ÍNDICE DE CUADROS

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other’s sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain. (329)

Before the flood, though, comes a letter from Philip. The letter shows Maggie that one other person in the world has felt as she has felt and has achieved a sympathetic power like her own. It begins significantly with the sentence “Maggie,—I believe in you” (633). It continues in a similar tone and confesses love and respect for her.

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Eagleton points out the simultaneously affirming and condemning nature of the flood, and he reads it as I do, as a release of dammed narrative power. “The extraordinary ending of The Mill on the Floss allows Maggie to be reunited with her brother, and with the way of life he symbolizes, but to obliterate him at the same time. It is as though the full force of the novel’s pent-up desire is unleashed, like the river Floss itself, threatening to sweep away the very world for which this dutiful young woman has laid down her personal happiness” (Eagleton, The English Novel 176). But it is not the novel’s desire; it is Eliot’s revenge on the world that hemmed Maggie in.

The new life I have found in caring for your joy and sorrow more than for what is directly my own, has transformed the spirit of rebellious murmuring into that willing endurance which is the birth of strong sympathy. I think nothing but such complete and intense love could have initiated me into that enlarged life which grows and grows by appropriating the life of others; for before, I was always dragged back from it by ever-present painful self- consciousness. I even think sometimes that this gift of transferred life which has come to me in loving you, may be a new power to me. (634)

Like Latimer in “The Lifted Veil,” Philip thinks that he has a new gift for understanding that no one else has ever had. He is wrong because Maggie has had it all along in modified form. The letter is redemptive for Maggie, and it helps her acknowledge the “gift of sorrow” which she has always possessed. She believes that she can redeem her gift now by turning her “passionate error into a new force of unselfish human love” (646). Indeed she does so by giving up her life for her brother when she attempts to rescue him in the great flood.

Both casual readers and critics alike are frustrated by this ending.89 For one, they disbelieve that Maggie would ever capitulate to Stephen at all. For another, they chafe at the punishment meted out to her.90 And finally, some find it poorly written. Bissell claims that Maggie “resolves on a course that can bring no approval from the community and only a troubled peace to her own conscience. The dilemma is too great for Maggie Tulliver and, one suspects, for George Eliot. The flood waters of the Floss provide a convenient

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Allegations of deus ex machina and inorganic form have been thrown at the novel since its publication. In an unsigned review in The Guardian on April 25, 1860, the reviewer takes issue with the abruptness of the change in the novel’s structure and argues that perhaps realism is not the best goal for art: “Nobody who reads it can, we should think, avoid the feeling that in the last volume he passes into a new book. There is a clear dislocation in the story between Maggie’s girlhood and Maggie’s great temptation. It is perfectly true that it may be the same in real life. . . . But the course of human things is not necessarily the pattern for a work of art. . . .” The Critical Response to George Eliot, Ser. 11, ed. Karen L. Pangallo (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994) 69.

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At the same time, the flood is inevitable. Death by drowning is a recurring trope throughout the novel, and it is hard to imagine Maggie finding a happy life in St. Ogg’s. Some critics read the inevitability as a

consequence of irreconcilable tensions within the story. It “can only end tragically, split between its insistence that the nostalgic referent exists but cannot be regained and its unacknowledged understanding that the image of a perfect childhood is only a creation of Maggie’s desires” (McGowan “George Eliot’s Realism” 182).

solution.”91 Carol Christ also couches her statements in the language of narrative

convenience: “The flood creates a reconciliation in death between brother and sister that the novel has made evident could not be attained in life. The discomfort that so many readers feel with the ending of The Mill on the Floss stems in large part from its convenience.”92 She elaborates her point: “Eliot attains Tom’s and Maggie’s reconciliation only by placing them in a situation in which they do not need to confront the hatred between them, and she saves Maggie from the necessity to test her final self-abnegation.”93 More than just “a convenient solution,” I find the last chapters of the book beautifully written and entirely satisfactory, if sad.94 Maggie repeatedly proves her ability to stick, for years on end, to uncomfortably limiting decisions. The convenience of the plot, if it can be called such, really comes in the forced change in Tom, who has been shown at all other times to be impossibly recalcitrant. “There were no impulses in Tom that led him to expect what did not present itself to him as a right to be demanded” (308). Within the world of the novel, Tom’s position

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Bissell 234. Dorothea Barrett understands the disappointment that readers, especially feminists, feel in Maggie’s supposed failure, but she provides a rereading that helps to reclaim Maggie’s fate as an idealist’s triumph. “When we see the novel as a tale of resistance against male coercion, it becomes apparent that Maggie does not fail as a feminist: she achieves a hard-won, though admittedly fruitless, victory” (Barrett 56). I am inclined to agree. After all, Maggie is willing to die to prove herself, unfair as that is. Barrett fashions the struggle between Maggie and St. Ogg’s as a battle between idealism and pragmatism. Her cause may be a losing one, but it is worth fighting because the fight is what matters. She calls it “a passionate idealism, fundamentally radical in its demands for excellence—but which, by reason of its volatile intensity, inevitably results in failure—is more admirable than an inherently conservative pragmatism, which desires to do the least evil and which, by reason of the mediocrity of its aspiration, attains its goal and supersedes the good achieved by the passionate idealist” (Barrett 74).

92

Christ 136.

93

Christ 136.

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F. R. Leavis disagrees with me completely because he detests the flood as a “daydream indulgence we are all familiar with [that] could not have imposed itself on the novelist as the right ending if her mature intelligence had been fully engaged, giving her full self-knowledge.” His rough treatment continues. “The flooded river has no symbolic or metaphorical value. It is only the dreamed-of perfect accident . . .” (45-46).

is fully validated. To the reader, he has to be judged much more harshly.95 Whereas the people of St. Ogg’s see Tom as a steady, moral man, the reader cannot help but see him as inflexible and unsympathetic. Eliot was not just on the side of the underdog, she hoped to reveal hidden depths to the sort of inflexible people that Tom represents.

The flood provides an apotheosis for Maggie. Individuals in Eliot’s fiction can occasionally martyr themselves to larger causes and deeper currents and thereby gain greater significance on a social stage than they can in life. Peter Fenves describes something similar in his article on “Janet’s Repentance.” In relation to that story—but equally as applicable here—he writes, “The individual comes into relief at the scene of death. Without such a scene . . . we, as readers, could never recognize the process that resulted in the generalities of natural history.”96 The flood acts as the great dissolver of sentiment. It allows Maggie to be subsumed and to become part of the myth of St. Ogg’s. This sort of apotheosis is practically impossible without some sort of massive change. “[W]hat quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?” (652). The only way to redress the spreading “pulsations of unmerited pain” is by acknowledging the suffering of others (329).

For Eliot’s novelistic project to be successful, her readership must be educable. They must learn from Latimer’s obstinacy; they must learn to protect themselves in a way that Maggie does not. The education depends on individual experience and upon a willingness to

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Reading Tom as a success within the novel and a failure outside it is a popular critical move. For example, Doyle states that “Like Maggie, we feel at the end of Book 5 that Tom is good, despite all; but unlike her, we are not convinced that his faults are redeemed” (Doyle 68). I am willing to acknowledge more of the influence of Eliot’s biography than usual here inasmuch as Maggie’s willingness to forgive Tom echoes Eliot’s desire for approval from her brother Isaac.

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play along, or as I said before, to accept Maggie’s claims to goodness as facts. Terry Eagleton believes in this same good faith effort when he writes about the novel’s moral function: “The novel is a model of morality because it can feel its way sensitively into a whole galaxy of human lives . . . If traditional morality works by universal principles, the novelist-as-author can go one further by bringing these principles to bear on uniquely particular situations, which for Eliot is the only true basis for moral judgment.”97

The Scenes of Clerical Life showed that people living within communities should not presume that social understanding will be kind to them. Instead, they must exercise their will in acts of self-presentation that will influence the community towards greater generosity of spirit. They must also be careful not to lose themselves in the process. “The Lifted Veil” showed the dangers for the artist who would hope to act as a leader in this process of social change. He or she could become a pariah just as easily as an inspiration, and this possibility is made more likely if the artist does not come to the project with a willingness to

acknowledge his or her own failings. Eliot herself was able to confess her faults, and she made herself vulnerable to the world’s criticism, by acknowledging that she was Marian Evans, by living publicly with George Henry Lewes, and by writing so much of her own story in her fiction. The Mill on the Floss provided Eliot with a platform to address an unfair system and allowed her to perform a detailed analysis of what unsupportable pressure can do to a human ego. Maggie’s death is simultaneously the depressed acceptance of social reality and the triumph over misunderstanding. Eliot would ultimately work towards happier outcomes for her characters because as she continued to write, she recognized the power of narrative. This power emerges in a dialogic relationship with her readers—together they can

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read about a world they wish to create.98 With Daniel Deronda, I will show that, rather than letting her personal history control her plot, she moved towards greater agency in her

storytelling. Gwendolen Harleth may be a sinner, but she knows her sins. Daniel Deronda may be raised in one system, but he can choose another.

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“Understanding and response are dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other” (Bakhtin 1206).

Chapter Four: “The Transmutation of Self”: The Limits of Sympathy in Daniel Deronda

I. Introduction

Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the wanderer’s orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense suffering which take the quality of action—like the cry of Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea and sky he invokes and the deity he defies. (164)1

One may not live adequately with a self-asserting self; but one cannot live at all without it.2

George Eliot worked on Daniel Deronda intermittently from 1873 to 1876. It was her last novel, and it was extremely difficult for her to produce. Although it is not as intensely (over)researched as Romola, her letters and George Henry Lewes’s record the problems she encountered in finishing it. On January 17, 1874, Lewes wrote to Blackwood asking him for help in encouraging Eliot. “I am hard at work and wish she were; but she simmers and simmers, despairs and despairs, believes she can never do anything again worth doing etc. etc. A word from you may give her momentary confidence. Once let her begin

and on she will go of her own impulse.”3 She traveled to synagogues in Frankfurt. She researched Judaism. She asked legal friends for details of the law. She refused to share the

1

Unless otherwise identified, the parenthetical citations in this section refer to George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Terence Cave (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1995).

2

George Levine, “Daniel Deronda: A New Epistemology,” Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Suzy Anger (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001) 57.

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title. She even asked Lewes’s son Stephen for details on life at Cambridge.4 Nevertheless, she needed Lewes and Blackwood to tell her over and over that the “scope and merits” of the book were “wonderful” before she could make herself finish it because she was afraid that her creative abilities had begun to fade—as she later put it, “that I have exhibited my faculties in a state of decay.”5 The two men were up to the task, and their encouragement was strong. Blackwood wrote Eliot immediately after publication began to tell her that she was “writing one of the most remarkable Books that ever was produced by man or woman. I know nothing like it.”6 In this last discussion of her life and works, I will address Eliot’s literary goals as they were achieved through Gwendolen and Grandcourt’s domestic plot as well as Daniel and Mordecai’s philosophical plot.

Although this phase of George Eliot’s life saw her become a more public figure than she had been previously, her fiction turned inwards again. Social arrangements were

refigured into small scenes and family dynamics, just as they had been in her early fiction, but this time those small groups became microcosms of the larger world. Maggie had been a minor figure in St. Ogg’s and a major figure in the Tulliver family, but in the intervening years, Eliot had moved on to characters like Romola de’ Bardi, Felix Holt, and Tertius Lydgate, who lived in encyclopedically larger communities and affected the greater world more directly, creating what Claude T. Bissell calls a “catholicity of vision.”7 In some ways,

4

All of these anecdotes are recounted in Volume VI of the Letters.

5

“John Blackwood to George Eliot,” 18 October 1875, Letters VI.178 and “to John Blackwood,” 3 November 1876, Letters VI.304.

6

30 November 1875, Letters VI.195.

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Bissell, 227. Even the wider world of her later novels represent a projection of interiority onto the outside world. Bissell urges the reader to “[n]otice how George Eliot, by the strength of her personality and the happy alliance of circumstances, was never closely identified for any length of time with any one social group or any one class” (226). Although Bissell and I agree that Eliot experienced a great deal of movement and was therefore equipped to give a broad view of life, we disagree over the anxiety that her movement produced. “She

Gwendolen and Daniel in Daniel Deronda represent a desire to retreat from public life for their diffident author. By emphasizing very private lives and reducing the size of her cast of characters, Eliot completed the nostalgic turn that began with the historical situations of her books’ settings. The path between her first stories and this, her last, novel had meandered, but it returned to a familiar spot. Daniel Deronda also returns to the theme of sympathy as a path out of the trap of egoism which had occupied her since her earliest writing. However, it is pessimistic in its resolution since it emphasizes sympathy’s limitations more than its strengths.

Daniel Deronda begins as Eliot’s other books usually do—set back in the past. However, this time around, the past she chooses is very recent, and by the end of the book, she has almost reached her own present. She writes, “I like to mark the time, and connect the course of individual lives with the historic stream, for all classes of thinkers. This was the period when the broadening gauge in crinolines seemed to demand an agitation for the general enlargement of churches, ballrooms, and vehicles” (87-88). The insistence on “marking the time” shows her consciousness of the continual move towards chronology to situate diegetic action with reference to the real world.8 It is also significant that she relates “individual lives” to “the historic stream.” This relationship both locates the particular to the universal in a useful way and simultaneously provides a justification for representing the particular at all. Eliot does not say that she will “chart” or “parallel” her characters to a is, as it were, removed from the world of petty aspirations and petty conflicts that dog the author whose social