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The Victorian Experience

"Mrs Lewes is getting her eyes
redder and swollener every
morning as she lives through her
tragic story. But there is such a
strain of poetry to relieve the
tragedy that the more she cries, and
the readers cry, the better say I.” (G.H.
Lewes, 5 March 1860)

I cannot choose but think upon the time
When our two lives grew like two buds that kiss
At lightest thrill from the bee’s swinging chime,
Because the one so near the other is.
He was the elder and a little man
Of forty inches, bound to show no dread,
And I the girl that puppy-like now ran,
Now lagged behind my brother’s larger tread.
I held him wise, and when he talked to me
Of snakes and birds, and which God loved the best,
I thought his knowledge marked the boundary
Where men grew blind, though angels knew the rest.
If he said Hush! I tried to hold my breath;
Wherever he said Come! I stepped in faith.The Victorian Experience

 Autobiographical: Maggie grows up in a provincial
milieu = reflects Eliot’s own struggles growing up as an
intellectually ambitious girl. Several incidents related
to GE’s own childhood: hacking off her hair, running
away with gypsies…
 A double Bildungsroman? How is Tom’s development
explored sympathetically?

 Tom’s schoolmaster Mr Stelling, declares that girls may
have ‘a great deal of superficial cleverness; but they
couldn’t go far into anything. They’re quick and
shallow.’
 Maggie is sent instead to Miss Firniss’s boarding-
school, which concentrates more on the development
of manners than the expansion of the mind
 (Book 2, ch. 1).

 ‘an over-’cute woman’s no better nor a long-tailed
sheep — she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that’ (Mr
Tulliver, Book 1, ch. 2).
 Maggie’s childhood reading: Pug’s tour of Europe,
Animated Nature.
 Daniel Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil
‘That old woman in the water’s a witch — they’ve put her
in to find out whether she’s a witch or no; and if she
swims she’s a witch, and if she’s drowned — and killed,
you know — she’s innocent, and not a witch, but only a
poor silly old woman. But what good would it do her
then, you know, when she was drowned?’ (Book 1, ch. 3)
 John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

‘It had the corners turned down in
many places, and some hand, now
for ever quiet, had made at certain
passages strong pen and ink
marks, long since browned by
time. Maggie turned from leaf to
leaf and read where the quiet hand
pointed. … She went on from one
brown mark to another, where the
quiet hand seemed to point,
hardly conscious that she was
reading—seeming rather to listen
to a low voice. ‘

 The Mill on the Floss as tragic
Bildungsroman, or anti-
Bildungsroman?
 Susan Fraiman Unbecoming
Women: British Women
Writers and the Novel of
Development 1993 (Columbia
UP, 1992)

 GE, ‘Silly Novels by Lady
Novelists’ - published
anonymously in the
Westminster Review in
1856. In the essay, Eliot
criticises the majority of
novels written by and for
women, objecting to
their 'silliness' and
disregard for reality.
 In contrast, Eliot wants
to explore how social
environment acts to
produce different
outcomes for young
women who are
apparently born in
similar circumstances
e.g. Maggie and Lucy...

 "It's for your own good I say
this."
 Modeled on GE’s mother's
sisters, the Pearsons
 "to leave an unimpeachable
will”
 A particular moment in
human development –
‘how rich Protestant
peasants lived in middle
England ‘ (Hughes)

 played out in the character of Maggie
 “She’s more like a gypsy nor ever,” says Aunt Pullet; “it’s
very bad luck, sister, as the gell should be so brown . . .
I doubt it’ll stand in her way i’life to be so brown”
(i:7:68).
 “I can tell you something about Geography too – that’s
about the world we live in – very useful and
interesting,…it’s in my Catechism of Geography”
(i:11:109). (Maggie offering to educate the Gypsies

 Transgressive romantic liaisons - Philip Waken,
Stephen Guest
 However, to Stephen, “if the past is not to bind us,
where can duty lie?” (vii:4:475).
 Ultimately Maggie chooses “duty” over passion;
brother and family over her lover; the past over the
future.
 Renunciation rewarded only by death – a deeply
pessimistic novel?

 Maggie inherits her innovative spirit from her father
and his lineage:
 “Mr. Tulliver’s grandfather had been heard to say that
he was descended from one Ralph Tulliver, a
wonderfully clever fellow, who had ruined himself”
(iv:1:274).

 In Sophocles’ play, Antigone insists on carrying out
funeral rites for her dead brother, despite Creon’s
orders – this leads to her own death
 In her essay, “The Antigone and its Moral” (1856), GE
explains that the basis of Antigone’s tragedy is the
“dramatic collision” of principles of equal validity; not
the triumph of one set of principles over the other.
 “the impulse of sisterly piety which allies itself with
reverence for the Gods,” and this “clashes with the
duties of citizenship; two principles, both having their
validity, are at war with each other”.
 Maggie, however, acts more on feeling (‘sympathy’)
than duty. The Victorian Experience

 The Mill on the Floss indicates that emotional
attachment to the past is stronger than an imagined
future. Other novels display a stronger belief in
innovation and progress. E.g.
 Silas Marner: Eppie chooses to remain with her
adoptive father, Silas, and the community to which she
has grown accustomed;
 Middlemarch: Dorothea renounces her inheritance
from Casaubon.
 However a reversal in Daniel Deronda: blood comes to
be associated with race.

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