This is a deeply sad book, and that was all the spoiler I needed. I could see from page minus 20, somewhere in the introduction, that Maggie was (as the song says) born to lose. The details of how she lost, I thought and feared, would be impossible to take: after hurting me for five hundred pages, the book would kill me with its last ten.
I was wrong, in fact. The book's a tragedy, but it has a cozy, cheery ending for a tragedy. I felt better when the book was over. I forgot how good Victorians were at writing upbeat endings, even in their saddest stuff. I forgot, too, that there's a large mixture of dialect comedy in the book, along with excellent suspense, so Eliot knows how to keep her readers laughing and stay popular. She made a fortune off this book.
But let's look at some complaints that have been made. The heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is extremely bright -- and as a woman, she can't be sent to school by her rich but totally unintellectual country parents. Her much dumber brother is sent to school, hates school but ends up making good money, misunderstands and refuses to speak to his intelligent sister.
That is the theme of the book: how the brother hurts the sister because he is a practical man who doesn't understand or respect intelligence. The reader has her nose rubbed in this theme from the beginning to the end. At the beginning, nine-year-old Maggie absent-mindedly forgets all about the rabbits her thirteen-year-old brother asked her to look after while he was away. He asked another farmworker to look after them too, and the farmworker also forgot. The unreliable farmworker is (to the brother) just a loser employee, but Maggie he punishes for her absent-mindedness. He refuses to speak to her, and of course the reader is very close to being on the brother's side. The rabbits die. They don't get saved by luck or by some other guy. They die of starvation.
In other words, Eliot does not desert her theme or cover it with sugar. Intelligent girls can be absent-minded to a murderous degree, and no one thinks girls deserve an education in any case. A practical money-making man is obviously superior to a dreamy girl who deserves no education in the first place. Look: the girl kills rabbits! The boy gets practical things done! Maybe, reader, you'll agree that the girl would be better off dead.
That's how deep the hook is sunk to begin with, and the following narrative only sinks it deeper. When she grows up, Maggie commits herself to an intelligent hunchback, but then falls in lust with a handsome, shallow man who likes her looks. Maggie's love is wrong. She knows that with her head and heart, but her head and heart aren't all there is to her. She wants the guy. Obviously, and many readers agreed at the time the book was written, and still agree now, Maggie is no good. She's slutty. She would be better off never having been born. When her brother got mad at her about the rabbits, he forgave her because he was thirteen and because, among tough country people, dead rabbits don't register very heavily. But when he's an adult and she's a slut, he never speaks to her again, just like George Eliot's own brother never spoke to her again when she started living with a married man.
That is the theme of the book. The theme of the book is not that intelligent women are lovable because they're so smart and never act slutty because, at nineteen, their passions are totally under their intelligent control. Jane Austen's themes are a tiny little bit like that, because she doesn't mind always leading up to a happy marriage (and I underline _always_). Eliot wanted to make a slightly different point: you don't have to like us, but don't you have to let us live? Can't we, like men, do some good even when we're bad guys in the bedroom and don't much care about cute little animals?
The struggle to ask these questions makes this a scary book. The reader is afraid she will be hurt and disgusted even more than she has been already. In fact, the book ends tragically but calmingly.
Or does it ever end? People complain that Eliot moralizes too much, but how can she have moralized too much when the moral point she wanted to make is still not made, when her heroine Maggie is still seen by some as a dislikeable rabbit-killing slut, a century and a half after she was created? How can Eliot have argued too much when all her argument failed to get her point across?
Perhaps her point will always fail to get across. That would be sadder than THE MILL ON THE FLOSS.
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NOT THE NOVEL
Received a poorly printed pamphlet of 42 pages in 18 pt font… looks like other people received the novel but this ain’t it.
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Deepakumari k j
Good
Reviewed in India on January 26, 2024
Deepakumari k j
Reviewed in India on January 26, 2024
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Kindle Customer. Di.
Sweet sorrow
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 4, 2023