Fionnuala's Reviews > The Mill on the Floss

There are characters in literature who are unforgettable.
Different readers will place different characters in the unforgettable category but I'd imagine there are a few characters who would turn up on the lists of a great many readers: Anna Karenina, for example, Heathcliff, perhaps, Don Quixote most definitely.
You've probably already thought of names to add to the list, other famous literary characters I've either forgotten about or never heard of, but no matter the exalted status of the characters who might figure on such a list, I'm now convinced that George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver could hold her own in the unforgettable stakes—which causes me to wonder what it is that makes a character unforgettable.
Already, looking at my own short list, I see some elements that these characters have in common: being different in their thinking and mode of living, and most strikingly, the tragic destiny they share in one way or another (though tragic Don Quixote is memorable for his comic side too—and he managed to die safely in his own bed, attended by his faithful Sancho Panza).

But back to Maggie Tulliver. Out of the many tragic literary characters I've read about, some of whom are also marked out by difference, why do I place her immediately in the exclusive 'unforgettable' group? And why, since she's such a powerful character, didn't Eliot name the book after her, as she did with Romola, Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda?
When I reached the end of the book, I understood Eliot's choice of title better. It's actually a very fine title: The Mill on the Floss. Not only is there a lilting music to it, it also embodies the essence of the story: the intense love Maggie felt throughout her life for her childhood home by the river. Indeed, there are some beautiful lines about the connections people feel to a 'place' in this book, the thoughts, for example, that Eliot gives Maggie's father, and which could well have been Maggie's thoughts too, at an older age:
He couldn't bear to think of himself living on any other spot than this, where he knew the sound of every gate door, and felt that the shape and color of every roof and weather-stain and broken hillock was good, because his growing senses had been fed on them.

Maggie's growing senses are central to the power she holds as a character, and they are the reason she is unforgettable. She lives almost as if she had no membrane to shield her nerve endings, she feels every moment of life with huge intensity—in great contrast to her extended family, the Gleggs and the Pullets, and their paltry preoccupations with nest eggs and feather mattresses.

We get an inkling of Maggie's unusual sensitivity at the very beginning of the book which opens with an unnamed narrator dozing in an armchair, dreamily recalling a child seen years before, a little dark-haired girl standing by the mill on the river Floss, staring intently into the water. Our attention is fixed firmly on dark-haired Maggie from that moment, and the narrator's meditation about the swollen river, which begins as a simple description of the water but segues into what could be the thoughts of the child contemplating it, traces the arc of the story in a few simple lines: The stream is brimful now, and lies high in this little withy plantation, and half drowns the grassy fringe of the croft in front of the house. As I look at the full stream, the vivid grass, the delicate bright-green powder softening the outline of the great trunks and branches that gleam from under the bare purple boughs I am in love with moistness, and envy the white ducks that are dipping their heads far into the water here among the withes, unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above .
(Incidentally, the narrator then disappears as a 'character', and we find ourselves in an omniscient narration. We never discover who the narrator is, this person who claimed to remember Maggie as a child, but we understand that it is the same narrator nevertheless who continues to tell us Maggie's story because twice in the course of the tale, the narrator gives a sign of his/her presence with an 'I' statement, quite like the mysterious way Henry James sometimes slips an 'I' statement into an omniscient narrative).

So, from the beginning, our attention is on dark-haired Maggie, the girl who will later say:
I'm determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness. If you could give me some story where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance. I want to avenge all the dark unhappy ones.."

The reader is completely behind Maggie in this desire to see the dark woman triumph. And dark-haired Maggie does triumph, the river playing an unexpected role in her victory. But the terrible irony is that Maggie cannot bear to triumph at the cost of the blond woman's happiness, and the mill and the river become her refuge in the end as they were in the beginning.
A perfect story with a perfect title.