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Eliot Lite

George Eliot's first great popular novel gives only hints of the depths to be plumbed in the future. In many ways, The Mill on the Floss is a silly romantic story, similar to many others in the nineteenth century: spunky young girl is the despair of her traditional family, grows into womanhood to be wooed by several suitors, makes socially disastrous choices before finding her one true love — although in this case the melodramatic ending reveals her great love is not what is usually expected in such novels.

But in the course of telling the story, a number of other interests are revealed. When, through little fault of her own, our heroine is shamed, Eliot is brilliant in depicting the small-town vindictiveness brought to bear against her (no doubt taken from her own experience as a social outcast in the provinces), as well as examples of some unexpected champions rising above the pettiness.

The Mill on the Floss actually has two story arcs, starting with the peak and decline of the Tulliver family fortunes and how it affects young siblings Maggie and Tom. This part of the novel features some great characterization of not just Tullivers, but their relatives, neighbours and school chums. A multilayered world is created and the reader becomes engaged with this world, wondering how it will all play out. But after the family is left broke and broken, the narrative shifts to the affairs of Maggie's heart. Though it may have been popular in its day, this is the weakest stretch of the novel, at least until disaster strikes Maggie in this arena as well and we're thrown back into the social milieu. The resolution features a suddenly arising natural disaster and a hasty return to the initial story of Tom and Maggie.

A bare description of the plot makes The Mill on the Floss sound like an insubstantial potboiler, and in some ways that's what it is. What raises it though is Eliot's intelligence and her writing ability, which manage to get much more interesting observations between the lines. Her generalizations about the kinds of people found in social settings are particularly entertaining and many of her lines, such as the one quoted above left, contain ironical digs that her original readers may have missed.

There is also a slightly disturbing ambiguity in The Mill on the Floss for the modern reader. While Maggie is the protagonist with whom we are generally in sympathy versus the narrow-mindedness of relatives and townsfolk, at times it seems the author is playing to a readership who would demand that Maggie's free-spiritedness and disobedience be recognized and punished. Her inability to rein in her good-natured impulses and conform to the dour norm of her community causes her great guilt and ultimately a bad end. In later works, Eliot highlights the contradiction all the more but resolves it differently.

The Mill on the Floss is not classic, full-blown Eliot, but on the way.

P.S., here's a question about the novel that readers might enjoy pondering: who is the narrator at the beginning who returns to the Floss, reminisces about what happened there some years ago and introduces us to the scene inside the Tulliver home that starts the narrative? That's the last we hear from that perspective. Did Eliot forget to bring back and explain the observer? Did she forget how the novel began and kill off the narrator in the course of the story?

— Eric