[In this essay, Freeman contends that the omniscient narration of The Mill on the Floss renders the novel's ending appropriate.]

"By God she is a wonderful woman."—John Blackwood, upon reading the next-to-last chapter of The Mill on the Floss

Looking up from The Mill on the Floss, generations of readers have been drawn to comment on George Eliot herself—often without John Blackwood's admiring enthusiasm, but nearly always with the sense that the history of Maggie and Tom Tulliver is a highly personal narrative, as significant to the storyteller as it is to her audience. Significant, yet at the same time troubling: "What does it all come to except that human life is inexplicable, and that women who feel this find the feeling painful?" This nicely alliterative response ["The Mill on the Floss," Saturday Review, 9, 14, April 1860] appeared in print ten days after the novel was first published. It took some time for readers of The Mill on the Floss to focus their criticisms, to reach a consensus. Gordon S. Haight summed it up a hundred and one years later [in his introduction to The Mill on the Floss, 1961], when he observed that "dissatisfaction with the catastrophic ending is almost universal." Today there is little reason to revise that estimate, though efforts to account for the belief that the novelist falters as she brings her story to a close continue to accumulate.

They are not easy to summarize. A long, carefully documented, and fully realized narrative stretching over some ten years ends in a sudden natural disaster which snuffs out the lives of her hero and heroine immediately after the "one supreme moment" in which their lifelong division was finally healed. This catastrophe, seemingly at odds with all that precedes it, has led critics to a number of suggestions: indulgence in wish fullfillment, lapse into self-deceit, failure of nerve, or some other more charitable explanation. Nearly every case carries the implication of weakness on George Eliot's part.

That the passage of time has not silenced readers of The Mill on the Floss as it has the woman who wrote it and herself looked back on it with as much regret as satisfaction, is less disheartening than perhaps it ought to be: the novel continues, alive, to reach out. One may be touched, however, at any number of points. In this essay, I propose to attend as much to the narrator who tells about Maggie and Tom as to the short lives they live out. I propose further to consider that narrator as a full participant in the fiction George Eliot created. Her history, as generously as the history of the Tulliver family and the history of George Eliot herself, rewards contemplation. A crucial element of the novel's aesthetic structure, it too has a beginning and an end, a past and a future. And the memory of how her narration began can make what it becomes in the end intelligible—in fact, moving. George Eliot, I would argue, has admirably realized not only the tale her narrator tells, but also—and just as vividly—the intense experience of telling it. Once the story within The Mill on the Floss is perceived as told, the ending of the novel, taken by so many to be an aesthetic lapse, is just, appropriate, and inevitable.

To participate in The Mill on the Floss is to exist in time, as much for the narrator as for the characters she describes. In the end, simple chronology subdues them all. But in the beginning, the narrator is all mastery; perfectly recapturing the past ("I remember those large dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge—", she enters it herself and leaning on the bridge looks across the water at the motionless little girl. The sound of the rushing water and the booming mill curtains her off from "the world beyond," she says, as if that solitude were a necessary condition to her inspiration. It enables her to invite us to enter too, to look and see (those are her verbs) for ourselves. It frees her to remember, to animate the water, the horses, and the ducks, to read the tardy waggoner's mind, and to bring that child back to life. Bringing Maggie Tulliver within reach, George Eliot's narrator has defied the death that is to come.

W. J. Harvey [in The Art of George Eliot, 1963] calls this power "audacious," and he deems it successful. Yet this inspired possession—and the narrator is as much possessed as possessing—does not endure. The world does not withdraw permanently, nor the child remain motionless. Nor does time stand still: from the moment the narrator realizes she is dreaming in her chair, the years it will take before Maggie and Tom die together begin inexorably to pass. Her confident ability to bring a lost world back to life and invite us to enter it with her, sharing her perfect sympathy and understanding and recognizing her authority to achieve this miracle, dies with them.

Look at the conclusion. Here, the passage of time, no longer extinguished by the narrator's strong and willing memory, is carefully noted, its effects acknowledged, especially its awful power to erase: "The desolation wrought by that flood, had left little visible trace on the face of the earth, five years later. The fifth autumn was rich in golden corn-stacks, rising in thick clusters among the distant hedgerows; the wharves and warehouses on the Floss were busy again, with echoes of eager voices, with hopeful lading and unlading". Surrendering her former visionary power to the bountiful yet indifferent seasons and the unflagging energy of British commerce, the narrator no longer boldly enters into what she sees, inviting our attention. Instead, we watch her in retreat. "To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair" refers not to her own desolation—at least not directly—but to marks on hills and trees. Whatever human sorrow remains is experienced in private, for now the narrator's observation keeps its distance; now, she notices only visible facts, public knowledge, the face of the earth. The two men who wordlessly visit Dorlcote churchyard (and they visit separately) go unnamed. And as if memory itself were failing her, she must look on their tomb for the names of the two bodies "found in close embrace" five years before. Her final act is to repeat the sentence she sees engraved there, so that in the end even her words are not her own. "In their death, they were not divided" appeared on the title page of The Mill on the Floss, before its narrator ever began to speak. It has silenced her at last.

This transformation in George Eliot's narrator, however, is not so abrupt as it seems. It works itself out gradually, as the passing years steadily undermine her initial authority. Time imposes the terms of that erosion; even to describe it, therefore, is a form of submission, demanding that the reader of The Mill on the Floss participate in the novel's reality, as much a creature of time as the narrator herself or the story she tells. We must look to the future, to the present, and to the past, the three sources of narrative authority in the novel. Each perspective is eventually closed off.

The sense of a significant future has no part in the watches kept by Philip, Stephen, and the "sweet face beside him" long after the flood has receded, just as the close embrace of brother and sister exists within their tomb, not beyond it. To know what is to come makes no difference to any of them. They share this deprivation with George Eliot's narrator, whose story, now futureless, is at an end. But there was a time when every character in The Mill on the Floss was obsessed with thoughts of what the future might hold, and only the narrator had the answer. That Mrs. Tulliver's children might drown some day is by no means the only prediction made in the novel, though it is usually the only one noticed. Mr. Tulliver fears that Tom might take the mill away from him, he fears that Maggie's cleverness will "turn to trouble", Mrs. Tulliver fears that she might not be able to wash Tom's linen at his new school; Maggie hopefully intends to keep Tom's house when they grow up; Tom expects always to take care of her. The Dodson clan, though they fear for the future of Maggie and Tom, tainted by Tulliver blood, outwits the future's power over their own respectability by the strict commands of their respective Wills. Mr. Tulliver, after he loses the mill not to Tom but to Wakem, makes a fierce gesture against contingency when he forces his son to record in the family Bible that he will have his revenge, that the future will somehow provide his satisfaction.

Tedious to list but useful to recognize, these habitual expressions of the wish to know and control the future saturate the novel, all of them either ironically wrong or ironically right, all of them guesswork. And not only in the beginning. Philip Wakem is good at it, too—witness his timid witticism to Maggie, predicting that she may some day "carry away all the love" from her cousin Lucy, or the dozing dream that comes to him in his "vague dread" of the future, in which he "fancied Maggie was slipping down a glistening, green, slimy channel of a waterfall, and he was looking on helpless". And as the Great Temptation gathers together, Lucy—too innocent to fear for herself—plans to save Maggie from more drudgery as a governess by marrying her to Philip. "Wouldn't that be a pretty ending to all my poor, poor Maggie's troubles?" she asks, happily.

Maggie reacts with a shiver, a "sudden chill." She too is preoccupied with endings. From the time when, as a remorseful child—remorseful in this case over the death of Tom's rabbits—she wished that the subsequent history of the Prodigal Son had not been "left a blank", through her futile efforts to imagine a happy finish for Scott's The Pirate ("I could never make a happy ending out of that beginning"), and on to her "presentiment of a troublous future" in her own life, Maggie has struggled to see ahead, to finish the story for herself. She never abandons the effort. Even her last, penitential return to St. Ogg's is in part an act of defiance. "I will not go away because people say false things of me," she tells Dr. Kenn, "They shall learn to retract them". And her last words before the flood waters finally reach her betray the same preoccupation: "O God, if my life is to be long, let me live to bless and comfort—".

Death, however, is only a few hours away. How could she have guessed? The reader of The Mill on the Floss has long since been taught the rule Maggie Tulliver never learns to follow, that to make predictions is to make mistakes. Only George Eliot's narrator—at least in the beginning—is secure in her knowledge of what's to come. "Nature," she points out sententiously when young Tom comes home to the mill for the first time, "has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies". Special pains are taken more than once to see that we remain uncertain—even Mr. Riley's motives when he suggests a teacher for Tom are not what "a too sagacious observer" might expect. We are in the dark, as we watch Maggie and Tom as children trot along and sit down together, "with no thought that life would ever change 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". We only know that their predictions must be wrong.

"Life did change for Tom and Maggie," the narrator comments, but she won't say how. Alone in her knowledge of the future (earned, of course, by that initial step backwards in time), her authority seems complete. Only Maggie, who remains incorrigible, comes to challenge it; only Maggie takes the future into her own hands and, in the end, succeeds. But long before that happens there are signs of this growing energy, aside from Maggie's very interesting penchant for finishing romantic novels herself. While at the beginning of The Mill on the Floss we are repeatedly advised to take Maggie's childish sorrows seriously, as if to trivialize her experience were to miss it altogether, as time passes Maggie's feelings take on a potential significance no authorial apology can augment. She contains her own future in the smoldering fires of her developing nature. Trapped at home with her impoverished family,

… she rebelled against her lot, she fainted under its loneliness, and fits even of anger and hatred toward her father and mother, who were so unlike what she would have them to be—toward Tom, who checked her, and met her thought or feeling always by some thwarting difference—would flow out over her affections and conscience like a lava stream, and frighten her with a sense that it was not difficult for her to become a demon.

This hidden passion becomes increasingly forbidding as Maggie becomes increasingly adult. To watch the child Maggie passionately chop her hair off is touching—but only faintly disquieting; indeed, the narrator uses the occasion to remind us that Maggie's trouble is not to be sneered at. Watching her enter the Red Deeps six years later, however, her hair grown into a "jet crown," one feels intimidated,

… one has a sense of uneasiness in looking at her—a sense of opposing elements, of which a fierce collision is imminent: surely there is a hushed expression, such as one often sees in older faces under borderless caps, out of keeping with the resistant youth, which one expects to flash out in a sudden, passionate glance, that will dissipate all the quietude, like a damp fire leaping out again when all seemed safe.

Now, the narrator herself is disturbed by Maggie's latent force. The dangerous future—once safely distant, when it was as yet untold—is slowly making itself known. And she herself, like the Dodsons and the Tullivers, has come to fear for it. Two more years of Maggie's life pass and we are told outright that though we have known Maggie "a long while" and are familiar with her characteristics, her history cannot be predicted even by the most privileged of observers: "Maggie's destiny … is at present hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river: we only know that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the same final home".

And so we wait, reader and narrator alike witnessing Maggie's passionate attraction to and abandonment of Stephen Guest, until at last the unmapped river floods St. Ogg's and Maggie, alone, takes control of her future. She does so in order to renounce it, in a gesture unthinkable to any other character in the novel and independent of the foresight of its narrator. Only moments before, Maggie saw the remaining years of her life as a series of penitent, hurtful, and repeated self-denials. On the instant, however, her fear and despair leave her. She thinks of nothing "but that she had suddenly passed away from that life which she had been dreading", and she calls up her energy "as if her life were a stored-up force that was being spent in this hour, unneeded for any future". On her way home for the last time, Maggie's only wish is that she not die before she gets there, that she not "perish too soon". The extinction of the long years ahead is a price Maggie willingly pays, as she finds her way across the flood to Tom. On her own authority and to her own satisfaction, she at last finishes the story.

Once George Eliot's narrator accomplishes her visionary leap into the past, The Mill on the Floss is relentlessly chronological. Her omniscience very rarely disobeys the law that connects past, present, and future in an unbroken chain. Foreknowledge is a powerful instrument to that omniscience, so long as she alone knows what the next link will be. So also is her insight into the immediate present, an insight exhibiting both tact and wisdom—a far-reaching authoritative perspective on the present, that carefully schools us into understanding. For a time, at least, we learn to watch the unfolding present with sympathy, the virtue in which George Eliot's narrators consistently specialize. We pity the young Maggie for her "perspectiveless conception of life". We feel for young Tom, boxed in by Mr. Stelling's rigid belief that a single educational regimen must do for all minds and unable to see beyond his present misery. We are invited to share the narrator's "sense of oppressive narrowness" generated by "these emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers", even as we learn to join their small preoccupations to her wide experience of life, literature, science, and history, and to become accustomed to that celebrated tone of sympathetic wisdom. "Mr. Tulliver had a destiny as well as Oedipus", we are told, in a characteristic reminder that the tiny doings of a "miller and maltster" can have wide application. Or again: "Mr. Tulliver, you perceive … was as proud and obstinate as if he had been a very lofty personage".

Mr. Tulliver himself perceives no such thing. Both the Dodsons and the Tullivers, in fact, lack any capacity to conceive their own experience in the light of lives and times other than their own, just as they lack the "highly modifying influence" George Eliot's narrator habitually provides for her reader. "In natural science," she tells us with familiar authority, ".. there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations … It is surely the same with human life". So the lesson goes. The baffled wish to preach it not to us but to Maggie, "as lonely in her trouble as if every other girl besides herself had been cherished and watched over by elder minds, not forgetful of their own early time", seems unmistakable, however, especially when the lonely child comes across The Imitation of Christ and finds on its pages the notations of a "quiet hand" and the words of a "supreme Teacher," the "direct communication of a human soul's belief and experience". It is an interesting moment in the novel, for here the narrator's capacity to instruct her reader seems no longer a sufficient motive; here her sympathy as well as our own seem no longer a sufficient motive; here her sympathy as well as our own seem no longer to the point. Maggie is being instructed, but by whom?

She lectures us nonetheless, in what appears to be an inappropriate diatribe against high society, "its claret and its velvet-carpets, its dinner-engagements six weeks deep, its opera and its faery ball-rooms", the object of a scorn quite out of keeping with the sympathetic good humor she has hitherto striven to maintain. Meanwhile, Maggie, "without the aid of established authorities and appointed guides", reads on. And our carefully nurtured understanding of her, though it too can never touch her directly, is now taken for granted: "From what you know of her, you will not be surprised [and of course we are not] that she threw some exaggeration and willfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even into her self-renunciation".

Maggie, that is to say, learns her lesson incompletely. As yet unlearned in the pain of genuine renunciation, she firmly turns her mirror to the wall. But George Eliot's narrator, not able to shed the light of her own wise counsel on Maggie herself in her hour of need, is also unable to maintain her sense that the reader continues to benefit by it. By the time the recalcitrant Maggie, her determination to resist the alms of her family having forced her to take the traditionally onerous post of a governess, beings to enjoy the luxuries of a stylish vacation with her cousin Lucy, our sympathy comes openly into doubt. Our "large vision" of the relation of the petty to the large, it seems, ceases to function when it comes to the behavior of St. Ogg's fashionable sons and daughters. For instance, Maggie is said to look flushed at the end of a busy day. "Had anything remarkable happened?" asks the narrator—and immediately offers the following disagreeable reply: "Nothing that you are not likely to consider in the highest degree unimportant". We also are said to consider it "incredible" that Lucy and Maggie talk together before going to bed and "inexplicable" that Lucy should welcome Maggie into her happy life with the adoring Stephen.

One resents this imputed hostility, after having been ceaselessly indoctrinated into the habit of sympathy. One does not asily give up the narrator's former willingness to teach. Yet that authority seeps away, as The Mill on the Floss moves out into the world, as the world (and the world's wife) comes into its own. For when Maggie returns to St. Ogg's for the last time, bringing her broken reputation with her and looking only for a refuge, the virtue of a widened understanding of events is once and for all put to the test, and in an arena over which George Eliot's narrator, enraged at the judgments of those smug matrons as if she herself had forgotten how to sympathize with "small minds," has no influence whatever. One incident after another is referred to this issue. Tom's cruel rejection of Maggie is the consequence of his being "imprisoned within the limits of his own nature," his fatal lack of "the wider vision." The ladies of the town, in their unwavering condemnation, are not "beguiled by any wide speculative conceptions" Philip painfully learns the blessings of an "enlarged life," the "birth of strong sympathy"; but since he is never seen out of doors this lesson is of little significance to the world. Lucy learns to forgive Maggie, to see her ("You are better than I am—") sympathetically; but she too remains secluded. Dr. Kenn, whose popularity with his female parishioners is very nearly extinguished because of his sympathy for Maggie, in the end advises her to leave town.

The test results, in short, are negative. And as they come in, one by one, George Eliot's narrator herself lays aside the effort. The swift pace of the last two books of The Mill on the Floss is often noticed. The cause, I think, is not merely George Eliot's wish to get to Rome for Holy Week. Both the scrupulous endeavor of her narrator to solicit her reader's sympathy and the task of exhibiting her own are plainly irrelevant to the march of events that leads up to and follows the prodigal's return. Maggie's fate at the hands of the ladies of St. Ogg's comes to pass, whether or no.

Thus knowledge of the future and widely sympathetic insight into the present gradually lose their authority in The Mill on the Floss as the story moves closer and closer to its catastrophe. The fate of the narrator's memory, her ability to recover the past, is similar; but this loss devastates far more seriously than those other failures, since memory is not only the source of her inspiration as a storyteller, it is also her salvation as an individual—indeed, it is the only mode of salvation offered in the novel. She spells out this blessing very early, in a fervently detailed revelation of her own experience as a perceiving mind with the gift of loving speech. It occurs in Book One:

The woods I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet—what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows—such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass today, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.

Without this commitment to the past, George Eliot's narrator could not speak at all; she could never have arrived at Dorlcote Mill in the first place. The subtle modulation from "my" to "our," an assumed solidarity between narrator and reader rare enough to pause over, allows us to share the reward of an awakened perception and the language in which to utter it truly. Furthermore, we share it with Maggie and Tom, as they grow out of their early ignorance and into a sense of the past. Learning to see themselves in time, not outside it, they acquire what Maggie later calls "the divine voice within us" that reminds us of "all the motives that sanctify our lives". No wonder the invocation of the voice of memory is potent enough to resolve for the moment all our differences. It is our common bond, our common salvation.

Listening to that voice, Maggie is about to leave Stephen and go back to St. Ogg's. Her return, the most important decision she has ever made, is an emblem of its saving guidance—but this time salvation does not inevitably follow. The pattern was established when the storyteller first left "the world beyond" and made her way to the mill, he memory leading her back to that chilly February afternoon; it was renewed when Tom returned home at Christmas the following year, seeing "the bright light in the parlour at home, as the gig passed noiselessly over the … bridge"—details which deliberately recall the opening of the novel; and it is repeated throughout the various homecomings to follow. Its symbolic authority is lost, however, when Maggie goes home only to be denied her brother's roof and forced to meet the world. Once again, Maggie's history threatens her historian.

It has taken Maggie many years of struggle to acquire the docility that leads her to renounce Stephen and face the music back home. Her painfully learned obedience to the principle that the past will guide her rightly is profoundly different from the willing commitment made by George Eliot's narrator to the same imperative; but surely her ultimate tenacity deserves the prize. The forgetful child who left her brother's rabbits to die, who ran away from home to wander with the gypsies, who was jolted into an awareness of the value of the past by the loss of all its amenities, who was persuaded into secret meetings in the Red Deeps by the revival of an early affection, and who floated downstream with the wrong man only so long as her memory remained quiescent, earns her virtue. Her difficult experience of life grants her the authority to question the "natural law" her lover relies on and to articulate in her own words a loyalty we at one time were told was below the level of speech:

"I have tried to think it again and again; but I see, if we judged that way, there would be a warrant for all the treachery and cruelty—we should justify breaking the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on earth. If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment."

Maggie has finally found her inspiration. Speaking for herself at last—no more does the narrator remind us that Maggie needs "established authorities"—she now possesses and obeys the guiding, saving memory that the entire narration of The Mill on the Floss has tried to honor. It guides her to the end; and in the end, as she sets out over the floodwaters, it means more to her than life.

Maggie's sacrifice of herself to the god of recollection easily outdistances whatever other pieties the novel offers. But Maggie's is not the only memory that must finally be satisfied. The long substantiation of Maggie and Tom's childhood serves us as well as them—we too can remember, if we will. We can inquire into the accuracy of Maggie's dream of her happy childhood; we can question her habitual tendency to become a child again; we can see how the past has in fact tyrannized over Maggie's future by providing her with needs she never outgrows, even as it tyrannizes over Tom by ingraining in him a rigidity only his sister's last act of rashness—not by any means her first—can soften:

There had arisen in him a repulsion towards Maggie that derived its very intensity from their early childish love in the time when they had clasped tiny fingers together, and their later sense of nearness in a common duty and a common sorrow: the sight of her, as he had told her, was hateful to him.

Tom's cruelty is the result of the same loyalty Maggie becomes willing to die for. Which, one wonders, is the deadlier consequence? How can this novel celebrate the divine guidance only memory can give, when those who follow it end up dead and we who observe it end up unconvinced?

We come to these subversive questions by summoning up our own accumulated memory of Maggie and Tom's past—that is, we participate in the same process by which George Eliot's narrator began to tell their story, looking confidently back to her vivid memory of the large dipping willows, the stone bridge, and the mill. The loss of that early confidence, as the task of realizing Maggie and Tom's "joy-in-death or death-in-joy" looms larger and larger, means that she has come to them too. Maggie and Tom have had their reconciliations before, of course, each one exacting its own harsh penalty; but this time, since it costs them their lives, the price is clearly exorbitant. That they die happy adds to the tragedy—eliciting a horror felt as much by the narrator, who must finish what she began and honor that happiness, as it is by the reader, who looks on in helpless dismay.

The heightened immediacy and eloquence of "The Last Conflict" are indirect expressions of this increasing dread. Maggie's consciousness is given with a conspicuous absence of authorial intervention, as she struggles to find her direction across the floodwaters:

"O God, where am I? Which is the way home?" she
cried out, in the dim loneliness.

What was happening to them at the Mill? The flood had once nearly destroyed it. They might be in danger—in distress; her mother and her brother, alone there, beyond reach of help!

This final homeward journey, in all its heroism, danger, and exhaustion, is utterly different from the dreamlike, inspiring return with which the novel began. The wheel has not come full circle—for the direction George Eliot's narrator took when she began is contradicted by the direction her heroine takes in the end. The intensity of Maggie's effort is rewarded by "one supreme moment" of memory, reaching back to "the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together". George Eliot's narrator, however, had scrupulously remembered everything—the fetish, the floury spiders, the "pretty" patchwork, and the dead moles nailed to the stable wall. She renounces it all, in the simplifying eloquence of those little clasped hands. Maggie's version of the past, like her heroic effort to retrieve it, is all that remains.

Readers of The Mill on the Floss have never hesitated to point out the haste and tension of its closing pages. These excesses signify the lessening poise of a narrator who can feel her authority waver, but who even so continues to the end, when the inscription on Maggie and Tom's tomb speaks for itself. That early mastery, easy in its knowledge of the distant unnamed future, its sure and sympathetic grasp of the present moment, and its earnest conviction that remembering the past can both inspire and guide, has vanished in the act of telling over a history that gradually undermines the validity of all three. Whatever authority endures—once Maggie and Tom drown together—is possessed by the waters that close over them. "I am in love with moistness," George Eliot's narrator said as she watched the white ducks dip their heads in the murmuring Ripple; but time, like the river's gentle current, does not stop in response to that loving impulse. The stone bridge on which she leaned in order to look across the water at the silent little girl is eventually swept away.

And so George Eliot's narrator, who would speak to Maggie Tulliver if she could, is finally overwhelmed. Unable to alter the course of the unmapped river she saw as Maggie's destiny, she too must submit. In that submission, however, she enters the tragic world of The Mill on the Floss more truly than any expression of authorial sympathy, foreknowledge, or memory could possibly permit, having earned her union with those other victims in the inevitability of their common fate.