The afterword to this copy of The Mill on the Floss describes it as “earnest, moral, and long” which, I have to say, aren’t necessarily my three favorite literary adjectives. But I was 80% sure that there wouldn’t be any dragons, and I figured I was due for an earnest novel after wallowing in fantasy and all that modern ironic stuff. I also really loved Middlemarch, although I read that a long time ago and on a train across Greece, which may have impacted my state of mind.
The Mill on the Floss is, as promised, an earnest story about Maggie Tulliver, a young girl growing up in semi-rural England in the early 1800s, faced with a temperament that is strictly at odds with the rest of her family, an intellectual curiosity that is rarely fed and, as time goes on, financial problems with her family and a remarkable number of romantic complications for a book that ends before she hits her 20s. Throughout the book, Maggie strives to align her desires and views of the world with those of her family and lovers (used throughout the book in the least physical way possible) and constantly comes up short; it is in many ways an epic story of her vacillating between passion and asceticism and never finding a balance that wins her the approbation of the brother she loves kind of desperately – indeed, she seems to sink from one social mistake to the next pretty rapidly.
The most curious part of reading this book for me was how little I was able to root for any of the characters. I’m not sure if I couldn’t pull myself into alignment with a Victorian sensibility, or if Eliot wrote them as intentionally unsympathetic, which is sometimes the sense I got from her narrative voice, or if she was just trying to capture the reality that some situations are just untenable, that when a young girl is asked to accept or reject the friendship of her father’s enemy’s son that it’s impossible to pick a side between the virtues of friendship and those of family responsibility.  Maggie is faced with a series of harshly unpleasant choices, particularly for a sensitive teenager (a category that didn’t really exist in the 1820s, of course), and rather than wanting desperately for her to make one choice or the other – if she makes the happy one, it’s a romantic novel, if she makes the unhappy one it’s a tragedy – the reader instead must suffer alongside her as she dreads making either one. (Apparently George Eliot herself had a long relationship with a married man, making her something of an expert in these inescapable moral and emotional quandaries). I’ll agree that the book is earnest (and long!) but it’s certainly not moral an Aesopian, proscriptive kind of way: rather, it exposes the fragile emotional center of morality and how it fails to take into account the complicated relationship between personal desires and social demands. It’s pretty emotionally gripping, but if you need resolution, prepare to be disappointed.