ESC: English Studies in Canada

T H E E N D I N G OF T H E M I L L O N T H E F L O S S K E R R Y MC S W E E N E Y M cGill University “ I could never make a happy ending out of that beginning.” — Maggie Tulliver on Scott’s The Pirate', The Mill on the Floss, chapter 33 E v e r since its first publication in i860, commentators have been close to unanimous in their dissatisfaction with the catastrophic ending of The Mill on the Floss — the deaths of the novel’s two central characters, Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom, in the flood that devastates St Ogg’s. “The steps that lead towards an end so gloomy are not sufficiently marked and solemn .. . observed Bulwer-Lytton in a letter to George Eliot’s publisher; “and there has not been even sufficient care taken to make that final recon­ ciliation in death of brother and sister as touching as it should be. Tom indeed has been by that time set so far apart from his sister, that he can’t be jerked back into the old boyish love of a sudden, and we don’t see why he should be drowned at all.” 1 When shown Bulwer-Lytton’s letter, George Eliot herself agreed that the ending was defective because “ the tragedy is not adequately prepared.” 2 Six years later Henry James identified the end­ ing as the novel’s only serious shortcoming: “The story is told as if it were destined to have, if not a strictly happy termination, at least one within ordinary probabilities. As it stands, the dénouement shocks the reader most painfully. Nothing has prepared him for it; the story does not move towards it; it casts no shadow before it.” 3 According to F. R. Leavis, the author’s “mature intelligence” had not been fully engaged in the ending, which was “like a kind of daydream indulgence.” 4 And, to cite only one further example, Barbara Hardy condemned the ending as a “ solution by fantasy,” an act of “bad faith” in striking contrast to “the authenticity of everything that comes before.” 5 It would be perverse not to agree that there is a discontinuity between the body of The M ill on the Floss and its ending. In the former the dominant subject is how the lives of Maggie and Tom Tulliver are affected E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x ii, i , March 1986 by their familial, social, and cultural environment. George Eliot is even reported to have said in 1869 that her “sole purpose” in writing the novel “was to show the conflict which is going on everywhere when the younger generation with its higher culture comes into collision with the older.” 6 The point of view from which this conflict is presented is objective and might even be called scientific. In chapter 30 the narrator explains her method: copious notations of “the mental condition of these emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers” are supplied so that the reader can feel and can understand how the “oppressive narrowness” of St Ogg’s acted on the young Tulliver siblings, whose dislocations are said to be typical of “every historical advance of mankind” and to have significance for anyone with the same “large vision of relations” as that of the natural scientist (238).7 The ending is a different matter. Earlier in the novel the narrator had described the frag­ mentary utterance of the stricken Mr. Tulliver to be “as if he every other moment lost narration in vision” (230). Something similar might be said to occur at the end of The M ill on the Floss, during which the scientific laws of sequence, causality, and duration, which had dominated the narrative, are suddenly superseded by the providential activity of what the text at one point refers to as “ the Unseen Pity” (453). The M ill on the Floss is not the only novel of George Eliot’s to contain a marked discontinuity. Many commentators have noted that the DorotheaLadislaw plot...