SOURCE: Carlisle, Janice. “The Mirror in The Mill on the Floss: Toward a Reading of Autobiography as Discourse.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 23, no. 2 (fall 1990): 177-96.

[In the following essay, Carlisle analyzes the autobiographical structural patterns, action, and characterization of George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss.]

When in the fifth book of The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver glances instinctively toward an inverted mirror, “the square looking-glass which [she has] condemned to hang with its face towards the wall,”¹ her gesture renders suspect the strength of her impulse towards renunciation. The mirror, like a naughty child, has been made to stand facing the wall, and it figures forth, as the narrator later explains, more Maggie's “abandoning all care for adornment” than her “renouncing the contemplation of her face” (264). Maggie remembers where the mirror is located; she remembers that she would see her face displayed before her if the looking-glass were allowed to perform its ordinary functions. Her reflex-like assumption of the presence of her face, as if the inverted mirror could still hold it, recreates what cannot be seen. As I will argue, this gesture represents not only Maggie's half-measures at self-annihilation, but also George Eliot's personal relation to the novel that tells Maggie's story.

To a surprising extent, Eliot's autobiographical relation to this text reflects, not a sense of self-justification won from painful experience, but precisely those conventional social judgments that The Mill on the Floss ostensibly calls into question. Such a reading of this particular novel as autobiography presupposes, in turn, a rethinking of the theories that have stood behind more traditional criticism of the genre. Although poststructuralist thinking has clearly rejected the model of an independent and unitary identity assumed as valid in many of the earlier studies of autobiography, a coherent poststructuralist theory of the genre has emerged more slowly.² This essay is an attempt to move toward that theory by demonstrating the critical maneuvers required if autobiographical texts are to be understood in relation to the discourses that call into being the kinds of subjects that they represent. If subjects are constituted by the discourses they have available to them—by the systems of explanation and evaluation offered them by religion, law, art, medicine, and education—then autobiographies function as forms of discourse to ratify such a process.

As if turning the mirror toward the wall in her second novel, Eliot chose not to write a first-person narrative that would have more clearly announced the autobiographical sources of its subject. The fiction of omniscience that Eliot adopts in The Mill would have discouraged any contemporary readers, even those relatives and close early friends who knew her story, from categorizing this novel as another confession like the one that Charlotte Brontë proclaimed when she added to the title of Jane Eyre the subtitle, An Autobiography. George Eliot had used the first-person in The Lifted Veil, the short jeu de mélancholie that obtruded on her early attempts to write The Mill.³ Indeed, that strange tale can be seen as an attempt to purge confessional impulses and to do so by treating through Latimer, an autobiographical narrator, material that is less strictly autobiographical than that treated in the novel. Yet this purgation, like Maggie's acts of renunciation, is short-lived. Just as Maggie learns later in The Mill on the Floss to take pleasure, albeit temporary pleasure, in her goddess-like good looks, George Eliot herself in the course of the novel seems to renounce the renunciation of autobiography that her choice of narrative voice signals. The inverted mirror still represents the face from which it is turned.

Ever since the facts about Marian Evans's relation to her brother Isaac have been known, there has been no hesitation to label The Mill on the Floss the novel “most visibly close to George Eliot's life.” As Gordon Haight pointed out in a prefatory note on the chronology of the novel, Marian Evans was born in the same year as Maggie Tulliver, Isaac, in the same year as Tom.⁴ Eliot emphasized the personal provenance of such episodes as the children's fishing expedition by choosing to represent them again in her sonnet sequence “Brother and Sister,” the poem that she completed at the end of the decade in which she wrote The Mill. The autobiographical source of much of Eliot's material is often credited with the “authenticity” of the part of the novel that treats Maggie's childhood, while the later parts are dismissed as self-indulgent wish fulfillment,⁵ but it is in those later sections, I think, that the autobiographical impulse most tellingly, yet most deceptively, resides. The central fact of Maggie's adult experience—the inevitable conflict, the “shifting relation between passion and duty” (437)—was central for George Eliot as well. While Maggie and Stephen Guest turn conflict to crisis by “forgetting themselves in a boat,” as Ruskin nastily put it,⁶ Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes turned painful conflict into more painful resolution by taking the boat that would lead them from England and a year's stay in Germany to the fiction of marital legitimacy that they maintained for twenty years. But these parallels are ultimately less telling than the changes that George Eliot wrought upon them in the novel in whose plot they become central.

The Mill on the Floss, in fact, attains its status as autobiographical novel less because of the personal material it treats than because of the way in which George Eliot structures the action and characterization in the novel. The further the novel moves from the facts of Eliot's life, the more genuinely it becomes autobiography. Facts are left behind to enable a personal, confessional “truth” whose face is more effectively hidden from view than the penitent's in the confessional, but whose voice is nonetheless clearly heard if one attends to the major patterns that Eliot imposes on the fictive experience in the novel. The “truth” that emerges from this act of confession ultimately belies its ostensible source in the private or the personal. In his work on autobiography, Philippe Lejeune has looked for a “textual sign” that will proclaim that a work is autobiographical. The proper name on a work's title page, the sign that Lejeune finds to satisfy his inquiries, offers no such indication in this case.⁷ Rather, that sign resides in the distinctive quality of the relations of the characters in the novel to each other, to the action, and to the various discourses invoked to comment upon their actions. If the novel becomes self-referential in a way that the fictionality of the text would seem to deny, it does so, not by virtue of Eliot's creation of an autobiographical figure named Maggie Tulliver, but by virtue of that character's placement within the autobiographical structures of her fictional context.

One central component in such a structure is the figure of the double, a figure that finds its best-recognized examples in the novels of Charles Dickens, particularly in the relation of characters like Pip and Orlick or David Copperfield and Uriah Heep. Uriah Heep stands in for David to represent the sexual ambitions on Agnes that David himself cannot acknowledge; together the two characters depict the conflict between sexual desires and sexual idealism that characterized Dickens's experience of women. A similar case can be made for the relation of Lucy Snowe and Paulina Home in Charlotte Brontë's Villette. According to Freud and his disciple Otto Rank, the presence of such “doubles” clearly reflects the author's death-wish,⁸ but that conclusion depends on viewing an author's work as a simple reflection of his or her identity, an identity that should, in conditions of health, strive to be whole and independent; any hint of fragmentation or dispersal of self-concept is, according to such assumptions, both pathological and dangerous. A poststructuralist theory like Jacques Lacan's concept of the mirror stage suggests otherwise: identity, if it is to be apprehended at all, must appear already alienated from its source.⁹ Doubled characters function in relation to each other as the infant and the image in the mirror at the mirror stage. According to Lacan, the child beholds a powerful and integral identity that both is and is not his or her own. It is not simply that David Copperfield's urges are reflected in those of Uriah Heep: they could not be perceived by David at all if they were only his own. Without the mirror that Uriah provides, David could not acknowledge, even covertly, his feelings for Agnes. His identity is never single, independent, and whole; because it is defined by its autobiographical context, it is necessarily fragmented, dependent, and dispersed.

Such claims, so clearly the result of recent theoretical explorations, are inaugurated in Romantic theory and practice. Sheila M. Kearns has persuasively argued that for Coleridge the autobiographical process is firmly based in the nature of consciousness and language. Self-consciousness, as Coleridge asserts in his Logic, is “a subject which becomes a subject in and by the very act of making itself its own object.” In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge's definition of self-consciousness points even more specifically to autobiography: the “perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and subject, which presupposes each other, and can exist only as antithesis.” Consciousness involves a doubling in which mind is both the power to perceive and the phenomenon being perceived.¹⁰ Without the “antithesis” in the bifurcation of consciousness into the subject and object that “presuppose” each other, there is no “one and the same power” of consciousness. Self-duplication is precisely the term that describes the aim of autobiography; by qualifying that term with the adjective perpetual, Coleridge points to the continuous and continuously repetitive structure of autobiography, a structure in which one element reflects another and another until the subject has become “its own object.”

De Quincey, in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, elucidates the mechanism involved in this process. Describing the most frightening of his opium visions, he speaks of the terrifying power of the mind to “mak[e] itself … objective and the sentient organ project itself as its own subject.”¹¹ To illustrate that process more vividly, De Quincey creates an image of his opium visions by depicting a composite “imaginary prison” drawn by the artist Piranesi, a “vast Gothic hall” complete with “all sorts of engines and machinery.” Situated in this oppressive architecture and “groping” up a staircase is “Piranesi himself.” De Quincey asks his reader to scan the drawing that he is describing: “Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But … behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived. … Again elevate your eye, … and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours … —With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams” (106). In describing an “endless growth and self-reproduction,” De Quincey, of course, refers to the power that the images in his dreams have to proliferate endlessly, but his obsessive evocation of the repeated images of the artist Piranesi within his own engraving provides a telling figure of what Coleridge would call the “perpetual self-duplication” inherent in consciousness and particularly apparent in autobiography. In De Quincey's view, Piranesi is as much his own subject as his carceri are, but in Coleridge's terms, the images in the carceri constitute the self-consciousness of the artist who creates them. Just as De Quincey projects multiple images of Piranesi into the picture that Piranesi draws, De Quincey appears in various guises in his account of his past experience, specifically in the figures of the abandoned child and the “lost Pariah woman” (139) of his wretched months in London.

Among George Eliot's contemporaries, even thinkers with radically opposed philosophical orientations offer similar theories that point to the relation between perception and autobiography. In one passage of commentary in The Mill on the Floss, the narrator refers facetiously to “follow[ing] great authorities, and call[ing] the mind a sheet of white paper or a mirror” (123) as if those two metaphors could imply only diametrically opposed ideas, but in fact the “great authorities” of both schools during her own period defined consciousness in similarly illuminating ways. John Stuart Mill, who was heavily invested in the “white-paper” theory repudiated by Coleridge, makes much the same point as the sage of Highgate when he discusses the relativity of knowledge and the assimilative powers of perception. All acts of perception, for Mill, are based on recognitions of difference; as his protegé Alexander Bain put it, “all consciousness, all sensation, all knowledge must be of doubles.” Despite that fact, the mind, as if by nature, according to Mill, seeks to recognize similarities or, to use Mill's term, to create assimilations. Such assimilations, as I argue elsewhere, consistently inform Mill's practice as an autobiographical writer even in those critical essays that are less than ostensibly about himself.¹² Similarly, in The Essence of Christianity, the work that Marian Evans translated, Ludwig Feuerbach makes a point similar to Mill's when he discusses consciousness as the distinguishing characteristic of humankind. For Feuerbach, “consciousness consists in a being becoming objective to itself,” and the object that an individual perceives is “his manifested nature, his true objective ego.” The mirror is Feuerbach's figure for perception: “The other is my thou,—the relation being reciprocal,—my alter ego, man objective to me, the revelation of my own nature, the eye seeing itself.”¹³ In Feuerbach's thought, such a process of self-objectification and self-recognition is the source of morality and, as it is for Mill, the explanation of religion. In autobiography, it involves a particular structure of characterization.

Self-duplication, objectification, assimilation: all these terms point to the process of reciprocal constitution whereby certain characters in an autobiographical text “presuppose” and therefore define each other. An uncanny duplicative relation between characters is a “textual sign” of autobiography. The challenge that such a claim presents is clear: if this distinctive structure of characterization represents the author's personal experience, how does the autobiographical text function as discourse to evaluate that experience? To answer that question, the reader must try to understand the doubled characters of an autobiographical text from the perspective of the various discourses that the author calls upon to evaluate them. Citing the work of Michel Pêcheux, Felicity Nussbaum has argued that “‘meaning’” is produced “at the conjunctions of conflicting discourses.”¹⁴ In the case of The Mill on the Floss, the supposed conflicts between discourses function less to reveal the inconsistencies in an ideological formation than to constitute autobiography as itself a discourse to which the individual is subject.

The initial locus of such conflicts in The Mill on the Floss is, of course, Maggie Tulliver, but as the novel reaches its conclusion, they center ultimately and more importantly on the character of Philip Wakem. The duplicative structure of “self-reproduction,” to use De Quincey's term, explains the otherwise inexplicably awkward first chapter of the novel. The first words of the second chapter, Tulliver's crude statement of his educational ambitions for Tom, would provide both an effective and engaging opening. Instead, the novel opens with the narrator's reverie over the landscape around the mill so that George Eliot can establish the specular relation between the teller and the tale. The authorial function is embodied in the narrator, a narrator so physically present in the remembered scene of the story and in the present scene of its telling that the arms of the narrator's body rest on “the cold stone of the bridge” and “the arms of my chair.” The narrator, in turn, imagines a little girl; a structure of reflected and proliferating images is already being revealed. Eliot emphasizes the analogic relation of one character to another by placing them both in the same posture: the narrator states, “Now I can turn my eyes towards the mill again, and watch the unresting wheel sending out its diamond jets of water. That little girl is watching it too” (8). Maggie's introduction in the novel finds her in the same stance of rapt attention that the narrator assumes—and assumes so effectively, it turns out, that the narrator falls into a doze, just the kind of liminal state in which autobiographical “self-duplication” so often takes place.

As the action of The Mill unfolds, such issues are associated less with Maggie than with Philip, thus freeing Maggie for passive suffering as Philip takes on the narrator's initial stance of inactive spectatorship. Eliot signals this moment of transition when in the first scene in the Red Deeps, the novel seems to begin again and begin anew. Just as in the first chapter of Book I, the narrator and Maggie watch the mill wheel, in the first chapter of Book V, the narrator watches Maggie as she walks in the Red Deeps and then reveals that Philip has been watching her as well. Just as the narrator has described Maggie's presence in this wooded recess, using the present tense to emphasize that this is a verbal painting (“You may see her now, as she walks down the favourite turning, and enters the Deeps by a narrow path through a group of Scotch firs” [263]), Philip chooses to paint a portrait of Maggie in the same location. His role as the narrator's second self is emphasized both when he creates pictorial images of Maggie and when he voices attitudes about her plight that echo the narrator's.¹⁵ Yet Philip has a more important role to play as Maggie's second self. Numbers of readers have pointed to the duplicative relation between Maggie and Philip without having given it that label.¹⁶ Philip enters the novel to become the voice of rebellion and desire once Maggie herself embraces submission and denial. Philip personifies Maggie's longing for the world of books, music, and art. When they meet in the Red Deeps, he simply represents the activity and survival of that part of herself that she has attempted, unsuccessfully, to annihilate. “You are not resigned; you are only trying to stupefy yourself” (288), he tells Maggie.

Philip in the course of the novel, however, becomes much more than even Maggie's or the narrator's second self. In his ambitions and in his incapacities, Philip is less the source of a moral lesson than a figure on which culture inscribes the issues associated with its own self-interest. If, as Michel Foucault argues, the “incitement to discourse” in modern experience, the compulsion to confess, produces only those supposedly unique accounts of personal experience conformable to institutional and social requirements,¹⁷ then Eliot's confession in the creation of Philip Wakem reveals her submission to the relatively marginalized status of art and the artist in the Victorian period. In turn, the novel demonstrates the extent to which autobiographies masquerade as accounts of more or less triumphant individualization when, in fact, they often function to perpetuate the larger social goals that can be achieved only if they are disguised.

By the time that Maggie is seventeen, all the traits of the would-be artist, all the rebellion and imaginative storytelling, have been drained out of her and have become embodied in Philip. As she tells him in one of their conversations in the Red Deeps, she has no desire to become Mme. de Staël's Corinne, the woman who is a great poet as well as unhappy lover. As a child, Maggie has tried to entertain her brother and the miller Luke with her fanciful tales, but when she reaches the scenes in the Red Deeps, Philip tells stories to her, and she listens. Philip plays the role that might have been reserved for Maggie so that Eliot can draw a portrait of the artist as cripple, a portrait whose lineaments reveal the crippling limitations of art in a money-getting society. Even more importantly, Philip is George Eliot's portrait of the artist as that picture would be drawn, not by the successful professional artist like herself, but by the Dodsons and Tullivers, the Evanses and the Pearsons of the world.

In her depiction of the provincial respectability of figures like the businessman Mr. Deane, Eliot makes clear her understanding of a world that values the practicality and concrete accomplishments for which the English were famous. In depicting Philip, she reveals the prejudices of such figures. Even a writer like Thomas Carlyle belittles art in his support of the solidity of industrial invention and manufacture: as he puts it in Past and Present (1843), “Great honour to him whose Epic is a melodious hexameter Iliad … But still greater honour, if his Epic be a mighty Empire.” “Thy Epic,” says Carlyle when he addresses “Mr. Bull,” is “written on huge characters on the face of this Planet,—sea-moles, cotton-trades, railways, fleets and cities, Indian Empires, Americas, New-Hollands; legible throughout the Solar System!” In less grandiloquent terms, Mill makes the same point when he categorizes “productive” and “unproductive labourers” in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), the productive being those who make the “community richer in material products”: in this scheme, the work of the artist, like that of the opera singer or the clergyman, falls under the category of the “unproductive” because it yields only “immediate enjoyment.”¹⁸ Like Carlyle's diatribe and Mill's categories, Eliot's novel presents the figure of Philip Wakem as an irrelevant excrescence in a world of getting and spending.

The proof of this point, as of much else that can be said of Philip's role, inheres in the characteristics that Eliot gives him that are extraneous to the plot, wholly gratuitous in relation to the demands of Maggie's story. Philip's salient feature is his deformity, yet there is no need of such a trait to explain Tom's aversion to the friendship of Maggie and Philip. The fact that Philip is Wakem's son creates a hostility between the families as great as that separating the Montagues and Capulets. Such hostility is barrier enough between Maggie and Philip. Moreover, Philip need be only less physically vital than Stephen Guest to play a younger Casaubon to Stephen's Sir James Chettam. Like Latimer of The Lifted Veil, he is “morbid” because he has been “unfavourably exempted from ordinary conditions.” He is one of that category of “ugly and deformed people” who have, if not unusual virtues, at least unusual “desperation of hunger” (290-1). Yet Philip's nature as a physical exception, as an individual burdened with a deformity great enough to cause a response of aversion or disgust in those who see him, figures precisely the way in which “the world's wife” (431) and her mate conceive of the artist.

In no respect is this point more obvious than in Eliot's repeated identifications of Philip as a woman. Like Maggie, the overly “cute girlchild,” he is a “mistake of nature” (12). He is marginalized by his deformity as women are marginalized by their gender. Most of the major characters are given an opportunity to comment on Philip's womanish qualities. One of the first features that Tom notices in Philip is the “truly pitiable” girlish curl to his hair (142). When Tom wants to insult Philip, he refers to his twisted spine and his resulting disinclination for manly exercise: “You're no better than a girl” (152). When Maggie bends to kiss Philip in the Red Deeps, she sees him with Tom's eyes: she “stooped her tall head to kiss the pale face that was full of pleading, timid love—like a woman's” (296). Lucy and Mr. Deane address the salient issues of the case when they discuss Philip's ignorance of “business knowledge,” the result of his having been raised “like a girl” (370). Philip's exclusion from the world of practical affairs marks him as both an artist and a woman. “Kept aloof from all practical life as Philip had been, and by nature half feminine in sensitiveness, he had some of the woman's intolerant repulsion towards worldliness” (291).

More pertinent still to his identification as a woman is Philip's amateur status as an artist. In The Subjection of Women, Mill explains that only through one's professional status does one earn a livelihood and establish one's place in society. Women are excluded from such opportunities, Mill goes on to argue, and “women artists,” except those on the stage, are “all amateurs.” When Mill comments, “The vast superiority of professional persons over amateurs is a familiar fact,” he acknowledges the conventional view that marginalizes most “women artists.”¹⁹ Philip is the amateur artist and, therefore, the womanish artist. As he himself points out, he has been trained to “no profession”; he is financially dependent on his father, and without his father's blessing on their union, he can offer Maggie only “poverty as well as deformity” (373). Philip is, moreover, a dilettante. He “cares for” art, music, and poetry, and he uses a conventionally feminine image to convey his status as a dabbler, his lack of professional commitment to any particular art: “I flutter all ways, and fly in none” (287). Most significantly, the arts in which Philip excels, the arts with which he is identified, drawing and painting, are those he has taught himself: he draws, he tells Tom, by instinct; drawing is something “you can do … without learning” (142). Here Philip defines his abilities precisely as the Dodsons would: his is a capacity that requires no training and is worth exactly what it costs to nurture—nothing. George Eliot emphasizes the womanish qualities of Philip's gifts by having him stress his incapacities. As Philip tells Maggie, “I strive and strive, but can't produce what I want” (266). By contrast, Maggie tells Tom, “You are a man, Tom, and have power, and can do something in the world” (305). Women and artists have no power, they can do nothing. Like Carlyle's Teufelsdröckh in Sartor Resartus, Philip inhabits his high ivory tower of a studio, less because he has chosen isolation from the fever and the fret of common life, than because he is helplessly excluded from it. He is, like the wounded Philoctetes whose story he tells, cast off from the world. Mr. Deane tells Tom, “The world isn't made of pen, ink, and paper, and if you're to get on in the world, young man, you must know what the world's made of” (202). Maggie contrasts the world “in books” and “the world outside … books” (205); clearly, she and Philip are condemned to live in the former because they have no status in the latter.

If Philip represents the marginalized role of the artist in a commercial era, then he functions, I think, to turn the autobiographical mirror of The Mill toward its creator in a way that reflects, not her highest ambitions for her art, but the contemporary suspicion of it. Indeed, the gendered attributes that George Eliot fixes upon him explain her earlier choice of a male pseudonym as she entered on a career of writing; the only way to reject the association of writing with womanly weaknesses and incapacities was to reject a woman's name.²⁰ Yet Philip's deformity and lack of professionalism seem to ratify rather than question contemporary prejudices against the valueless, light-weight world of artistic butterflies. Philip is, of course, a young provincial, perhaps a genuine artist in the making, more likely not. But that is precisely the point. Instead of embodying her own ambitions in a character who at least has the potential for a future success equal to her own, Eliot chooses a self-reflecting image of doubt and debility. Eliot's letters are filled with numbingly repetitive statements of her uncertainty about her capacity to do the work she had cut out for herself. The portrait of the artist that she draws in Philip reveals the cultural, not personal, sources of that doubt. Despite all the narrator's attempts to elicit sympathy for Philip by contrasting his virtues to Tom's rigidity and even callous unconcern, Eliot confesses her own lack of faith in her chosen work by creating Philip as the twisted mirror of her early experience and early ambitions.

Beyond his function in this regard, however, Philip has other roles to play within the “world in books” constituted by The Mill on the Floss, and to understand them one must look at the extent to which Philip himself, even more than his physical incapacities, is not required by the action of the novel. Like his deformity, his attachment to Maggie is, in simple terms of the plot, quite superfluous. The action of the last volume of the novel depends on a number of conventional love triangles, but in that volume, Eliot has so thoroughly complicated the relations of the younger characters that Philip is not needed to stand as third in the triangles that erect barriers between Maggie and Stephen. Lucy Deane performs that role more than adequately. Maggie's instinctive physical shrinking from Philip seems, as well, to suggest that he poses no real opposition to Stephen's wishes, although Maggie's loyalty to Lucy certainly does. The narrator and a character like the lawyer Wakem may frequently emphasize the accidental nature of Philip's condition—he was not born a hunchback—but Philip considers himself unmarriageable. Not surprisingly, given the extent of his identification as a woman, he claims that the “things that other men have … will always be denied me” (266). George Eliot seems to stress the superfluity of Philip's presence in the final action of the novel by including an accident that incapacitates Wakem's bastard son Jetsome and gives the lawyer a sufficient reason to sell the mill to Deane's company after Philip has convinced him to do so. That coincidence suggests that Philip's meddling, though more successful than Mrs. Tulliver's earlier intervention with the lawyer, is no more instrumental than hers in determining that events will issue in the desired outcome.

Yet Philip's role at the end of the novel is crucial for another reason: just as Eliot's earlier treatment of him capitulates to contemporary prejudices about the effete uselessness of artistic labor, Philip's role in the action provides an autobiographical commentary on her own experience, one that undercuts the stand of self-righteous moral scrupulosity with which she invariably defended her life with George Henry Lewes. As she wrote to her brother Isaac's lawyer in 1857, “Our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond” (Letters 2:349). To understand Philip's relation to this issue, the reader needs to see how Philip functions in the more unconventional triangulated structures by which Eliot defines the relations of her characters throughout the novel.

Both the action and characterization in The Mill on the Floss are dominated by repetition and recurrence: flood waters have risen in the past, and they can be expected to rise again in the future. In fact, the flood comes at the end of the novel to rescue Maggie from the repetitive patterns that seem to define her experience. “Am I to struggle and fall and repent again?” she asks as she kneels in prayer and feels the cold water at her feet (453). Similarly, the narrator explains that Tulliver's thoughts, after his failure and bankruptcy, like those of other “uncultured minds, confined to a narrow range of personal experience,” involve “the same words, the same scenes [that] are revolved over and over again.” In the end, such individuals become no more than “machines set to a recurrent series of movements” (244-5). The Mill on the Floss is a similar narrative machine. Perhaps, in this sense, the novel is well named despite the fact that its mill is located, not on the Floss, but on the Ripple. Eliot structures the action on one set of relations between her characters, and that relation obtains again and again with different characters in the same roles. The effect is the relentless movement characteristic of a mill wheel—or a juggernaut.

Instead of the love triangles that dominate the action of the third volume, the first two volumes turn on what might be called juridical triangles: one character is tried and convicted on the charges assumed to be true by another character, and a third, a Portia-like judge, declares that clemency is in order. One character is exposed to the severe condemnation of another—the words severity and blame occur in the novel with almost obsessive frequency—and a third character, usually echoed by the narrator, offers sympathy and understanding to the first. This pattern holds true throughout the childhood sections of The Mill when Maggie is blamed, Tom and Mrs. Tulliver are severe, and Mr. Tulliver affectionately forgiving. When Tom goes to school and is subjected to the rigor of Mr. Stelling's expectations, the boy becomes “more like a girl than he had ever been in his life before” (124); the Tullivers' odd decision to allow Maggie to visit him puts her in a position to play the role of the comforter. When Mr. Tulliver falls ill and is reduced to the helplessness of a “baby … returned to the nurse's lap” (175), he is blamed for his incompetence by both Mrs. Tulliver and the Dodson clan, but Maggie again arrives to comfort the father now so in need of her ministrations. Scenes in which Maggie serves as the judge who is endowed with clearly superior insight into the matter at hand alternate with scenes in which she is exposed to the jury's unquestioning condemnation. When Philip is exposed to Tom's insults after he discovers the meetings of Maggie and Philip in the Red Deeps, Maggie again plays the sympathetic role, though she is reduced to motionless spectatorship. Although Bulwer-Lytton may not have been the only reader to have objected to Maggie's role in this scene (Letters 8:262), her presence is explained by Eliot's need to reestablish at each juncture in the plot the juridical triangle that structures the action.

Maggie's movement from role of judged to that of judge is significant because it allows her to escape the demeaning position of guilty defendant and play the nobler, more satisfying part of nurturing comforter. Such occasions tend to enhance the reader's trust in the reliability of Maggie's sometimes temporarily wayward judgment. Despite setbacks—Tom, for instance, is severe on Maggie's public display of the family's humiliation—Maggie's right to her role as superior judge seems more and more assured until the end of the novel. In each case, Maggie's compassionate response is seconded by the narrator's claims to the understanding and sympathy that have their source in “a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wider fellow-feeling with all that is human” (438). In such comments, Eliot invokes both the religious language with which Christians celebrate the values of charity and the aesthetic language with which the Romantics exalt the sympathetic imagination. In the end, however, such a glorification of the moral values for which Maggie seems to stand is thoroughly undercut by a capitulation to societal interests, a capitulation in which Philip is the key figure.

At the end of the novel, the love triangles have intervened to complicate the action and to increase the number of characters involved in the juridical triangles. Maggie errs and is convicted of blameworthy behavior by the jury of the “world's wife.” Maggie is subjected, in particular, to the severity of Tom's disgust. And Lucy, Mrs. Tulliver, Dr. Kenn, and Mrs. Glegg, along with Philip, offer the tolerant understanding and acceptance otherwise denied Maggie. It is at this point, I think, that Philip's role and its autobiographical implications become most significant. If his presence is not needed to incite the final crisis in the action, he does play a crucial role in developing the understanding of that crisis and the moral attitudes that Eliot encourages her readers to adopt toward it.

In some ways, Philip is no different from those other characters who either stand by Maggie or try to ease her suffering. Lucy's speech, “Maggie, dear, be comforted” (448), is the essential import of Mrs. Tulliver's loyalty, Mrs. Glegg's imperviousness to the “world's wife,” and Dr. Keen's albeit temporary support. Yet Philip's relation to Maggie does differ from those of such other characters: she has hurt him more directly because she has betrayed the love that she has declared to him. At the end of the novel, even Lucy, to whom Maggie's actions have done great harm, plans to go with Stephen Guest's sisters to the coast where, perhaps, the narrator hints, she will meet Stephen himself. Unlike Lucy, Philip has lost everything. In his letter to Maggie, he fully recognizes the value of what he has lost, “the promise of another self that would lift my aching affection into the divine rapture of an ever-springing, ever-satisfied want,” but he refuses to blame Maggie. Instead, his letter opens, “Maggie,—I believe in you.” Philip denounces Stephen, of course, but he more thoroughly denounces his own “selfish passion.” Then, in recounting his own past experience of an act of renunciation in a way that recalls the voice of Thomas à Kempis, he declares that he has transcended “selfish desire” and “egoism” and now feels for Maggie only a “strong sympathy,” that “enlarged life which grows and grows by appropriating the life of others” (440-3). His letter recounts the same act of self-annihilation that Maggie longs for just before the flood reaches her: her temptation to join Stephen is overcome by “fountains of self-renouncing pity and affection, of faithfulness and resolve,” and she sets aside her longing for “the easy delicious leaning on [Stephen's] loving strength” (452). Similarly, Philip makes no claims on Maggie; he describes himself as “yours—not with selfish wishes, but with a devotion that excludes such wishes” (443).

Philip's renunciation of personal and selfish desires is, of course, the high point of the moral evolution that the narrator has championed throughout the novel. The impulse to counter blame with forgiveness and to assuage severity with sympathy, if not always with the effective rescue figured forth by St. Oggs and his boat, has its source in an ideal of selfless giving, of transcended desires. In the novel, that ideal is matched within the characters by an equally strong impulse to aggression and revenge once one's desires are thwarted.²¹ Yet Philip's move toward selfless sympathy is all the more significant because he has earlier been so certain of the justice of his own desires. Again, his characterization, initially structured by its relation to Maggie's, has its final meaning in the self-duplicating structure that allows him to become the mirror of his creator's dilemmas. Until he writes his letter to Maggie, he is the character who has taken Marian Evans's side in the conflict that defined her adult experience. In the contest between love and duty, Philip has always taken his side, as Marian Evans did, with love, not duty. Twice Philip tells Maggie that his bond to his father—a bond that is like his connection to his own “aching limb”—will never force him to give up Maggie. In a contest between his father and the woman he loves, Maggie will win. If his father's “wish” in the matter is not “right,” as Maggie recognizes that Tom's is not (265), Philip would not yield. Nor did Marian Evans: she chose Lewes, left England with him, and returned to face the consequences of her actions.

At this point in the novel, Maggie's role could easily correspond to that of George Henry Lewes, and Philip's could recapitulate that of Marian Evans. According to the double standard of Victorian sexual ethics, Maggie's reputation as damaged goods, based on the presumably physical nature of her relation to Stephen, is a figure for precisely the opprobrium that accrued to Lewes when he broke his ties to his wife, Agnes Lewes. As Marian Evans Lewes explained to John Chapman in 1854, “The phrase ‘run away’ as applied to me is simply amusing—I wonder what I had to run away from. But as applied to Mr. Lewes it is more serious” (Letters 8:124). Philip is, moreover, as he announces in his letter to Maggie, the “artist,” the character who embodies all the disadvantages of that marginal position but who, instead of offering Maggie the unconventional recourse of the unconventional marriage that his marginality might seem to justify, offers her only his “strong sympathy.” Like Marian Evans, Philip has nothing to run away from. When she explained her actions to Charles Bray, she claimed that none of her “friends and acquaintances” would have their “digestion” disordered by her actions since they had cared so little for her “while she lived in privacy and loneliness.” Lewes was “worthy of the sacrifice I have incurred, and my only anxiety is that he should be rightly judged” (Letters 8:128, 125). What Marian Evans did in agreeing to establish an illicit conjugal bond with someone no one else would have, Philip cannot even imagine doing. In fact, he behaves as properly as the “world's wife” could ask.

Just, then, as Eliot capitulates to contemporary prejudices in creating Philip as the portrait of the artist as cripple, she capitulates to the narrow morality of the Dodsons and the Pearsons by allowing Philip to do so. By the end of the novel, George Eliot had created a situation in which she could relive the past and remake the choices that she had already made: in the person of Maggie, she could choose Isaac Evans or Lewes and be justified in doing so. In the person of Philip, she could reject as selfishly immoral the desires that had moved her to accept Lewes. By allowing Maggie to refuse to sacrifice her ties with the past and her family despite the strength of her desires, George Eliot created what she could not be, a noble, self-sacrificing character. By creating Philip as a further self-replication, she could allow one part of herself to ratify the decisions that the other part could not make. One function of the final flood that ends Maggie's suffering may be to draw attention, Eliot's and her reader's, away from how thoroughly Eliot has undercut and compromised her public defenses of her relation to Lewes. The “world's wife” has won this contest, not only as it pertains to the fictional character Philip, but to the autobiographical impulses of his creator.

Not incidentally, the writing of The Mill had advanced as a number of events revived memories of the sacrifices Eliot had made and renewed fears that her past choices would damage her reputation as a writer.²² In February of 1859, Marian Lewes heard for the first time in almost two years from her sister Chrissey Clarke; their contact had been cut off by Isaac Evans's insistence that his erring sister be treated as the pariah she was. The letter from Chrissey “has ploughed up my heart,” Marian Lewes said (Letters 3:23). Less than a month later, Chrissey died of consumption. If George Eliot was not Philoctetes set on an island because of his wound, Marian Evans must have felt at times as effectively excluded from her family circle. Six weeks later, Eliot resumed work on her novel, only to face problems that brought together the questions of respectability and professional success. John Blackwood, to whose editorial “scruples and alarms” (Letters 2:348) Eliot had become accustomed, was clearly concerned that revealing his prize author's identity would make her novels unmarketable. He hurt her growing professional pride by refusing to put her pseudonym on The Lifted Veil when it appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, and he was loath to enter the lists on her side to defend her against Joseph Liggins's silly claims that he was the author of Adam Bede. In June of 1859, Eliot and Lewes determined not to maintain her anonymity any longer, partially, it seems, because they did not want to appear to be motivated by “fear of the effect of the author's name” on public opinion (Letters 3:106). Yet the concatenation of Eliot's private decisions and her public ambitions continued to create painful situations. By February of 1860, when she was well into the writing of the final volume of The Mill, Eliot was commenting to William Blackwood, “Mudie seems to be beginning a small warfare against us. … There had need be some authors and publishers strong enough to resist his tyranny.” Despite such fighting words, Eliot could hardly ignore that her livelihood and, to some extent, that of Lewes and Lewes's sons, depended on Mudie's not winning a war against an author whose personal life identified her as a “polluted source” of fiction (Letters 3:262, 209n). The pressures on Eliot to conform to her society's values could not have been greater.

Surprisingly, George Eliot chose to treat in the novel published after the relatively successful, pseudonymous Adam Bede the very experience that threatened her modest, but promising relation to the Victorian reading public. Michel Foucault's comments on confession as a “ritual of discourse” are pertinent here. Confession may seem to be a self-motivated act whose goal is self-liberation, but it is otherwise: “The confession is a ritual of discourse … that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or the virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated.”²³ Eliot's decision to write a novel that so openly questions her society's moral standards at just this delicate point in her career has often been cited as proof of her artistic integrity and her liberation from the constraints of society's moral strictures. Yet if The Mill on the Floss is construed as a confession that Eliot offered up to her readers, its personal function is obvious: the guilt that even her anonymity created would require a public act of contrition. Because Eliot's earlier actions had been so openly resistant, her autobiographical novel became even more forcefully, though covertly submissive. In writing The Mill, in creating the self-duplicating images of herself in Maggie and in Philip, George Eliot holds up the glass of public opinion and assents to its verdict against her own unconventional choices. Despite the compassion embodied in its narrator, the novel plays the role of the jury from whose verdict there is no appeal.

In 1869 Emily Davies recorded the substance of a conversation she had had with “Mrs. Lewes.” After the talk turned to The Mill on the Floss, a novel in which, its author explained, “everything is softened, as compared with real life,” Eliot shifted the subject to the more general, but related topic of autobiography: “Her own experience she said was worse. It was impossible for her to write an autobiography, but she wished that somebody else could do it, it might be useful—or, that she could do it herself. She could do it better than any one else, because she could do it impartially, judging herself, and showing how wrong she was” (Letters 8:465). According to Davies, Eliot was referring specifically to the “holy war” she waged with her father over her unconventional religious views, but as she had said over a year earlier, “Looking back on my past, it seems to me so full of errors and failures” (Letters 4:437). Her union with Lewes was never one of the failures that she openly acknowledged. Yet The Mill on the Floss, by functioning as the impartial source of self-judgment that Eliot thought she could have created if she had written an autobiography, confesses even that fault and accepts society's judgments against her past. As Eliot said of the later novel Romola, her fictions were “ideal—I feel it acutely in the reproof of my own soul is constantly getting from the image it has made. My own books scourge me” (Letters 4:103-4). As an act of autobiographical self-abasement, The Mill on the Floss reveals its creator's guilt, a guilt wholly in line with society's needs to uphold the integrity of marital bonds. The impulse toward self-punishment that surfaces with the rising of the flood at the end of the novel has been characteristic of its autobiographical impulses all along.

Such a conclusion is not, of course, the self-proclaimed lesson of the action as George Eliot presents it. Indeed, the point of presenting this reading of The Mill on the Floss is to demonstrate the lengths to which critical analysis must go to reveal how an autobiographical text disguises its implication in the various discourses whose power it would seem to deny. The autobiographical discourse of The Mill on the Floss functions precisely as the “world's wife” would desire, to erase aberrant desires or, failing that outcome, to overwhelm them with guilt. The voices of Thomas à Kempis and Wordsworth, the lessons of renunciation and of loving attachment to the past, are invoked precisely to conceal the extent to which the novel answers to the voice of Mrs. Grundy. Analysis of Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua and Mill's Autobiography would lead, I think, to similar conclusions: each author's attempt to portray an identity that has emerged from a definition in terms of the external pressures exerted on it simply confirms the strength of such pressures. Although it is neither necessary nor possible to divorce autobiography from its traditional description as a referential art, such referentiality does not involve a simple process in which the main character reflects the author's experience. Rather, the autobiographical text sets out structures of relations—between characters, between actions, and between conflicting discourses—and all these relations, if seen in relation to each other, represent the image of the author as it is called forth by the discourses that constitute it as subject. In effect, then, The Mill on the Floss turns the mirror against the wall as all autobiographies do: they reflect, not an inviolate private self, but a view of the subject as it is mirrored in the language and values of its historical situation.

Notes

1. The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight, Clarendon Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 262. Quotations from this edition will be cited in the text.

2. For a full and cogent treatment of the differences between poststructuralist theories of the subject and traditional values of autobiography, see Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989), Chapter 1.

3. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954-78), 3:41; hereinafter cited in the text. As a representation of George Eliot's concerns about her role as a novelist, The Lifted Veil is, perhaps, as centrally autobiographical as The Mill. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 445-77.

4. Barbara Hardy, Particularities: Readings in George Eliot (Athens, Ohio: Ohio Univ. Press, 1982), p. 58. Gordon S. Haight, ed., The Mill on the Floss (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. xxiii. For a complete summary of the autobiographical material treated in the novel, see Juliet McLaughlan, “The Mill on the Floss: Fiction or Autobiography?” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 27 (1988): 127-39; for an extended treatment of the novel as a “new kind of autobiographical novel,” see Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New York: Knopf, 1975), pp. 421-9.

5. Jerome H. Buckley, “George Eliot's Double Life: The Mill on the Floss as Bildungsroman,” in From Smollett to Jane Austen, ed. Samuel I. Mintz (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1981), pp. 213, 215-17.

6. John Ruskin, Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880); rpt. David Carroll, ed., George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), p. 166.

7. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary, Theory and History of Literature 52 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 4, 20. In a later essay, Lejeune suggests that the “truth” of autobiography should be located less in its content and style than in its structure; by structure, Lejeune means principally an innovative handling of sequence that releases the writer from the constraints of a chronology based on the order of events in the life as it has been lived, but his emphasis on structure could be as profitably applied to the structure of characterization and action in both autobiographies and autobiographical novels (“The Order of Narrative in Sartre's Les Mots,” p. 71).

8. Julian Moynahan, “The Hero's Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations,” Essays in Criticism 10 (1960): 60-79. Mark Spilka treated the relation between David and Uriah as a case of “projected feelings” in Dickens and Kafka: A Mutual Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1963) p. 176, but he concludes that Uriah's “relation to David's inner life seems faint” (p. 194). For a discussion of Lucy Snowe, see my “The Face in the Mirror: Villette and the Conventions of Autobiography,” ELH 46 (1979): 262-89. For a Freudian reading of the double, see Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, ed. and trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1971).

9. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 1-7.

10. For this discussion of Coleridge, I am indebted to Sheila M. Kearns, “Autobiography Names Itself,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 2 (1986-87): 6-13. For the relevant passages from Coleridge, see Logic, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson, Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), p. 84; Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Collected Works (1983), 1:273. Molly Rothenberg also offered indispensable insights into these passages and the issues treated in this essay.

11. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), ed. Alethea Hayter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 107. Subsequent references are to this edition.

12. Alexander Bain, notes to James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, ed. John Stuart Mill (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), 2:12n. John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism, in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J. M. Robson, Collected Works, vol. 10 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 272. For a discussion of Mill's autobiographical modes of assimilation, see the final two chapters of my “John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character,” forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.

13. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1957), pp. 82, 6, 5, 158.

14. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, p. 36.

15. See, for instance, Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 55. For Philip's “original” in the artist d'Albert-Durade, with whom Marian Evans stayed in Geneva in 1849-50, see Hugh Witemeyer, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 14; Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford, 1968), p. 79.

16. H. M. Daleski, The Divided Heroine (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984), p. 54: Philip is “himself a Maggie … with all the animality tamed.” Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, p. 493: Philip is Maggie's “own stunted nature.” Two articles treat Philip as central to an interpretation of The Mill without discussing his autobiographical relevance: Barbara Guth, “Philip: The Tragedy of The Mill on the Floss,” Studies in the Novel 15 (1983): 356-63; John Levay, “Maggie as Muse: The Maggie-Philip Relationship in The Mill on the Floss,” English Studies in Canada 9 (1983): 69-79. Levay comments that Philip is “like Maggie” (p. 71), and Guth notes, “Philip is a male counterpart of Maggie” (p. 359).

17. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), Part 2, Chapter 1.

18. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. Richard D. Altick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 162. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed. J. M. Robson, Collected Works (1965), 2:50.

19. J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, in Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. J. M. Robson, Collected Works, vol. 21 (1984), p. 317.

20. For proof of Marian Evans's scorn for “scribbling women,” one need look no farther than her 1856 essay “Silly Women by Lady Novelists”: in opposition to the apparently endless varieties of “silly novels,” the writer can think of only an unspecified “cluster of great names” to suggest that women can write well (The Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963], p. 324). For a persuasive discussion of the identification of women with writing in the Victorian period, see Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), Chapter 4.

21. The inscription of Tulliver's curse on Wakem in the family Bible is only the most obvious instance of a desire to hurt that, as Nina Auerbach has pointed out, is as much Maggie's as it is any other character's (“The Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie Tulliver,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30 [1972]: 150-71). Nor are the two impulses easily distinguished from each other. When Maggie thinks that her family's misfortunes offer a “larger room for her love to flow in” (226) than their times of prosperity and concord, she is giving way to the desire that others should feel pain so that she will have an opportunity to assuage it. See also Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, Chapter 14.

22. For an insightful treatment of the relation between the “secrets” of Eliot's public and private lives, see Alexander Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), Chapter 6.

23. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1: 61-62. Foucault later explains that the ritual of confession has “spread” since the Reformation and taken the various forms of “interrogations, consultations, autobiographical narratives, letters” (1: 63).