SOURCE: “Incest Patterns in Two Victorian Novels,” in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XV, No. 3, Summer, 1965, pp. 135-62.

[In the following essay, Smith argues that incest is a central theme in both Jane Eyre, where Jane struggles against her incestuous feelings for father figure Rochester, and Mill on the Floss, where the controversial flood-death scene and the passionate embrace between brother and sister illuminate the incestuous undercurrent of the novel.]

1. HER MASTER'S VOICE: JANE EYRE AND THE INCEST TABOO

Even the initial reading of Jane Eyre¹ will reveal that the central organizing element is Jane's psychic conflict concerning her relationship with Rochester. I shall attempt to show that this conflict is much deeper and more fundamental than she (or probably Charlotte Brontë) realized. Whether Jane realized it or not (and I think she did not) and whether Charlotte realized it or not (and I suspect she did not), Jane's problem is not really one of bigamy: it is one of incest, incest between daughter and father. Jane's psyche is the battleground for warring impulses: on the one hand, a powerful instinctual inclination for intimacy with the father or his representative; on the other hand, a powerful internalization of the communal taboo against incest. A corollary to this incest conflict is Jane's obsession with the family unit, in particular an obsession with reconstruction of the family unit to eliminate the “evil” mother, to effect a union with the father, and to replace “bad” siblings with “good” ones.

Before presenting the textual evidence, I will say a few things about the technique of this analysis. I shall do more than “psychoanalyze” Jane. I shall also suggest that the total structure of the novel reinforces the unconscious psychic pattern postulated for Jane. I shall suggest, for example, that certain characters, places, and events in the novel function symbolically to represent Jane's psyche: characters and places are objective symbols of parts of her psyche; and dramatic events are symbols of psychic events. I shall suggest that the basic dramatic rhythm is one of oscillation, an oscillation correlated with and symbolic of the swings of Jane's psyche between the incest wish and the incest taboo. My analysis assumes, in short, that the incest hypothesis explains best not only Jane's conflict, but the total structure of the novel.²

The fundamental outlines of Jane's psychic conflict are established immediately in the scenes at Gateshead with the Reed family. Jane is the central figure in what might be referred to as the “Cinderella” paradigm or archetype. There is an evil mother figure and evil siblings, two girls and a boy. The mother is not Jane's “real” mother; she is an archetypal stepmother, as the Reed children are step-siblings. At the hands of the stepmother and step-siblings, Jane is a victim of rejection, persecution, and abuse. There is no father to protect Jane, only a fantasied father, Mr. Reed, who, if he had been present, would have been kind to her and protected her from the vicious stepmother and step-siblings. Jane's persecution reaches its zenith in her forced captivity in the “red room.” This scene is worth rather close analysis for its statement of the incest theme and its compressed development of the basic structure of the novel.

The “red room” is the bedroom which Mr. and Mrs. Reed had shared when he was still alive. In other words, it is the site of the parental conjugal relations which are of such preeminent concern to the child in his early stages of psychosexual development. Jane's description of the room is dominated by references to the bed (pp. 8-9): “A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the center …”; “the bed rose before me”; “The vacant majesty of the bed and room.” The furnishing next most vivid in Jane's memory is the big chair near the bed. “Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne” (8-9). A great deal of meaning is compressed into this throne simile. A throne is occupied by a king—a father figure par excellence, and a very specific kind of father figure: frightening and awesome, yet attractive. We begin to see, as Jane's unconscious selects objects of memory and characterizes them, the nature of her obsession-clusters. One final aspect of this scene is to be observed: when Jane takes a position of rest, it is on the stool in front of the “throne,” the proper place for a subject before her king, for a daughter before her father.

That the parental bedroom is a place of terror for Jane demands interpretation. Since it is the site of parental sexual union, it may be identified as a room to which the child is forbidden entry at certain times, times when the parents do “mysterious things” there together. The child fears it simply because external authority has restricted the child's freedom to enter. But for the more sophisticated female child, there are deeper reasons for fear and anxiety. Only the mother has a right to share the bed with the father. If a daughter entering the room fantasies herself as in fact being the mother and usurping the mother's place in bed with the father, she is overwhelmed with guilt for her incestuous fantasy and for her disloyalty to her mother.

The final stages of the scene in the red room suggest that the ten-year-old Jane not only feared but committed, in fantasy, incest with Mr. Reed. Looking at the bed (9), she has a vision of Mr. Reed's ghost leaving the grave and coming into the bedroom with her. She sees a light moving in the room—the ghost itself coming to possess her. Her emotional reaction is appropriate to sexual excitation: “I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated; endurance broke down” (12-13). She rushes to the door, begs to be permitted to retreat from this adult role and to return to her child identity: “Take me out! Let me go into the nursery.” Cruelly refused, she faints under the strain, blocking from consciousness, by blocking all of consciousness, the fantasied union so abhorrent to her taboo-stricken superego. To understand Jane's later conflict respecting Rochester, we will want to remember the intensity of her reaction here. We will be more tolerant of her flight from Rochester, perhaps, if we are aware of the extent to which she dreaded the consummation of her sexual desires.³

In the period immediately following the red room episode, Jane goes through a phase of psychic misery which she is unable to explain. It is more than despair at the continued persecution by the Reeds; its genesis is internal; the punishment is self-inflicted. By the incest hypothesis this phenomenon is not difficult to account for. Having in fantasy violated the incest taboo, she must now suffer the punishment inflicted by the superego; remorse, the inevitable concomitant of transgression, invades her spirit. (The image of the benevolent father-figure has not left her completely, however; it reappears in two forms: the kindly apothecary, Mr. Lloyd, who attends her in her illness, and the lines of the ballad sung by the servant Bessie: “God, in His Mercy, protection is showing. / Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child. / … Still will my Father, with promise and blessing. / Take to his bosom the poor orphan child” [18-7].)

Jane's punishment following the red room episode is not only internal. Mrs. Reed, the mother whose prerogatives have been usurped, torments Jane even more viciously; then, after open encounter, she arranges to have Jane sent away. She acts symbolically, that is, to remove the sexual threat which Jane embodies by removing Jane herself. Mrs. Reed's ally in this excision is Brocklehurst, the master of Lowood School. We learn that the male figure is not only one of benevolence and sexual attraction. There is another side to the father, just as there is another side to Jane, that of the stern voice of moral rectitude. Brocklehurst is the symbolic objectification of Jane's superego. He is equated with death, death to passion, and death to sexuality: “a black pillar”; “a grim face … like a carved mask …” (29). (We learn later that he deprives the Lowood girls of all things which can be associated with pleasure, and that, among other things, he relieves them of one of the symbols of their sexual allure, their long hair.)

Removal to the Lowood school opens a new phase for Jane, both in her physical surroundings and in her psychological orientation. While Gateshead had been a period of the id in ascendancy, Lowood is a period of the superego. Where passion at Gateshead had led her to symbolic incest and rebellion, self-discipline and expiation in the convent-like Lowood bring her obedience, approval, and desexualized achievement. Where Gateshead was under the aegis of the sexual ghost-father, Lowood is under the aegis of the rigid, sex-denying Brocklehurst. It is worth noting another factor connected with Jane's law-abiding tenure at Lowood: the presence of Miss Temple, a kind of “good mother” whose kindness counterbalances Brocklehurst's harshness. When after a number of years Miss Temple marries, we learn from Jane that it was her influence which had enabled Jane to keep a rein on her passionate nature.

From the day she left I was no longer the same: with her was gone every settled feeling, every association that had made Lowood in some degree a home to me … I … found that … she had taken with her the serene atmosphere I had been breathing in her vicinity—and that now I was left in my natural element, and beginning to feel the stirring of old emotions. It did not seem as if a prop were withdrawn, but rather as if a motive were gone: it was not the power to be tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for tranquility was no more.

(91-92)

We can now add another item to our psychological data on Jane Eyre: if a “good mother” replaces the “evil mother” in her family unit, her incestuous propensities become muted.

But, as Jane says, with this influence gone, the “old emotions” begin to “stir.” She begins to seek a new environment, a “new servitude”, as she calls it.

The journey to Thornfield and Edward Fairfax Rochester introduces a third phase for Jane, a return to passion, lawlessness, incest. If the incest hypothesis is to be confirmed, the question must be faced, is Rochester a lover qua father? or merely a lover qua lover? Is there evidence that, in Jane's unconscious perception, he is essentially a father? First, there is the simple fact that Jane was searching for a situation as governess, a situation which would inevitably cast her, as caretaker of children, as an interloper between mother and father. Second, there is a corollary of her role as governess: her role as servant to, it turns out, a man; like a daughter to her father, Jane wishes to serve. We remember her longing for a “new servitude.” We see later her intractable preference for addressing Rochester as “sir” or “master,” even when he has asked her to use “Edward” and even when she is narrating and therefore under no compulsion of propriety as she is when in his presence. We also learn later that she does serve Rochester is most fundamental ways. Their dramatic first meeting is the first incident of service. Rochester, on horseback, sweeps by her and is spilled from his horse. Like a good daughter, she is available to assist him to his horse.⁴ The next time Jane is of service to Rochester is when she saves him from death by fire when Bertha has ignited his bed. Finally, in the dénouement, after his mutilation, she becomes his indispensable servant—his eyes, his mobility—as a daughter might “mother” her father.

A third datum suggesting the father-daughter relationship is age disparity. Jane is eighteen. Rochester says he must be twenty years older than she (149). She guesses him to be thirty-five (126). And Mrs. Fairfax places him at near forty (179). Rochester himself says he is “old enough to be her father” (149). And Rochester continually refers to her as “little girl,” “quaint inexperienced girl,” or “neophyte.” We are not permitted to forget this disparity in later stages of the novel. For example, the old butler who answers Jane's inquiries about the destruction of Thornfield unwittingly describes Jane as follows: “She was a little small thing, they say, almost like a child. I never saw her myself; but I’ve heard Leah, the housemaid, tell of her. Leah liked her well enough. Mr. Rochester was about forty, and this governess not twenty; and you see, when gentlemen of his age fall in love with girls, they are often like as if they were bewitched: Well, he would marry her” (495).

A fourth kind of evidence is Jane's perception of Rochester: like a father might be to a small daughter, he has a “dark face,” “stern features,” and a “heavy brow,” and is identified with a “frown” (126). One final reference will indicate the kind of evidence spread throughout the text indicating a father-daughter relationship: at one point Rochester accuses Jane of stiffness in the presence of a “father or master” and predicts she will learn to be “natural” with him as he finds it “impossible to be conventional with her” (155).

The incest hypothesis entails an assignment of new values to the characters and events at Thornfield. Of primary significance is the new role of Bertha, Rochester's mad wife, as, vis-à-vis Jane, the evil mother whom Jane would replace in her incest fantasies. Bertha is a perfect projection of the incestuous daughter's archetypal unconscious perception of the evil mother. She is hideous, black, vicious. Jane's long-delayed discovery of Bertha's existence and relationship to Rochester is another manifestation of the struggle within her psyche between wish fulfillment and the incest taboo. Jane does not want to know there is another woman in the house, a mother whose place she is usurping. Grace Poole becomes the objective symbol of Jane's rationalization: as her conscious mind is bombarded by evidence of her incestuous role, she denies the incest by denying that a mother exists, effecting a compromise between the pleasure-principle and the reality-principle by imagining that Grace Poole is the source of all the discomforting evidence. In a sense, Bertha is symbolic of a part of Jane's psyche, the emerging awareness that her sexual proclivities are tied up with the incest taboo. We might even say, without attempting to be too schematic, that Thornfield is a symbol of Jane's psyche as a whole: in it we have Rochester, the id, the symbol of instinctual fulfillment; Bertha, associated with the superego and its taboo; and Jane, the ego which must mediate between the conflicting demands of the other two. In this respect, the name “Thornfield” takes on a new relevance.

I might reaffirm at this point that Jane never does, of course, come to any conscious awareness of her violation of the taboo; only her unconscious has this perception; hence her violent reaction to union with Rochester once the secret of the evil mother is out. On the threshold of ultimate consummation of her incestuous wish, i.e., marriage with Rochester, her unconscious intuition of the taboo takes over and she flees in terror and revulsion. We might note that after this intuition, her mind once more returns to thoughts of the red room at Gateshead.

(367)

The flight from Thornfield marks the end of the third phase of Jane's conflict. At Gateshead, in her attempt to flee the “red room,” and at Thornfield, when the “evil mother” paid her a nocturnal visit (326), Jane fainted on account of the intensity of her conflict; she nearly repeats this reaction at the start of her flight from Thornfield: “A weakness, beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell: I lay on the ground some minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf. I had some fear—or hope—that here I should die …” (370). The period which follows of misery from hunger, wetness, cold, and continual rejection by representatives of society is a period of expiation for Jane—mortification of the flesh which has brought her to the brink of psychic disaster. She once again enters a period of the superego, as she had earlier when sent to Lowood. She seeks to return to the security of childhood. This leads her, first, to commit her welfare to “mother” nature: “I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and ask repose” (373). “… my mother would lodge me without money and without price” (373). Her regressive impulse leads her, secondly, to stumble finally upon a configuration of “good” siblings, Diana, Mary, and St. John Rivers. That these characters function symbolically as siblings is made quite clear by Jane a little later: “It seemed I had found a brother … and two sisters;” she is overjoyed when she discovers that they are in fact her cousins and that she has found her way to a family hearth. The period at Marsh End and Morton is reminiscent of Lowood in being a period of intellectual achievement, fulfillment of “duty” and subjugation of the passionate side of her nature. St. John, like Brocklehurst, ultimately proves to be another representative of the superego, the impulse to deny the flesh for the spirit. This can be demonstrated by innumerable references. A few of the more cogent ones:

… I counsel you to resist, firmly, every temptation which would incline you to look back …

(417)

Don’t cling so tenaciously to ties of the flesh …

(452)

Literally, he lived only to aspire—after what was good and great, certainly: but still he would never rest; nor approve of others resting around him.

(454)

I happened to look his way: there I found myself under the influence of the ever-watchful blue eye.

(459)

He will never love me; but he shall approve me.

(468)

… during that time he made me feel what severe punishment a good, yet stern, a conscientious, yet implacable man can inflict on one who has offended him.

(475)

Despite her initial elation at finding acceptance at the hearth of this symbolic family, Jane finds she cannot endure the tyranny of the superego for long. She recognizes that an alliance with St. John to go to India would be tantamount to death.

If I join St. John, I abandon half myself; if I go to India, I go to premature death.

(468)

… to do as you wish me would, I begin to think, be almost equivalent to committing suicide.

(48)

The superego and death, we will remember, were also symbolic extensions of Lowood's Brocklehurst.

Jane rejects St. John's pleas for an alliance in a peculiar inversion of the customary temptation scene. Here there is no temptation by the flesh. St. John, symbol of the superego and representative of the flesh-denial principle, three times tempts her to abandon her “true nature” to become his spiritual companion. She nearly succumbs: “I was tempted to cease struggling with him—to push down the torment of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own” (485). But she is saved by the call of passion and sexuality—the voice of Rochester coming to her out of the void.⁵ She capitulates to this call, and resolves to return to the life of passion. We might say that between two incestuously illicit relationships, Jane has chosen that which is “right” for her; Rochester, the symbolic father, offered passion without marriage; St. John, the symbolic brother, offers marriage without passion; Jane chooses that which will give her “life” rather than “death.”

The return to Thornfield and Ferndean constitutes, of course, the final phase of Jane's conflict. The psychic pendulum begins its swing into its fifth major oscillation between the poles of passion and denial of passion. It is now about to rest. Although Jane's decision for incestuous passion had been made before she returned to Thornfield,⁶ once there it is irrevocably confirmed by the new facts she learns. These facts serve to decrease considerably the intensity of her conflict. The most important of them is the death, by her own act, of the evil mother. This relieves Jane of one of the immediate sources of guilt associated with the incest taboo. Another new fact is the pitiable condition in which she finds Rochester. Permanently blind in one eye, temporarily in the other, and maimed by the loss of one limb, Rochester has suffered a symbolic partial castration. For Jane this has two consequences; first, the father has lost some (but not all) of the sexual power which made him a fearful figure as well as a beloved one; in other words, his “father-ness” has been modified to some extent; and secondly, now Jane can fulfil the desexualized daughterly role of service to the helpless father, a role we have seen emphasized over and over again earlier in the novel. The role of service prompted by Rochester's mutilation suggests one further consequence: Jane's superego actually joins forces with her passion. Blaming herself for his predicament, she concludes she can expiate only by lifelong servitude to her old master. The psychic conflict has been resolved; daughter and father, sans mother and segregated in “decaying” Ferndean from the taboo-reminding community, live happily ever after.

2. “IN THEIR DEATH THEY WERE NOT DIVIDED”: THE FORM OF ILLICIT PASSION IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS

The ending of The Mill on the Floss⁷ has tortured the critics. And it is not difficult to see why. Maggie and Tom Tulliver, sister and brother, nineteen and twenty-three years old, drown in each other's passionate embrace as a consequence of the powerful turbulence of the flooded river Floss. The mill which they have just left is disintegrating under the impact of the same natural force. The mill has been their childhood home, the river the natural source of vitality, power, and danger which touched upon that home.

Henry James is probably the most distinguished of the critics to be puzzled, frustrated, and annoyed by the ending

The chief defect—indeed, the only serious one—in The Mill on the Floss is its conclusion. Such a conclusion is in itself assuredly not illegitimate, and there is nothing in the fact of the flood, to my knowledge, essentially unnatural: what I object to is its relation to the preceding part of the story. The story is told as if it were destined to have, if not a strictly happy termination, at least one 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. … But one thing is certain: a denouement by which Maggie should have called Stephen back would have been extremely interesting, and would have had far more in its favor than can be put in confusion by a mere exclamation of horror.⁸

James's reaction is representative of the reactions of most of the critics since his time.⁹ Critical displeasure generally appears in one of two formulations, both based on a standard of artistic coherence or organic integrity: The novel has not prepared us for the turn of action which concludes it; we do not expect the focus of action to be on the Maggie-Tom relationship; therefore the ending is non-integral, a fault. Or: We do not expect the action to be either as disastrous in quality or as passionately informed as it is; therefore the emotion is unjustified (melodramatic), a fault. The critical impulse, therefore, is surgical and rehabilatory—to sever and to replace. With a kind of nervous embarrassment for their author, these critics wish devoutly that this ending had been not itself but another.

The brute facts of the ending of the novel are these: the human relationship with which it culminates is a passionate physical embrace between a man and a woman; the man and woman are brother and sister; the embrace between brother and sister is carried into death. In life, such an embrace—that is, a passionate one between not a man and woman of different families but between a brother and sister—is not a normal relationship. It takes only a minimal sophistication in psychoanalytic theory to postulate a special kind of motivation for such a relationship, a motivation which is outside the awareness of its agents—in short, an unconscious one. And as in life, so in fiction. When fictional characters have been placed in peculiar relationships, it is appropriate to suggest unconscious motivations of their actions. Accordingly, the present essay will contend that the enigmatic and controversial flood-death scene, rather than being excised or ignored, must be taken as an indispensable source of illumination of the entire novel.

The essay undertakes three major critical tasks: to develop a theory of structure and meaning—an “interpretation”—of The Mill on the Floss by the employment of psychological insights derived from psychoanalytic theory; to express briefly, en route, the theoretic premises of the technique used; and to suggest the consequences of the interpretation in making an evaluation of the novel as a literary achievement. As a preliminary, there are two caveats about the technique. First no claim is made to really expert knowledge of the intricacies of psychoanalytic theory, or to any knowledge at all of the methods of applied psychoanalysis. The only claim is an understanding of some of the rudiments of psychoanalytic theory. This is not to be considered a handicap, however. A rudimentary knowledge is probably adequate for the type of analysis here presented. Second, the critical technique is not “purely” psychoanalytic in any sense, but is fundamentally rooted in the more conventional modes of literary analysis. It makes use, for example, of such basic literary notions as “character,” “structure,” and “symbol.” It is “psychoanalytic,” however, in the sense that it assumes the existence of human motivations which are beyond the awareness or consciousness of the agents motivated, motivations whose quality and dimensions can be detected only by a process of interpretation of verbal and physical acts and conscious mental events.

The author's mind, moreover, cannot be ignored; it is her mind, after all, of which the entire novel is an emanation. Its structure is a symbolic transformation (or projection or objectification) of her psychic processes, both conscious and unconscious. But if all the propositions arising from the study of a novel were about the author's mind, there would be no ordered and comprehensive understanding of the literary artifact itself, only a partial understanding of the artificer. An author's mind and the minds of his characters, then, are analytically distinct. But it is not that simple. They are in fact parts of the same mental fabric. The latter is really a function of the former. As has been suggested, a literary structure in its every detail is a projection of the author's conscious and unconscious mental processes. In many novels the two types of processes seem to have been unified in shaping the structure, and an “interpretation” of the “unconscious meaning” is not necessary. In some novels, however, fundamental elements of structure seem to have unconscious sources, and literary meaning depends on an interpretation of unconscious meaning. The conscious motivations of literary characters are attributable only to the conscious mental processes of the author—his “conscious purpose.” But the unconscious motivations of characters may result from either the conscious or the unconscious processes of the author. When it is part of the author's conscious purpose to indicate an unconscious motivation in a character, he will weave into the structure “pointers” by which the reader knows that the author knows what he is doing. Twentieth-century authors are likely to be of this type. But where the depiction in a character of unconscious motivation is owing to the author's unconscious purpose, such “pointers” will be absent. Pre-twentieth-century authors frequently are of this type. In the interpretation to follow of The Mill on the Floss, the hypothesis will be that certain characters are unconsciously motivated, that their unconscious motivations originate primarily in the unconscious purpose of the author, and that an interpretation of the unconscious meaning is necessary to reveal the fundamental structure of the novel. Most of the analysis, however, will center on the characters' unconscious motivations, rather than the author's.

The organizing principle of The Mill on the Floss is an unconscious incestuous passion between Maggie and Tom Tulliver.¹⁰ (The motivation is the characters', not the author's.) The passion is mutual, but its greatest intensity is in Maggie, and the novel's focus is primarily on the consequences of this passion for her life, both inner and outer. “Unconscious incestuous passion” does not mean the commission of acts of sexual intercourse by Maggie and Tom—at least not quite—nor does it mean an awareness on their parts of this characterization of the relationship. It does mean, however, a psychic state which is “erotic” in the fullest sense of the term: physical, sexual, and desperately intense. It refers to a psychic state which manifests itself in numerous acts and feelings and culminates in the final death embrace.

This raises sharply the question of authorial purpose. Was it conscious or unconscious? Probably—although one cannot be absolutely sure after reading the flood-death scene—Eliot was not aware, at least not fully aware, of the nature of the relationship. That is, she would not have characterized it as “incestuous,” probably not as “erotic” or “sexual,” nor even as “physical.” One suspects she would have been aghast and indignant at such a characterization. She probably was aware that she was depicting the brother-sister relationship as being in some way special, valuable, and gratifying. Perhaps she viewed it as a “pure” relationship, undepreciated by the taint of sexuality. One can only speculate about Eliot's own erotic obsessions. The biographies allude to her deep “affection” for her brother Isaac;¹¹ she kept house for her father from age seventeen to twenty-nine; and her other novels are highly suggestive of peculiar erotic relationships between a young woman and an older man or a young woman and a stern, harsh or domineering man: Dorothea and Casaubon in Middlemarch, Gwendolen and Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda, Hetty and Adam in Adam Bede, Romola and Tito Melema in Romola, even Eppie and Silas in Silas Marner.¹² But these parallels are only suggestive, and need not be relied upon for the incest thesis here proposed.

The interpretation based on this thesis may be summarized briefly. The erotic nature of the Maggie-Tom relationship is complicated by a need for authority or punishment on Maggie's part, and an authoritarian core to Tom's personality. One might use such modern terminology as sadomasochistic, but this is unnecessary and probably introduces connotations not suggested by the structure of the novel. Maggie's two other important relationships, those with Philip and Stephen, are variations of the male erotic relationship. They function structurally to clarify the Tom-Maggie relationship and the nature of Maggie's internal conflict. Philip is a desexualized object-choice for Maggie, Stephen a sexually-charged one. Her ultimate abandonment of both dramatizes the intensity of her passion for Tom. The river is symbolically associated with the erotic impulse in Maggie, and with movement toward erotic gratification. This is the case both in the boat episode with Stephen and in the flood-death scene with Tom. The flood and the joint death of Maggie and Tom are emotionally and esthetically analogous to the physical turgor accompanying sexual fulfillment in its most literal sense. As a structure of emotion the death scene is ambivalent, a kind of joy-in-death or death-in-joy, the mingling of exaltation and despair. As an object of Maggie's unconscious desires, Tom is linked symbolically with several other psychic entities—childhood, family, home, the mill, and the river. This cluster suggests a wider, figurative meaning for “incestuous”—a kind of turning inward and backward, away from the “otherness” of other people, away from the adult world of experience, and toward a paradise of childhood innocence and uninhibited fulfillment.

Three main types of textual evidence support the incest thesis. One is the “thematic matrix” of familial narcissism in general, and sister-brother love in particular, in which the Maggie-Tom relationship is set. Another is the Maggie-Tom relationship itself, throughout the novel. And a third is the cluster of peculiar phenomena associated with Maggie—actions and physical characteristics which show her to be “wicked”; an oppressive burden of guilt; and a severe psychic conflict which opposes impulses of gratification (realizing her “passionate nature”) and “renunciation.”

The “thematic matrix” is the basic network of human relationships other than Maggie and Tom's which supports the notion of blood-centered eroticism. The novel develops this theme almost obsessively. Relations by blood come first, those by marriage second, and any others a poor third. It appears most blatantly among the Dodsons, for whom “family” is a First Principle. But Mr. Tulliver exhibits it as well in his fixation on the ancestral connection with the mill (220). The theme is more relevant to Maggie and Tom when it appears as a sibling preference—the sister-sister relationship in the case of the Dodson “girls,” or the strictly analogous sister-brother relationship of Mr. Tulliver and Gritty Tulliver Moss, or Stephen Guest and his sisters, or even of the four sons and four daughters of the Mosses. The special feeling of Mr. Tulliver for his sister Gritty, and his perception of the analogy to Tom and Maggie, appear on numerous occasions (73, 75, 76, 193, 230, 233). The pervasiveness of this theme hardly can be exaggerated. Time and again the texture yields a variation on it. The importance for the Maggie-Tom relationship is of course obvious—an unconscious incestuous passion is the more plausible in a milieu where family is always first, where erotic energy takes blood relations as its objects.¹³

There is a more direct verification of the quality of the Maggie-Tom relationship in the details of the relationship itself. Maggie's childhood passion for Tom, when she is nine and he is twelve, is never hidden. It is first signified merely by her aroused reaction at the mention of his name (15). Then she becomes angry when their mother makes an insulting remark about Tom (16) and anxious upon learning he is to go away to school (22). Before long it blossoms into an outright statement to Luke, the head miller, of her love for Tom and an expression of her fantasies for future housekeeping with him: “I love Tom so dearly, Luke-better than anybody else in the world. When he grows up, I shall keep his house and we shall always live together” (28). It soon moves into the physical stage of hugs and kisses (30, 31) and a declaration to Tom himself of her love: “I do love you, Tom” (32). The relationship becomes complicated, however. Tom is shown to have a distinctly punitive and authoritarian aspect to his personality, an aspect fully developed in such childhood episodes as those concerning the dead rabbits (32), the jam puff (42), the haircut (58), and Lucy and the willow-switch (78). Maggie is the most frequent subject of this trait; the punishment of his reproach is the dread of her life. The trait remains in Tom into adulthood and figures importantly in the novel's meaning, as will appear. But when Tom is not rejecting her, Maggie is deliriously happy, and renews her dreams of an eternal idyll with him:

It was enough that Tom called her Magsie, and was pleased with her. There was nothing to mar her delight in the whispers and the dreamy silences … It was one of their happy mornings. They trotted along and sat down together, with no thought that life would ever change much for them: they would only get bigger and not go to school, and it would always be like the holidays; they would always live together and be fond of each other.”

(37)

Most, but not all, of the feeling and physical initiative flows from Maggie; Tom, too has his moments:

Maggie and Tom were still very much like young animals, and so she could rub her cheek against his and kiss his ear in a random, sobbing way, and there were tender fibres in the lad that had been used to answer Maggie's fondling; so that he behaved with a weakness quite inconsistent with his resolution to punish her as much as she deserved: he actually began to kiss her in return, and say ‘Don't cry, then, Magsie—here, eat a bit o' cake.’ … they ate together and rubbed each other's cheeks and brows and noses together, while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies.

(35-36)

When Tom goes away to school, he longs for Maggie's company and prays for her (128, 126). Her two visits to the school, the first when he is twelve and she nine, the second four years later, are important events in both their lives. After the first moments of the later visit, she once again “loved Tom's shadow” (158).

It may be objected that this childhood love between Maggie and Tom is “innocent,” and that therefore the notion of incestuous passion is untenable. The rejoinder is simple. As long as the relationship is only a childhood matter, it is “innocent”—innocent, that is, in the social sense, not necessarily in any psychoanalytic sense. A show of extravagant affection between sister and brother is socially tolerable behavior as long as they are small children. But if the behavior extends into adulthood, the concept of overt incest becomes relevant, and the passion takes on a new coloration. In literature, once an illicit adult relationship is indicated, it seems justifiable to interpret a complexly developed childhood passion as a prefiguration or foreshadowing of the adult passion. The question thus is, do those portions of the novel dealing with Maggie and Tom after childhood support the incest thesis? The answer is yes, and the transition is artfully done. Frequently in the childhood scenes, the imagery is drawn from the Edenic myth. Then, as Maggie and Tom reach the age of sexual awareness, of loss of innocence, imagery from that myth is even more dominant. When Tom is sixteen and Maggie thirteen, the family disaster occurs; Mr. Tulliver loses his lawsuit, and thereby the mill, and is precipitated into paralysis. “Book Third”—the section describing these events—is titled “The Downfall,” plausible echo of Paradise Lost. And the paragraphs describing Maggie and Tom's sorrowful journey homeward after she has informed him of the disaster are palpably Miltonic:

The two slight youthful figures soon grew indistinct on the distant road—were soon lost behind the projecting hedgerow. They had gone forth together into their new life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness and the golden gates of their childhood had forever closed behind them.

(170-171)

They have been expelled from paradise; childhood is over; it is the end of innocence, the beginning of knowledge of good and evil. The change in Maggie's attitude toward erotic acts has already been shown a few pages earlier, when she is inhibited from giving Philip the charitable kiss promised in childhood. Again the Edenic imagery is patent:

When they did meet, she remembered her promise to kiss him, but as a young lady who had been at a boarding-school, she knew that such a greeting was out of the question, and Philip would not expect it. The promise was void, like so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach—impossible to be fulfilled when the golden gates had been passed.

(165-166)

Before Mr. Tulliver's “downfall,” Maggie and Tom's world had been—at least relatively—a paradise. Family, home, and childhood had made them secure from the pain of experience and the disappointments of awareness. The disaster brings drastic changes; the splendor in the grass begins to fade. The family begins to disintegrate; the mill is about to be taken by strangers, and the shadow of erotic consciousness passes over Maggie and Tom's idyllic relationship. But although the overt manifestations of their passion, so prevalent in childhood, rapidly diminish, the passion itself does not fade. It remains, muted and masked. And as the novel continues to develop, this suppressed and submerged quality of the relationship begins to create pressure for emergence, for an eventual open and unambiguous union between Maggie and Tom. There is a feeling that the relationship must culminate.

During the first dark days of the downfall, when Maggie and Tom are still living at home, learning to struggle with this new life of experience, their feeling for each other is manifested primarily in touchiness and resentment. Tom berates Maggie, for example, for her rebellious outburst at the aunts and uncles for their dubious charity (190), and she accuses him of harshness toward her (207). The scene ends with Maggie in tears, wondering why this world of experience seems to be one “where people behaved the best to those they did not pretend to love” (208). Maggie longs to regain a sense of home and paradise: “… a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it” (208). She expresses a related feeling when she realizes her books will go with the sale: “… everything is going away from us—the end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning” (212).

For a time the Maggie-Tom relationship is dormant. Then suddenly appears what must be the most bizarre section of the novel, the fourth book, “The Valley of Humiliation.” Three years have passed since the family disaster. Maggie is now sixteen, Tom nineteen. This is the chapter in which Maggie, with no obvious motivation for such a radical course of action, undertakes to renounce whatever she conceives to be pleasurable. Taking Thomas à Kempis, the religious “mystic,” as her interior “voice,” she finds a refuge from the world of experience and from her own tyrannical sense of guilt in a program of self-flagellation and self-denial. But more about this later. Even during this eerie hiatus in Maggie's life, the feeling for her brother is only dormant, not dead. She gets “no answer to her little caresses, either from her father or from Tom—the two idols of her life” (245). And she has “the cruel sense that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together” (251). Spending her time on solitary walks in the spiritually comforting “Red Deeps,” Maggie meets once again her childhood worshipper, Philip Wakem, on whom she fixes some of the erotic energy with which she has been so generously endowed and which is clamoring so insistently for gratification.

The first meeting in the Red Deeps with the mature Philip (he is twenty-one, Maggie sixteen) marks two changes in Maggie's life. The first is that she begins to emerge from “the valley of humiliation” under the influence of Philip's sweet reasonableness. The other is that she feels the force of the passion for her which has been smoldering in her brother. Tom is infuriated when he learns of Maggie's secret meetings with Philip. The ostensible explanation, of course, is that Philip is of the blood of the enemy, of the Wakem devil which has brought down the paradisal House of Tulliver. But the intensity of Tom's reaction belies such a simple explanation. This intensity suggests a deeper motivation, an unconscious sexual one. Philip, in other words, is a sexual rival—he is deformed by a hump on his back. The implication is that to Tom's psyche a sexual connection between Philip and Maggie would be a physical degradation to her: “A love for a deformed man would be odious in any woman—in a sister intolerable. But if she had been carrying on any kind of intercourse whatever with Philip, a stop must be put to it at once: she was disobeying her father's strongest feelings and her brother's express commands …” (298). Tom's fury is thus explainable on two grounds. He is obsessed with his sister's chastity precisely because his own erotic desire for her gives rise to feelings of sexual jealousy and rivalry. And the sexual jealousy is aggravated by the perception of the degrading quality of the rival. Thus Tom warns Philip: “What I wish is that you should understand me—that I should take care of my sister, and that if you dare to make the least attempt to come near her, or to write to her, or to keep the slightest hold on her mind, your puny, miserable body, that ought to have put some modesty into your mind, shall not protect you” (302). The model for Tom's reaction is not that of a brother, but that of an outraged lover or husband. Tom's abuse of Philip causes a break in Tom's relationship with Maggie. It takes death to reconcile them—not their own deaths yet, but their father's. Chastened by the awesomeness of this loss so important to them both, they embrace in a tearful, restrained, chapter-ending reconciliation, neatly forecasting the great reunion which ends the novel: “Tom and Maggie went downstairs together into the room where their father's place was empty. Their eyes turned to the same spot, and Maggie spoke: ‘Tom, forgive me—let us always love each other,’ and they clung and wept together” (315).

This is the point at which many critics, if the novel had been theirs, would have ended it. But Eliot, whose novel it is, does not. A new element is introduced—the Stephen relationship—to clarify further the nature of Maggie's erotic concerns and of the Maggie-Tom relationship. Stephen is the most patent embodiment of physically-rooted sexuality in the novel.¹⁴ It was clearly Eliot's conscious purpose to portray him this way, although even here she resorts to vintage Victorian circumlocutions. Stephen provides a new measure of Tom's feeling for Maggie. Tom's violent disapproval of her alliance with Philip may have been attributable to the peculiar circumstances of that relationship. Philip did not constitute a complete and vital sexual object. He was cerebral rather than physical. His deformity nullified his sexuality. Even Maggie fully realized this—her eroticism was purified into intellectuality and pity. To Tom, Philip's deformity made him even worse than a neuter. He was a sexual monstrosity. All may be different with Stephen, who is a radically different sort of being. He has all the bodily appeal that Philip lacked. There is no question about the difference in the relationship with Maggie which this difference creates. It is not pity that draws Maggie to Stephen; it is a more mysterious kind of force which has its location elsewhere than in her mind or her “higher” impulses. It is the sort of force which carries her away “against her will”—the force of sexuality. But Tom's reaction to Stephen's comparatively wholesome sexuality is identical with his earlier one to Philip's deformed and nullified sexuality—jealous rage. After Maggie's return from the boat trip with Stephen, Tom again excoriates and rejects her in a storm of abuse generated as a result of unconscious sexual rivalry. (“You have been carrying on a clandestine relation with Stephen Guest—as you did before with another” 423.) Neither the cerebral Philip nor the physical Stephen will be permitted to possess Tom's Maggie. Tom's punitive side is at its height in his viciousness to Maggie: “I loathe your character and your conduct. … But you shall not come under my roof. It is enough that I have to bear the thought of your disgrace: the sight of you is hateful to me” (425). Once again Tom sends Maggie away in a passionate moment of punishing rejection, as he had done so many times in childhood, and as he had done after discovering her association with Philip. And once again the submerged structure of their relationship establishes an expectation of a sweetly remorseful, turbulently passionate sister and brother reconciliation. It is not until the climactic final scene that this reconciliation will occur.

The third category of evidence for the incest thesis is Maggie's “wickedness,” guilt, and psychic conflict. An unconscious incest wish would be expected to be accompanied by a strong sense of guilt and its alternate psychic forms—a self-image of transgression and “wickedness,” a feeling of ostracism, and a persistent tendency to inflict self-punishment or to seek punishment. These qualities are repeatedly associated with Maggie, either as part of the depiction of her actions and inner states, or as external references which give symbolic reinforcement to these actions and states. And—what is important for the unconscious incest-wish thesis—her guilt and its correlatives are not adequately justified in the surface action, or conscious meaning, of the novel.

Maggie's “wickedness” is liberally established in the childhood sections of the novel. There are numerous specific acts which she commits which reflect this quality, e.g., letting Tom's rabbits die, thrusting pins in her “fetish,” cutting off her own hair, running away to the gypsy camp. There are numerous references to Maggie by other characters attributing this quality to her, e.g., naughty (12, 25, 33, 61, 92), mischievous (12), “demonstrative” and “rebellious” (30), ugly (77), “culprit” (91), “gypsy” (61, 94), “half-wild” (94). There are numerous descriptions of her appearance which confirm this quality, e.g., dirty (12, 25), “brown” (i.e., her skin) (56, 61, 86, 94), “dark-eyed” (31), and having dark and unruly hair (12, 15, 25, 26, 55, 56, 57, 58, 129, 130, 133, 167, 208, 242, 258).¹⁵ Finally, there are numerous symbolic extensions of this quality, e.g., her reading as a child Defoe's History of the Devil (17), her “seven small demons” (84, 88), and her trip among her “unknown kindred,” the “diabolical” gypsies (96). Tom is not always free from these varied associations, but their concentration is decidedly on Maggie. For her, the “wickedness” theme is carried into adulthood as a kind of taboo associated with erotic alliances. Her friendships with Philip, Stephen, and even Dr. Kenn are all “wrong” in some way, and result in her ostracism, either from the community-at-large or—more importantly to her—from Tom. And there is of course that final alliance with Tom, the most “wicked” of them all.

Maggie's guilt—a strictly internal matter—is suggested in some of the childhood scenes but receives its fullest development after “the downfall” and the loss of paradise, especially in her early adolescence, when she enters “the valley of humiliation.” The novel itself formulates Maggie's psychic conflict not in the modern terminology of “guilt” over an “unconscious wish” but as an impulse toward “renunciation” of the self-fulfillment urged by her “passionate nature.”

It is most helpful to talk about Maggie's guilt in connection with her desire for punishment, since they relate to a single psychic process. In “Book Fourth: The Valley of Humiliation,” Maggie is a guilt-ridden adolescent who has never really committed any crimes to justify her guilt. She is desperately in need of relief. She finds it, at least temporarily, in the writings of à Kempis, who proclaims self-denial to be the route to peace and virtue. As her internalized “guide” he teaches her that if she punishes herself physically and mentally, either by such crude techniques as lying on a hard floor all night (261) or in the less barbaric way of deprivation of pleasures, she will find peace. The cycle of sensed transgression, guilt, punishment, and release is now complete. The relevance to the incest thesis is obvious.

From the premise of an unconscious incestuous passion between Maggie and Tom it is now possible to integrate into a single theory of structure and meaning the childhood sections of the novel, Maggie's psychic turmoil, the Philip and Stephen relationships, and the flood-death scene which generated the premise. One way to describe the structure is in terms of the movement of Maggie's psyche. Beginning in a spontaneous and openly passionate childhood love of Tom, it moves to sexual awareness or “loss of innocence,” then to deep unconscious adolescent guilt and self-punishment through renunciation, finally to gradual emergence (in advances and retreats) of the old passionate nature—first through a desexualized, intellectualized, ironically “brotherly” love of Philip, then through a patently sexual love of Stephen, to culmination in a thinly-disguised erotic union with her brother, the true object of her “passionate nature.” The structure thus proves how intense and fundamental her feeling for Tom is; for him she has forsaken Philip, who represents intellect, sensitivity, humility, selflessness, and loyalty, but lacks sexuality; and she has also forsaken Stephen, who represents sexuality. She returns to Tom, who is both sexual and her brother.

In addition, Tom has another quality which Maggie needs—his authoritarianism. This quality is important enough to be analyzed in some detail. One of the components of Maggie's passion for Tom is the gratification of her need to be punished. Her general need for punishment has already been shown. A desire to submit to authority is a variation of this need. She has shown in the Stephen episodes her impulse to submit to strength and be dominated: “… there was an unspeakable charm in being told what to do” (409); “… close within her reach—urging itself upon her even as a claim—was another future, in which hard endurance and effort were to be exchanged for easy delicious leaning on another's loving strength” (450). (See also 334, 356, 393, 407, 411.) And Tom is an even more dominating personality than Stephen. He has been portrayed from the earliest childhood days as authoritarian and physical—the two qualities, besides his actually being her brother, which make him erotically compelling to Maggie. These two qualities are combined in the imagery which predominates in association with Tom—that of warrior hero. He is “good at all active games—fighting especially” (118). He is a “well-made, active-looking” boy (145) and a “well-made barbarian” (146). He is fascinated by stories of military heroism and asks the young Philip whether the Greeks were great fighters and whether there is “anything like David, Goliath, and Samson in Greek history” (146). And he awes and frightens Maggie, and cuts himself, with a sword he has borrowed from his drillmaster (156). There are many other indications of his authoritarian and heroic qualities. He is described by the omniscient narrator as one who desires mastery over “inferior animals … and small sisters” (82), and who “saw some justice in severity” (199). Maggie frequently alludes to his harshness (e.g., 207). And he demonstrates both qualities in action, the authoritarianism in such acts as his rigid, uncompromising demand that Maggie abandon Philip and the heroism in his Horatio Alger-like rise to economic success and repossession of the family mill. (Philip, of course, is Tom's polar opposite. Philip is submissive and intellectual, rather than domineering and physical.)

Tom's personality provides a new perspective on the Maggie-Tom relationship. It has been a chronicle of episodes of hero worship (with its physical, sexual core) on Maggie's part, rejection and punishment by Tom, and reconciliation which merges the punitive and erotic in a moment of passion and release. This movement is seen in the childhood scenes, at the death of the father, and again in the closing flood-death scene.

The implications of the Maggie-Tom relationship have their fullest development in the final scenes of the novel, where Maggie, in a rowboat, fights her way back to the mill, “rescues” her brother from the crumbling mill, and both die, drowned in the flood, their rescue boat capsized by fragments of “wooden machinery.” F. R. Leavis is wrong when he says that the “flooded river has no symbolic or metaphoric value.”¹⁶ On the contrary, the flooded river is freighted with symbolic meaning, meaning which, once again, is indicated by the Maggie-Stephen relationship. The river is symbolically associated with Maggie's psyche—with unconscious drives and sexuality. As the Stephen boat episode makes quite obvious, the movement of the river is connected with Maggie's loss of conscious control over her actions and the gradual “taking over” of a kind of dreamy passiveness in which she drifts into action, motivated by the erotic inner forces which lie beneath consciousness. The Stephen boat episode thus makes it possible to infer the symbolic meaning of the flood-death scene with Tom. If a river at normal flow is associated with Maggie's gradual loss of conscious control, a river at flood represents a kind of “inundation” of her entire being by the forces beneath consciousness. Whereas with Stephen she at least retained enough conscious control or “will” to flee the river, once she has begun to make her way back to Tom she is completely in the power of the inundating sub-rational forces. Thus those critics who believe her final pledge of renunciation, after receiving Stephen's letter, to be an expression of her final spiritual state are grossly mistaken. This last renunciation is merely a prelude to the final “flood” of passion which will unite her with Tom.

The flood-death scene is richly suggestive. Maggie arrives at the mill in her boat with “panting joy” (455). Conveniently, there are no third parties to intrude. Mrs. Tulliver is not at the mill (“It is I, Tom,—Maggie. Where is mother?” “She is not here: she went to Garum, the day before yesterday” 455). Once together in the boat, they experience the deepest of emotional responses, Tom's a kind of sudden awakening (“… a new revelation to his spirit, of the depths in life, that had lain beyond his vision …” 455) and Maggie's pleasure in pain so appropriate to her (“Maggie could make no answer but a long deep sob of that mysterious wondrous happiness that is one with pain” 456). As they move further on this river of impulse, they are warned by the communal observers to “Get out of the current!” (456). But by now it is too late. All that remains is the height of climax, then release in death: “‘It is coming, Maggie!’ Tom said, in a deep hoarse voice, loosing the oars and clasping her” (456). Those who cannot unite and consummate their love in life, can do so in death: “… brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted …” (456). Or, as their tombstone later said so incisively: “‘In their death they were not divided’” (559).¹⁷

The emotional content of the ending is complex. It is not simple pathos, or even the simple excess of melodrama. It is a joy-in-death or death-in-joy which in its doubleness has at least a remote affinity with the emotion of tragedy. This joy-in-death has several aspects, all of which give the ending a symbolic richness denied by the critics. First, there is the simple linkage between Maggie's need for punishment and Tom's punitiveness. The union provides a peculiar joy-pain gratification of the incest wish. If its gratification brings guilt internally, its accompaniment by death is at once a kind of punishment and a removal from the reaches of community judgment. Gratification and self-annihilation become merged in a single moment of ecstasy. Finally, there is the narrowly sexual content of the ending. The passionate death in this scene is structurally equivalent with the passionate “death” of the sexual orgasm, which may be taken as a paradigm for the ending of the novel—both follow the pattern of mystical release of an urgent drive in a paroxysm of ecstatic experience, followed by relaxation, a sense of self-annihilation, and “peace.” The sexual model is especially pertinent here, since the death is not single but joint, and the parties are clasped in an embrace, the posture of sexual union.¹⁸

One final matter will conclude this interpretation. The thesis of incestuous passion can be extended beyond its simplest sexual sense. The final reunion between Maggie and Tom involves more than their persons. It is as well a joint return to the mill and what the mill symbolizes—the Eden of childhood, family, and home from which this pair had been so rudely thrust. Eliot's and Maggie's identification of this cluster is apparent throughout the novel, and is introduced at the critical moment of the drowning, after brother and sister have gone down “never to be parted.” They are described as “living through again in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together” (456). The central symbolic significance of the loss and repossession of the mill is now clear. It represents the loss and repossession of the paradise of childhood. The incest wish and a broader regressive wish become functions of each other. The largest structural pattern of the novel is thus one of venture and return: Possession of the mill, its loss, and its repossession; Maggie and Tom's physical movement from the mill to the outside to the mill again; the movement of Maggie's erotic attachment from Tom to the outsiders Philip and Stephen back to Tom again; Maggie and Tom's union, separation, and reunion; movement from incestuous eroticism to attempted normative eroticism back to incestuous eroticism; and movement from the childhood world of innocence to the adult world of experience back to the childhood world again.

One hopes this interpretation has not diminished any of a number of excellences others have found in The Mill on the Floss—the achieved expression of profound psychological insight, into both the painful interior of childhood and the dense fabric of adult community life; the conveyance of a tone subtly complex in balancing imaginative sympathy and satiric power; and the evocation of that “sense of life” so difficult to achieve in fiction. But one also hopes that more can be claimed for the interpretation—that it has, for the most part, demonstrated the artistic coherence or organic integrity of the entire novel; that it has, Henry James notwithstanding, demonstrated the structural relevance—more, the structural indispensability—of the final scene, that excrescence which the surgical critics so much wanted to amputate. One might also claim that is has suggested a symbolic richness in the climactic scene which F. R. Leavis failed to perceive. Perhaps one should stop there in making an evaluation, for if one were really to explore the implications of the novel as a “criticism of life,” one would find himself in dangerous waters.¹⁹

Notes

1. All references are to the Rinehart paperback (New York, 1961).

2. I have tried deliberately to avoid any investigation of the relation between Charlotte Brontë's psyche and Jane's psyche or the structure of the novel.

3. Incidentally, in previewing her relationship with Rochester, we might note the servants' whispered discussion of the ghost episode: “Something passed her, all dressed in white, and vanished. … A great black dog behind him” (15). As we shall see, in her first encounter with Rochester he is accompanied by a great dog. Although St. John is a wholly different kind of figure from Rochester, in an early (though not the first) appearance he, too, is accompanied by a dog: “A dog—old Carlo, Mr. River's pointer, as I saw in a moment—was pushing the gate with his nose” (416). (Emphasis supplied). These coincidences are mentioned only to suggest possibilities for sexual symbolism.

4. There are symbolic sexual implications to this scene which might be explored: in dream symbolism, horses are notoriously connected with male sexuality; the accompaniment of the dog, already mentioned, is suggestive; and the association between the fallen horse and Jane's assistance might be revelatory—an association between sex, Jane, and failure and humiliation of the male, a pattern which will appear again in Rochester's mutilation at the end of the novel.

5. For a psychoanalytic interpretation of this scene, see Wayne Burns, “The critical Relevance of Freudianism,” Western Review, XX (1956), 301-314; originally “Freudianism, Criticism and Jane Eyre,” Literature and Psychology, II, 5 (November 1952), 4-13. For a psychologist's view that Charlotte Brontë's novels indicate an Oedipal conflict on her part, see Harold G. McCurdy, “A Study of the Novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë as an Expression of their Personalities,” Journal of Personality, XVI (1947), 109-152.

6. It could be argued that Jane indicates on the day she leaves Thornfield that she wants to and therefore will return. She tells us, after leaving the coach which carried her away from Thornfield, “The Coach is a mile off by this time: I am alone. At this moment I discover that I forgot to take my parcel out of the pocket of the coach, where I placed it for safety …” (71). A psychopathologist of everyday life might maintain that her forgetting was unconsciously motivated by a desire to stay at Thornfield.

7. All references herein are to the Riverside edition, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston, 1961).

8. “The Novels of George Eliot,” Atlantic Monthly, XVIII (1866), 490.

9. E.g., “I, at least, cannot help wishing the third volume [Books 6 and 7] could have been suppressed,” Leslie Stephen, George Eliot (London, 1919), p. 104; “… ends very badly,” David Cecil, Victorian Novelists (Chicago, 1958), p. 268; “… a ‘dramatic’ close of a kind congenial to the Victorian novel-reader. … The dreamed-of perfect accident that gives us the opportunity for the dreamed-of heroic act … not … embarrassingly gross, but … a revealed immaturity,” F. R. Leavis, “George Eliot,” in The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (New York, 1948), pp. 45-46; “… final specious reconcilement between brother and sister in that hastily contrived last scene of all,” Gerald Bullett, George Eliot: Her Life and Books (New Haven, 1948), p. 198; “… this poetic justice at the culminating point of a long, serious, naturalistic novel, is a dishonest contrivance,” Joan Bennett, George Eliot: Her Mind and Art (Cambridge, England, 1948), p. 130; “Even a well-prepared deus ex machina like this one may give the appearance of arbitrary concluding wish,” Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London, 1959), p. 57; “The ending, though plausible, is somewhat too convenient,” Jerome Thale, The Novels of George Eliot (New York, 1959), p. 51; W. J. Harvey, The Art of George Eliot (London, 1961), p. 21; “It must also be granted that the flood disturbs the composition, introducing a melodramatic violence not in harmony with the rest of the tale,” William R. Steinhoff, “Intent and Fulfillment in the Ending of The Mill on the Floss,” in The Image of the Work: Essays in Criticism, by B. H. Lehman and others (Berkeley, 1955), pp. 231-251, at 231.

   Three articles discuss the orthodoxy of the critics toward the ending, and may be consulted for additional critical references: Steinhoff, above; Bernard J. Paris, “Toward a Revaluation of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XI (1956), 18-31; Larry Rubin, “River Imagery as a Means of Foreshadowing in The Mill on the Floss,” Modern Language Notes, LXXI (1956), 18-22.

   A number of critics approve the ending. “… the death of Maggie and Tom comes upon us as something fated and waited for, but not as something inevitable,” Robert Speaight, George Eliot (New York, 1954), p. 57; “The flood scene contains the most highly concentrated use of symbolism in the book,” Reva Stump, Movement and Vision in George Eliot's Novels (Seattle, 1959), p. 127; “… the drowning scene is so heavily foreshadowed throughout the novel that it seems artistically impossible for the book to end in any other way,” Rubin, above, p. 19.

10. A few critics have at least sensed the nature of the Maggie-Tom relationship. Lettice Cooper, for example, sees Maggie's “adoration of her brother, Tom,” realizes that the “climax of the book is the reconciliation between brother and sister at the moment of death,” and concludes that Tom “remains to the end the pivot of Maggie's world, exercising that power over her which the lesser but more fully integrated personality so often wields over the character with so much greater potentialities, but still disorganized. “George Eliot (London, New York, Toronto, n. d.), p. 21. William R. Steinhoff, above, perceives that Maggie has a “fixation on her family” such that “even had the circumstances favored marriage with Stephen he could not have substituted successfully for her father or Tom.” Robert Speaight, above, interprets Maggie's death as, in part, “a symbol of love fulfilled, for never on this earth would Tom and Maggie have loved each other to the measure of their mutual need” (p. 57). And Gerald Bullett, above, asserts that the novel's “ending, with its ‘supreme moment,’ is a clear sign of the importance attached by the author to this Tom-Maggie theme” (p. 198). But even these critics have failed to define the relationship explicitly and to develop its implications.

11. E.g., George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals, ed. J. W. Cross (3 vols., Edinburgh and London, 1885), p. 10.

12. There are many indications in the novel that Tom and his father are identified in many ways, both by George Eliot and by Maggie. Eliot's Tom wants to recreate his father in himself; e.g., he employs the same Bible ritual his father had followed (300-301), and he drives himself to repossess the mill which had been so dear to his father. Maggie's identification of the two is seen in such perceptions as “her father and Tom—the two idols of her life” (245). To simplify the thesis of this essay, Mr. Tulliver's role in the Maggie-Tom relationship will henceforth be ignored.

13. This judgment arises out of conventions of literary analysis, not those of psychoanalysis.

14. Even the critics—or at least some of them—recognize this; e.g., Barbara Hardy, p. 56; Lettice Cooper, p. 22. Perhaps this is why Stephen evokes such hysterical responses from the critics: e.g., Swinburne, who, like Tom, takes a proprietary sexual interest in sister Maggie. See A. C. Swinburne, A Note on Charlotte Brontë (London, 1877), pp. 32-33.

15. Maggie's hair is the subject of a sustained synecdoche which is a minor tour de force of the novel's texture, whether the symbolic association was conscious or unconscious on Eliot's part. Time after time Maggie's psychic state is correlated with and indicated by the condition or behavior of her hair. For example, she tosses it to show spirit, it refuses to curl when she is being rebellious, and it is behind her ears or plaited when she is being ascetic and submissive. The references listed above constitute a partial list of such references to her hair.

16. The Great Tradition, p. 45. External evidence alone creates at least a presumption he is in error. According to Haight, the flood-death scene was the part of the novel planned first, and her chief research preparatory to writing was the study of cases of inundation. “At the British Museum in January 1859 she copied into her commonplace book accounts of inundations from the Annual Register with details of ships driven into flooded fields, bridges washed away, and a family rescued from the upper story of their house …” Riverside edition, p. v. Cf. also Steinhoff, p. 232. W. J. Harvey has indicated the figurative implications of the river (Ch. X, “Image and Symbols,” pp. 222-245). He fails, however, to grasp the meaning of the flood-death scene (p. 235). Larry Rubin has shown the careful, abundant foreshadowing, throughout the novel, of the flood-death scene (“River Imagery …,” above.) But Rubin's note is deficient in its suggestion that the ending of the novel is artistically valid merely because it has been imagistically foreshadowed. The note exemplifies the pitfalls of measuring artistic coherence simply according to a standard of thematic repetition, without reference to a standard of meaning rooted in life. The brief explanation of meaning which Rubin does suggest (“In a universe governed by George Eliot's doctrine of consequences, some type of retribution was bound to be visited upon the heroine as a kind of moral expiation for her sin …” [p. 21]) is inadequate. The explanation is correct in asserting Maggie's need for punishment. But it leaves out entirely, as most other criticism does, the significance of the sister-brother embrace. Rubin's explanation would have been as applicable to an ending in which Maggie committed suicide alone. But she did not. The death was a double one: Maggie and Tom died—and in each other's arms. This, Rubin might have noted, was implicit in some of the foreshadowing he adduces; e.g., Mrs. Tulliver's statement, “‘They're such children for the water, mine are. … They'll be brought in dead and drowned some day. I wish that river was far enough’” (92-93). Incidentally, a foreshadowing which Rubin missed and which combines both the notions of death by flood and punishment for sin is the early reference to the Noah myth (46).

17. The phrase, as Haight's note indicates, has a Biblical source. King Saul and his beloved son Jonathan become estranged when Jonathan thwarts his father's plot against the life of Jonathan's friend David (I Samuel). Eventually, father and son die together in battle against the Philistines (I Samuel 3:1-4). When informed of the deaths of his friend and his friend's father, David delivers a eulogy: “Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided; they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions” (II Samuel 1:23).

    It is perhaps legitimate to ask what effect this Biblical reference has on the hypothesis of the present essay. Probably not too much. As a general proposition of literary interpretation, literary allusions must be subordinate to dramatic structure. Besides, in this case the allusion is not really antithetical to the hypothesis. As to whether “in their death” means at the moment of death or in the perpetual state of death, the same ambiguities exist in the Biblical story as in the novel.

18. The association of death and “death” is not just a peculiarity of etymology, as this so cogently illustrates. The psychological patterns of the two phenomena are closely analogous. The verbal equivalence is thus firmly founded in experience.

19. I became aware after this essay was completed that Robert Penn Warren and Mark Spilka apparently read The Mill on the Floss as I do. In Warren's 1963 novel Flood a sister and brother named Maggie and Brad Tolliver are unmistakably erotically bound to each other. In the conclusion to Dickens and Kafka: A Mutual Interpretation (Bloomington, Ind., 1963) Spilka says in passing of The Mill on the Floss, “George Eliot celebrates Maggie Tulliver's girlhood love for her brother Tom; but when Maggie reaches puberty, her family is shattered by her father's bankruptcy: from that point onward, economic and sexual distress converge to drive her apart from Tom, until they are finally reunited by that flooded river, already associated with sexual passion, which drowns them in their last embrace—an image which recalls the incestuous deathward flow in Dombey” (p. 264).