Like Roxana–and decidedly unlike Emma–The Mill on the Floss ends very sadly. Why? Obviously there is a symbolic relationship between the Flood and the water imagery the “runs” all the way through the novel and which we saw working very strongly in Ruskin too. But why end the novel so tragically? What might this final image tell us about the relationship between fiction and economics? Is there, moreover, a correlation between the way Eliot ends her novel and her take on Maggie’s sexuality, education, and gender?
2 thoughts on “The Ending…”
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Maggie is an independent thinker, creative, curious, and rebellious throughout the majority of the novel. Whether intentionally, or unintentionally, Maggie’s cognitive tendencies highlight alternative perspectives on gender stereotypes, class/social expectations, paradigms of intelligence and beauty, etc. Maggie’s “spirited-ness” creates tensions in the novel that highlight the flaws in these entrenched ways of thinking, doing, and being that pervade the lives of the other residents of St. Oggs. However, she seems limited in her capacity to evoke change due to these same ideologies that she is consistently running up against.
Maggie’s role as a social agitator is stilted when she falls in “love” with Stephen. Her focus shifts to love, marriage, and questions of morality and duty. It seems to me that Maggie’s role as heroine is compromised through her distraction. Her potential to be an agent of change is seemingly sidetracked by this love narrative. Her death, I think, is Elliot’s way of illustrating that for new economic and social systems to move forward in a positive manner and for us to participate successfully within them will require new ways of thinking. If we stop pushing towards this (even for a second) we will lose momentum and get swallowed up in the “tide” of tradition.
It would seem that the individual does not have the power to reverse or divert the flow of the system (or alter his or her place within the system). I think this points to the fact that economic systems have a way of engulfing us and forcing us (perhaps luring us) into conformity. Living outside of the economic system or trying to change its trajectory is a fruitless and, ultimately, destructive pursuit. Perhaps Elliot’s novel could be said to convey this bleak truth.
Any thoughts? (Agreements or Disagreements?)
I agree with everything Janine said above, and would add that the point Kreisel makes in “Superfluity and Suction”, that Maggie’s attempted repression of her ‘spiritedness’ points towards the problem of hoarding/saving in the marketplace leads to the flood as an image of the expulsion of these tendencies. Thus, her subversion of normative perspectives that Janine pointed to above also occurs within Maggie’s self, causing the repression that leads to the tragic conclusion of the novel.
I also think that our discussion in class on Tuesday about the rejection of cultural capital and classical education in the novel is relevant here as well. If the flood can be read as an image of renewal, it could potentially symbolize a rejection of the idea of education as cultural capital. This idea is furthered by industrial machinery being the actual cause of Tom and Maggie’s death, not the flood itself.
The role industry takes in Maggie’s death might also highlight the difference between Tom’s financial/industrial plotline and Maggie’s sentimental plotline, which is often labelled by other characters (especially Tom) as ‘excessive’. If the flood can be read, as Kreisel alludes to, as the expulsion of Maggie’s excessive romanticism, then the ending of the novel points to the domination of industry over this mindset.