A Question of Tone in The Mill on the Floss

      The Mill on the Floss is a tragic story not alone in the essential sense that the principal characters die at the end.  The shadow of doom plays over Maggie and Tom even in their childhood when the real agonies of their lives lay far in the future.   At one point the narrator explicitly declares that the story is tragic, though admittedly in an unconventional way.  While the genre, she says, has customarily featured “lofty” heroes as the “source of that conspicuous, far-echoing tragedy, which sweeps the stage in regal robes, and makes the dullest chronicler sublime,” yet humbler people may likewise possess hubris (in Eliot’s phrase “pride and obstinacy”) and “have their tragedy too,” though often “of that unwept, hidden sort that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record.” (III, 1)  Written at a time when literary Realism was overtaking Romanticism, The Mill on the Floss sought to adapt the ancient form to modern experience by situating tragedy in a bourgeois setting familiar to many of the book's readers from lived experience. 

     The book closes in a pathetic scene in which Stephen and Philip separately visit Tom and Maggie’s grave.  The postmortem intimacy both between the siblings and between Maggie and her lovers, seems more sentimental than tragic, but the tone is thoroughly melancholy.  Their death in the flood had been repeatedly foreshadowed throughout the book not least in the unlikely legend of St. Ogg and its reprise in Maggie’s dreams while in the boat with Stephen. [1]  Though the fall of Jeremy Tulliver through his obstinate lack of judgement may be the central catastrophe of the plot, the focus is really on Maggie, the spirited girl too clever for her circumstances, too sensitive to avoid self-doubt and too emotional to act in a way others might find prudent.  Then, too, Tom is inherently kind but narrow-minded and stubborn like his father, Stephen is captured in languid insouciance until the crisis, while Philip Wakem, his father, the Dodson aunts, and virtually everyone in the story is portrayed as flawed to various degrees.  Even those who try to conduct their lives with moral sensitivity find their choices clouded by ambiguity and contradiction.  (The sole exception is good old Bob Jakin, whose dialect may sound comic, but who proves not only a loyal friend in spite of class division, but even a good investment advisor.)

     Yet the gravity of the situation in which Maggie and Tom find themselves remains latent for a long stretch.  For most of the volume the reader hears nothing of impending doom, but rather the voice of a warmly wise narrator, superior to the characters in knowledge and judgement, but not as much critical of them as gently amused and indulgent toward their all-too-human shortcomings.  While this sort of authorial attitude is generally foregrounded in predominately comic works, it is present in serious ones as well, occurring not only in Dickens and Trollope, but in George Eliot.  This tone is so dominant that passages might be found throughout her work.  The present analysis examines examples in “Mr and Mrs Glegg at Home” (Book I, Chapter 12).

     This odd condescension which views the characters as acting with incomplete knowledge or erring judgement is facilitated for a portion of the narrative by Tom and Maggie’s being still children, and the attitude is here intensified by the notion that St. Ogg’s at the time of the story was itself naive and young, a kind of immature village.

     Paradoxically, this trait is expressed even in calling the town “venerable,” which here sounds patronizing, as if to say “quaint,” or “curious.”  It is also said to be “familiar with forgotten years,” suggesting both a history and a failure to learn from it.  This phrase introduces a Romantic formulation of the past implying a misty, legendary history including “a Saxon hero-king” (who himself takes a retrospective view, thinking of “the scenes of his youth and love-time”).  The modern more sophisticated reader is urged to be indulgent, to “look with loving pardon on the inconsistencies” of village architecture.  The book’s “refined readers” are likely to feel condescension when regarding the country scene, as the author pays tribute to the readers’ refinement, graciously suggesting that their familiarity with such rural products as cheese and wool is not even in their daily use, but rather only “through the medium of the best classic pastorals.” [2]  The light tone is unmistakable.

     Eliot notes that in earlier years foreign wars had raged and civil conflict as well: “first Puritans thanked God for the blood of the Loyalists, and then Loyalists thanked God for the blood of the Puritans.”  The language suggests that there was no right and wrong cause; rather, each mindlessly reflected the fanaticism of the other.  St. Ogg’s was unconscious of the past, never educated by it, as the village had “inherited a long past without thinking of it.”  “The days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change it” for, after all, “for a long while it had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of men.”  Not only had religion as well as politics become routine, in general, “it was a time when ignorance was much more comfortable than at present.”

     As a leading example of such “ignorance,” the narrator notes that it was “a time when ladies in rich silk gowns wore large pockets, in which they carried a mutton-bone to secure them against cramp. Mrs Glegg carried such a bone, which she had inherited from her grandmother” in blind obedience to tradition.  She and her sister Mrs. Pullet are highly predictable, every appearance demonstrating anew the same characteristics: Mrs. Glegg’s lofty view of herself and her family and Mrs. Pullet’s vulnerability to melancholy and pessimism. 

     Mrs. Glegg may, one learns, look out from her front parlor to frown upon the “gadding about” of married women or out the back to reflect on her husband’s “folly” in maintaining elaborate gardens.  The reader, of course, is to feel altogether superior to both, gifted by the omniscient narrator with a vision nearly divine. The comedy widens from the lady herself to her entire sex; it emerges that “the responsibilities of a wife” include keeping a “check on her husband’s pleasures, which are hardly ever of a rational or commendable kind.” 

     Mr. Glegg is hardly more exemplary.  His energy might seem so, as might his delight in close-up studies of the natural history of his garden plot, yet we learn that he uses his observations to seek esoteric correspondences between the behavior of slugs and the like and events in the greater world.  This speculation is excused on the ground that he “had an unusual amount of mental activity, which, when disengaged from the wool business, naturally made itself a pathway in other directions.”  He, too, has a censorious side to his meditations, satisfied by considering the “contrairiness” of women of which his wife, of course, is an excellent example.  Both may appear foolish to others such as the narrator and the reader, but their foibles are invisible to themselves; both consider themselves to have good sense, though neither quite thinks that of the other, and the reader is entitled to look down on them all, albeit with an indulgent eye.

      If he is stingy, he is “a lovable skinflint.” If she sems in a foul mood, surely it is because she is one of those “who seem to enjoy their ill-temper.”  His difficult wife is only exhibiting “a too pungent seasoning that nature had given to [her] virtues.” As he has “an affectionate disposition,” he is inclined to accept her ways and, indeed, to take pride in “the tightness and emphasis” with which she rolled their table-napkins.  Mr. Glegg’s devotion to his garden may owe a good deal to his wish to escape the confines of his house, while his wife caricatures Maggie’s asceticism when she “made her tea weaker than usual this morning and declined butter” due to being annoyed.  The chapter’s final scene between them depicts their muted but habitual friction.  She is set on finding fault whatever he might do and he responds with some asperity, though the temperature never rises far.  The reader knows that the duet is enacted daily. 

     Despite their flaws – the main way in which each is described – neither is in any way wicked.  In fact, the entire book has no wicked characters.  Much of the narration is pitched on the level of social and psychological satire, colored with Dickensian warmth rather than Swiftian fierceness.  Perhaps for this reason the sudden denouement has struck so many critics as a fault.  The emotional engagement mounts to another plane from the practice of humor in which no one really is hurt and everyone strives to do well in a variety of absurd and ineffective ways to a sudden life-and-death crisis and the summation of two lives that had had more of privation and self-denial than of pleasures for years.  The shift from amusement to gravitas is abrupt.

     While combining comedy with tragedy would have seemed a breach of literary decorum in antiquity, by Horatian standards for instance, the mixing had come to be defended well before Eliot’s novel.  Samuel Johnson’s praise of Shakespeare, for instance, not only accepts the poet’s “mixing comick and tragick scenes”; he lauds such mixed compositions as exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination.”  As Johnson eloquently notes, in lived experience very often “the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another.”  [3] 

     At the same time that Eliot’s novel establishes new ground for realistic narrative, her loyalty to the Classical tradition, especially elements of Greek tragedy, remains. [4]  In The Mill on the Floss she insists on the emotional profundity of the experiences of ordinary, small-town citizens while at the same time reflecting their radically limited view.  Each is obliged at act on the basis of, at best, partial information.  It is then no wonder if worthy motives might motivate unworthy actions.  In the end the mingling of what the ancients would have thought incompatible, an impermissible violation of decorum, is justified for the simple reason that it reflects everyone's common experience.  Each of us is given an imperfect view of what is before our eyes, we are all like Oedipus oblivious, walking always directly toward our own undoing unaware of what lies ahead.  Literary decorum cannot govern life; each day presents a succession of moments of fatuous absurdity followed by sensitive concern, a satiric insight may be followed by deep empathy and ridicule may be jumbled with profound anxiety in a mélange reflected in the tonal range of The Mill on the Floss. 

 

 

 1. Among the studies of this device is Larry Rubin, “River Imagery as a Means of Foreshadowing in The Mill on the Floss,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jan., 1956).

2.  Proust, another writer captivated by memory, expressed great admiration for George Eliot and for The Mill on the Floss in particular.  Among the many studies of her influence on him are Ian McCall, “The Portrayal of Childhood in Proust's Jean Santeuil and Eliot's ‘The Mill on the Floss’", Comparative Literature Studies Vol. 36, No. 2 (1999); Kenichi Kurata, “George Eliot, Marcel Poriust, and the Logic of Desire,” The George Eliot Review 44 (2014), and Inge Crosman Wimmers, “Proust and Eliot: An Intertextual Reading,” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature Vol. 36, No. 1 (January 2012)

3.  “Preface to Shakespeare.”

4.  Fir a general treatment, see P. E. Easterling, “George Eliot and Greek Tragedy,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1991).