Abstract
There is a widely held view that, for all that it achieves, The Mill on the Floss does not in the end fulfil itself. A. S. Byatt asserts, for example, that George Eliot ‘tends to avoid complex figures of speech in the works up to and including The Mill’;1 that there is no ‘authorial “poetic” web’;2 and that ‘there is an incoherence which puzzles each reader, each reading’.3 The last — crucial — criticism is apparently developed from that of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, which George Eliot had herself accepted as just. Lytton, Miss Byatt reminds us,
argued that the ‘tragedy was not adequately prepared’, putting his finger on a difficulty many readers felt, and feel, with this novel — that the sublimely emotional ending is not really part of, or connected to, the rest of the narrative, either in matter or manner.
George Eliot’s answer was: ‘This is a defect which I felt even while writing the third volume, and have felt ever since the MS left me. The “epische Breite” into which I was beguiled by love of my subject in the first two volumes, caused a want of proportionate fullness in the treatment of the third, which I shall always regret.’4
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Notes
A. S. Byatt (ed.), Introduction to The Mill on the Floss, Penguin English Library (1979) p. 32.
U. C. Knoepflmacher, in George Eliot’s Early Novels (1968), also establishes a relationship between Milton’s poem and the novel. His allusions, however, are confined to the Flood, or contained in the passage which explains that ‘the squatting toad, the allusions to demons and serpents, the “temptation” which causes Tom and Lucy to walk to the forbidden end of the garden, Maggie’s revolt against Tom’s male superiority, her sudden outburst of passion, the free she leans against so impenitently, the “justice” which will soon punish both boy and girl, invest this scene with mock-heroic dimensions. The “passions at war in Maggie” are clearly analogous to those which led another female in another garden to commit an action which was of the proper magnitude. The link is ironic, of course, but we are not allowed to escape it: “‘O Tom, dare you?’ said Lucy, ‘Aunt said we mustn’t go out of the garden.’” God in this child-world is any adult, even one as severely limited in authority and understanding as Mrs Tulliver’s favourite sister’ (pp. 185–6).
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) iv. 148–9. (I have used Christopher Ricks’s edition of 1968.)
William J. Sullivan view in ‘Music and Musical Allusion in The Mill on the Floss’, Criticism, 16 (Summer 1974) 243, that, in conjunction, the title of the chapter, the oratorio and the aria ‘characterize the (culpably?) innocent world of Stephen and Lucy, a world which only apparently parallels the innocent world of Maggie’s childhood and a world to which she vainly seeks admittance’, oversimplifies the relationship between character, setting and theme. The world depicted here in fact belongs not to Stephen and Lucy, but to Lucy only, whose innocence — and that of her world — is neither culpable nor blemished. It is Stephen and Maggie who introduce culpability into Paradise. Stephen has his own world of Park House, and is in ‘Paradise’ only as Lucy’s guest (as his surname implies). Maggie is also a guest. She does not ‘vainly seek admittance’, but — properly, though temporarily, admitted — becomes the unwilling usurper.
For an illuminating discussion of the origins of the libretto for The Creation, see H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, iv: Haydn: The Years of ‘The Creation’ 1796–1800 (1977) pp. 345–9.
John Walter Cross, George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals (1885) i, 315.
Gordon Haight, for example, says that the ‘“inexorable power of sound” still sways her in the same way’ in adolescence as in childhood — ‘The Mill on the Floss’, in A Century of George Eliot Criticism, ed. Haight (1966) p. 341. This essay first appeared in the Riverside edition of the novel (1961). Sullivan similarly asserts that ‘the magic music of childhood, the thrilling and solemn music of adolescence, and the romantic music of young womanhood, provoke identical responses in Maggie’ (Criticism, 16, p. 235).
George Wither, Sonnet 4 in Faire-Virtue, the Mistresse of Phil’arete (1622).
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© 1989 Beryl Gray
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Gray, B. (1989). The Mill on the Floss. In: George Eliot and Music. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10018-7_2
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