Jan-Maat's Reviews > The Mill on the Floss

George Elliot is both impressively encyclopaedic (from Captain Swing to pedallers)and narrowly individual (education shaping young people to be able to do nothing in particular) in this other tale of provincial life before the Railway Age. One lesson here is that"Nature repairs her ravages" (p490) but people don't. The fatal flaw of bearing a grudge is passed down from father Tulliver to son Tom so underlining that The days of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke's grand dirge over them: they live still in that far-off worship paid by many a youth and man to that woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger or the hem of her robe. Bob with pack on his back, has as respectful adoration for this dark eyed maiden as if he had been a knight in armour calling aloud on her name as he pricked on to the fight p266. so to Tom jealously guards his inherited grudge against the Wakems for whom it has all been just business.

It struck me that Elliot must have been a reader herself and I felt was defining her heroine in relation to a dozen others familiar to mid-Victorian readers. A Gretna green marriage or life as a teacher - not for her girl! Neither Villette nor the proper Victorian solution of marriage to the most eligible bachelor that the town has to offer or to the parish priest( which itself as we know from Middlemarch is not an ending but only the beginning of a story for a woman of intelligence) offer any hope here, Elliot is much meaner with her characters. Life for her is work without short-cuts. The plot of the family prosperity eaten up by a court case struck me as a bit Bleak House, on the downside the eventual ending is foreshadowed very early on making it clear that is only ever going to be semi-autobiographical at most. Because the provincial girl we know, did grow up to write a secular gospel in her novels as answer to Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, The sea of Faith may withdraw, but literature covers the naked shingles of the shore.

Fittingly for a book in which education is a central theme - although the educations provided don't match the needs of those taught in a world in which the central concern is to lend out your money at five percent rather than four whenever possible - Maggie imagines a cross between sir Walter Scott and Byron as potentially satisfying - but maybe Elliot is offering up her own books as an answer to life's problems we have in the vision of the ruined Rhine castles of the robber barons a sense of the insufficiency of medieval attitudes to the honour of debt and repayment in the modern age? Times change. Does Eliot teach us how to live better lives in these changed times?
On reflection I don't much like the great flood she uses to close the story - just as in the inundation myths it suggests the creator has run out of ideas and can find no way of resolving the narrative (having as per above rejected solutions that other authors found acceptable) and so has nothing left but for to wash the slate clean. Despite proposing herself as the answer to unsatisfactory reading, this is still an apprentice work in which character is stronger than plot for all that she disapproves of Novalis claiming that 'character is destiny' her story seems to me to bear out his suggestion since none of her characters escape the destiny which their characters point towards within this society.