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The Mill on the Floss and Antigone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

David Moldstad
David Moldstad*
Affiliation:
College of Wooster Wooster, Ohio
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Abstract

The Mill on the Floss, like Sophocles' Antigone, illustrates George Eliot's belief in the recurring conflict between the individual moral vision and social convention. The central problem in Antigone, she wrote, lay between “reverence for the gods” and “the duties of citizenship: two principles, both having their validity, are at war with each.” Whenever man's moral vision collides with social convention the opposition between Antigone and Creon is renewed. Her words seem applicable to the dominant conflict in The Mill. An honorable but unimaginative person, Tom Tulliver clashes with his sister Maggie when she refuses to abide by conventions which seem inhumane or hurtful to those she loves. As Antigone espouses a higher law by burying Polynices in defiance of Creon, so Maggie espouses a higher law in opposing the vengeance against Wakem. Although Tom and Maggie are both partly right in their quarrel over Maggie's secretly seeing Philip Wakem, Tom, like Creon, is foolishly overconfident in crediting his conventional honor, which is simply no measure of the case. The conflict between Maggie and her brother is further aggravated by the tendency of the practical-minded Tom to domineer over his imaginative and (to him) inconsistent sister.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 3 , May 1970 , pp. 527 - 531
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

Note 1 in page 527 The Mill on the Floss, ed. G. S. Haight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), p. 58. All subsequent references are to this edition.

Note 2 in page 527 See General Economic History, trans, from the German by F. H. Knight (New York: Greenberg, 1927), Ch. xxx, for a discussion of the rationalizing spirit of capitalistic economic man.

Note 3 in page 528 George Eliot's interest in Greek drama, dating from before her first fiction, lasted all her life. She was especially attached to Aeschylus and Sophocles. Vernon RendalPs “George Eliot and the Classics,” reprinted from Notes and Queries, cxcii (13 and 27 Dec. 1947), 544–546, 564–565, and cxciii (3 April, 26 June 1948), 148–149, 272–274, in A Century of George liliol Criticism, ed. G. S. Haight (Boston:Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965), pp. 215–226, describes Eliot as a “capable classical scholar.” Rendall quotes Jebb's letter of 1873 in which Jebb tells (not too clearly) of Eliot's explaining that Sophocles has influenced her “in the delineation of the great primitive emotions” (p. 215). Eliot began reading the Antigone in 1855 and the Ajax in 1856, Rendall writes, and he quotes her letter of 1857 where she speaks of rushing “on the slightest pretext to Sophocles,” and as being “excited about blind old Oedipus” (p. 221).

Note 4 in page 528 “The Antigone and its Moral,” The Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), p. 262. Further references to this essay are from this edition.

Note 5 in page 528 On 4 April 1861 George Eliot, accused of disdain for Tom, wrote to Blackwood, “The exhibition of the right on both sides [is] the very soul of my intention in the story.” See G. S. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), in, 397. Obviously the view she expresses here of the novel's central issue parallels the one she had found in A nligone five years earlier.

Note 6 in page 529 Better than any of her other novels, The Mill reflects what George Eliot sees as central to the conflict of Antigone. But the blind Bardo-Romola and the blind Oedipus-Antigone relations are similar, and the painter Piero di Cosimo compares Romola to Antigone, as Mrs. Barbara Hardy observes in The Novels of George Eliol (London: Athlone Press, 1963), p. 173. The Antigone is not mentioned in The Mill, but there are references to Oedipus Rex, the Ajax, and Philoctetes. See Rendall, pp. 216–217.

Note 7 in page 529 In Movement and Vision in George Eliot's Novels (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1959), Reva Stump points out (p. 117) that Tom, in turning Maggie away when she returned from Mudport, denied half his father's dying wish. Mr. Tulliver had once said that the river became angry when the mill changed hands. Miss Stump notes that the river rose not after young Jetsome took over the mill but after Tom did.

Note 8 in page 529 Antigone, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1954), i. 672, p. 182.