The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot

There is Eliot's The Mill of the Floss which I am reading too. Characterization is the key word - there is wonderful characterization in that too, such that we understand why Tom is confident, always right, why imaginative Maggie is ever questioning herself and magnifying her tragedies. I'm not very good at characterization and these two books offer a great study.

I just finished The Mill on the Floss - couldn't put it down after I had begun, although the ending disappoints me. The entire book is full of Victorian melodrama which I revel in, but if I were inclined to cry over novels, I would cry over Maggie Tulliver's death. She seems real to me - the ever wronged, tragic, fallen clever woman. Couldn't Eliot have allotted a better fate for her after all? Jane Eyre got her Rochester and Catherine and Heathcliffe's love are requited in their children, but Maggie Tulliver's - only relief - is in death.

New to Eliot I loved her writing and her art of evoking sympathy - truly of describing human psychology. Is that what a novel is - character studies, and wisdom imparted as to a mode of life? Achieved through conflict of course, internal and external. Lessons in human nature. I will give you a sample of some of Eliot's words which strike me:

Of those two young hearts Tom's suffered the most unmixed pain, for Maggie, with all her keen susceptibility, yet felt as if the sorrow made larger room for her love to flow in, and gave breathing space to her passionate nature.

This is the path we all like when we set out on our abandonment of egoism - the path of martyrdom and endurance, where the palm-branches grow, rather than the steep highway of tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame, where there are no leafy homours to be gathered and worn.

Perhaps the emphasis of his admiration did not fall precisely on this rarest quality in her -perhaps he approved his own choice of her chiefly because she did not strike him as a remarkable rarity.

The middle-aged ,who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory is still half-passionate and not merely contmeplative, should surely be a sort of natural priesthood, whom life has disciplined and consecrated to be the refuge and rescue of early stumblers and victims of self-despair.

Where, then would be all the memories of early striving, all the deep pity for another's pain, which had been nurtured in her through years of affection and hardship, all the divine presentiment of something higher than mere personal enjoyment which had made the sacredness of life?

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

Then there is Philip's letter with echoes of Jingle in Pat. Are there truly those who love so, who love devotedly and gladly and unrequitedly, finding that such love sustains them? Is there really anyone like Tom - so unimaginative and quick to judge, so decisive in his sense of righteousness? Was Maggie's bravado in the final rescue enough to convince Tom to give her merit? There is something so vaguely dissatisfying about the ending.

But we know there are women like Maggie - we female readers know that we are ones ourselves. Do writers write anything except for the like-minded? We are clever and forever slighted - we are impulsive, self-doubting, imaginative to the disregard of consequences and self-sacrirficial. We strive to do right and find that it doesn't pay. We are hurt when we hurt others.

And there are of course many like dear Lucy, like Maggie's simple mother - who thwart the circumstances against themselves in benevolence and guilelessness. We laugh at them, we clever women, we find that our souls are fashioned of different stuff than theirs are - but we flock to their comfort all the same in our hours of need.

How different from Atwood where she gives the dullest Roz and simpering Charis credit. For perhaps even dull women have backstories and uncanny powers. They have strived too, to carve themselves a niche in this world of women-who-oppress-women.