SOURCE: "A Reinterpretation of The Mill on the Floss," in PMLA, Vol. 87, No. 1, January, 1972, pp. 53-63.

[In the following essay, Hagan challenges the conclusions drawn by several earlier critics, maintaining that the relationship between Maggie Tulliver, her brother Tom, and by extension their father, is the main concern of The Mill on the Floss.]

The salient fact about the most significant and representative of the recent interpretations of The Mill on the Floss is the extent to which they have become polarized, with William R. Steinhoff and Jerome Thale exemplifying one kind of reading and Bernard J. Paris, Reva Stump, and George Levine the other [respectively, in "Intent and Fulfillment in the Ending of The Mill on the Floss," in The Image of the Work, edited by B. H. Lehman et al., 1955; "Intelligence as Deception: The Mill on the Floss," PMLA, 80, September 1965; "Toward a Revaluation of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss," Nineteenth Centu ry Fiction, 11, June 1956; Movement and Vision in George Eliot's Novels, 1959; and The Novels of George Eliot, 1959]. Each of these critics has made valuable contributions to our understanding of various aspects of this novel, and I trust that whatever I say here will not be taken as ignoring this fact. Yet the way in which, between them, they dichotomize the novel's vision does essentially simplify its complex wholeness. I will try to demonstrate this by analyzing both approaches in turn, and then by offering a reading of my own.

I

For the first two critics, the novel is a tragedy of repression and regression. Maggie Tulliver's life culminates in her downfall, and she herself is responsible for this because she is flawed by her acceptance of an unnatural philosophy of renunciation and by a morbid, infantile fixation upon her father and brother; both flaws fatally pull against her legitimate desire and need for a life of wider fulfillment. Steinhoff puts the case as follows:

Throughout the novel Maggie is revealed to be gradually losing buoyancy in her repeated failures to reconcile her individual demands with the pressures of family and society. At each failure she turns naturally back to a period of relative happiness and security, her childhood, in which her father and brother are permanent sources of comfort and authority. Gradually there is built up in her a mistrust of her own adventuring spirit, a fear of independent action, and, as a corollary, a tendency to equate self-martyrdom with goodness.…

The irony in her final decision [to rescue Tom from the flood], and the reason why the novel has to culminate in an event that is both "glorious" and "tragic," is that while renunciation seems to Maggie the only right course, it is at the same time a surrender to narrowness and conventionality. She is giving in to her weakness: a fatal timidity toward life.… [an] inability to choose adult experience at the expense of being uprooted from family life.

One of the most serious and obvious errors in this reading is the misunderstanding of George Eliot's attitude toward the philosophy of Thomas á Kempis, with which Maggie becomes acquainted in Book IV. The degree to which Maggie can live, or at least struggle to live, by that philosophy does become one of the major issues of the novel. But Steinhoff and Thale fail to perceive the moral perspective from which George Eliot treats this issue. For them, all of Maggie's attempts to live in accord with Kempis' teachings are utterly misguided. Indeed, these attempts are the essence of her tragedy, for by struggling to repress the most vital desires of her nature, according to Kempis' prescriptions, which Thale sees as essentially "the same wisdom which is so unlovely in the Dodsons," she denies herself all possibility of adult fulfillment and regressively surrenders to "narrowness and conventionality." In Steinhoff s and Thale's view the moral norm of the novel is announced not by Kempis, but by Philip in the Red Deeps when he warns Maggie that her efforts at renunciation are unnatural and dangerous. To accept Philip's view as the author's is, however, a mistake. The very chapter in which Maggie reads Kempis for the first time contains a passage of authorial commentary honoring the saint's words in the highest terms and it seems perfectly clear that the tone with which George Eliot treats Maggie's struggles to renounce her desires is deeply sympathetic throughout. Maggie's rejection of Stephen Guest, in particular, is surely represented as an act of the greatest moral heroism.

It is true, of course, that because of Maggie's passionate and imaginative nature, her vitality and youth, her intense need to love and be loved and her urgent yearnings for a wider, fuller, richer life than that afforded by the oppressive narrowness of her environment, we would certainly prefer that she did not have to renounce. We recognize the legitimacy of her desires, and wish that she lived in an ideal world where they could be satisfied without guilt. In such a world Philip's warnings against repression would be valid. But Maggie does not live in an ideal world. Given the fact that she profoundly loves her father and brother; that both adamantly oppose her having anything to do with Philip; that Stephen has led Lucy to believe that he will marry her; and that Philip remains faithful to his love for Maggie herself, renunciation first of Philip and then of Stephen is the only morally admirable course open to her. Had she gone on to love and marry Philip against her father's and Tom's wishes, she would have been betraying their "primary natural claim on her," a claim rooted in blood and a common past alike. And had she run away and married Stephen, she would have been betraying the sacred trust vested in her by Philip and Lucy. To have acted, under these particular circumstances, only in accord with her own desires for love and happiness would have been to "justify breaking the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on earth'." Philip is certainly right in predicting that the desires she represses will later assault her "'like a savage appetite'," for this is precisely what happens when she meets Stephen. But this does not mean that Maggie's repression is wrong per se; it is the very essence of her tragedy that at every turn the choices which are morally right should also have terrible consequences.

Steinhoff s and Thale's misunderstanding of George Eliot's attitude toward this issue does not, however, exist in isolation. Because they believe that Maggie's renunciation of Philip, in the spirit of Kempis, is wrong, and because they see that it is her love for her father and brother which causes her to renounce Philip out of respect for their disapproval, they conclude that this love itself is wrong. Though fully recognizing its intensity, they deny that it ought to have the morally binding force on her which it does. Maggie's struggles to live by Kempis' teachings, her filial and sisterly devotion, and her final attempt to rescue Tom from the flood at the risk of her own life are thus all indiscriminately grouped together as "a surrender to narrowness and conventionality," "weakness," and "a fatal timidity toward life." But this interpretation, like that of the significance of Kempis, surely ignores the attitude of the author herself. Though the point is almost impossible to demonstrate without referring the reader to large parts of the text, I submit that whenever George Eliot represents or comments upon Maggie's attachment to Tulliver and Tom, she does so with the deepest respect and sympathy. Even single phrases like "simple primitive love," "primary natural claim," and "a perpetual yearning … that had its roots deeper than all change," which George Eliot uses at different times with reference to this attachment, have an honorific ring in themselves. Furthermore, one simply must not ignore the relevance to this question of either the extremely revealing authorial description in v, ii, of family relations as "the most sacred relations of our lives" or the two famous Wordsworthian and Proustian passages of authorial commentary at the end of I, v, and II, i, which develop the theme that "the loves and sanctities of our life" have their "deep immovable roots" in memories of childhood. George Eliot's insistence in the former passage that "our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day 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" is prefaced by an explicit statement that the unbreakable bond between Maggie and Tom was forged of precisely such beneficent childhood experiences as these.

It seems clear, then, that the two features of Maggie's psychology that Steinhoff and Thale regard as flaws—her love for her father and brother, and her desire to live by the philosophy of Kempis—are among the very things which ought most to enlist the reader's respect and sympathy. In addition, these critics' assumption that Maggie's tragedy is the result of some kind of flaw in her character is itself open to objection on still other grounds. For George Eliot, after carefully making an explicit distinction between two kinds of tragedy—the Naturalistic tragedy of circumstance and the Aristotelian tragedy of flawed character—relates Maggie's father to the second, but Maggie herself to the first:

… you have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics but her history, which is a thing hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. "Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms—"character is destiny." But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms towards the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.

This passage is of crucial importance in defining the perspective in which Maggie's story must finally be viewed. Her destiny is a tragic one; this tragedy is primarily determined not by her character but by the particular circumstances in which she finds herself; and, as the last sentence hints, the most decisive of these circumstances is comprised in the characters and actions of her close relations—her father and her brother. As I shall emphasize, it is the latter who reveal an increasing inability, after a certain point in the story, to reciprocate her love, and this development becomes the crux of the whole plot—the pivot on which Maggie's tragedy ultimately turns.

II

It may be argued, of course, that Maggie's character is flawed, but that she overcomes this flaw and that her destiny consists chiefly of this very process of spiritual development. This is the position taken, in fact, by the second group of critics whom I have mentioned—Paris, Stump, and Levine. Whereas Steinhoff and Thale maintain that Maggie's search for love and happiness outside her family and immediate society is good, and that her attempts at renunciation and her attachment to her father and brother which inhibit and thwart this search are a tragic mistake, these other critics maintain the opposite. Correctly seeing that George Eliot intends us to admire equally Maggie's struggles to live by Kempis' philosophy and her devotion to Tom and Tulliver, they conclude that, because this is so, Maggie's efforts to transcend her environment must be wrong, and that these efforts spring from a flaw in her character which can be identified as "egoism." As Paris has put it, "Maggie's desires for beauty and pleasure are essentially selfish or egoistic in their nature. Although gratification of those desires would enable Maggie to realize a higher and more desirable level of civilization than that which prevails in St. Ogg's, it is only by a renunciation of the desires of the self that Maggie can truly realize her 'higher faculties'." Accordingly, the process by which Maggie struggles toward this renunciation and finally achieves it by making the triumphant self-sacrifices of twice rejecting Stephen and then of attempting to rescue Tom from the flood becomes the main subject of the novel.

Perhaps the most obvious objection to this interpretation is that it ignores George Eliot's clear directive, just cited, that we view Maggie's story as a specific kind of tragedy. While not denying the presence of tragic elements in that story, it tends to place it on the whole in the category of the Bildungsroman. It is a reading which also suffers from lack of clarity. If the contention that Maggie is flawed because her desires for beauty and pleasure are "essentially selfish or egoistic" means simply that, under the special circumstances in which Maggie finds herself, her desires for personal happiness ought to take second place to the moral duties she feels toward others (Tom, Philip, and Lucy) and that insofar as they do not they constitute flaws in her character, then such a description of the situation is valid—though in this case to speak of her desires as "selfish" or "egoistic" is surely somewhat misleading. But if, as I suspect, what is meant is that Maggie is flawed because her desires per se are selfish and egoistic, then this reading is unacceptable. The great attention George Eliot devotes to her largely satirical representations of the oppressive narrowness of provincial society in the persons of Mrs. Tulliver, the Gleggs, the Pullets, Mr. Stelling, and others inevitably encourages us to view with deep sympathy Maggie's longings to escape that environment. And certainly such sympathy is the dominant tone of the numerous passages in which these longings themselves are represented. If George Eliot wants us to feel that in renouncing Philip and Stephen Maggie is doing the right thing, she also wants us to feel that the yearnings which she renounces are no less right. Indeed, it is precisely because they are right that when circumstances make it morally necessary for her to give them up her story becomes genuinely tragic.

But there are still more fundamental objections to the Paris-Stump-Levine interpretation of the novel. Even granting that Maggie's desires for personal happiness are "egoistic" only in the sense that I have accepted, the problem remains as to whether her successive renunciations of those desires constitute a moral progression of the sort this interpretation indicates. All three critics maintain that by the time Maggie is able to reject Stephen and, later, to risk her life in order to save Tom from the flood, she has reached a point in her development where she is able to act in accord with Kempis' philosophy to a degree she would not have been able to act earlier. But their defense of this conclusion is very inadequate. Although, for example, Maggie performed the morally heroic act of renouncing Philip over two years before she even met Stephen, this is a crucial phase of her life—a phase occupying almost the whole of Book v—to which none of these critics gives more than casual attention. Even if one were to argue, as I think one must, that the moral significance of her renunciation of Philip is much less than that of the renunciation of Stephen, in that the former was enjoined by Tom, whereas the latter is self-motivated, there still exists the great difficulty of regarding her attempted rescue of Tom as the logical culmination of this series. Levine, for instance, sees the rescue as the fullest achievement of that selflessness toward which Maggie has been steadily growing, because it is wholly instinctive—"her first spontaneously moral action." But this interpretation is implausible, for given one of the premises on which the whole novel is based—that is, the peculiar depth, intensity, and constancy of Maggie's love for her brother, who, along with her father, is one of "the two idols of her life"—the probability is clearly established that if Tom's life had been threatened at any point earlier in the novel Maggie would have reacted in exactly the same way; she would have tried to rescue him whether she had read Kempis or not. The only reason she risks her life to save him at the end of the novel is simply that the opportunity to do so did not arise before the time of the flood.

Moreover, to return to Maggie's rejections of Philip and Stephen, if what is meant by moral development is that Maggie achieves complete acceptance of Kempis' philosophy, then it must be objected that there is no ground whatsoever for concluding that the latter rejection shows this any more than did the former. Maggie's final struggle, which occurs as a result of Stephen's importunate letter in VII, V, ends quite inconclusively. Indeed, in view of the fact that she achieved "contented renunciation" once before at the time she lived away from home for two years as a governess only to have this destroyed when she met Stephen, there is no certainty that because she has now renounced Stephen she will not falter again. Although she piously murmurs Kempis' words and burns Stephen's letter, vowing that tomorrow she will write him "the last word of parting," these words and actions are followed by a "cry of self-despair": "'How shall I have patience and strength? Am I to struggle and fall and repent again?—has life other trials as hard for me still?"' To these important questions the novel provides no answer. For, though Maggie falls to her knees and begins to pray for strength, her prayer is suddenly cut off by the flood in which she and Tom drown. Maggie is trying to live by her choice, and this attempt does have immense moral value, but there is no guarantee that she actually can.

But even accepting those aspects of the Paris-Stump-Levine interpretation of Maggie's development which I think can properly be admitted—namely, that Kempis' philosophy does define one of George Eliot's moral norms, that Maggie does significantly struggle to live by this philosophy, and that she does morally develop insofar as she can at least temporarily renounce first Philip and then Stephen—the most important question of all is still left open: What precisely is the importance of this subject in relation to the novel as a whole? That the degree to which Maggie can live, or struggle to live, by Kempis' philosophy is one of the major issues of the novel is perfectly clear. But Paris, Stump, and Levine insist that it is the major issue—the central subject of the whole book—a point on which Steinhoff and Thale, in spite of their misinterpretation of George Eliot's attitude toward Kempis, wholly agree. This is the very point on which I wish to challenge all of these critics at length by offering an interpretation of the novel's central subject which is quite different. In the last analysis, the matter is a delicate problem of emphasis, and one of the cruxes of this problem lies in what we make of the novel's much criticized ending, which deals with the flood and its aftermath. Since this subject, as I have just noted, has an entirely different kind of significance from Maggie's attempts to live by the philosophy of Kempis, it is strange that if the novel as a whole is primarily concerned with the latter it should place its final emphasis on the former; and it is doubly strange that the very last words of the book—the words of Maggie and Tom's epitaph, "In death they were not divided," which focus on the subject of the brother's and sister's relationship not only in death but, by implication, in life too—should also appear as the novel's epigraph and thereby give that subject even greater emphasis. What the ending and the epigraph provide, I submit, is a vital clue as to what the main concern of the novel really is—namely, the nature of Maggie's relation to Tom (and, by extension, to her father) and the tragic effects of this relation on her life. Everything else in the novel, including Maggie's own moral development in terms of Kempis' philosophy (important though the latter certainly is), is ultimately subordinate to that.

III

One of the reasons the critics I have been considering offer a questionable interpretation of the novel's tragic central subject is that they narrow the range of George Eliot's outlook and thus create a polarization which does not exist in the novel itself. Each reading ignores the explicit indication of her perspective which she provides near the beginning of Book IV, where, after explaining that she has been depicting the "oppressive narrowness" of Tom's and Maggie's environment in order that the reader may understand "how it has acted on young natures in many generations," she identifies the young natures with whom she is specifically concerned as those "that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generation before them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts." Applied to Maggie, this passage makes clear that the yearnings for a wider life which spring from the fact that Maggie has "risen above the mental level of the generation before" her and the love which ties her to her brother, her father, and her past by "the strongest fibres" of her heart are to be regarded as equally legitimate, equally worthy of fulfillment. By not allowing that both kinds of need deserve satisfaction, that it would be best for Maggie if neither had to be sacrificed, one misses either the fact that her life is a tragedy, or the fact that the essential nature of that tragedy is one of having to choose between goals that are equally good but incompatible.

This incompatibility is not inherent in the goals themselves (the desire to marry Philip and the desire to remain loyal to Tom, for example, are not intrinsically irreconcilable), but is the result of circumstance. Nor is this circumstance chiefly "social," for to whatever degree the narrowness of thought and feeling which is characteristic of Maggie's social environment thwarts her desires, it comes to play upon her chiefly through the characters and actions of Tom and Tulliver. Maggie has intense desires for a full and rich life which Tom and Tulliver can neither comprehend nor sympathize with, but she is, at the same time, bound to them by a noble love which makes her renunciation of those desires morally necessary. From this situation spring directly or indirectly all the decisive frustrations of her life and hence the tragedy which is at the center of the novel. A detailed analysis of the structure of the plot will I believe, demonstrate this.

The first segment, which comprises Books I and 11, centers on Maggie's late childhood and establishes the premises about her psychology and her relations to Tom, her father, and her society in general on which the rest of the novel depends. The major emphasis is placed on precisely those two aspects of her character and situation which, as I have just noted, are explicitly singled out at the beginning of Book IV: that is, her intellectual and spiritual superiority to her environment and the fact that she is "nevertheless tied" to this environment by "the strongest fibres" of her heart. On the one hand, extensive, primarily satirical portraits of her mother and her maternal aunts and uncles, who lack Maggie's sensitivity, and who habitually misunderstand, criticize, and reject her, make clear the degree to which her position in this society is an isolated and painful one. On the other hand, George Eliot shows that Maggie is dominated by a great need to love and be loved by Tom and Tulliver, which impels her to turn to them in times of trouble, and enables her to find in this uncomprehending and otherwise intolerable environment a spiritual home. The essential fact is that, during this period of her life, her father and brother reciprocate her love. This is why at the end of Book II, when Maggie's childhood is coming to an end, George Eliot can refer to it as having been an Eden, and why at the end of the novel the last thing Maggie remembers before she drowns is the time when she and Tom, like a kind of Adam and Eve, "had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together." The point is not that Maggie's childhood is an unadulterated idyll (it obviously is not), but that this is the time when her need to be loved and accepted by her brother and father is most fully satisfied. It is true, of course, that even in this period Tom's need to love Maggie is much less than hers to love him. But it is also true that, in comparison to the later periods of her life, Maggie's childhood is the period of least frustration and greatest fulfillment. It becomes for her the touchstone of what her loving relations to her brother and father should be.

The relations to her brother, in particular, are defined most clearly by a series of parallel episodes which give Book I its structural backbone (the episode on the dead rabbits, of the jam-puff, of the haircutting, of the mud, and, climactically, of the gypsies, and in nearly every one of which there emerges a sequence of actions which dramatizes Maggie's hunger for Tom's love, the frustration of that hunger, her rebellion, and the pleasure she receives from reconciliation. At this period of her life such reconciliation and the consequent fulfillment of her need to be loved by her brother satisfy Maggie's deepest instincts. Her need to rebel is decidedly secondary, and is primarily a response to her brother's rejections. When Maggie's craving to love and be loved by her brother asserts itself, as sooner or later it always does, her desire to rebel is suppressed; and when that craving is satisfied, as sooner or later it always is, she is reconciled to her otherwise hostile environment.

In Book III, however, with the father's financial and mental collapse, begins the process which results in the cruel frustration of that craving and in the tragic search for alternative sources of fulfillment. This Book is thus the pivot on which the central action of the novel turns. Its title, "The Downfall," refers not only to the misfortunes which befall Tulliver, but to the fact that those misfortunes expel Maggie from the "Eden" of her childhood by progressively alienating from her the father's and brother's love on which she has come so deeply to depend.

Her initial inclination is to seek escape from her daily miseries by retreating into "wild romances of a flight from home … to some great man," like Walter Scott, who would understand and "surely do something for her." Such fancies led her in childhood to seek compensation for Tom's rejection by running away to the gypsies. But this kind of solution will no longer work, for by now Tulliver's plight has inculcated Maggie with a strong sense of moral responsibility. The object of her first quest becomes, therefore, a way not of fleeing her world, but of enduring it, and the key ready to hand turns out, of course, to be Thomas á Kempis, in the spirit of whose philosophy of renunciation and resignation Maggie hopes to solve the problem of her frustrated desire for her father's and brother's love and for the happiness of her childhood by crushing that desire itself. This quest is the main subject of Book IV, Chapter iii.

That it fails—as the two different quests which follow it in Books V and VI will also fail—is clear. The crucial question is why it fails. In one sense, obviously, the fault is Maggie's: her longings for a happiness which will compensate for the emptiness of her life after her father's downfall are so great that the effort of renunciation becomes for her a source of that very happiness which she is supposedly renouncing. George Eliot's ironical attitude toward this piece of self-deception is quite explicit. Yet it is also true, as I have shown, that Maggie's longings arouse George Eliot's deepest sympathies. To deny their legitimacy would be to insist absurdly that she alter her very nature and completely subdue herself to the oppressive narrowness of the provincial world around her. Thus, it might seem to follow that the fault lies instead in Kempis' philosophy itself: Kempis' demand that legitimate yearnings such as Maggie's be suppressed is unnatural. Yet, again as I have shown, George Eliot's sympathy for this philosophy is as great as her sympathy for the passions it would deny. Under the circumstances, Maggie's attempt to live by it—to endure suffering rather than to seek escape in romantic daydreams—not only makes good sense, but is even morally noble. The issue, therefore, comes down to the existence of the circumstances themselves—circumstances which decree that what is morally noble should also be unnatural. To ask why Maggie's first quest fails is to ask what has brought these circumstances into being.

And the answer to that can only be the flaws in the characters of her father and brother. Maggie's frustration and her struggles to endure that frustration by means of renunciation are the direct consequences of Tom's and Tulliver's failure, at this stage in her life, to perceive, to understand, and to reciprocate her love. Were they to respond to her now as they did in her childhood, Maggie's happiness would be restored, and any futile attempts to deny her need for happiness would therefore no longer need to be made. But such a response has become impossible for them: their mutual hatred of Wakem, their acute sense of disgrace, and their grim determination to restore the family fortunes imprison them in a world of gloomy obsessions from which Maggie is wholly excluded. The conflict which thus results is the conflict which appears in all George Eliot's novels—that between two radically different kinds of characters; on the one hand, the large-souled, who, like "all of us" (as George Eliot puts it in Middlemarch, Ch. xxi), are "born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves," but are sensitive and imaginative enough ultimately to transcend this limitation and see that others possess "an equivalent center of self," and, on the other hand, the narrow-souled, who are incapable of this kind of vision, and remain permanently trapped in the confines of the egoistic self.

The conflict between these two kinds of characters which begins to emerge as the novels' central tragic issue in Book IV becomes even more intense, however, in Book V, when Maggie begins her second quest for fulfillment, the result of which is her involvement with Philip Wakem. The futility of her attempt to live by Kempis' philosophy which was demonstrated in Book IV by her self-deception is demonstrated even more clearly now, three years later, by the flaring-up of her erotic passion for "the only person who had ever seemed to love her devotedly, as she had always longed to be loved." Her need to love and to be loved by her father and brother and to win their approval remains as compelling and legitimate as ever; she continues to be bound to them by "the strongest fibres" of her heart. But now, partly because Tom and Tulliver continue to frustrate her demand, and partly because Maggie is going through a natural process of maturation, which, in accord with "the onward tendency of human things," enables her to rise even farther "above … [their] mental level" than previously, this need is balanced by an equally strong, legitimate, and autonomous desire to find additional fulfillment from sources beyond them. Both kinds of fulfillment have become essential to her. Yet, because of the "moral stupidity" of Tom and her father, she will get neither. This is the basic tragic situation of the novel which now definitely takes shape.

The obvious solution to Maggie's hunger for a new life in Book V is for her and Philip to marry; she is nearly seventeen by this time, and he is twenty-one. Near the end of a year of secret meetings in the Red Deeps, she kisses him, admits that she loves him, confesses that she has found in him the greatest happiness since her childhood with Tom, and implicitly tells him that, though the thought is new to her, she would willingly marry him if there were no obstacle. But the crux of the situation is precisely that there is an obstacle, and that because of it her second quest proves as futile as the first. Superficially, of course, that obstacle is in Maggie herself—in her profound attachment to her father and brother, both of whom oppose not only marriage but even friendship between Maggie and Philip because of their long-standing hatred of Philip's father. If Maggie's attachment to them were not so deep, she could disregard the voice of her guilty conscience which urges her to renounce Philip, defy their ban, and find an escape from her frustration. But it does not follow from this that her attachment is wrong. George Eliot explicitly states that Philip's arguments for continuing to meet Maggie in the Red Deeps are "sophistry" and "subterfuge"; and she calls Maggie's "prompting against a concealment that would introduce doubleness into her own mind, and might cause new misery to those [Tom and Tulliver] who had the primary natural claim on her" a "true" prompting. Given Maggie's deep loyalty to her father and brother, and given George Eliot's complete sympathy with that loyalty, Maggie's scruples of conscience are wholly justified. The real obstacle to her fulfillment lies, as in her first quest, in the flawed characters of Tom and Tulliver, whose opposition to Philip springs from their narrow prejudice against Wakem and their complete failure to appreciate the depth of Maggie's need for a fuller life. The most active opposition comes, of course, from Tom, who cruelly forces upon Maggie an absolute choice between Philip and himself. Were it not for Tom's fanaticism, Maggie could be loyal to him and marry Philip at the same time; in themselves both goals are completely compatible and completely desirable. The necessity of choosing between them is an artificial one forced upon Maggie by Tom's insensitivity. The situation is very similar, indeed, to that in Middlemarch, when Mr. Casaubon cruelly contrives his will so as to force Dorothea to choose between inheriting his property and marrying Ladislaw. As George Eliot sums up at the end of Book VI, Chapter xii, Tom belongs to a class of minds to which

prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth.… however it [a prejudice] may come, those minds will give it a habitation: it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right: it is at once a staff and a baton. Every prejudice that will answer these prejudices is self-evident.

The nature of the tragic contrast between the two kinds of characters represented by Maggie and Tom and its decisive effect on Maggie's destiny could hardly be spelled out more distinctly.

By the middle of Book VI, however, the situation has been complicated by an additional factor: Maggie is reluctant to marry Philip not only because of Tom's continued opposition, but because of her growing attraction to Stephen Guest, whom she met at Lucy's home upon her return to St. Ogg's after her two years' absence as a governess, and whose admiration has become one of the chief causes of her renewed discontent. The two things with which Stephen is most frequently associated—music and the river—come to epitomize the irresistible force of the intoxication which she increasingly feels in his presence. To satisfy her newly aroused yearnings for love and life by surrendering herself to Stephen has now become, in fact, her third and final quest.

This quest fails, of course, no less than did the others. Maggie has to renounce Stephen, just as she renounced Philip, and, as a result, the frustration of her life reaches its tragic climax. The pattern of futile quests which has been taking shape since the last chapter of Book IV is thus logically completed and the novel's true central subject is fully defined. The relation of this failure to the two preceding ones, however, needs careful clarification. The first two quests failed, as we have seen, because of the flaws in the characters of Maggie's father and brother, who were unable to reciprocate her love and opposed her marriage to Philip. But the third quest fails for a different reason: Maggie gives up Stephen, not (as in Philip's case) because she is intimidated into doing so and wishes to avoid betraying Tom and her father, but because of her own free choice and her desire not to betray Philip and Lucy, to whom she and Stephen are tacitly engaged. In this decision Tom plays no role whatsoever. Nevertheless, he is decisively related to the failure of Maggie's third quest in other ways which keep the conflict between him and Maggie—and, by implication, the larger conflict between the kinds of characters which they respectively represent—the tragic focal point of the novel to the very end.

To begin with, though Maggie renounces Stephen of her own free will, both her involvement with him in the first place and the great intensity of that involvement are direct consequences of the earlier renunciation of Philip which Tom virtually forced upon her. Philip's warning at the time—namely, that "'You will be thrown into the world some day, and then every rational satisfaction of your nature that you deny now, will assault you like a savage appetite"'—is precisely what happens later when she meets Stephen. Had she been able to marry Philip with Tom's approval in Book V, this tragic development would presumably have been impossible. Tom has helped to create the very predicament for which Maggie herself must pay the tragic price.

Moreover, almost equally influential in Maggie's destiny is the continuation of Tom's ban on Philip not only to the beginning of Book VI, but even to the end. The obvious solution to her suffering after her renunciation of Stephen at the end of Book VI would be to return to Philip and marry him, just as this was the obvious solution at the beginning of this Book, when she came back to St. Ogg's. Philip's letter clearly implies that if Maggie were to return to him, he would accept her. But, even if she were able to overcome her remorse and the infatuation she still strongly feels for Stephen, the insuperable barrier of Tom's ban on Philip would still remain. Tom's "bitter repugnance to Philip" is the same after the trip down the river as it was before—the same at the end of her final quest as it was at the beginning. The "something" for which Maggie had earlier hoped "to soften him" has still not occurred.

But the most important way in which Tom is related to the failure of Maggie's final quest is through his reaction to her renunciation itself. This reaction is, indeed, the central subject of all but the last chapter and the brief "Conclusion" of Book VII, a fact which strikingly differentiates this Book from the three preceding ones (which are centrally concerned with Maggie's quests themselves), and thus makes clear the decisive thematic significance George Eliot wishes to attach to it. Maggie's renunciation of Stephen is climactic: uncompelled by anything but the voice of honor and conscience, and carried out in opposition to the strongest, most sensual passion for love and a rich life she has known, it represents the moment in the novel when her success in living by Kempis' philosophy is most complete. Only later, when temptation in the form of Stephen's letter assaults her again, does her hold on this philosophy slacken. Yet the point of the first four chapters of Book VII is that if Maggie's self-discipline has reached its height, so too, in ironic counterpoint, has Tom's blindness and opposition. The heroism of her renunciation of Stephen, instead of at last winning her brother's understanding, respect, and love, as it should, is powerless against the alienation of his sympathy which has been caused by the river journey itself. Completely oblivious to the moral grandeur of that renunciation, he rejects her more brutally than ever before, and Maggie, of course, is crushed.

With the exception of the malicious town gossips, no one else in her world is so cruel to her. In fact, after the rejection scene in Chapter i, nearly every other episode in the first four chapters of Book VII is carefully designed by George Eliot to emphasize the key importance of that scene by contrasting Tom with characters and actions which put him in the worst possible light: Bob Jakin climaxes an earlier series of benevolent actions by chivalrously taking Maggie into his home as a lodger; Dr. Kenn gives her sympathetic counsel, and, failing in his efforts to find her employment elsewhere, takes her on as a governess to his own children; Philip declares not only that he forgives Maggie and still loves her, but that in loving her he has attained to a new and enlarged life of selflessness; Lucy too has forgiven her; and even Aunt Glegg, although motivated by family pride, comes staunchly to her defense on the ground that she should be punished only in proportion to the misdeeds actually proved against her, rather than those merely alleged. Especially important is the contrast between Tom and Dr. Kenn. Whereas the latter can appreciate Maggie's spiritual conflicts because he is a man of "broad, strong sense" who can "discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy," Tom is the "man of maxims" par excellence—a representative of all those "minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality—without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human". This passage, echoing the earlier one on Tom as a man of prejudice, emphatically defines again the crucial distinction between the two types of human character which underlies the tragic contrast and conflict between Tom and Maggie herself.

But, if it is true that Tom's climactic rejection of Maggie is the central subject of most of Book VII, this has the crucial effect of placing the drama of her fall and recovery in Book VI in a wholly new perspective. What now becomes clear is that the struggle leading up to her renunciation of Stephen and the renunciation itself have been fully and emphatically rendered by George Eliot not because they themselves are the novel's central subject, but because they provide the occasion for the rejection which is the culminating revelation of Tom's insensitivity, and because only in relation to their nobility can the horror of that rejection and insensitivity be fully measured. The ultimate importance of the entire affair with Stephen which constitutes Book VI is not that it brings to a climax Maggie's efforts to live by Kempis' philosophy (though this does happen), but rather that it brings to a climax Tom's failure to understand his sister's needs and reciprocate her love. By the end of Book VII, Chapter iv, then, the drama of Maggie's tragic frustration is complete in all essentials, and has emerged as the true center of the novel. Each of her three vitally necessary quests for love and a wider life, which were originally incited by the alienation of her father's and brother's love at the time of the family downfall, and were later broadened and intensified by the natural process of her maturation, has ended in failure. And the failure in each case is related in some vital way to the flawed characters of Tom or Tulliver or both, who are far inferior to Maggie in spiritual sensitivity, but to whom she is nevertheless bound by the noblest feelings of loyalty and devotion.

There still remains, of course, the important question of how this drama is related to another one, namely, that of the flood and its aftermath, which comprises the main action of Book VII, Chapter V, and the "Conclusion." As is well known, this part of the novel has given critics more trouble than any other; there is almost universal agreement that for one reason or another it is unsatisfactory. That the action is melodramatic and indeed almost comic in its foreshortening and fortuity; that it is sentimental in the abruptness with which Tom at last awakens to Maggie's nobility and in the description of their death embrace; and that it has the defect of imposing a somewhat mechanical finality, a formal "ending," upon a struggle in Maggie's soul which, as long as Tom's opposition exists, can only remain inconclusive—all are points that can be conceded at once. But the question of the thematic relevance of this action to the rest of the novel may still be profitably reconsidered. For if the flood sequence is seen as functioning primarily to clarify and reinforce the tragic central theme of the novel I have been defining, its logic becomes inescapable. When Maggie begins her prayer to the "Unseen Pity" in Book VII, Chapter V, that theme has been developed as far as strict dramatic necessity requires: as a result of the attitudes of her father and brother various frustrations have been built up in her which there is no way of enduring except by struggling again, as we see her doing, to renounce all her desires. The flood sequence, though it carries the action farther, adds nothing new to this theme. But it does serve as a rhetorical device for giving it maximum final emphasis. A series of ironies focuses all the major issues. That the "something" which Maggie had earlier hoped would "soften" Tom has finally occurred, so that he begins to awaken to her greatness of soul and to reciprocate her love, accentuates the momentous significance of his earlier blindness and spirit of opposition; that this awakening occurs only because Maggie is sacrificing herself to save him highlights the importance of his selfishness; that now it comes too late to alter Maggie's destiny confirms our sense of the decisive difference for the better it could have made earlier; that she and Tom are killed by floating "machinery" symbolizes how destructive have been the effects on her of her father's and brother's prosaic materialism; and finally, that their epitaph reads "In death they were not divided" comments definitively on how much Maggie and Tom were divided in life. With this epitaph, indeed, as I suggested earlier, the thematic center of the novel is established conclusively: appearing as both the last words and again as the epigraph, it unmistakably implies that the whole of Maggie's story must be seen with reference to her tragic relationship with Tom—and, of course, by extension, her father. The key concept of the novel, it emphatically announces, is "division"—the division between the large-souled woman, whose profound love for her father and brother is one of the proofs of her spiritual greatness, and the narrow-souled father and brother themselves, whose inability to reciprocate that love or grasp the validity and urgency of her other needs destroys her life.