In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver’s unresolved childhood rage, which results from her sense that she is devalued by her family and society, is transformed into her adult misuse of sexual power in her relationships with Philip, Stephen, and Dr Kenn. Her creator, George Eliot, rationalises Maggie’s behaviour with men and even turns her into an idealised heroine in the last section of the book. Eliot’s apparent inability to see the aggression in her heroine’s actions seems to derive in part from the autobiographical nature of the novel and possibly reflects the patterns of her own relationships with men in her young adult life.

Narcissistic Rage in The Mill on the Floss

Contrasting Middlemarch with Wuthering Heights, Thomas C. Moser has remarked that "George Eliot requires no second guessing," for in her novels "everything is held up to the light"; novels which justify the critic's using depth psychology are "those in which unconscious creation plays a large part and in which sex is a central subject.'" Although in theory it may be difficult to distinguish between works in which "unconscious creation plays a large part" and those in which it does not, in practice it appears obvious that the insights of depth psychology must be applied, if at all, in a very different way to George Eliot than to Dickens or to Charlotte and Emily Bronti. For despite the demonstrable care the last three took with their work, their writings frequently give the impression of an intuitive rather than an intellectual handling of plot, imagery and symbol. By contrast, with Eliot we are constantly aware of the author as a strong presence, consciously shaping her fictive creations to illustrate beliefs previously arrived at through intellectual processes. So much is critical commonplace. Yet Eliot's novels, and in particular The Mill on the Floss, have attracted some psychological criticism. David Smith has attempted to demonstrate the extent to which Maggie and Tom Tulliver's attachment is incestuous,2 while Bernard J. Paris (modifying his earlier position as to the unity between Eliot's intentions and achievements) has discussed the conflicts in Maggie, and Eliot's uneven treatment of them, in terms of Karen Horney's concepts of aggressive and compliant character-trends.3 Laurence Lerner, without going so far as to judge Maggie "neurotic," as Paris does, finds the central conflict in The Mill on the Floss to be one between reason and impulse. According to Lerner, in repeating the imagery of being "borne along by the tide" in Maggie's union with her brother in death, Eliot the novelist opted artistically for impulse, however much Eliot the thinker was consciously choosing reason and restraint; for the reader sympathizes with Stephen Guest's plea against self-denial rather than with Maggie's willed suppression of her deepest feelings.4 Lerner also credits Eliot with having worked out "a good deal of what psycho-analysis has since discovered,"5 but this turns out to refer only to Eliot's sense of the existence of

Michael Steig

Papers

Anality in "The Mill on the Floss"