1954–5), Vol. 1, pp. 316–17.
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Johnstone, P.R.F. (2002). Narcissistic Rage in The Mill on the Floss. In: Yousaf, N., Maunder, A. (eds) The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. New Casebooks. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21296-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21296-1_7
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