Death on the Floss

I have already more than hinted (Life on the Floss) at criticism for the ending of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.  Some fine critics have taken a hard stance, and John Sutherland in Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?, in the essay called How good an oarswoman is Maggie Tulliver?, says “it is difficult to find a critic of weight prepared to commend the last chapter of The Mill on the Floss”.  Here, for example, is Henry James:

"The story is told as if it were destined to have ... [an ending] ... within ordinary probabilities.  As it stands, the denouement shocks the reader most painfully.  Nothing has prepared him for it; the story does not move towards it; it casts no shadow before it. ... I would in this particular case have infinitely preferred that Maggie should have been left to her own devices."

Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s father) wished that the third volume had been suppressed.  And the fierce F R Leavis felt:

The flooded river has no symbolic or metaphorical value.  It is only [an] accident which gives us the opportunity for the dreamed-of heroic act ... and provide a gloriously tragic curtain.  Not that the sentimental in it is embarrassingly gross, but the finality is not that of great art – and [its] significance is ... a revealed immaturity.

All this is true, and I agree with it; Tom's sudden rise to prosperity, for example, where within a short apprecticeship he earns enough to pay off his father's debts through the unlikely chances of successive successful trading ventures and the early knowledge of a collapsing bank, marks a romantic determination that all will be well in the end.  His success is as as sudden and as unexplained as his father's failure; it seems to set the scene for an ending which might not be happy, but is not utterly tragic: perhaps Tom back at the mill (another fine coincidence to get rid of the incumbent manager), with Maggie in service, pulling herself up again.  And then, Maggie becomes a friend of Lucy's, beautiful and courted .. perhaps she will eventually be happy with Philip?  No, Eliot throws all this away, and suddenly and irrationally, sweeps all away in a tragedy which is unpremeditated and which has no fitness with what has gone before. I don't, you understand, insist on a happy ending, but I do like emotional coherence!

But John Sutherland has more practical criticisms, of the sort that some people find tediously irrelevant, but others think are fatally intrusive to any enjoyment of a book.  He just thinks it couldn’t happen the way it’s described.  First, there is the simple question of the flood.  It seems to come from nowhere and rises with terrifying speed - first into the house where Maggie is living, then an hour or so later, up to the second storey of the mill.  All this is remarkably unlikely in the wide, flat lands of the landscape here described, where the flood would spread out over great extent, but would actually rise slowly without a steep valley to contain it.

  

And what is this machinery which bears down on their boat and sinks them?  Why is it going so fast when they are not?  And why does it float at all, if it is machinery - well, because Eliot in the second edition makes it "wooden", an unlikely concept in itself.  And where does Maggie learn to row and scull so well?  And in such a raging flood, how does she get the frail boat into the mill?  The questions go on and on, and Sutherland is merciless, and the final book becomes more and more fantastical.  This spoils the book dreadfully for some; for me, though, the greater problem is the discontinuity between the bulk of the book and its dramatic ending.  I shall go back to Scenes From Clerical Life or Felix Holt when I next want to read George Eliot!

Comments

[Natalie T.]

Thank you for the great commentary and pictures. When my cats are entwined and grooming each other I call them "Tom and Maggie" for the nonce.