The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Pub. 1860. Ed. Gordon Haight and Juliette Atkinson. Oxford: World Classics, 2015.

• Pub 1860 3 vols, Blackwood
• Good for: narrative framing 10; complex narrative temporality (set in the 1820s, 109 deep time and colonial time with fetish 27 (Charles Lyell/Charles Darwin, the latter particularly 12, 19, 30, 42, 80 descent/inheritance of traits)) (compare to Shirley (Charlotte Brontë, 1849)); bildungsroman & reading and education (15, 17-18, 328, 464 again old canon [[[St Clair 2004]]]) (Tom's education 130, 132, 139, compare to David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850)); Eliot's didacticism 37, 160, 242, 253 (Compare Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872));

Class Notes

• Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872) does things Mill doesn't
  • network as subject
  • Mill more bildungsroman, development of individual consciousness ("what novels should do" - Ian Watt)
• science, philosophy, and realist fiction are all of a piece for Eliot and Lewes
• Tulliver is farming class, "yeoman," but capitalism is accelerating -> the capitalist and professional class is becoming more prominent (here, Wakem and Deane)
• Legal literacy - society and the law becoming more enmeshed
• The narrator
  • this person is not in the novel (like Bleak House (1853) or the beginning of Lord Jim (Conrad, 1900)), embodied but impossible, not in the diegetic story world
  • diegetic world as "snow globe"
  • relation between the novel and story world is osmotic, permeable, the way a river is in a landscape
  • the dream-state the narrator says she's in - a different diegetic level
  • also this is v. autobiographical, to complicate things further: it's not collapsible but more complex - it's about the actual world (trying to understand the world Eliot and we live in) and a fictional one
  • the expansive "we" b/c playing with autobiography and fiction (and periodical anonymity - like The Warden (Trollope, 1855)), it's reasonable to assume the narrator would turn out to be Maggie
• we are given more about some characters and that affects our ability to sympathize -- we're so fixated on Maggie at the beginning, and Eliot was frustrated that people didn't get this was Tom's book too (160) - he's not just a foil character to aid Maggie's development like John Reed in Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
• Maggie's fetish (27ff)
  • the narrator doesn't really interpret it - not v. Eliotian
  • pre Marxian and Freudian fetishism
  • metafictive: the way an author manipulates characters?
  • anger -> sympathy?
  • an early historically discussion of fetishism (that gets at the sense that Marx is trying to invert with commodity fetishism)
    • Stalylbrass - fetishism from colonialist views on religious objects -> cross-cutural interpretation
  • Eliot might have been familiar with the sense of it as a magical object
  • no one comforts Maggie the way she does the doll
  • deep time and colonialism drawn to Africa - evolutionary and colonial time
  • "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny": Maggie displays primitive religion
    • a post-Darwinian evolutionary idea
    • the individual organism develops the way the species did
    • biological vs. historical evolution
• embedding evolution and religion into history - it makes sense to echo those stories as historical expressions of how people act so the saint's story (St. Ogg's) makes sense in a realist novel, like Satan/theology are expressions of understanding how humans work
• Hard to read this investment in things in terms of Marxist commodity fetishism - convertibility to other types of values - it's another type of commodity fetishism
  • Mrs Tulliver and her stuff
• Coal at the beginning can be Roland Barthes Reality Effect description (but extraneous to the plot), or in Liz Miller's reading (in "Fixed Capital and the Flow"), it's integral to understanding time scales
  • what coal and steam do to time
  • Mill shows Eliot and the Victorians were aware of the radical transformation of time and space by steam engine but not aware of longterm effects
    • what is experienced as acceleration has delayed effects that are climate change
• importance of a tidal river - you might be able to step in the same river twice!

Reading Notes

• Set 1820s -- post napoleonic but pre 1832 reform act
• 10: figurative language is puzzling
• 12, 19, 30, 42, 80 descent/inheritance of traits

   * 37, 44, 82 speciation
   * 53 Gradations in civilization
   * 54 kin vs others
   * 57 Breeding/mixing blood
   * 68 deformity in the person of Philip Wakem
   * Persistent comparison of the children to animals of course because Darwin had broken down that barrier
   * Eliot read Origin while writing this

• 13 foreshadowing
• 15, 328 hotspur Shakespeare

   * 357 Sir Andrew
   * 464 pocket Shakespeare 

• 17-18 reading Defoe
• 24 metafictional/generic
• 27: Maggie's fetish
• 32 unmodifiable characters
• 37 dignified alienation, species
• 51-2 the Dodsons' retrograde gentility in the person of mrs Glegg
• 53 how heavily they expect Tulliver to fail by discussing what would happen to Glwgg's money
• 66 historical difference in religiosity
• 106 the gypsy adventure is through Maggie's psychological geography as well
• 160 metafictive
• 252 again metafictive, obscure vitality, sordid, prosaic --> realism
• Worldliness without side-dishes reminds me of bronte's lentils in Shirley
• 253 there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations
• 267 thomas a kempis
• 280 quite wise
• 371 character is destiny - novalis (but later hardy in Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy, 1886) too)
• 382 renunciation again
• 442 Maggie reckoning with Stephen

Theme tracking

Pick up at 205 2.12.17

- = Tulliver
+ = enviro 
* = reading/writing
o = femininity
= = materiality
-> = narrat 
[square] = labor/industry
[dot] = evolution

Theme tracking

Important plot events

• Maggie's fetish?
• 60-63 Maggie's haircut

Tulliver and "puzzling" language (& other interesting uses of figurative/imaginative language)

• 10
• 15
• 19
• 22
• 29
• 33
• 40
• 66
• 72
• 80
• 88
• 122
• 149

environment

• 11 river
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 27
• 31
• 38 round pool
• 39 rivers
• 47
• 73 capital and enviro literally and metaphorically tied
• 74
• 83
• 99 dunlow common -> gypsies
• 109

It is one of  those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature, as much as the nests of the bower-birds or the winding galleries of the white ants: a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp on the hill-side, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce eager eyes at the fatness of the land. It is a town 'familiar with forgotten years.'

• 114
• 145
• 146
• 148
• 175
• 181

reading/writing

• 11
• 15-17 Maggie showing off to Mr Riley
• 19
• 21
• 22
• 27
• 28
• 29
• 33
• 38
• 68
• 76
• 88
• 102-3 teaching the gypsies
• 105
• 119 Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest
• 122
• 125
• 130 Eton Grammar, Euclid
• 131
• 132 Delectus
• 136
• 137
• 139

Maggie found the Latin Grammar quite soothing after her mathematical mortification; for she delighted in new words, and quickly found that there was an English Key at the end, which would make her very wise about Latin, at slight expense. She presently made up her mind to skip the rules in the Syntax - the examples became so absorbing. The mysterious sentences, snatched from an unknown context, - like strange horns of beasts, and leaves of unknown plants, brought from some far-off region - gave boundless scope to her imagination, and were all the more fascinating because they were in a peculiar tongue of their own, which she could learn to interpret. It was really interesting - the Latin Grammar that Tom had said no girls could learn: and she was proud because she found it interesting. The most fragmentary examples were her favourites. Mors omnibus est communis would have been jejune, only she liked to know the Latin; but the fortunate gentleman whom every one congratulated because he had a son 'endowed with such a position' afforded her a great deal of pleasure in conjecture, and she was quite lost in the 'thick grove impenetrable by no star,' when Tom called out, 'Now, then, Magsie, give us the Grammar!' 'O, Tom, it's such a pretty book!' she said[.] 

• 154
• 160 Homer
• 172
• 184 Tulliver reads letter and collapses
• 203

femininity

• 12
• 13
• 17
• 19
• 23
• 26
• 32
• 34
• 36
• 38
• 41
• 42
• 50
• 52
• 55
• 70
• 81
• 89
• 132
• 141
• 174

materiality

• 13
• 18
• 21
• 27
• 41 Dodsons
• 53
• 56 "primeval strata of her wardrobe"
• 80
• 88
• 188 mrs t's "laid-up treasures"
• 198 disgrace and teapots

narratorial intervention

• 14
• 19
• 24 metafictive
• 25
• 31
• 35
• 37

We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behaviour to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilized society. Maggie and Tom were still very much like young animals[.]

• 39
• 43
• 44
• 46
• 50
• 53
• 56
• 59
• 61
• 62
• 66
• 71
• 72
• 74
• 80
• 95
• 96
• 101
• 106
• 109

In order to see Mr and Mrs Glegg at home, we must enter the town of St Ogg's - that venerable town with the red-fluted roofs and the broad warehouse gables, where the black ships unlade themselves of their burthens from the far north, and carry away, in exchange, the precious inland products, the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces, which my refined readers have doubtless become acquainted with through the medium of the best classic pastorals.

• 112
• 113
• 121
• 123 tulliver/oedipus
• 130
• 131 Aristotle
• 143
• 151
• 154
• 157
• 160 metafictive
• 165

It is doubtful whether our soldiers would be maintained if there were not pacific people at home who like to fancy themselves soldiers. War, like other dramatic spectacles, might possibly cease for want of a 'public.'

• 183

The pride and obstinacy of millers and other insignificant people, whom you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too; but it is of that unwept, hidden sort, that goes on from generation to generation and leaves no record -- such tragedy, perhaps, as lies in the conflicts of young souls, hungry for joy, under a lot made suddenly hard to them, under the dreariness of a home where the morning brings no promise with it, and where the unexpectant discontent of warn and disappointed parents weights on the children like a damp, thick air, in which all the functions of life are depressed; or such tragedy as lies in the slow or sudden death that finds only a parish funeral. There are certain animals to which tenacity of position is a law of life - they can never flourish again, after a single wrench: and there are certain human beings to whom predominance is a law of life - they can only sustain humiliation so long as htey can refuse to believe in it, and, in their own conception, predominate still.

• 185

labor/industrial spaces/economics

• 28
• 59
• 68
• 71
• 72
• 73 capital and enviro literally and metaphorically tied
• 78
• 91
• 92 economic change
• 145
• 147
• 158
• 177 Maggie telling Tom about the lawsuit failing
• 181
• 191
• 199
• 201
• 204

evolution/inheritance/Darwinian

• 12, 19, 30, 42, 80 descent/inheritance of traits
• 37, 44, 82 speciation
• 53 Gradations in civilization
• 54 kin vs others
• 57 Breeding/mixing blood
• 68 deformity in the person of Philip Wakem
• Persistent comparison of the children to animals of course because Darwin had broken down that barrier
• Eliot read Origin while writing this
• 122
• 191
• 204