Mapping the Movement of Desire in George Eliot: a Spatial Study of Character Itinerancy

in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss

by Rachel Narozniak

B.A. in English, May 2017, Rutgers University

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Science

of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Master of Arts

May 19, 2019

Thesis directed by

Maria Frawley Professor of English

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© Copyright 2019 by Rachel K. Narozniak All rights Reserved

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Acknowledgments

I extend the most grateful of thanks to The George Washington University’s

English Department, which has not only fostered, but also contributed to the further

growth of my passion for English literature. The past two-years that I have spent

furthering my education at this university have allowed me to continue to sharpen my

research and analysis skills. I’ve reworked prior research topics, and explored new ones

during my time at GWU, and am eternally grateful for the faulty and program support

that I have consistently received during my time as a graduate student here.

My thesis director, Maria Frawley, was an unwavering source of support

throughout the experience of writing this thesis, from its nascent start to its final form.

Thank you, Maria, for encouraging me throughout the process of writing this thesis. From

recommending critical scholarship that could benefit my analysis, to providing insightful

suggestions when it came to the multiple draft review stages, your guidance was crucial

to the success of the project and inspired me to always make the strongest analytical push

possible. Thank you for always being accessible, and always happy to talk. I very much

value the time and effort that you invested in this project.

I would like to also sincerely thank my second reader, Nathan Hensley. Thank

you, Nathan, for the long term academic guidance that you have consistently offered me

during my time as a graduate student. Your academic advice as a professor, PhD

application advisor, and second reader, has also been invaluable, and certainly

illuminating. I greatly appreciate your commitment to the thesis as its second reader.

Thank you for reviewing the project!

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Abstract of Thesis

Mapping the Movement of Desire in George Eliot: a Spatial Study of Character Itinerancy

in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss

This thesis uses George Eliot’s Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss as its two

primary texts in its examination of the community destabilizing and community

imperiling desire, as it develops in the “knowable communities” of Hayslope and St

Ogg’s, respectively (Williams 165). “Mapping the Movement of Desire in George Eliot”

borrows Raymond Williams’ concept of the “knowable community,” and applies

Williams’ observations about the “knowable community’s” structure of community to

Hayslope and St Ogg’s, to first identify each locality as a “knowable community,” and to

then underscore the specific characteristics of each space that render “knowable

community” an apt classification of Hayslope and St Ogg’s alike (165). “Mapping the

Movement of Desire in George Eliot” maintains that the “knowable communities” of

Hayslope and St Ogg’s are fragile social spaces on account of their intimate scale (165).

The thesis posits that the Hayslope and St Ogg’s communities are particularly susceptible

to social disruption, given their small size.

I use the phrases “community destabilizing desire” and “community imperiling

desire” to refer to the desire that has the power to prove socially debilitating to the

“knowable community” (165). “Mapping the Movement of Desire in George Eliot”

understands community destabilizing desire and community imperiling desire to be desire

of an illicit nature that stands in contention with the social values of the community. To

invoke Courtney Berger, the desire that is community destabilizing and/or imperiling in

character directly and incontrovertibly defies the “standards of care” that the community

itself sets, enforces, and expects its members to uphold (Berger 308). This specific kind

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of community antagonizing desire threatens the social equilibrium of the community.

“Mapping the Movement of Desire in George Eliot” asserts that this social equanimity is

requisite to the function and longevity of the community.

The thesis’ discussion of space can be attributed to the project’s theory that the

characters who catalyze and enact community destabilizing and community imperiling

desire must consequently leave the social space of the community. Their absences are a

rehabilitative opportunity for the socially upset community to re-establish social

coherency. The paper identifies Hetty, Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen as such characters,

and pinpoints their individual geographic movements out of and away from Hayslope and

St Ogg’s to compose a record of character mobility. The thesis does so under the premise

that the separate exits of each character are necessary in the analytic context of

community maintenance. In viewing the characters’ egresses from the communities of

Hayslope and St Ogg’s as necessary and unavoidable, the thesis argues that these

characters’ exits—which on the surface appear to represent community deconstruction—

are in fact a crucial component of Eliot’s idiosyncratic style of community construction.

This project examines Eliot’s conceptualization of community as a systemic process of

creation achieved through the spatial subtraction of specific characters from Eliot’s

“knowable community” (Williams 165).

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………….…iii

Abstract…………………………...…………………………………….……………..…iv

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter 1: “Trivial fancy” makes “poor wanderers”: The Relation of Scandal and

Space in Adam Bede….....…………………………………………………………………6

Chapter 2: The Impossibility of Proximity: Compulsory Migration in The Mill on

the Floss……………………………………………………………….…………………33

Conclusion…………………………………………………………….……………........69

Works Cited……………………………………………………………….................…..72

Introduction

The female protagonists of George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the

Floss (1860), Hetty Sorrel and Maggie Tulliver are both characterized as “wanderers.”

The epithet is crucial to the spatial examination that lies at the heart of this thesis. Eliot

famously refers to Hetty as “the poor wanderer” of Adam Bede, and Maggie, the “lonely

wanderer” (588, 533). Hetty’s pregnancy, birth of a child out of wedlock, and attempted

infanticide jointly render Eliot’s choice of the adjective “poor” an apt descriptor of the

misfortune that Hetty unceasingly faces, from the moment that she leaves Hayslope to

quite literally follow in Captain Arthur Donnithorne’s footsteps as she pursues him in

Windsor, to her death in transit back to Hayslope at novel’s end. Hetty is indeed “poor,”

and Maggie “lonely,” as the youngest Tulliver prepares to make her solitary exit from St

Ogg’s society in The Mill on the Floss (588, 533).

The central interest of this thesis lies in tracing the individual spatial movements

of Eliot’s “wanderers,” from the “knowable communities” of Hayslope, St Ogg’s, and

beyond (588; Williams 165). Eliot’s two female protagonists are itinerant literary

personalities who traverse dirt road, field, and even water en route to their respective

destinations in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. Yet, this thesis seeks to do more

than just chart the singular stops that comprise Hetty and Maggie’s geographic courses.

“Mapping the Movement of Desire in George Eliot” ponders the narrative significance of

such character movement within the frame of the highly stylized “knowable [country]

community,” to measure the degree to which characters’ actions can cause these certain

characters to stand in contention with the social and behavioral norms of the “knowable

community,” and how such a character’s geographic displacement from the community

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becomes a necessary and natural byproduct of the conduct that is antithetical to

community expectation(s) (165). The project posits that this precise kind of character

spatial migration, out of and away from the “knowable community” depicted in the given

text, is a convention of Eliot’s system of community maintenance and preservation in

Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss (165). “Mapping the Movement of Desire in

George Eliot” advances the idea that Eliot’s version of the “knowable [country]

community” is “knowable” in that it is often in a state of social flux (165).

To most comprehensively convey this paper’s interest in the spatial movements of

Eliot’s characters, it is first necessary to put a little pressure on the description “lonely” in

“lonely wanderer,” to ask whether Hetty and Maggie are truly “lonely” in their statuses as

“wanderers,” in the broader narrative context of each novel (Eliot 533). The answer that

“Mapping the Movement of Desire in George Eliot” offers is “no.” Neither Hetty nor

Maggie surface as the sole “wanderers” of either text, and this thesis accordingly

identifies and explores the fellow “wanderers” of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss:

Captain Arthur Donnithorne, and Mr. Stephen Guest (533).

Aside from Hetty and Maggie, it is Arthur and Stephen who make the most

expansive, spatially sweeping movements of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. The

concept of character mobility, as it manifests in each work, complicates the idea of being

“lonely,” for although the geographic paths that Hetty, Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen

follow in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss diverge, one character’s egress from the

“knowable community” would not occur without the other wanderer’s (Williams 165).

Hetty’s spatial maneuvers are inextricable from Arthur’s, as Maggie’s are from

Stephen’s. The act of movement doesn’t just liken Hetty and Arthur, and Maggie and

Stephen to one another; it binds them.

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This thesis invokes Raymond Williams’ notion of the “knowable [country]

community,” to first identify Hayslope and St Ogg’s as literary examplars of the tight

knit, small scale social networks that characterize the pastorally “knowable” (165). I

engage Williams’ theory of the “knowable community,” and apply it to the rural localities

of Hayslope and St Ogg’s to deliberately and elaborately illustrate how Eliot depicts the

locations as such, and to inform the theory of spatial movement that I propose as evident

in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss (165). I frequently use the phrases “community

destabilizing desire,” and “community imperiling desire” to reference the desire that Eliot

evidences as mutual between Hetty and Arthur and Maggie and Stephen. The two

chapters that follow, the first on Adam Bede, and the second on The Mill on the Floss,

explore how, specifically, the desire between both duos arises as that of a “community

destabilizing” and “imperiling” caliber in Hayslope and in St Ogg’s.

Williams describes the “knowable [country] community” as a geographic site that

serves as the “epitome of direct relationships: of face-to-face contacts within which we

can find and value the real substance of personal relationships” (165-166). To quote

Williams at greater length, this “knowable community” is characteristically socially

transparent; indeed, “people are more easily identified and connected within it [the

community]; the structure of community is in many ways more visible” (165-166). Small

by spatial design, the clustered “knowable community”—in its intimate social

“structure”—is more susceptible to scandal than its counterpart, the socially disparate city

(165-166). I reference Williams here to clarify the significances of “community

destabilizing” and “community imperiling”; when I declare the desire evident between

Hetty and Arthur and Maggie and Stephen to be such, I mean that the desire is socially

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debilitating, in that it threatens the social equilibrium of these two “knowable

communities” (165).

This thesis posits that social equilibrium is requisite to the function and longevity

of the “knowable community” (165). The characters who catalyze and enact “community

destabilizing” and “community imperiling” desire disrupt the social equilibrium of the

“knowable community” (165). These characters consequently must leave the social space

of the community, their absences a rehabilitative opportunity for the socially upset

community to re-establish its equanimity. As Courtney Berger so succinctly articulates,

“In order to restore Hayslope to its former state of social coherency, Arthur and Hetty

must be removed (through transportation or self-exile)” (Berger 324). “Mapping the

Movement of Desire in George Eliot” painstakingly pinpoints the respective geographic

movements of Hetty, Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen in Adam Bede and The Mill on the

Floss, to compose a record of character travel, under the premise that the separate exits

that Hetty, Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen effect in each text are necessary, in the analytic

context of community maintenance.

The records of individual character movement, in and out of the “knowable

communities” of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss that I present in “Mapping the

Movement of Desire in George Eliot” offer a way to think about the collective—the

community—by focusing on the individual: a character who is a part of this broader

collective, and a socially antagonistic part, at that. To trace the spatial courses that Hetty,

Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen take, and to study these individual narrative treks in relation

to the ideas of sociality and social coherency, and further, the fragility of the social fabric

of the “knowable communities” of Hayslope and St Ogg’s, is to examine what Forest

Pyle calls Eliot’s “project…of community” (Williams 165; Pyle 5). Pyle maintains that

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the notion of community in George Eliot “is always and by definition ‘at loose ends’: it

always by definition stands in the need of suturing that does not so much restore as make

it. But in order to be made effectively…the process must always appear as the restoration

of a community presently lost or rent, the recovery of the original weave” (21).

This thesis views the egress of the characters associated with community

destabilizing and imperiling desire as a central tenent of Eliot’s structure of community;

indeed, the spatial roving of the characters associated with community destabilizing and

imperiling desire emerges as a pattern of community structure that is first evident in

Adam Bede, and that later repeats in The Mill on the Floss. Hetty, Arthur, Maggie, and

Stephen’s respective exits from the works to which they belong allow for the restoration

of “social coherency” that Berger mentions; “social coherency” is synonymous with the

“suturing” that Pyle references (Berger 308; Pyle 21). “Mapping the Movement of Desire

in George Eliot” interprets Hetty and Arthur’s displacement from Hayslope, and Maggie

and Stephen’s dislocation from St Ogg’s as socially recuperative opportunities for each

community, chances for “restoration,” for “the recovery of the original [social] weave”

(21). In viewing these individual character movements away from and out of the

“knowable communities” of Hayslope and St Ogg’s as necessary and unavoidable,

“Mapping the Movement of Desire in George Eliot” asserts that these characters’ exits—

which on the surface appear to represent community deconstruction, in the removal of

community members—are, in fact, a crucial component of Eliot’s idiosyncratic style of

community construction. “Mapping the Movement of Desire in George Eliot” examines

Eliot’s conceptualization of community as a systemic process of creation achieved

through the spatial subtraction of specific characters from Eliot’s “knowable community”

(Williams 165).

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“Trivial fancy” Makes “poor wanderers”: The Relation of Scandal and Space in Adam Bede

George Eliot is careful to geographically situate the narrative of Adam Bede at the

novel’s very beginning. In what is only the third sentence of the first chapter of Adam

Bede, Eliot writes “With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy

workshop of Mr Johnathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it

appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799” (Eliot 1). The “you”

whom Eliot “show[s]” this “roomy workshop” is of course the reader of the work, who,

addressed in so direct a manner, follows the bead of ink at the base of Eliot’s pen to

Johnathan Burge’s workshop, in the rural village of Hayslope (1). The most salient detail

of this third sentence of the chapter is not its mention of Johnathan Burge, nor the

workshop, where—as Eliot discloses in the next sentence—five workmen busy

themselves among “doors and window-frames and wainscoting,” but its mention of

Hayslope, where many of the constituting events of Adam Bede will transpire (1).

It is perhaps surprising that Eliot limits the descriptive focus of this first chapter to

Burge’s workshop, given that it is Hayslope, and not the workshop, that is to provide the

locational foundation upon which Eliot will construct Adam Bede. Burge’s workshop

bears the distinctive scent of “pine-wood,” which wafts from the “tent-like pile of planks

outside the open door” (1). “Slanting sunbeams” illuminate the “oak panelling” that

stands “propped up against the wall,” while a “rough grey shepard-dog” snoozes on a bed

of wood shavings (1). The “afternoon sun” is “warm” upon the five workmen, one of

whom—the eponymous Adam Bede— sings in a “strong barytone” (1). Eliot crafts a

meticulous portrait of Burge’s workshop that appeals to each sense, excluding taste.

Through Eliot’s exhaustive description of the workshop, the “you” of the chapter’s third

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sentence can effectually see, hear, smell, touch, and hear the various components that

collectively set the scene of Burge’s workshop. The depth of detail in Eliot’s delineation

of the workshop does not extend to Hayslope in this first chapter; in fact, Eliot does not

offer even a descriptive fragment of what Hayslope is like until the second chapter of

Adam Bede, “The Preaching.”

The introductory sentence of “The Preaching” provides a semblance of what

Hayslope is like. More specifically, the portrait that this beginning sentence paints for

Eliot’s reader is one not only of the action of that particular day in the village, but of

Hayslope’s social dynamic: “About a quarter to seven there was an unusual appearance

of excitement in the village of Hayslope, and through the whole length of its little street,

from the Donnithorne Arms to the churchyard gate, the inhabitants had evidently been

drawn out of their houses by something more than the pleasure of lounging in the evening

sunshine” (18). A close reading of the sentence culminates in several conclusions

regarding life in Hayslope: the first, “excitement” is not common to the village (18). The

second pertains to the intimate size of Hayslope, which lays a spatial claim to a “little

street,” the whole length of which winds not out of sight due to expanse, but rather

remains visible in its entirety to each “inhabitant…drawn out of” house (18). The

compact “little street” spans the length between “the Donnithorne Arms” and the

“churchyard gate” (18). Eliot does not overtly identify Hayslope as a village small both in

spatial size and in population, but she needs not do so, for the reader of Adam Bede can

deduce that Hayslope exists as such merely from this introductory sentence of “The

Preaching.”

It is a Methodist preaching on the Green that elicits the “unusual appearance of

excitement” in Hayslope, and—in a further exemplification of the modest scope of

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Hayslope sociality—it is at this Methodist preaching that “Every generation in the

village” is present (23). In her discussion of “the narrative of community” in Narrative of

Community: The Identification of a Genre, Sandra Zagarell outlines the characteristics of

a novel that classify the given work as a “narrative of community” (Zagarell 2). The

“narrative of community…take[s] as [its] subject the life of a community…and portray[s]

the minute and quite ordinary processes through which the community maintains itself as

an entity” (2). As per Zagarell, the self of a “narrative of community…exists as part of

the interdependent network of the community rather than as an individualistic unit” (2).

Evidently, the Methodist preaching that serves as the source of the “unusual appearance

of excitement” in Hayslope is anything but “ordinary” in the context of quotidian

Hayslope affairs (Eliot 23; Zagarell 2). And yet, despite the “unusual” nature of the stir

that the Methodist preaching sets into motion in Hayslope, Adam Bede is indeed a text

that foregrounds “the minute and quite ordinary processes through which [the community

of Hayslope] maintains itself as an entity” (Eliot 23; Zagarell 2). Adam Bede notably

begins in Johnathan Burge’s workshop, which is an emblem of “the minute and quite

ordinary” in Hayslope (2). The “minute and quite ordinary processes” of Burge’s

workshop encompass the carpentry that employs Adam Bede and his brother, Seth, and

the remaining four workmen each day (2). Ensuing chapters like “The Hall Farm” and

“The Dairy” elucidate the other “minute and quite ordinary processes” of Hayslope:

Captain Arthur Donnithorne’s visits to the properties that comprise Donnithorne Chase,

of which Arthur is the heir, the milking of the cows at the Poyser dairy farm, and so on

and so forth (2).

The “narrative of community” traditionally “seeks to represent what gives the

community its identity, what enables it to remain itself” (520). Much of the narrative’s

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ability to not only present but also to relate the community’s distinctive identity to the

reader lies in the narrative’s illustration of the “details of local life,” or phrased

differently, the “continuous small-scale negotiations and daily procedures through which

[the community] sustains [itself] (6). Key to the construction of community in a

“narrative of community,” however, is not just a depiction of the circadian social

interactions and events that collaboratively construct the milieu of the community, but the

portrayal of these “details of local life” as those that simultaneously foster and illustrate

“modes of interdependence among community members” (6). These “details” focalize

“the collective life of the community” (6). The “narrative ‘action’” of the “narrative of

community” reliably “stresses how the elements of the community are integrated” (520).

THe Methodist preaching on the Green that engenders the “unusual appearance of

excitement” in Hayslope functions as an example of such integration in the village

community (Eliot 23).

Zagarell’s concept of the “narrative of community” naturally calls to mind

Raymond Williams’ comparable theory of the “knowable community,” which Williams

explains at length in chapter ten of Marxism and Literature, “Knowable Communities”

(Zagarell 2; Williams 165). Zagarell’s notion of the “narrative of community,” and

Williams’ idea of the “knowable [country] community” jointly guide this thesis’ analysis

of the pastoral village of Hayslope, its tightly knit community, and the narrative

implications of the ease with which Adam Bede lends itself to classification as a

“narrative of community,” and Hayslope as a “knowable [country] community” (Zagarell

2; Williams 165). Williams acknowledges two different kinds of communities in

“Knowable Communities”: the community of the city, and the community of the country.

Of the two, it is the community of the country that is most “knowable” (165). The split

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between the community of the city and the community of the country results in a

commensurate differentiation in fiction, which Williams articulates as “the fiction of the

city and the fiction of the country” (165). The primary distinction between the

community of the city and the community of the country, or synonymously, “the fiction

of the city and the fiction of the country,” is one of sociality. As Williams outlines, “In

the city, experience and community would be essentially opaque; in the country kind,

essentially transparent” (165).

Williams expounds upon the social discrepancies in both the city and the country

communities: “a country community, most typically a village, is an epitome of direct

relationships: of face-to-face contacts within which we can find and value the real

substance of personal relationships,” Williams writes (165-166). “[The country] is

smaller in scale [than the city]; people are more easily identified and connected within it;

the structure of the community is in many ways more visible” (165-166). To extend

Williams’ preceding sentence, one would only need to add “than that of the city.” A

landscape with a population far too broad in scale to proffer a comparably “visible”

structure of community, the city is the geographical space wherein “identity and

community become more problematic, as a matter of perception and as a matter of

valuation” (165). The transparency of the “personal relationships” that members of the

country community foster, and by extension, the broader social organization of this

community, is central to the country community’s ability to present as “knowable” (165).

Williams’ remark that “…people are more easily identified within the country

community is dual in its significance, and can speak to the expedition with which the

characters of the rural village might recognize one another as they go about their daily

undertakings (166). Yet Williams’ comment can also encompass the reader’s experience,

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in that the reader too can “easily identify” which characters of the novel fulfill which

specific societal roles in that “knowable [country] community” (165). This capability

would of course only additionally underscore the “knowable and communicable” nature

of the “people and their relationships” within the “knowable [country] community” (165).

It is no mistake that the “knowable community” is decidedly “knowable” (165).

Williams deems the “knowable community” that figures so frequently in the oeuvres of

nineteenth-century writers like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy evidence of a “traditional

method—an underlying stance and approach—that the novelist offers to show people and

their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways” (165). Most of the

settings of Eliot’s works are “knowable communities”; St. Ogg’s of The Mill on the

Floss, and Middlemarch of the novel of the same name appear as such (165). Hayslope is

no exception, nor is the village that borders Hayslope, Snowfield. Hayslope and

Snowfield belong to separate counties, Loamshire and Stonyshire, and as George R.

Creeger notes in his article, “An Interpretation of Adam Bede,” both counties “seem like

little more than a Victorian variation on the Romantic theme of country vs. city” (Creeger

2). Creeger references the Romantic period’s artistic interest in the economic shift from a

settled, rural economy to an industrial capitalist model, visible in the work of enclosure

poets as Britain moved towards industrialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries. Creeger, however, also evokes Williams. Creeger’s mention of the “theme of

country vs. city” can be read as a succinct application of Williams’ division of “the

fiction of the city and the fiction of the country (2; Williams 165).

Zagarell and Williams’ respective theories of “narratives of community” and the

“knowable community” focus on the social organization of the rural—and typically

preindustrial—communities of novels like Adam Bede and Jane Austen’s Persuasion

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(Zagarell 2). Zagarell’s “narrative of community” and Williams’ “knowable community”

pair well in a spatial and social analysis of Hayslope, as Zagarell delves beyond

Williams’ consideration of the social fabric of the “knowable community,” to think about

an author’s development of the characters within this specific kind of community. (2;

Williams 165). Whereas Williams focalizes character relationality and interdependence in

the “knowable [country] community,” Zagarell underscores the motifs central to the

community’s protagonists (165). Zagarell cites “identity” and “heterosexual romance” as

“crucial issues…in the development of the major characters” of a “narrative of

community” (Zagarell 14). “Identity” and “heterosexual romance” are indeed crucial

conflicts of Adam Bede. Adam Bede, Methodist preacher and cousin to Hetty Sorrel,

Dinah Morris, Posyer dairy farm dairymaid, Hetty Sorrel, and Captain Arthur

Donnithorne are all characters for whom identity and heterosexual romance prove

problematic. Adam, Dinah, Hetty, and Arthur’s shared status as central characters of

Adam Bede is illustrated, in part, by each of these characters’ individual identity and

heterosexual romance related difficulties. Yet, of these four protagonists of Adam Bede, it

is ultimately Hetty Sorrel and Capitan Arthur Donnithorne’s issues of identity and

heterosexual romance that prove to be the most deeply debilitating in the context of

Eliot’s character development of both Sorrel and Donnithorne, a development that is dual

and concurrent. Sorrel and Donnithorne are characters whose “developments” prove to be

as intertwined and as inextricable as the problems of identity and heterosexual romance

as Adam Bede unfurls (14).

Adam Bede is “a realistic depiction of the chain of cause and effect within a social

community,” and the suggestive glances, blushes, and verbal flirtations that precede

Hetty and Arthur’s sexual encounter in Fir-tree Grove provide the “cause” that sets this

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“chain” grinding into motion (Berger 307). The motifs of identity and heterosexual

romance that Zagarell specifies as paramount to the character development of the

“narrative of community’s” primary characters become visible as the core and

inescapable “issues” of Adam Bede through Sorrel and Donnithorne’s illicit sexual affairs

(Zagarell 14). On the surface, Hetty and Arthur’s sexual relationship appears a simple

manner of identity and heterosexual romance, for Hetty is a woman, Arthur a man, a

gender reality that culminates in Hetty and Arthur’s realization of a “heterosexual

romance” (14). But, to read Hetty and Arthur’s sexual encounters as such is to interpret

their exchanges too simply, without the unavoidable social implications that inevitably

become attached to the interactions. Hayslope’s small size, and its status as a “knowable

community”—and Adam Bede’s as a “narrative of community”—matters in the context

of Hetty and Arthur’s sexual activity, and foregrounds the issue of identity (14). A

romance that would transcend the merely sexual cannot be between Hetty and Arthur,

characters who belong to two very different social classes.

The orphaned dairymaid of the Poyser farm, Hetty belongs to Adam Bede’s

working class, where she coexists with fellow members of the working class tier, like

Adam and Seth Bede. Arthur alternatively lives and breathes among the pages of Adam

Bede as an image of feudalism. As the son of the acting overseer of Donnithorne Chase,

Squire Donnithorne, Arthur Donnithorne is the intended heir of the Chase, and

subsequently occupies a social position above that of the working class. On account of

both his last name and the social power that the “Donnithorne” surname and land

proprietorship imbues, Arthur Donnithorne cannot entertain the idea of marriage with a

member of a lower social class. From his first glimpse of Hetty in the dairy, to the

consummation of his lust for Hetty in the Grove, Arthur Donnithorne remains acutely

14

aware of the impossibility of a public romance with Hetty. “No gentleman, out of a

ballad, could marry a farmer’s niece,” Donnithorne acknowledges, after his first chance

meeting with Sorrel at Fir-tree Grove (Eliot 151). “There must be an end to the whole

thing at once,” Donnithorne surmises, “It was too foolish” (151).

Arthur is conscious of the wrong inherent in his dalliances with Hetty: “To flirt

with Hetty was a very different affair from flirting with a pretty girl of his own station:

that was understood to be an amusement on both sides; or, if it became serious, there was

no obstacle to marriage” (151). The phrases “Of his own station” and “an amusement”

simultaneously elucidate the discrepancy in power between Hetty and Arthur, and,

needless to say, Arthur’s awareness of a disparity of social position between he and Hetty

(151). Eliot’s use of the word “amusement,” however, highlights what “Of his own

station” does not—a suggested sense of harm inherent in Arthur’s repeated flirtations

with Sorrel. Arthur and Hetty must be of the same “station,” of equal social footing, for

their banter to qualify as an “amusement,” wherein both parties engage the other simply

for the purpose of romantic entertainment (151). As Hetty is very clearly not of a social

“station” commensurate with Arthur’s, the flirtation carries the harm of misrepresentation

(151). Hetty, not understanding such flirtation to be mere “amusement,” can—and does—

misinterpret Arthur’s advances as those indicative of a more serious course of romance,

one to end in marriage (151). Indeed, Hetty muses

Captain Donnithorne couldn’t like her to go on doing work: he would like to see

her in nice clothes, and thin shoes and white stockings, perhaps with silk clocks to

them; for he must love her very much…He would want to marry her, and make a

lady of her; she could hardly dare to shape the thought—yet how else could it be?

(165)

15

Hetty’s near inability to “shape the thought” of such an imagined future with

Arthur evidences her familiarity with the Victorian class system, and its limitations on

cross-class romance; Hetty too perceives the imbalance of power between she and

Arthur. (165). Hetty’s presumption that Arthur would “make a lady of her” further

illuminates the lopsided state of power between Hetty and Arthur, while simultaneously

revealing Hetty to be sensible of the disproportionate distribution of power between she

and Arthur (165). The implication of Hetty’s thought that Donnithorne would “make a

lady of her” is manifold: Hetty is not a lady, can only be made so through marriage with a

member of an elevated social situation, and, in her hope to ascend to ladyship, is wholly

dependent upon Arthur, the male who can engender this social apotheosis of sorts if he so

desires (165). Prior to his meetings with Hetty in the Grove, Arthur resolves “…he had

better not take any more notice of her; [for] it might put notions into her head” (139).

And with Arthur’s “…desire to see Hetty,” which “…rushe[s] back like an ill-stemmed

current,” “notions” consequently and concurrently ‘rush’ into Hetty’s ‘head’ (139).

Zagarell’s issues of identity and heterosexual romance intertwine in Adam Bede to

become a complication of cross-class attraction. Sorrel and Donnithorne’s diverging

socioeconomic identities render a heterosexual romance between both characters

infeasible and unrealistic. A realist text, Adam Bede cannot, will not, and ultimately does

not enable the unworkable to work, thus—and perhaps, needless to say—a public

romantic relationship between Hetty and Arthur cannot come to fruition in the way that

Hetty envisions.

Identity is a problematic matter of social class in the context of Hetty and Arthur’s

secret sexual relationship (Zagarell 14). The concept of identity, however, extends

beyond concerns of social class, to also encompass the Hayslope community (14).

16

Courtney Berger’s observation that “Eliot brings locality or geography as a means for

comprehending individual and communal identities” in Adam Bede is germane to this

project’s analysis of identity and heterosexual romance vis-à-vis Hetty and Arthur

(Berger 308; Zagarell 14). The characters of Zagarell’s “narrative of community,” and of

Williams’ “knowable community” construct a quaint community, wherein community

members are necessarily and unavoidably interdependent on each other (2; Williams

165). The varied processes of community, like the carpentry in Burge’s workshop and the

milking on the Poyser dairy farm, are likewise necessarily and unavoidably symbiotic.

When the community members of a “narrative of community,” and of a “knowable

community” individually fulfill their social roles and observe their social responsibilities

within the community, they become the small working parts of a broader system of

community, which could not function without the harmony of these small parts (Zagarell

2; Williams 165).

As the kind of community perceptible in a “narrative of community,” and a

“knowable community,” at that, Hayslope is a geographical space that indeed renders the

“individual and communal identities” of Adam Bede’s characters legible; Hetty and

Arthur serve as examples (Zagarell 2; Williams 165). A description of Hetty’s

“individual” identity would likely mention her unparalleled beauty, which readers of

Adam Bede know—and know well—to be the chief distinguishing feature of Hetty’s

character (Berger 308). Eliot labors to emphasize Hetty’s physical allure at each juncture

in the novel that she possibly can, which only further solidifies Hetty’s individual identity

as the belle of Hayslope. “O yes! she was very pretty,” Eliot writes from Hetty’s

perspective, “…Prettier than anybody about Hayslope—prettier than any of the ladies she

had ever seen visiting at the Chase“ (Eliot 164). Arthur Donnithorne’s impending

17

inheritance of Donnithorne Chase predicates his individual identity; the residents of

Hayslope recognize Arthur as the intended heir, and receive Arthur with a reverence that,

in the whole of Adam Bede, appears to be specific to and reserved only for Arthur, being

that he is the sole assumed heir to the Chase (Berger 308).

Like the many other characters of Adam Bede, Hetty and Arthur possess character

traits that differentiate them from other Hayslope dwellers. Yet even so—and again, like

the other characters who figure in the novel—Hetty and Arthur are nevertheless

constituents of the larger social community of Hayslope. To study Hetty through a

“communal” lens would be to see Hetty as the dairymaid whose work enables the Poyser

dairy farm to continue its cycle of production, to the benefit of the Hayslope residents

who patronize the dairy farm (308). To similarly view Arthur through the same lens

would be to interpret him as the callow but, in Eliot’s words, “good-natured” heir of

Donnithorne Chase, who will oversee the Chase both in terms of property, and in terms

of people (Eliot 136).

Eliot makes a stylistic return to the second person address that she initially

employs on the very first page of Adam Bede in chapter twelve, “In The Wood.” “You

perceive that Arthur Donnithorne was ‘a good fellow,’” Eliot writes, as she begins a new

paragraph on the page, to further extend the character sketch of Arthur Donnithorne that

she offers on page 135 (136). Eliot’s use of singular quotation marks around “‘a good

fellow’” can be read as a reprise to her earlier remark that Arthur “…was nothing, if not

good-natured,” but it too can suggest a thinly veiled sardonicism that prompts a question:

is Arthur “‘a good fellow?’” (136). The singular quotation marks that envelop “‘a good

fellow’” could be Eliot’s visual cue to her reader to question whether Eliot is sincere in

her mention of Arthur as such (136). The singular quotation marks, in other words, might

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appear as a deliberate punctuational maneuver, designed to sow seeds of doubt in the

proverbial soil of Arthur’s character.

The account of Arthur Donnithorne’s character that Eliot provides in chapter

twelve of Adam Bede contains the reverberating echo of Berger’s concept of “communal

identity” (Berger 308). The sentence “…all his [Arthur’s] pictures of the future, when he

should come into the estate, were made up of a prosperous, contented tenantry, adoring

their landlord, who would be the model of an English gentleman” is particularly salient to

the notion of Arthur’s “communal identity” within Hayslope and Adam Bede, in that it

underscores Arthur’s position as the eventual protectorate of the community (136). The

issue of identity—whether of the “individual” or “communal” kind—functions

differently for Arthur than it does for Hetty (Zagarell 14; Berger 308). In his possession

of “the territorial name of Donnithorne,” Arthur Donnithorne bears the responsibility of

managing the Chase and the people who farm the land that comprises the Chase, when

Squire Donnithorne eventually passes the baton of feudal power to Arthur (Eliot 79).

Arthur’s expected occupancy of a position of power well above that of those who depend

upon use of the Chase land, like the Poysers, causes Arthur to occupy an elevated social

position. The feudal responsibility of “landlord,” to which Arthur inches with increasing

proximity each day of Adam Bede, imbues Arthur’s individual actions with a weight that,

like Arthur’s sense of power comparative to that of the Hayslope residents, is far greater

in its nature. Arthur Donnithorne might easily be the fair and benevolent acting landlord

of the Chase, whom the tenantry “adores,” and who, in his role of “social centrality” to

the village of Hayslope, helps to maintain the equilibrium of the Hayslope community

(136; Ball 46). Yet, in his anticipated role of Chase landlord, and in the “social centrality”

that is inextricable from his identity as such, Donnithorne might just as easily place the

19

Hayslope community into a state of precariousness if he is to act immoderately, or

conduct himself in a manner that should prove socially disruptive (46).

Arthur’s contemplation that “…he should hate himself if he made a scandal…on

the estate that was to be on his own some day, and among tenants by whom he liked,

above all, to be respected,” doubles as an instance of both irony and foreshadowing, as it

concurrently underscores the social harm inherent in Arthur’s behavior (Eliot 151). Here

is Eliot’s hardly obscure hint to the reader of Adam Bede: Arthur will in fact “make” a

“scandal,” on the estate, among the tenants (151). Eliot’s overt gesture to the social

trouble that Arthur will soon catalyze follows her earlier statement: “…if [Arthur] should

happen to spoil a woman’s existence for her, [he] will make it up to her with expensive

bon-bons, packed up and directed with his own hand” (137). Bede’s reader performs little

guess work in deducing that the impending “scandal” will certainly involve the ruination

of “a woman’s existence,” and in identifying the “woman” in question to be none other

than Hetty Sorrel (137).

Courtney Berger asserts that the early novels of Eliot’s career as a nineteenth-

century novelist each possess “a social world in which individuals both help to constitute

and are answerable to the standards of the group” (Berger 308). Berger further argues that

a character’s “liability”—“his or her concern about producing harm in the world”—is

“…the most effective means for binding people to a common moral standard, and, in

turn, for giving structure to social relations” (308). In Eliot’s work, and certainly in Adam

Bede, the concept of identity encompasses a character’s “…cultivated commitment to the

society’s coherence and effectiveness” (309). From Berger’s perspective, to maintain an

identity within the community is to exercise consciousness in the creation and

maintenance of that identity. The member of Eliot’s community is not a puppet of

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fictional sorts that mindlessly goes about its business, day in and day out—Eliot’s

community member is more cerebral than that, and mindful not only of his or her own

sense of “liability,” but also of the overarching function of community in the given

pastoral setting (309). The communities of Eliot’s “early work” are socially self-

governing, and the “knowable community” of Hayslope does not deviate from this trend

of Eliot’s novelistic catalogue (308; Zagarell 4; Williams 165).

Arthur’s decision to visit Reverend Irwine to “…open his heart to the Rector,”

and to unencumber his mind of the thought of Hetty and of his augmenting fondness of

her in doing so evidences Arthur’s awareness of his liability (Eliot 178). Although Arthur

intends to verbally entrust Irwine with the history of his seduction of Hetty—in its full

extent—Arthur vacillates as he ponders, “How could he make Irwine understand his

position unless he told him those little scenes in the wood; and how could he tell them

without looking like a fool?” (184). Arthur fails to transfer his mental burden from the

recesses of his own mind to Irwine’s in his quest for mental solace, to which he so

resolutely commits after he meets Hetty in Fir-tree Grove once more that same evening.

Arthur vows that he “…would go and tell Irwine—tell him everything,” for “The mere

act of telling it would make it seem trivial; the temptation would vanish” (152). As

Arthur himself concludes, “In every way it would help him, to tell Irwine” (152).

Arthur’s decision to seek out the Rector in an effort to “make….temptation…vanish”

evidences Arthur’s sense of “liability”; Arthur knows that his sexual encounters with

Hetty can “produce harm,” and he accordingly attempts to stifle his infatuation with

Hetty, the “…trivial fancy [that] seemed to grasp him” (152; Berger 308; Eliot 140). No

longer of the opinion that “…any real harm in Hetty’s case…was out of the question” as

his attraction to Hetty grows with each successive meeting with the dairymaid in Fir-tree

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Grove, Arthur decides to leave Hayslope for Eagledale, and determines that he will set

off upon leaving Irwine’s “…without an hour’s delay” (139, 190).

“Whether [Arthur] would have self-mastery enough to be always as harmless and

purely beneficent as his good nature led him to desire,” as Eliot writes, “was a question

that no one had yet decided against him” (136). This question, however, lingers as one

that will soon yield an answer, as Arthur prepares to depart for Eagledale. Eliot’s

repetitive use of different forms of the word “harm,” in “…any real harm in Hetty’s case”

and “harmless,” emphasizes the association of Arthur’s character not only with the

various forms of the word “harm,” but also with its very definition (139, 136). Although

Arthur leaves Hayslope to evade further “temptation,” Arthur’s flight from Hayslope is

no solution, for Arthur has already wrought his harm upon Hetty, and by extension, upon

the Hayslope community (152). Both Hetty and the community are to learn the full extent

of the harm that Arthur engendered, and will become acquainted with its scope in this

order.

As Josephine McDonough so crucially puts it, George Eliot’s “…visions of

organic, village life” in Hayslope are “visions” in which the characters are “…joined to

their environment by ‘vital threads that will not bear disruption’” (McDonough 40).

McDonough quotes David Carroll, who writes of Raveloe, a rural village in

Warwickshire that provides the setting of Eliot’s 1861 novel, Silas Marner. Carroll states,

“It is impossible to dissociate any of the characters from the village in which they were

born and bred—they form an organic whole with Raveloe; they are not connected with it

by any external, or even humorous bands, but by vital threads that will not bear

disruption” (Carroll 187). The characters who reside in Hayslope are much the same: the

22

characters of Adam Bede who live in Hayslope are similarly inextricable from the

village— they too form “an organic whole” with Hayslope (187).

We can consider Arthur to be one of these “vital threads” of the Hayslope

community. Or, rephrased slightly less metaphorically, we can read Arthur as a thread of

feudal management that, day in and day out, enables Donnithorne Chase, and those who

utilize the Chase’s land—members of the Hayslope community—to keep Hayslope

functioning in a steady state (187). If this “thread” falters and breaks, the “…idealized

social order and way of life” of Hayslope will in fact “bear disruption” (187; McDonough

40).

Arthur’s “thread” frays further with each ensuing sexual encounter with Hetty

(Carroll 187). On page 110 of Adam Bede, we see Arthur’s “thread” in a progressing state

of wear, in a scene that occurs just before this proverbial fiber grows continuously and

increasingly thin: “Hetty had become aware that Mr Arthur Donnithorne would take a

good deal of trouble for the chance of seeing her” (Eliot 110). The phrase “would take a

good deal of trouble for the chance of seeing her” has dual significance: Arthur “would

take a good deal of trouble,” in a sense that indicates the lengths to which Arthur is

willing to go, the effort and energy that Arthur is willing to expend “…for the chance of

seeing her” (110). Arthur is willing to go to “…a good deal of trouble” for this “chance”

(110). It’s furthermore worth noting that Arthur would voluntarily face this “…good deal

of trouble” not for the guarantee of seeing Hetty, but for the mere “chance” (110). In

“…would take a good deal of trouble,” we also hear Eliot’s suggestion that Arthur would

readily bear a considerable amount of “trouble” for this opportunity to see Hetty (110).

We too perceive that this “trouble” might not necessarily be that of effort or energy, but

rather that of a consequential kind (110). In the words of Reverend Irwine,

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“Consequences are unpitying,” as Arthur—and later, Hetty—is to learn (171). As Irwine

tells Arthur, “Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any

fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves”

(171).

To reinvoke Courtney Berger, Arthur “…helps to constitute” the “social world”

of Hayslope, and is thereby “…answerable to the standards of [this] group” (Berger 308).

One might say that it’s fortunate that Arthur would “…take a good deal of trouble” for

the “chance” to see Hetty, for Arthur will “take” just that as Arthur—and Hetty—

“…answer to the standards” of Hayslope as the narrative progressively develops, and as

Arthur and Hetty face the consequences of their actions. In the words of Irwine, these

consequences are indeed not “confined” to Arthur and Hetty—they pervade the Hayslope

community (Eliot 110; Berger 308; Eliot 171).

Berger sees “liability” as a concept that “…binds individuals to the social world

as a whole” in Adam Bede (Berger 317). Berger’s study of “liability” in Adam Bede leads

her to an important question: “What happens when a [character] simply cannot adhere to

the standard of care expected by the social group?” (313). If we modify Berger’s inquiry

just slightly, we can reword it to read “What happens when a character simply cannot

adhere to the standard of care [we might also substitute “behavior” for “care”] expected

by the community?” (313). The terms “social group” and “community” are likely

synonymous for Berger, but the interchange of “community” for “social group” focuses

Berger’s question to a greater degree, to remove some of the ambiguity of the broad

phrase, “social group” (313). Adam Bede qualifies as a “narrative of community,” save

for one characteristic: “Narratives of community,” Zagarell writes, “remain in one place”

(Zagarell 6). Although the characters, and the overarching narrative of Adam Bede dwell

24

mostly in Hayslope for the duration of the novel, Adam Bede’s plot hardly remains rooted

in just one place. Arthur’s movement from Hayslope to Eagledale, and later, to Ireland

with the Militia that he joins, accounts for the majority of the spatial mobility of the text,

as does Hetty’s pursuit of Arthur, which takes her through a myriad of locations outside

of Hayslope. Arthur and Hetty’s extensive travel beyond Hayslope is not without crucial

narrative purpose. In Adam Bede, The Mill On the Floss, and certainly even

Middlemarch, the characters who display behavior that does not align with the

expectation of the community, and who act in a way that disturbs, or threatens to disturb

the community must leave the spatial setting of the community, hence Arthur’s departure

for Eagledale. The characters who exhibit and encourage, or in some way partake in the

kind of sexual or romantic desire that would agitate the balanced social equilibrium of the

community inevitably depart from the “knowable community,” a space that cannot

reasonably foster the desire that endangers the stability of the community (Williams 165).

French philosopher of the “material dimensions” of space, Henri Lefebvre writes, “Itself

the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while

suggesting others, and prohibiting yet others” (Mountford 24). The “social space” of

Hayslope indeed “prohibits” select “actions to occur”; Arthur’s illicit sexual affair with a

dairy maid whom he does not intend to marry qualifies as one such “action” that would

be not be permissible in the context of this “social space” (24). As Hetty and readers of

Adam Bede alike are to discover as the plot of Adam Bede advances, infanticide is

representative of yet another “prohibited action” within the “social space” of Hayslope

(24).

Courtney Berger corroborates the significance of Arthur and Hetty’s respective

exits from Hayslope: “In order to restore Hayslope to its former state of social coherency,

25

Arthur and Hetty must be removed (through transportation or self-exile)” (Berger 324).

Shock waves of a social caliber nevertheless emanate throughout the community of

Hayslope when Hetty returns to the village to face trial for infanticide at novel’s end. The

concurrent revelation that Arthur is the father of Hetty’s smothered child seems only to

augment the seismic power of the waves of social disruption that roll through Hayslope at

this juncture in the text. Neither Arthur nor Hetty’s departure from Hayslope following

their sexual relationship—and, although unbeknownst to Hetty at the time of her flight,

following her nascent pregnancy—completely spares the Hayslope community the social

turmoil that it experiences when the community becomes acquainted with the details of

Arthur and Hetty’s sexual interactions, when both characters return to Hayslope to attend

Hetty’s trial. Although Arthur and Hetty’s individually occurring migrations from

Hayslope prior to Hetty’s discovery of her pregnancy—and later, infanticide—fail to

fully halt the social harm of Hayslope, their ejection from the Hayslope community is

nevertheless necessary, and continues to be necessary even after Hetty’s trial terminates.

Arthur exemplifies the obligatory nature of his departure from Hayslope preceding the

trial, and again thereafter, when he tells Adam “…one of my reasons for going away is,

that no one else may leave Hayslope—may leave their home on my account. I would do

anything, there is no sacrifice I would not make, to prevent any further injury to others

through my---through what has happened” (Eliot 507). When Arthur verbally gestures

towards those who “…may leave their home on [his] account,” he alludes to the Poysers

(507). “Mr Irwine tells me the Poysers mean to leave the place where they have lived so

many years—for generations,” Arthur informs Adam (508) Arthur knows that to stay in

Hayslope is to further debilitate the community. The Poysers’ plan to move out of

Hayslope and abandon their dairy farm—the pride of the Poyser family—illustrates

26

Arthur’s “injury” to the community, an “injury” that aches with enough severity to

prompt the Poysers to contemplate egress from Hayslope (507).

“Further” toes two temporal lines: that of the past—“further injury” encapsulates

the harm that Arthur has inflicted upon the Hayslope community—and that of the future,

in the potential for the “further injury” to be done, should Arthur remain in Hayslope

(507). Arthur’s decision to exit Hayslope immediately after Hetty’s trial appears to be a

choice, but it’s not. Hayslope, as Berger notes, cannot regain even the most minute

fraction of its former “social coherency” if Arthur is to stay (Berger 324). The pervasive

nature of the social harm inherent in Arthur’s actions, and the non-exclusivity with which

this harm affects the Hayslope community figures in what Reverend Irwine says to

Adam: “Men’s lives are as thoroughly blended as disease. I know, I feel the terrible

extent of suffering this sin of Arthur’s has caused to others” (Eliot 460). The Poysers’

resolve to move out of Hayslope in the wake of Hetty’s arrest and trial focalizes the

social realness of the village of Hayslope, its community, and the consequences that

accompany the conduct that fails to satisfy the “standards of care” that the community

itself sets, enforces, and expects its members to uphold (Berger 308). The family’s

decision to leave Hayslope additionally concretizes the social harm that Arthur inflicts

upon the village of Hayslope. Arthur’s and Hetty’s “…intertwined fates could be

regarded as a moral lesson both to the people of Hayslope and to [Eliot’s] readers,” yet in

their propensity to be “regarded” as such by the members of the Hayslope community,

Arthur and Hetty’s actions jointly defame the Poyser name (313). David Carroll reminds

readers that the Hall Farm is “…a farm with a real dairy to be kept clean, and real maids

to be scolded, not a mere theatrical farm” (Carroll 74). The Poyser family name is

similarly representative of a real family, with a social reputation to uphold. Like the

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dairy, the social repute of the Poyser name is also “…to be kept clean” (74). To extend

the analogy further, the Poyser family is not “merely theatrical” in nature, but a “real”

family that functions as an integral stitch in the larger social fabric of Hayslope (74).

The initial outcome of Hetty’s sentence is death: Hetty is originally sentenced to

hang for her crime. The later reduction of Hetty’s sentence, from hanging to exile, is of

paramount importance to the spatial trend of the movement of problematic sexual and

romantic desire in Eliot’s work. Arthur and Hetty’s sweeping geographical movements,

which take them through Eagledale, Windsor, and beyond, exemplify the necessarily

mobile nature of the characters who foment contentious sexual and romantic desire.

Hetty’s resentencing, and later exile to Australia represents a sort of spatial climax in the

context of this thesis’ theory of community destabilizing desire and the associated

characters’ movement out of and away from the “knowable community” (Williams 165).

Hetty’s pregnancy and subsequent birth of a child is evidence of her sexual involvement

with Arthur; the baby is living proof of her participation in this very kind of community

imperiling desire. Unlike the child, Hetty cannot smother the act.

The desire that has the ability to dismantle, or at a minimum, severely shake the

social equanimity of the “knowable community” in which Eliot sets her novel requires

the inevitable departure of the characters who engross themselves in this kind of

community imperiling lust—or love (Williams 165). It is in the migratory fashion of this

desire, and of Eliot’s novelistic management of this desire, that Arthur sets off for

Eagledale, and later, Ireland. Although Arthur, by Hetty’s own admission, “…could do

nothing for her that would shelter her [pregnancy] from discovery and scorn among the

relatives and neighbours who once more made all her world,” Hetty nevertheless devises

a plan to find Arthur (Eliot 396). Hetty feels “no longing” to see her cousin, Dinah

28

Morris, when Dinah writes to Hetty, but Dinah’s letter is the timely “prextext” that

enables Hetty to escape Hayslope, and her impending betrothal to Adam Bede: “She

[Hetty] would tell her aunt when she got home again, that she should like the change of

going to Snowfield for a week or ten days. And then, when she got to Stoniton, where

nobody knew her, she would ask for the coach that would take her on the way to

Windsor. Arthur was at Windsor, and she would go to him”(397).

The laborious, multi-day affair that marks Hetty’s fateful spatial movement out of

and away from Hayslope begins when Hetty arrives at Stoniton, having left Hayslope by

coach. Hetty dismounts the coach, asks for directions to Windsor from Stoniton, and

spends the evening in a Stoniton inn. The next morning, Hetty sets out on the road to

walk to Ashby, a stop on the way to Windsor. As she traverses the road, Hetty meets with

a wagon on its way to Leicester, gets on the wagon, and promptly arrives in Leicester at

the end of what is her second day of travel. On the third morning, Hetty again begins to

walk to her next destination, when she crosses paths with a cart en route to Hinckley.

Hetty rides on the cart, and reaches Warwickshire at the close of this second evening.

Hetty, by now, is “…almost a hundred miles from Windsor,” where Arthur reposes (408).

From Warwickshire, Hetty makes her way to Stratford-on-Avon, only to discern that she

must extend her trip after confusing Stratford-on-Avon with the necessary next stop on

the way to Windsor, Stony Stratford. Hetty retraces her steps, lands in Stony Stratford,

and finally, Windsor, on the fifth day. Misfortune befalls Hetty at Windsor when she

discovers that Arthur and the Loamshire Militia have already left Windsor to go to

Ireland. Fatigued, destitute, and aimless, Hetty despairs:

…this money would not keep her long: what should she do when it was gone?

Where should she go? The horrible thought of want and beggary drove her once

29

to think she would go back to her uncle and aunt, and ask them to forgive her and

have pity on her. But she shrank from that idea again, as she might have shrunk

from scorching metal: she could never endure that shame before her uncle and

aunt, before Mary Burger, and the servants at the Chase, and the people at

Broxton, and everyone who knew her. They should never know what happened to

her. What could she do? (413).

The “shame” that Hetty should face stems from the now visible signification of

Hetty’s sexual relationship with Arthur: her pregnancy (413). The wife of the landlord of

the inn where Hetty rests upon entering Windsor observes Hetty’s pregnancy. Eliot

describes the wife’s silent assessment of Hetty’s changed physique, to attest to the now

apparent character of Hetty’s pregnancy. The wife’s eyes “…wandered to [Hetty’s]

figure, which in her hurried dressing on her journey she had taken no pains to conceal”

(408). Eliot’s remark, “…moreover, the stranger’s eye detects what the familiar

unsuspecting eye leaves unnoticed” subtly informs readers—who, at this point in the

novel, qualify as “familiar,” but not unsuspecting, eyes— of Hetty’s pregnancy, while

simultaneously communicating the wife’s knowledge that Hetty is with child (408).

Hetty answers her own question—“What could she do?”—when she initiates the

next step of her journey. Hetty gets on a coach that takes her twenty-miles backwards

from Windsor, back “…along the way she had come,” back to Stratford-on-Avon (416).

Hetty retires to a corner of a nearby pasture, to sleep in a break in the hedges. When night

gives way to morning, Hetty travels onward to Norton, with a newly devised plan to go to

Dinah in Stonyshire. Eliot ends the chapter, aptly titled “The Journey In Despair,” with

an ominous question that imparts that the “end” will not be favorable for Hetty: “What

will be the end?—the end of her objectless wandering…clinging to life only as the hunted

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wounded brute clings to it?” (423). The “end” of Hetty’s “objectless wandering” is set in

Stonyshire, at Stoniton, where Hetty is arrested, and put in prison for the murder of her

child (423). From Stoniton prison, Hetty returns to Hayslope, to be tried for infanticide.

The spatial movement of the problematic sexual and romantic desire, and of the

characters who fan the fictional flames of this desire—Arthur and Hetty—dictates that

Hetty’s homecoming cannot be long enduring. If the Hayslope community is ever to

regain its prior sense of “social coherency,” then neither Arthur, nor Hetty, can remain in

Hayslope for a prolonged period of time (Berger 324). Hetty’s resentencing from death,

to exile, functions as a sort of realist deus ex machina for the Hayslope community, that

spatially solves the community’s ‘Hetty problem.’ Hetty cannot be hanged in Hayslope,

for to die in Hayslope is still to remain in the village, if not in living body, then in buried

body. Hetty cannot die in Hayslope, among its community members. Exile is the natural

justice for Hetty’s crime, in the broader mobile schema of the community antagonistic

desire of Eliot’s canon.

Hetty’s exile from Hayslope is manifold, in that the judicious system exiles Hetty

from Hayslope, but so too does George Eliot, in her textual dispossession of Hetty,

following Hetty’s exile to Australia. Eliot not only refuses to follow Hetty to Australia,

for even the briefest of assessments of Hetty’s condition post-trial, but ceases to ever

mention Hetty by name again. The admission is Eliot’s symbolic removal of Hetty from

Adam Bede, and from the fragile community of Hayslope, as the community slowly

begins a reverse metamorphosis, from a state of social precarity, to one of social stability.

In the rare instances in which the novel’s characters speak of Hetty, their mention of

Hetty is terse and non-descript, as in Adam Bede’s epilogue. Situated several years after

Hetty’s exile, the epilogue broaches Hetty’s eventual death through Dinah’s conversation

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with Seth. “Adam was greatly moved this morning at the thought of the change he should

see in the poor young man [Arthur] from the sickness he has undergone, as well as the

years which have changed us all. And the death of the poor wanderer, when she was

coming back to us, has been sorrow upon sorrow,” Dinah states (Eliot 588). When Dinah

calls Hetty “the poor wanderer” in place of “Hetty,” Dinah effectually strips Hetty of the

individuality and identity that use of the name “Hetty” would impart (588). Hetty’s own

cousin evades mention of Hetty by name, opting instead for an evasive allusion. Eliot

allows Hetty to appear in Adam Bede’s epilogue with deliberate anonymity. Hetty thus

gains entry to the epilogue with unremarkable presence, only to be formally killed by a

text that has already figuratively killed Hetty in its erasure of her.

We glean the detail that Hetty dies when she was “…coming back” to Hayslope in

Adam Bede’s epilogue. Hetty’s death is symbolic in a spatial sense: although Hetty gains

the opportunity to return to Hayslope many years after her conviction and ensuing exile,

she dies before she can ever reach Hayslope (588). Hetty’s pending spatial readmission to

Hayslope society remains pending—it never reaches completion. That Hetty dies before

she can complete the trip from Australia to Hayslope further affirms the idea that a

character associated with community disruptive desire must vacate the social space

wherein this desire would prove threatening for a period of time. Her death additionally

advances the idea that sometimes, the character’s absence must be one of a permanent

nature, re-entry to the social space a narrative impossible for some.

Arthur also receives the chance to re-embed himself among the Hayslope

community members at novel’s end. Unlike Hetty, Arthur does not die before he reaches

Hayslope. Yet, when Arthur returns, he does not return unaltered. Adam professes Arthur

to be changed in “colour,” and “sadly” looking (589). Granted, Arthur is “…all sound in

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th’ inside,” and “…speaks just the same,” but Arthur nevertheless rejoins Hayslope

society as an attenuated version of himself, markedly different from the confident and

self-possessed Captain Arthur Donnithorne who graced the earlier pages of Adam Bede

(589). Mr Irwine’s reaction to Arthur evidences Arthur’s fragility upon his arrival in

Hayslope. Irwine proclaims that Arthur “…must see nobody but [Dinah]…as it’ll be bad

for him t’ have his feelings stirred with seeing many people one after another” (590).

Irwine’s observation that he, Dinah, Seth, and Adam need to get Arthur “…strong and

healthy” only additionally underscores the tenuousness of Arthur’s health (590).

While Arthur does chart an eventual return to Hayslope, he only does so after a

long series of years, and in a noticeably delicate condition. The circumstances of Arthur’s

re-entry into Hayslope society suggest that not all characters associated with community

destabilizing sexual and romantic desire will face perpetual and unrelenting extradition

from the community. Such a character might instead perform the necessary exit from the

social space, only to reappear years later, when the community has restored its sense of

“social coherency,” as Arthur does in Adam Bede (Berger 324). It’s worth noting,

however, that Arthur reenters Hayslope in a weakened capacity of character. A

consequence of aging, and indubitably, the emotional and physical tax of his immoral

behavior of the preceding years, Arthur’s feebleness might also indicate that the character

that does eventually come back to the community cannot—and does not—do so in an

uncompromised state. The character whose exit becomes a necessity for the continuation

of community wellbeing, in this sense, never makes a full return to the social space, even

when welcomed back, however many years later.

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The Impossibility of Proximity: Compulsory Migration in The Mill on the Floss

Whereas Adam Bede opens in and among the bustle of Johnathan Burge’s “roomy

workshop,” The Mill on the Floss, by contrast, is much more sweeping in its introductory

spatial purview. The 1860 novel begins with Eliot’s assessment of the natural landscape

of The Mill on the Floss’s setting, the town of St Ogg’s. No less thorough than that of

Burge’s workshop, Eliot’s description of the St Ogg’s scenery elucidates several key

differences between the respective localities of Hayslope and St Ogg’s. Eliot directs her

reader’s attention to:

A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to

the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an

impetuous embrace. On this mighty tide the black ships—laden with fresh-

scented fir-planks, with rounded sacks of oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter

of coal—are borne along to the town of St Ogg’s, which sows its aged, fluted red

roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the

river bank…Far away on earth hand stretch the rich pastures…made ready for the

seed of broad-leaved green crops, or touched already with the tint of the tender-

bladed autumn-sown corn” (9).

If Hayslope is an exemplar of the agriculturally oriented, “knowable” pastoral

community, then St Ogg’s is the geographical model of a nineteenth-century town that is

in a far more advanced stage of economic development (Williams 165). St Ogg’s is not

enclosed by sprawling, green hills, as Hayslope is; St Ogg’s instead straddles the

powerful Floss river, and the pastures that look towards the seed that is to be sown by St

Oggs farmers. The Floss, however, is not simply a geographical distinction between the

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fictive spaces of St Ogg’s and Hayslope: the Floss river, “…where the black ships unlade

themselves of their burthens from the far north and carry away, in exchange, the precious

inland products,” comprises another divergence, commercial modernity (Eliot 9). The

merchant ships that travel the Floss, to swap one good for another upon their arrival in St

Ogg’s, participate in a capitalistic commercial trade that stands in stark opposition to the

burgeoning rural-capitalism visible in Adam Bede. The Donnithornes’ right to

Donnithorne Chase, and lease of the dairy farm—which comprises part of the Chase

land—to the Poyser family evidences the existence of a pre-industrial system of land

management akin to feudalism. “That rich undulating district of Loamshire to which

Hayslope belonged, lies close to a grim outskirt of Stonyshire,” but notably not “close” to

a novelistic equivalent of the Floss River (Eliot AB 22).

The “little village” of Hayslope is a self-contained pre-industrial space, wherein a

rural working class labors to sustain the community’s economy (Eliot AB 66). The “black

ships” that sit atop the Floss’ tide, and the “coal” that “glitters” from its snug position

aboard the ships conversely materialize on the opening pages of The Mill on the Floss as

emblems of economic modernity, signifiers of “capitalist transformation” (Eliot 9; Esty

143). Eliot’s mention of Dorlcote Mill on the latter half of text’s first page further

illustrates St Ogg’s developmental modernity. Eliot observes the mill’s “unresting

wheel,” as it “…sends out its diamond jets of water” (10). “The rush of the water and the

booming of the mill,” Eliot says, “bring a dreamy deafness which seems to heighten the

peacefulness of the scene” (10). Although Eliot constructs St Ogg’s—like Hayslope—as

a pre-industrial locality, St Ogg’s bears traces of modernization that are not present in

Adam Bede.

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For all of its imagery indicative of a town in an more advanced state of economic

flux, The Mill on the Floss still underscores St Ogg’s status as a pre-industrial space, in

the contrast of the merchant ships and Dorlcote Mill with “…the thunder of the huge

covered waggon coming home with sacks of grain” (10). The “…thunder of the huge

covered waggon” is characteristically pastoral in sound (10). The “dreamy deafness” of

the mill, and the “thunder” of the “waggon” effect a sensory, sonic balance of scene that

points to another sort of elemental equilibrium in The Mill on the Floss, namely that of

the modern—apparent in Dorlcote Mill—and that of early pastoral working tradition—

perceptible in the “waggon,” and in the horse that draws this grain filled “waggon” (10).

Its pre-modern components considered, “1820’s St Ogg’s” still functions as an

example of Williams’ “knowable [country] community,” and The Mill on the Floss a

“narrative of community” (Esty 147; Williams 165; Zagarell 2). A “…sociological study

of provincial life,” The Mill on the Floss examines the “knowable community” of St

Ogg’s (Gilbert and Gubar 491; Williams 165). St Ogg’s is, per Eliot, “…one of those old,

old towns…a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history like a

millennial tree…a town ‘familiar with forgotten years’” (Eliot 123). As in Adam Bede,

Eliot “…portrays the interaction of private lives and…social milieu” in The Mill on the

Floss (Feltes 386). The phrase “private lives” certainly encompasses those of Stephen

Guest, Lucy Deane, Mr. Wakem, and his son, Philip Wakem, but as readers of The Mill

on the Floss know and know well, Eliot privileges the “private lives” of the Tullivers

across the text (386). Eliot devotes the focus of The Mill on the Floss to the “private

lives” of the Tullivers, but more specifically, to those of Tom and Maggie Tulliver (386).

Not drastically dissimilar from the Poysers in their working class role, the Tullivers

operate Dorlcote Mill. The subject of ownership, however, distinguishes the Tullivers

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from the Poysers: the Poysers do not singularly own the Hall Farm, while the Tullivers

independently own Dorlcote Mill.

The central industrial image of The Mill on the Floss, Dorlcote Mill and its land is

a family heirloom of a spatial sort: “The Tullivers had lived on this spot for generations,

and he [Tom] had sat listening on a low stool on winter evenings while his father talked

of the old half-timbered mill that had been there before the last great floods, which

damaged it so that his grandfather pulled it down and built the new one” (Eliot 276).

Dorlcote Mill is the source of the Tulliver family’s livelihood, the business that imposes a

quotidian schedule of labor on patriarch, Mr. Jeremy Tulliver, and on his son, Tom. Just

as the residents of Hayslope individually shoulder their daily responsibilities, which

qualify as “the minute and quite ordinary processes through which [the community]

maintains itself as an entity,” so too do the St Ogg’s locals (Zagarell 2). The Tulliver’s

relatives, the Deanes, manage shipping company, Guest & Co. The Pullets farm land, Mr.

Stelling tutors town pupils, and fellow St Ogg’s dweller, Lawyer Wakem, practices law.

The list above is not comprehensive; it does not enumerate each St Ogg’s community

member and his or her professional function in the context of the community, but rather

focuses on some of the town inhabitants and their respective engagements, to underscore

some of the “minute and quite ordinary processes” of St Ogg’s (2). As this project’s

preceding chapter outlines, a “narrative of community…stresses how the elements of the

community are integrated,” in a larger textual effort to emphasize “…modes of

interdependence among community members” (6). The lawsuit that engages Mr. Tulliver,

Mr. Pivart, and Lawyer Wakem, who defends Pivart, certainly illustrates

“…interdependence among community members,” in its problematization of the

“interdependence” of Mr. Tulliver and his neighbor, Pivart, on the Ripple River’s water

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supply (6). The new owner of Bincome’s farm and its surrounding land, Pivart seeks to

irrigate his property, much to Mr. Tulliver’s discontent. Yet, Pivart’s irrigation plans pose

a dilemma for Mr. Tulliver, who states “It’s plan enough what’s the rights and the wrongs

of water…a river’s a river, and if you’ve got a mill, you must have water to turn it; and

it’s not use telling me Pivart’s erigation and nonsense won’t stop my wheel” (Eliot

139/191).

Pivart’s victory in the legal proceeding grants him use of the Ripple, the river that

flows into the Ripple’s larger sister river, the Floss. Mr. Tulliver and Mr. Pivart’s dual

dependence on use of the Ripple’s water—the former, for productivity of Dorlcote Mill,

and the latter, for farmland—represents a “…mode of interdependence” among these two

community members (Zagarell 6). Both Tulliver and Pivart need the Ripple’s water in

order to sustain their separate businesses, which benefit not only Tulliver and Pivart as

individuals within the St Ogg’s community, but St Ogg’s as well. The community of St

Ogg’s likewise depends on the functionality of Dorlcote Mill, and presumably, on the

output(s) of Pivart’s farm.

The idea of “interdependence” among community members further figures in the

identities of the men involved in the lawsuit (6). The town lawyer, Lawyer Wakem

provides the legal counsel to the residents of St Ogg’s, who rely on Wakem for legal

representation when necessary, as in the case of Tulliver v. Pivart. To reinvoke Raymond

Williams’ definition of a “knowable [country] community,” the “knowable community”

is “an epitome of direct relationships: of face-to-face contacts” (Williams 165). Tulliver

and Pivart’s lawsuit affirms the existence of these “direct relationships” in St Ogg’s; the

defendant and the plaintiff in the case are ‘next-door’ neighbors, or in Williams’ words,

“face-to-face contacts” (165). Pivart is, after all, “a farmer setting up an irrigation scheme

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further up the river” (Miller 87). Pivart’s engagement of the town lawyer highlights

Lawyer Wakem as additional, personified proof of the existence these “direct

relationships” in St Ogg’s (Williams 165).

Tulliver v. Pivart is a lawsuit that emphasizes the small social network of St

Ogg’s, in its pitting of neighbor against neighbor. Rephrased, Tulliver v. Pivart is a

lawsuit that positions one “face-to-face contact” against another (165). Henry Auster

proclaims The Mill on the Floss to be a text that depicts “…the interpenetration of public

and private lives,” and Mr. Tulliver, Mr. Pivart, and Lawyer Wakem’s lawsuit indeed

illustrates this “interpenetration” of “public and private” (Feltes 356). Yet, in the tightly

knit “knowable community” of modest scale—St Ogg’s—it is of course doubtful whether

the “public and private” ever exist independently of each other (356). In the larger,

narrative context of George Eliot, the so-called “private” is inevitably and reliably made

public (356).

We can contemplate Zagarell’s idea of “…modes of interdependence among

community members” in an even richer manner if we consider the subject of Tulliver v.

Pivart—water use rights—in greater depth (Zagarell 6). Elizabeth Carolyn Miller draws

upon the work of Jules Law to argue that “irrigation technology,” and “the laws

governing it” were in nascent stages during the 1820 time period in which The Mill on the

Floss is set (Miller 87). It is for this reason that “…it would have been impossible for

Tulliver to know how his water-powered mill would be affected by an irrigation system

upstream” (87). Miller’s assertion about this “impossibility” invites another, one

concerned with the state of water power and energy during the time (87). Water, in this

historical moment, “…is both spatially and temporally unsuited to privatization, and thus

to capitalization on a large scale…is better suited to collectivization than privatization”

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(87-88). Even if the outcome of Tulliver v. Pivart were different, were decided in Mr.

Tulliver’s favor, Mr. Tulliver could not reasonably “privatize” the Ripple’s water, to

ensure longevity of Dorlcote Mill (88). This inability to “privatize” a water source

renders the Ripple as a key geographical feature of St Ogg’s that forcibly facilitates

“…interdependence among community members” (Zagarell 6). This particular form of

“interdependence” in St Ogg’s is borne not out of choice, but out of necessity (6).

The manner by which Mr. Tulliver forfeits ownership of Dorlcote Mill serves as

another instance of visible “…interdependence among community members” (6). Mr.

Tulliver’s loss in Tulliver v. Pivart leads to the bankruptcy of the Tulliver family. Maggie

articulates the magnitude of the Tulliver family’s misfortune when she visits Tom at his

tutor, Mr. Stelling’s, to impart news of the loss to Tom. “O Tom, he [Mr. Tulliver] will

lose the mill and the land, and everything,” Maggie cries, “He will have nothing left”

(Eliot 198). Adamant that he shall remain “Mr Tulliver of Dorlcote Mill,” Tulliver visits

Furley, the mortgage owner on the Dorlcote Mill land (198). Mr Tulliver resolves that

Furley “…would be glad not only to purchase the whole estate including the mill and the

homestead, but would accept Mr Tulliver as a tenant, and be willing to advance money to

be repaid with high interest out of the profits of the business” (205). Mr Tulliver’s

question, “Who would neglect such a profitable investment?” rings with unmistakable

irony, for Furley, “…lately much straitened for money,” has already sold the mortgage on

Tulliver’s land to Lawyer Wakem (206, 209). Needless to say, Wakem certainly does not

“…neglect such a profitable investment”—he retains the mortgage on Dorlcote Mill, in a

strategic move that renders Mr Tulliver Lawyer Wakem’s worker (209). Wakem’s

acquisition of Tulliver’s mortgage creates another node of “interdependence,” albeit one

wherein “interdependence” appears in markedly uneven distribution: Wakem depends on

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Tulliver to work the mill, while Tulliver depends—and depends heavily, at that—on

Wakem to preserve his identity as “Mr Tulliver of Dorlcote Mill” (Zagarell 6; Eliot 198).

The “interdependence” of Lawyer Wakem and Mr Tulliver by way of Dorlcote Mill is

not limited to these two characters, but rather catalyzes “interdependence” beyond

Wakem and Tulliver (Zagarell 6). Conscious that Wakem’s possession of the mortgage

places Wakem in a position to bid—and potentially win—Tulliver’s estate in its entirety,

Mr Tulliver enlists his cousin, Mr. Deane of Guest & Co., as a possible savior of Dorlcote

Mill—read: of Tulliver’s dignity. Again, the “interdependence” borne between Tullliver

and Deane is unbalanced: Deane’s ability to purchase Dorlcote Mill on behalf of Guest &

Co. would chiefly benefit Tulliver, who could be sure that Deane would keep Tulliver on

as the mill’s manager (6). On the alternative end of this “interdependency” is Dorlcote

Mill’s potential to be an attractive investment both for Deane, and for Guest & Co.

Indeed, as Deane himself acknowledges, “It would not…be a bad speculation for Guest

& Co. to buy Dorlcote Mill, and carry on the business, which was a good one, and might

be increased by the addition of steam power” (Eliot 0). The valuable nature of such an

investment rests not only in the mill’s status as a “good” business, but also in Mr

Tulliver’s expertise as the manager of this business, and in his staunch devotion to the

longevity of the business. Both Deane and Guest & Co. would depend on Tulliver for a

large part of the business’ productivity, and subsequently, its financial advantage to Guest

& Co. We may very well read Deane and Guest & Co. as “interdependent” on Mr

Tulliver in this way, but we need also to recognize the tenuousness of this interpretation,

for Deane and Guest & Co. would continue their trade with or without Dorlcote Mill.

Zagarell’s concept of “…interdependence among community members” in a

“narrative of community” is perceptible in The Mill on the Floss, as it was in Adam Bede

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(Zagarell 6). The chief difference is that The Mill on the Floss focuses much more closely

on “interdependence” as it manifests among a specific type of “community members”:

family members (6). The interplay of the community constituting families—the Tullivers,

the Deanes, and not to be forgotten, the Gleggs—is a crucial “detail of [St Ogg’s] life,”

and one that, in turn, increasingly elucidates the small size of the town (6). Eliot professes

St Ogg’s to be “…one of those old, old towns…a town which carries the traces of its long

growth and history like a millennial tree” (Eliot 123). In their multiple generations, the

Tulliver, Deane, and Glegg families represent the very “…traces of…long growth and

history” that Eliot mentions (123). Eliot’s multi-generational depiction of the Tulliver,

Deane, and Glegg families is a key feature of St Ogg’s “visible structure of community”

(Williams 165). The presence of different familial generations suggests that families and

individual family members alike customarily remain in St Ogg’s, to coexist among each

other, and among the other members of the community. The generation spanning nature

of these families’ representation in The Mill on the Floss paints a lucid portrait of St

Ogg’s as a “knowable community,” “knowable” partly because of the multi-generational

character of the families that comprise much of the St Ogg’s community (165).

Kate Flint observes what she calls George Eliot’s “…continual interest in the

formation of gender characteristics by community [and] by expectations,” in “George

Eliot and Gender” (Flint 163). Flint elaborates: “She [Eliot] is alive to the shifting

connections of gender and power, as they manifest themselves in both familial and

broader contexts; and making her readers think about the connections between power,

authority, and gender relations is an inseparable part of her literary and critical

enterprise” (163). These “…shifting connections of gender and power” are not

discriminatory in The Mill On The Floss; just about every character that Eliot introduces

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in the text illustrates the interrelatedness—or, to invoke Zagarell’s terminology, the

“interdependence”—of gender relations and power (163; Zagarell 6). We might recall

chapter nine, “An Item Added To The Family Register,” as the source of an example of

the interconnection of gender relations and power in the text. At the end of the chapter,

Mr Tulliver seethes, having just learned that Lawyer Wakem owns the mortgage on the

mill. The Tulliver patriarch beckons his son, Tom Tulliver, to write an inscription in the

family Bible. Before he even dictates what Tom is to write therein, Mr Tulliver firmly

instructs his son “‘Do as I tell you, Tom. Write’” (Eliot 281). Tom notably answers his

father’s order “with gloomy submission,” as he asks “‘What am I to write, Father?’”

(281). Mr Tulliver speaks his curse upon Wakem—“‘I wish evil may befall him. Write

that’”—and Tom diligently adds the notation to a page in the Bible (281). Distressed,

Maggie exclaims “ ‘O no, father, dear father!...You shouldn’t make Tom write that,’” to

which Tom dutifully replies “‘Be quiet, Maggie!...I shall write it” (281).

Although heterosexual illustrations of the “…shifting connections of gender and

power” are rife in Eliot’s narrative catalogue, and typically involve a dominant male

character, whose power overshadows that of the female counterpart, “gender and power”

are “connections” that likewise “shift” in male-to-male contexts in The Mill on the Floss

(Flint 163). The head of the family, Mr Tulliver possesses the patriarchal power

characteristic of Victorian domesticity, an absolute sort of power that enables him to

issue orders, and requires the members of the family to obey. Tom must consequently

bow to his father’s demands.

As Mr Tulliver grows increasingly disillusioned and increasingly ill later in the

novel, Tom Tulliver assumes Mr Tulliver’s role as the family patriarch, and exercises the

authority that Mr Tulliver once did. Eliot ironically remarks that Tom’s “unlikeness to his

43

father” grows “more and more obvious” as Tom’s Uncle Deane grooms him into an

astute businessman (Eliot 322). The irony of Eliot’s comment is, of course, Tom’s

newfound likeness to Mr Tulliver. The similarity between Tom and his father is only too

apparent in Book Five, when Tom makes Maggie swear on a Bible that she will no longer

fraternize with Lawyer Wakem’s son, Philip. Tom’s speech is striking in its resemblance

to his father’s in The Mill on the Floss’s preceding Bible scene: “‘Do what I require,’”

Tom tells Maggie, “‘I can’t trust you…Put your hand on this Bible, and say, ‘I renounce

all private speech and intercourse with Philip Wakem from this time forth’” (356). And,

as Tom does when his father instructs him to write the inscription in the holy book,

Maggie assents: “Maggie laid her hand on the page of the manuscript and repeated the

promise” (357). Eliot foregrounds the “connection of gender and power” in a “familial

context” in these two scenes, to illustrate the link between gender and power in a manner

that allows for no ambiguity (163), The male gender—specifically, the male patriarchal

figure—touts a supreme sense of domestic authority that requires the servility of all

family members, though chiefly those of the female gender (163). Maggie reluctantly

acquiesces, places her hand atop the Bible, and recites the oath that Tom scripts; she

defers to Tom, her hesitance an inconsequential precursor . As Tom and Mr. Tulliver

gradually trade roles as Mr. Tulliver’s health progressively degenerates, Tom transcends

his former identity as Maggie’s older brother, to become the exacting interim patriarch, to

whom Maggie must adhere.

The triangular link between “power, authority, and gender relations” visible in the

familial context of the Tulliver family informs the manner by which “identity” and

“heterosexual romance” work for Maggie in the novel (163; Zagarell 14). Zagarell

specifies identity and heterosexual romance as the “crucial issues…in the development of

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the major characters” of a “narrative of community” (14). Maggie Tulliver’s budding

romance with Lawyer Wakem’s son, Philip is the impetus for the problematic

interrelation of identity and heterosexual romance in the novel (14). Maggie knows that

to fraternize with Philip is to betray her family; the Tullivers feel the acute blight that

Lawyer Wakem deals the family in his strategic initial acquirement, and enduring

ownership, of the Tullivers’ mortgage. Wakem,“…not without…vindictiveness towards

the uncomplimentary miller,” is all the while cognizant that his proprietorship of the

mortgage “…would cause Mr. Tulliver the most deadly mortification” (Eliot 265-266).

The tempered, curious affection that Maggie develops for Philip—which Philip openly

reciprocates—constitutes heterosexual romance in The Mill on the Floss, and a conflict of

identity for Maggie, whose fondness for Philip doubles as affection and familial slight. “I

think I could hardly love any one better: there is nothing but what I love you for,” Maggie

confesses to Philip, safe in the thick shroud of Red Deep trees (347). “But it would be

better for us not to say any more about it—won’t it, dear Philip?” Maggie asks. “You

know we couldn’t even be friends, if our friendship were discovered. I have never felt

that I was right in giving way about seeing you…There is only one thing I will not do for

your sake—I will never do anything to wound my father” (349). Maggie’s ensuing

question to Philip, “…what would your own father say, Philip?” conveys the equal sense

of betrayal inherent in Maggie and Philip’s love for one another (349). Maggie knows

that the adversarial relationship between the Tulliver and Wakem families renders a

romance with Philip unsustainable; if Maggie encourages Philip’s advances, continues to

meet him in the Red Deeps, she—like Philip—will become a traitor to her family, and

above all, to her father. Maggie is only a praiseworthy daughter—and sister—if she

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rebuffs Philip, thereby stifling her own romantic interest in Wakem’s son. The concept of

identity is consequently inextricable from that of heterosexual romance.

The conflicting nature of identity and heterosexual romance is again apparent

when Tom coerces Maggie to swear that she will no longer see Philip (14). Maggie, from

Tom’s perspective, must concede, must pledge never to meet Philip again, “Else,” as

Tom tells Maggie, she “…will bring shame on us all, and grief on my father” (Eliot 356).

Sentient of Tom’s authority as the circumstantial Tulliver patriarch, Maggie repeats the

oath. We witness Zagarell’s notion of “liability”—a character’s “…concern about

producing harm in the world”—duly in Maggie’s adamancy that she and Philip can never

be “…more than friends”—“Let us give up thinking of anything else,” Maggie says to

Philip in the Red Deeps—and in her Bible sanctified vow not “to meet” or to “write”

Philip again (Berger 308; Eliot 349, 356). Maggie is sharply attuned to her propensity to

“produce harm in the world,” but even so, “the world” is too large in scope to befit a

description of Maggie’s awareness (Berger 308). Maggie is comparatively more

conscious of her ability to “produce harm” specifically within her family, however

advertently or inadvertently she should precipitate such injury (308).

Maggie is akin to Arthur Donnithorne, in that just as Arthur should not pursue

because of his elevated social status and his identity as the community protectorate next

in line, Maggie similarly should not entice Philip to continue his pursuit of her as a

consequence of the strife that binds the Tulliver and Wakem families. One might propose

that Philip, too, bears a comparable likeness to Donnithorne, in the sense that Philip

persists in his attempts to be “…more than friends” with Maggie, despite his knowledge

that even a platonic friendship with Philip would subject Maggie to her family’s disfavor

(Eliot 349). Much like Donnithorne, Philip is not blind to the deleterious consequences of

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his romantic quest for Maggie’s heart. And again, like Donnithorne, Philip privileges his

attraction for the female protagonist over all else.

The desire that develops between Maggie and Philip, however, warrants

distinction from the desire that manifests between Arthur and Hetty. Unlike the longing

that motivates Arthur and Hetty’s clandestine affair, the desire that entangles Maggie and

Philip is not community destabilizing per se, but familially destabilizing. The desire that

has the capacity to upset the social equanimity of St Ogg’s is not the longing observable

in Maggie and Philip’s interactions, but rather, in Maggie and Stephen Guest’s.

The “…fine young man” whom Eliot cites as “…the graceful and most odiferous

result of the largest oil-mill and the most extensive wharf in St Ogg’s,” Stephen Guest is

the son of the namesake Mr. Guest of Guest & Co. More importantly, Stephen is the love

interest of Maggie’s cousin, Lucy Deane (Eliot 377). Indeed, as Eliot writes, “Stephen

was aware that he had sense and independence enough to choose the wife who was likely

to make him happy, unbiassed by any indirect considerations. He meant to choose Lucy:

she was a little darling, and exactly the sort of woman he had always most admired”

(385). Eliot acquaints her reader with the trajectory of Stephen and Lucy’s relationship:

courtship to marriage.

Eliot introduces the reader of The Mill on the Floss to Stephen in the first chapter

of the sixth book of the novel. The chapter’s title, “A Duet in Paradise” alludes to the

piano duet that engages both Stephen and Lucy at the beginning of the introductory

chapter of Book Sixth. Readers attuned to the deliberate, uncoincidental nature of Eliot’s

word choice will note Eliot’s use of “Paradise” as a curious classification for the Deane

home, in which the chapter opens (377). Trouble will soon—and perhaps

unsurprisingly—befall this “Paradise” (377).

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The symbolic wheels of said trouble, which seem to leave their unmistakable

tread in the respective narrative landscapes of each of Eliot’s realist works, begin to turn

with the regularity of the wheel of Dorlcote Mill following Maggie’s arrival at the Deane

home. When Stephen speculates that Maggie will be “…a fat blonde girl, with round blue

eyes,” who will quietly “stare” at both Lucy and Stephen, Lucy confirms Stephen’s

conjecture, gleeful that Stephen’s misconception of Maggie’s appearance should prove

surprising, pending Stephen’s first introduction to the youngest Tulliver (380). Maggie

indeed is not what Stephen expects:

For one instant Stephen could not conceal his astonishment at the sight of this tall

dark-eyed nymph with her jet-black coronet of hair, the next, Maggie felt herself,

for the very first time in her life, receiving the tribute of a very deep blush and a

very deep bow from a person towards whom she herself was very conscious of

timidity. This new experience was very agreeable to her—so agreeable that it

almost effaced her previous emotion about Philip. There was a new brightness in

her eyes, and a very becoming flush on her cheek as she seated herself (391).

Unlike Lucy, who is “…exactly the sort of woman [Stephen] had always most

admired,” Maggie is a “creature” unfamiliar to Stephen, and alluring in her inability to be

typified (385, 426). Both Stephen and Maggie betray their attraction to one another via a

blush; Stephen’s “very deep blush” reflects in a mirror-like manner on Maggie’s face

(391). Another conflict of heterosexual romance and identity is immediately apparent

upon Stephen and Maggie’s introduction (Zagarell 14). Eliot sows seeds of community

destabilizing desire in this first meeting scene, which serves to acquaint Stephen and

Maggie, but serves also to acquaint Eliot’s reader with these seeds of desire, which will

soon sprout, to grow from nebulous attraction into socially debilitating desire. The

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questions that Eliot poses in Stephen’s voice later in the chapter as Stephen walks to the

boathouse foreshadow Stephen’s development of socially contentious desire for Maggie.

“Had he fallen in love with this surprising daughter of Mrs Tulliver at first sight?” Eliot

asks, from Stephen’s perspective. “Certainly not—” she answers, “such passions are

never heard of in real life. Besides, he was in love already and half engaged to the dearest

little creature in the world, and he was not a man to make a fool of himself in any way”

(Eliot 397). Eliot’s characterization of Stephen harmonizes with that of Arthur

Donnithorne in Adam Bede:

It was not possible for Arthur Donnithorne to do anything mean, dastardly, or

cruel…he should hate himself if he made a scandal…on the estate that was to be

his own some day…He could no more believe that he should so fall in his own

esteem than that he should break both his legs and go on crutches all the rest of

his life. He couldn’t imagine himself in that position; it was too odious, too unlike

him (AB 136, 151)

Yet, as we learn—and as we knew,even before Arthur “made” his “scandal,”

given the thinly veiled irony that shrouds Eliot’s language—Arthur is to “fall” in

“esteem,” and Stephen will similarly “make a fool of himself” (Bede 136, 151; Mill 397).

The phrasing that Eliot uses to describe Stephen and Arthur is similar in its suggestive

nature, and revelatory in its foreshadowing. Eliot’s above observations prove ironic long

before the respective conclusions of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. The irony and

foreshadowing that is audible in Eliot’s separate character sketches of Arthur and Stephen

extends to Eliot’s predictive commentary on Maggie’s fate: “Maggie’s destiny, then, is at

present hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped

river: we only know that the river is full and rapid” (418). “Maggie’s destiny” is not truly

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“hidden,” and the collective “we”—which aligns Eliot with her reader—need not “wait

for it to reveal itself,” for Eliot has already indicated the shape—albeit fragmented—of

“Maggie’s destiny” here (418). The specific course that the “unmapped river” should take

is as of yet undefined at this juncture in the text, but Eliot’s pointed allusion to this

figurative river’s wealth of water—which runs at a “rapid” pace—indicates that Maggie’s

“destiny” will unfurl at a commensurately swift rate, in what we can infer to be a quickly

progressing sequence of narrative events (418). Eliot’s remark that “the river is full”

further implies that Maggie’s “destiny” has the propensity to overtake her, to submerge

her, as the river of Eliot’s simile could, on account of its depth and the rate of its flow

(418). And Maggie’s “destiny” will soon engulf her, just as the Floss River engulfs

Dorlcote Mill and St Ogg’s in what is The Mill on the Floss’s finale (418). The “river”

that Eliot references is not merely a metaphorical river, although the reader of The Mill

on the Floss does not and cannot know the river of the simile to be anything but an artful

comparison—of “destiny” to river—at this point in the novel (418). Knowledge of The

Mill on the Floss’s finale considered, Eliot’s statement about Maggie’s “destiny” is

doubly foretelling (418).

Eliot emphasizes the importance of geographical space and its symbolic

associations long before the desire between Maggie and Stephen necessitates their spatial

movement out of—and away from—St Ogg’s. “It is evident to you now, that Maggie had

arrived at a moment in her life which must be considered by all prudent persons as a great

opportunity for a young woman. Launched into the higher society of St Ogg’s…Maggie

was certainly at a new starting-point in life,” Eliot proclaims, shortly after Maggie begins

her stay at the Deane home (416). If it were not “evident” before, it certainly is now, Eliot

careful to underscore the social potential inherent in Maggie’s presence in St Ogg’s, and

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in her relation to the Deanes, but even more specifically, to Lucy Deane, whom the

“higher society” holds in particularly high regard (416). Newly physically removed from

the terrestrial parameters of Dorlcote Mill and its flanking estate, and presently in the

company of Lucy, Maggie has the chance to establish herself in esteem among the “high

society” of St Ogg’s, and to attract a marital prospect in the process. Henri Lefebvre

reminds us that “social space is what permits fresh actions to occur” (Lefebvre 24). The

“social space” of St Ogg’s represents the promise of such “fresh actions” for Maggie,

who “…had the advantage of being quite unfamiliar to the majority of [her St Ogg’s]

beholders” (24; Eliot 416). Beyond the “beholders,” Maggie is “quite unfamiliar” to this

particular, socially elevated sector of St Ogg’s; all of Maggie’s actions in this segment of

the town shall consequently be “fresh,” or in other words, foundational (416; Lefebvre

24).

If we apply a touch of analytical pressure to Eliot’s use of the word “Arrived,” we

can deduce its layered significance in this context. “Arrived” situates Maggie in a

symbolic sense: Maggie has “Arrived” at a developmental, coming-of-age “moment,” a

“new starting-point” (Eliot 416). “Moment” encompasses the temporality of the life stage

at which Maggie has “arrived”: Maggie inches farther away from girlhood, and ever

closer to womanhood (416). “Arrived,” however, is not only time oriented, but also

spatially indicative, in the sense that “Arrived” succinctly conveys that Maggie has left

the domestic space of the Tulliver home, and Dorlcote Mill. Now physically outside of

the familiar boundaries of the Tulliver abode—although still within the town of St

Ogg’s—Maggie quite literally occupies a new space in a geographical sense. Eliot’s

phrase “a new starting-point” is simultaneously connotative of life stage and narrative

setting (416).

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Like Hayslope in Adam Bede, St Ogg’s is the “knowable [country] community”

wherein community destabilizing desire germinates and grows (Williams 165). Stephen’s

daily exposure to Maggie in the Deane residence catalyzes a “monomania” within

Stephen, as his fascination with the Tulliver daughter transcends fleeting interest, to

become an obsessive, psychologically dominating force (Eliot 422). Indeed, Stephen

“…wishe[d] he had never seen this Maggie Tulliver, to be thrown into a fever by her his

way” (426). Although Maggie reciprocates the longing that Stephen feels, it is necessary

to distinguish Stephen and Maggie’s desire for one another, by matter of degree.

Stephen’s infatuation with Maggie proves mentally monopolizing—Stephen, for instance,

“…rack[s] his invention continually to find out some means by which” he can earn a

mere “look” from Maggie (422). The attraction that tugs Maggie’s thoughts in Stephen’s

direction is not that of an equally consuming caliber, as Eliot evidences when Maggie

thinks back to the time that Lucy “takes” Maggie, to stand her before the “cheval glass”

in her room:

Maggie had smiled at herself then, and for the moment had forgotten everything

in the sense of her own beauty. If that state of mind could have lasted, her choice

would have been to have Stephen Guest at her feet, offering her a life filled with

all luxuries, with daily incense of adoration near and distant…But there were

things in her stronger than vanity—passion, and affection, and long deep

memories and early discipline and effort, of early claims on her love and pity; and

the stream of vanity was soon swept along and mingled with that wider current

which was at its highest force today (455).

Stephen’s appeal to Maggie is clear, but the attraction that Maggie feels to

Stephen cannot and does not match that which Stephen’s feels for Maggie. We recall that

52

Maggie receives “…the tribute of a very deep blush and a very deep bow” from Stephen

when they initially meet, both of which Maggie simply finds to be “…very agreeable”

(391). We can infer that part of Stephen’s allure, for Maggie, rests in his ability to inspire

within her an aesthetic related sort of confidence that, although inherently “vain”—as

Maggie is herself aware—contributes to the sense of womanly self-possession and pride

in appearance that Maggie develops during her stay at the Deane home. The above

excerpt demonstrates that Stephen, for Maggie, is inextricable from “vanity” (391).

Stephen has the capacity to make Maggie feel a sense of beauty that readers of The Mill

on the Floss do not see Maggie experience—let alone revel in—at any point in the novel

prior to her stay at the Deane residence, hence the “new brightness” in Maggie’s eyes,

and “the very becoming flush on her cheek” following Stephen’s very deep blush” and

“very deep bow” during their introduction (391). Unused to the attention of an affluent,

charming young gentleman of status, Maggie receives the “blush” and the “bow” for “the

very first time in her life” (391). We can only suppose this inaugural experience to be

intoxicating in its effect on Maggie, due to its prior lack, and general foreignness, in the

length of Maggie’s life that preceded this pivotal first meeting. The mirror scene, which

follows Stephen and Maggie’s initial encounter, confirms this idea.

While “vanity” is a potent force, Maggie herself acknowledges there to be others

far greater in power (455). Maggie’s mention of “…passion, and affection…[and] early

claims on her love and pity” as constituents of this ‘other’ category, the “things…stronger

than vanity,” denote Maggie’s continued consciousness of the oppositional quality of

heterosexual romance and identity in the context of her desire for Stephen (455). We can

read the “affection” and “early claims on her love and pity” that Maggie cites as the

comparatively more compelling components of her character as those relative to her

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relationship with Lucy (455). We do not meet Lucy for the very first time in the first

chapter of the sixth book of The Mill on the Floss, “A Duet in Paradise”; rather, we meet

Lucy in the seventh chapter of the first book of the text, when Lucy visits Maggie and

Tom (378). From her visit to Maggie and Tom as a child, to her later re-entry to the

narrative when she has grown into “the bell o’ St Ogg’s,” Lucy’s multiple appearances

within and across the text indicate Lucy to be a close familial connection, one deeply

ingrained in Maggie’s life since childhood (352). Lucy consequently lays such an “early

claim” on Maggie’s “love and pity,” and Maggie subsequently fosters a cousinly

“affection” for Lucy, which Lucy returns. True to Zagarell’s explanation, “identity and

heterosexual romance are crucial issues” for the primary characters of a “narrative of

community,” and we see the problematic intersection of each concept through Maggie,

whose identity as Lucy’s cousin creates a romantic impasse (Zagarell 14).

We might also read the “affection” and “…early claims on her love and pity” that

Maggie delineates as relational to Philip Wakem, for whom Maggie likewise expresses

her “affection” (455). Philip too has known Maggie for a considerable stretch of time,

enough to lay such “…early claims” in this temporal sense, if not in comparison to Lucy,

than certainly in comparison to Stephen (Eliot 455). Further, the “passion” that Maggie

references is likely to pertain not to Lucy, but to Philip, given the word’s romantic

connotation (455). The scene on page 455 illustrates the oppositional character of

Maggie’s identity, and her romantic interest in her cousin’s intended fiancée, to affirm

that identity and heterosexual romance are indeed key issues for a protagonist in a

“narrative of community” (Zagarell 14).

This juncture in the novel portrays the ever contentious nature of identity and

heterosexual romance in The Mill on the Floss, but it additionally illustrates Maggie’s

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sense of “liability” (Berger 308). “Liability,” Berger argues, “operates by way of self-

conscious reflection; conscientiousness about one’s actions and their potential harm

harnesses together the social and psychological aspects of persons” (324). Maggie’s

encounter with Lucy’s mirror is quite literally a moment of “self-conscious reflection”:

Maggie ‘reflects’ upon her look into the “cheval glass,” to discern her own beauty,

‘reflected’ back in the glass (Eliot 455). The “reflection” here is visually oriented (Berger

324). The “state of mind” that Maggie’s glance into the glass elicits is a state of vain

reverie, in which Maggie covets Stephen (Eliot 455). This dreamy, imaginative musing

eventually—and inevitably—gives way to Maggie’s more realistic thinking, evident in

the sentence that begins “But there were things in her stronger than vanity—passion, and

affection, and long deep memories and early discipline and effort, of early claims on her

love and pity; and the stream of vanity was soon swept along…” (455). It is this sentence

that signals Maggie’s “self-conscious reflection,” her “conscientiousness about [her]

actions and their potential harm” (Berger 308).

The verb “reflect,” and the noun “reflection” exist in a nuanced, layered capacity.

We see Maggie peer into the glass to reflect on her physical beauty, and we promptly

then see her fantasy shatter as she reflects on the “passion,” “affection,” and “…early

claims on her love and pity” established in the time that preceded her introduction to

Stephen (455). Written in the past tense, the mirror scene constitutes a narrative act of

reflection, as Eliot recalls the sequential order of Maggie’s previously occurring actions,

and relates them to her readers, in the midst of the novel’s presently unfolding events.

Past and present temporalities fold, to render the multi-significance of “reflect” and

“reflection” complex.

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The mirror scene conveys that Maggie is sensible of her “liability” (Berger 308).

In his chapter in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, “George Eliot and

philosophy,” George Levine writes “Maggie is confronted with perhaps the most famous

of moral dilemmas in George Eliot’s novels. She must choose between her love for

Stephen and her responsibility to avoid hurting Lucy and Philip” (Levine 93). We can

hear echoes of Courtney Berger’s notion of “liability” in Levine’s use of the word

“responsibility” (Berger 308; Levine 93). The mirror scene elucidates the dissonance

between Maggie’s desire for Stephen, and her “responsibility”— or, her “liability”—and

its connection to Lucy and Philip (93; Berger 308). Maggie is arguably the character most

deeply attuned to the concept of “liability” throughout The Mill on the Floss: her

puritanical tendencies bespeak her awareness of her ability to induce harm, and Maggie

fervently labors to avoid the sort of self-satisfaction that would injure those around her.

The “narrow moral asceticism” that motivates Maggie’s behavioral pattern of self-denial

is audible in Maggie’s musing earlier in the text: “…[Maggie] often wished she had him

[Philip] for a brother and a teacher, as they had fancied it might have been, in their talk

together. But that sort of wishing had been banished along with other dreams that

savoured of seeking her own will…” (Eliot 308-309). Maggie forbids herself even the

dreams and wishes secret to one’s own psyche in an absorbing, self-abnegating pledge to

not succumb to desire of any kind. Maggie is strong in her resolve that she will not

mentally entertain this “sort of wishing,” or the dreams akin to this “wishing,” but

notably deviates from this programme of psychological abstaining in the mirror scene,

where such “wishing” contemplatively ensnares Maggie, even if only ephemerally (308).

Yet, even though Maggie momentarily envisions Stephen as her choice of

romantic partner at this juncture in the text, the transient, desirous fancy does not

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translate to covetous action on Maggie’s behalf—at least, not immediately. As the

attraction between Stephen and Maggie grows increasingly magnetic, Maggie determines

that she will leave Lucy’s company, to venture away from the Deane home. “The Deane

home” has a metonymic function, for to place distance between she and the Deane

residence is really to place distance between she and Stephen. “O I must go,” Maggie tells

Dr Kenn when he asks if Maggie will remain in St Ogg’s, to become a “permanent

parishioner” (454). Eliot’s italicization of three of the four words that comprise Maggie’s

response to Dr Kenn visually impart the sense of urgency with which Maggie speaks, and

Dr Kenn wisely perceives Maggie’s “brief confidence” to be “charged with meaning”

(454). Lucy exhorts Maggie to stay: “You must give up going to stay with your aunt

Moss the day after tomorrow, Maggie,” Lucy says, “write a note to her, and tell her you

have put it off at my request…I don’t want you to go out of the way just now” (456). But

Maggie refuses to postpone her trip to her aunt Moss’ in the “beggarly parish” of Basset,

despite the earnestness of Lucy’s appeal (84). Maggie’s trip to Basset, however, will not

be a short sojourn from which Maggie will return, to once more rejoin Lucy in St Ogg’s;

unbeknownst to Lucy, Maggie has already written to her prior governess, Miss Firniss, to

seek a “situation to fill,” an endeavor that ensures Maggie’s relocation from St Ogg’s

(456).

“O Maggie—what is the reason?” Lucy asks, bewildered, when Maggie informs

Lucy of her plan. “There is nothing now to keep you and Philip apart,” Lucy gesticulates

(456). Maggie reminds Lucy that she has promised Tom that she will not foster a

relationship of any kind with Philip, to emphasize that the pursuit of a marriage with

Philip is currently out of the question, despite Maggie’s geographic distance: far enough

from Tom to render her able to consort with Philip, however covertly. The question that

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Lucy asks Maggie—“…is it that you don’t love Philip well enough to marry him?—tell

me—trust me”—evidences the dramatic irony of Maggie and Lucy’s exchange (457).

Eliot’s notation that Maggie’s hands “were quite cold” in Lucy’s as she pauses to answer

is a physical description that conveys two sentiments to Eliot’s reader: the first, that Lucy

has pierced the heart of Maggie’s resolution to leave, and the second, that Maggie—like

Eliot’s reader—knows it (457).

Maggie cannot leave St Ogg’s soon enough to wholly evade the possible betrayal

of Lucy’s trust. Maggie attends the Miss Guests’ party at Park House alongside Lucy

prior to her withdrawal from St Ogg’s society. Stephen invites Maggie, whom he finds

seated alone at a corner of the drawing-room, to walk with him in the sitting-room.

Maggie assents. Alone with Maggie in the room, Stephen “clasps” Maggie’s wrist, and

“shower[s] kisses on it,” driven by a “mad impulse” that motivates him to commit the

transgression (460). Slighted, Maggie reproaches Stephen: “How dare you?” she asks in

“a deeply shaken, half smothered voice” (460). “Leave me to myself…and for the future

avoid me,” Maggie instructs Stephen (460). Maggie’s criticism is firm, and appropriately

swift in reply to Stephen’s advance. Maggie issues the necessary reproach, but still

experiences “a moment’s happiness.” Maggie knows this “happiness” to be “treachery to

Lucy, to Philip—to her own better soul” (461). The next morning, Maggie sets off to

Bassett.

Maggie’s retreat from St Ogg’s is her preemptive measure to stem the reciprocal,

injurious desire that mounts between her and Stephen. Maggie purposefully places

geographic space between her and Stephen; her preventative action attests to her sense of

“liability” (Berger 308). Maggie’s movement proves futile, as Stephen follows her to

Basset. Stephen’s desire for Maggie transcends distance: “I can’t go away from you—I

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can’t leave you…I shall come back again if you send me away with this coldness,”

Stephen informs Maggie (466). Both characters demonstrate their acute sensitivity of

space through speech. Maggie tells Stephen that there is “no need for [her] to go any

farther” when Stephen begins to walk with her, down the lane of her aunt Moss’ property

(465). Spatially oriented language is again evident when Maggie chastises Stephen for

coming to Basset: “I don’t know whether you consider it gentlemanly and delicate

conduct to place me in a position that forced me to come out with you,” Maggie says

(465). On the next page, Maggie’s attention to spatial relations resounds in her realization

that “she must go on now,” “go on” away from Stephen (466).

The omnipresence of space in its symbolic social significance echoes in Stephen’s

answer to Maggie’s “hurried” expostulation that Stephen’s unexpected appearance in

Basset will appear “strange” (466). “Never mind,” Stephen answer[s] impatiently; they

don’t know the people at St Ogg’s” (466). The implication of Stephen’s reply is clear:

geographic distance from St Ogg’s extends an anonymity that allows Stephen to act upon

his desire for Maggie. Stephen’s retort additionally indicates that Stephen is conscious of

the potential for social harm inherent in his pursuit of Maggie—the potentially odd nature

of his abrupt visit matters not to Stephen, for the people at Basset “don’t know the people

at St Ogg’s,” and by extension, don’t know Stephen, don’t know that Stephen errs in his

visit to Maggie (466). We note that Maggie is conversely highly attentive to the social.

Maggie states that Stephen’s call will seem unusual, the primary reason for which is

Stephen’s social esteem. A physical emblem of St Ogg’s social upper crust, and

presumably a well-known, immediately recognizable figure given the social stature of the

Guest surname, Stephen—to invoke space—is out of place in the “beggarly parish” of

Basset (84). Stephen’s appearance in Bassett could prompt the sort of suggestive talk that

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could in turn circulate among the Basset residents, to ultimately travel back to St Ogg’s,

to Lucy.

When Stephen proposes that he and Maggie should “throw everything to the

winds for the sake of belonging to each other,” Maggie resists (467). “We should break

all these mistaken ties that were made in blindness—and determine to marry each other”

Stephen insists, while Maggie staunchly proclaims that she “would rather die than fall

into that temptation” (467). Maggie, however, eventually falters; she and Stephen

exchange “one kiss—and then a long look,” before Stephen mounts his horse to ride off,

away from Basset (467). Maggie too leaves Basset, at the very end of the week. From

Basset, Maggie travels to her aunt Pullet’s home in Garum Firs, and thereafter returns to

St Ogg’s, her intention to venture beyond St Ogg’s in search of a situation seemingly

narratively forgotten in this particular point in the text. As per Eliot, “In less than a week

Maggie was at St Ogg’s again” (477).

Stephen, who “had unaccountably taken to dining at Mr. Deane’s as often as

possible” in Maggie’s absence initially avoids the Deane residence when Maggie is

present. Stephen “at first began his mornings with a resolution that he would not dine

there—not even go in the evening, till Maggie was away” (477). Stephen even “devise[s]

a plan of starting off on a journey” that would route him in a direction other than St

Ogg’s, other than Maggie (477). Stephen attempts a sort of spatial management akin to

that which is evident in Maggie’s preceding, fleeting movement out of St Ogg’s, away

from the Deane dwelling. Stephen’s consciousness of his spatial position, of his spatial

relationality to a certain anomalous “sweet, strange, troublesome…creature,” is an acute

sense of awareness that Stephen exercises to ensure that he and Maggie will not meet

(426). But the ardency of Stephen’s efforts to evade Maggie soon attenuates in a gradual

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weakening of personal will that would appropriately be termed “inevitable,” given The

Mill on the Floss’ classification as a work of literary realism. Climactically, “…the

journey was not taken,” and Stephen increasingly lusts for “one more touch, one more

glance” at Maggie (477).

The expansive spatial movements of both Stephen and Maggie, initially made

together—and later, made separately—begin with the boating trip that is—in the context

of the original plan—a form of diversion that will unite Stephen, Lucy, Maggie, and

Philip for a rowing venture on the Floss. By way of circumstantial consequence, Stephen

and Maggie are the sole two characters who go boating:

They glided rapidly along, to Stephen’s rowing, helped by the backward-flowing

tide, past the Tofton trees and houses…Maggie was only dimly conscious of the

banks, as they passed them, and dwelt with no recognition on the villages: she

knew there were several to be passed before they reached Luckreth, where they

always stopped and left the boat. At all times she was so liable to fits of absence,

that she was likely enough to let her way-marks pass unnoticed (484).

Maggie eventually awakens to the unfamiliarity of the landscape: “the far-

stretching fields,” “the banks close by” are “entirely strange to her” (485). St Ogg’s and

Luckreth are many miles behind Stephen and Maggie; a return to either location would

entail a lengthy journey, a jaunt that would surely raise suspicion among the St Ogg’s

community members, who are bound to recognize Stephen and Maggie as missing, once

enough time lapses. Maggie recognizes the expanse of the distance that separates her and

Stephen from St Ogg’s and Luckreth. “We shall not get home for hours—and Lucy—O

God, help me!” Maggie cries (485). The fragment “and Lucy” is a syntactical pinpoint, at

which Maggie realizes the subsequent suggestion of she and Stephen’s abrupt, prolonged

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absence—a romantic affair (485). Her geographic position so far from St Ogg’s and

Luckreth, and her place opposite Stephen in the boat constitute two debilitating

circumstances for Maggie, who visualizes Lucy’s “look of pained surprise and doubt,”

the physical expression that would follow Lucy’s registration of the grim implication of

Stephen and Maggie’s failure to return (485). Maggie knows that the foreignness of the

surrounding landscape, denotative of her spatial estrangement from the two towns, will

be condemnatory. Her unannounced disappearance from St Ogg’s alongside Stephen will

convey a voluntariness of flight, egress sought to supplant Lucy in romantic position.

Maggie’s unwittingness that Stephen should neglect to stop rowing at the customary

destination of Luckreth is no salvation: “The irrevocable wrong that must blot her live

had been committed” (491). As George Levine attests, the presumptions and the

judgment that Maggie’s position in the boat opposite Stephen prompt will extend beyond

Lucy. “The narrative pronouncement is absolute;” Levine writes, “her [Maggie’s] act is

unequivocally immoral and the consequences will be relentless” (Levine 94).

The lack of proximity to St Ogg’s and Luckreth and the suppositions that their

distance from both towns spawn, however, is only devastating for Maggie. “See how the

tide is carrying us out…It will carry us on to Torby, and we can land there, and get some

carriage, and hurry on to York, and then to Scotland—and never pause a moment till we

are bound to each other so that only death can part us,” Stephen says (Eliot 485). Stephen

knows that he and Maggie cannot openly act upon their mutual desire in St Ogg’s, and it

is for this very reason that Stephen issues his unconventional marriage proposals in two

localities that noticeably do not include St Ogg’s. Stephen extends his first informal offer

of marriage to Maggie on her aunt’s property in Bassett, and again petitions Maggie to

take his hand at this very moment. Distance from St Ogg’s and Luckreth is crippling for

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Maggie, and perversely indicative of opportunity for Stephen. But Maggie castigates

Stephen, and rescinds his proposal; these responses engender additional ensuing

movement, as both Stephen and Maggie must plot their course back to St Ogg’s. Stephen

and Maggie do indeed go to Torby, but not to marry.

Once at Torby, Stephen and Maggie board a Dutch vessel en route to Mudport,

and expected to arrive there “in less than two days,” if the wind “held” (488). When the

steamer reaches its destination, Maggie seeks a coach, and continues her journey on to

York, alone. Misfortune permeates Maggie’s well intentioned, solitary trip back to St

Ogg’s, for York lays beyond St Ogg’s, “farther away from home, but [Maggie] did not

learn that until she was set down in the old city at midnight” (500). In the broader context

of Eliot’s female protagonists, Maggie recalls Hetty’s narrative trajectory, in that Maggie,

now, is “the poor wanderer” (AB 588).

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar posit that George Eliot’s works “…represent the

feminine community in its conservative standards” (Gilbert and Gubar 526). Tom’s and

the St Ogg’s community’s concurrent judgment of Maggie’s “irrevocable wrong”

corroborate the existence of such “conservative standards” in the context of the St Ogg’s

community (Eliot 485; Gilbert and Gubar 526). As Maggie labors to make her way back

to St Ogg’s, gone for what is the fifth calendar day, Maggie swiftly falls into community

disfavor, as Tom and the locals alike speculate that Maggie eloped with Stephen,

following Bob Jakin’s return to St Ogg’s from Mudport, the very spot where Stephen and

Maggie had previously landed. When Jakin “put[s] an end to all improbable suppositions

of an accident on the water by stating that he had seen her [Maggie] land from a vessel

with Mr Stephen Guest,” Tom wonders “Would the next news be that she was married—

or what? Probably that she was not married: Tom’s mind was set to the expectation of the

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worse that could happen—not death but disgrace” (502). To bring “disgrace” upon

oneself is to invite a fate worse than death, and like death, the “disgrace” that Tom

references bears a permanency. The word “disgrace” contains the thinly veiled suggestion

that Tom—and likely, the St Ogg’s residents—attribute Maggie’s assumed elopement to

pregnancy out of wedlock, which further tarnishes Maggie’s reputation. Maggie becomes

the antithesis to feminine “conservative standards,” as “the circumstances which…[give]

a disastrous character to her elopement [pass] beyond the more polite circles of St Ogg’s

and [become] a matter of common talk” (526; Eliot 506).

Maggie’s return to St Ogg’s negates the community members’ collective

expectation that Maggie had eloped, but even so, the “irrevocable wrong that must blot

her live had been committed,” and continues to discolor her character (485). Maggie is

not married—she is marred. Thus Eliot’s capitulation, “It was soon known throughout St

Ogg’s that Miss Tulliver was come back…at all events, Mr Stephen Guest had not

married her—which came to the same thing, so far as her culpability was concerned. We

judge others according to results; how else?” (509). St Ogg’s society does not besmirch

Stephen for his behavior, as it does Maggie:

“Mr Stephen Guest had certainly not behaved well; but then, young men were

liable to these sudden attachments…a young man of five and twenty is not to be

too severely judged in these cases—he is really very much at the mercy of a

designing bold girl. And it was clear that he had shaken her off as soon as he

could: indeed, for their having parted so soon looked very black indeed—for her”

(509, 511).

Maggie’s unmarried status is the “result” of the boating expedition that enables St

Ogg’s society to “judge” Stephen’s comportment as erratic and irresponsible, but

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ultimately not reprehensible to the degree that the community members deem Maggie’s

(509). The marriage that fails to come to fruition absolves Stephen of guilt, and in turn

shifts the weight of the blame solely onto Maggie’s shoulders. Just as Adam Bede “relies

on the story of fallen and female Hetty Sorrel for its suspense,” The Mill on the Floss

likewise sustains its focus on a “fallen” female: Maggie Tulliver (491).

The Mill on the Floss must exonerate Stephen. As the sole son of Mr. Guest,

Stephen is the heir of Guest & Co. More importantly, Stephen is the only heir of the

trading enterprise. Stephen’s singularity at his father’s successor parallels the company’s

singularity as St Ogg’s one central trading business. Guest & Co. is a key commercial

component of St Ogg’s economic activity, and on a smaller interpersonal level, ensures

the livelihoods of Tom and Mr. Deane, who work for Guest & Co. The importing and

shipping interests that shape Guest & Co.’s transactions sustain St Ogg’s status as a

burgeoning but lively commercial hub, while engaging Maggie’s immediate and

extended family. If Stephen is to descend into community disapprobation, the sort of

disrepute that would require Stephen to move out of St Ogg’s to relocate, the St Ogg’s

community would forfeit the longevity of Guest & Co. with Stephen.

The Mill on the Floss cannot attribute the brunt of adulterous fault to Stephen;

Eliot necessarily incriminates Maggie, whose consequential retreat from St Ogg’s society

poses no loss, no disadvantage—whether of a commercial or social kind—to the

community. Akin to Arthur and Hetty, Maggie must leave St Ogg’s, to “restore” St Ogg’s

to its “former state of social coherency” (Berger 324). Maggie’s “self-exile” from St

Ogg’s is essential, in that it engenders Stephen to return to the community, to carry on

with his life as if his life had never indecently intersected with Maggie’s (324). Stephen

cannot coexist alongside Maggie in St Ogg’s, for Maggie is a physical symbol of the illict

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affair. The community members cannot comprehensively dismiss and forget Stephen’s

transgression, cannot pardon him and progress, until Maggie ceases to dwell in St Ogg’s,

until Maggie, the bodily reminder of Stephen’s erring, is no longer present to remind.

Maggie’s spatial expatriation from the St Ogg’s community commences with

Tom. “You will find no home with me…You have disgraced us all—you have disgraced

my father’s name. You have been a curse to your best friends. You have been base—

deceitful…I wash my hands of you for ever. You don’t belong to me,” Tom informs

Maggie (Eliot 503). Tom expels Maggie from the Tulliver home, forbidding her to reside

under his roof. Maggie proceeds to call upon Bob Jakin, who encourages Maggie to go to

Dr Kenn at the Rectory, where she may obtain a place to stay. Maggie heeds Jakin’s

advice, and obligingly sets off to the Rectory, in search of a sanctuary that she will never

again alight upon in St Ogg’s (506).

The exigency of Maggie’s spatial removal from St Ogg’s is evident when Eliot

relates Tom’s internal reaction to Maggie’s “irrevocable wrong”: “His [Tom’s] sister’s

disgrace was naturally a heavy blow to him. It was to be hoped that she would go out of

the neighbourhood—to America, or anywhere—so as to purify the air of St Ogg’s from

the taint of her presence—extremely dangerous to daughters there” (485, 511). The

passive structure of this excerpt is crucial, as it restricts the “hoping” of which Eliot

speaks from assignation to Tom alone (455). Eliot could alternatively have written “Tom

hoped that she would go out of the neighbourhood,” but she doesn’t, and this detail

matters; Eliot instead states “It was to be hoped that she would go out of the

neighbourhood” (455). The syntactical implication of the passive structure of the

sentence is that Tom is not the sole community member who “hopes” that Maggie

“would go out of the neighbourhood”—the other St Ogg’s inhabitants do, too (455).

66

As not only a character, but the character irreversibly disgraced by community

destabilizing desire, Maggie is not to encounter enduring shelter alongside Dr Kenn at the

Rectory. The “taint of [Maggie’s] presence—extremely dangerous to daughters” in St

Ogg’s ascribes a virulence to Maggie’s character that threatens to commensurately “taint”

the reputations of those who associate with Maggie (455).

Maggie learns from Dr Kenn that Stephen went abroad to Holland immediately

after parting from her in York. Although Stephen pens and directs a letter to St Ogg’s that

“vindicates [Maggie] to the utmost,” Stephen’s written confession of his wrongdoing is

ineffectual, and neither restores Maggie to her former position of social respectability,

nor negates the necessity of Maggie’s departure from St Ogg’s (516). “O, if I could but

stop here!...I have no heart to begin a strange life again. I should have no stay. I should

feel like a lonely wanderer—cut off from the past…If I must go away at last, because—

because others wish it, I will not go now,” Maggie laments, when Dr Kenn exhorts her to

“consider whether it will not perhaps be better…to take a situation at a distance” from St

Ogg’s (516). Stephen’s letter impresses upon Dr Kenn the knowledge of “the

impossibility of their [Stephen and Maggie’s] proximity in St Ogg’s on any other

supposition [marriage], until after years of separation,” which imposes “an

insurmountable prospective difficulty over Maggie’s stay” in St Ogg’s (517). The choice

that Maggie believes herself to possess—of the moment when she shall leave St Ogg’s—

is illusory, as Dr Kenn’s fruitless endeavor to find Maggie a situation in St Ogg’s

indicates. As the crude speculation that Maggie intends to beguile Dr Kenn to marry her

pervades St Ogg’s society, Dr Kenn “Had made up his mind that he must advise Maggie

to go away from St Ogg’s for a time” (533). Maggie “must be a lonely wanderer…must

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go out among fresh faces…must begin a new life…There was no home, no help for the

erring” (533).

In the contrived literary context of Eliot’s narratives, and here specifically in The

Mill on the Floss, it is not a coincidence that Stephen travels from Holland to Mudport as

Maggie concurrently prepares to exit St Ogg’s. Maggie’s retreat permits Stephen’s return.

Several critics have read the flood that reunites estranged brother and sister in

“fatal fellowship” at novel’s end as a deus ex machina (542). This thesis opposes the

theory that the flood of The Mill on the Floss’s finale is a deus ex machina;

characteristically unexpected and sudden in the context of the narrative, the deus ex

machina provides a solution, an end to an—or to the—insurmountable issue of the story.

I propose a reading of the flood that deviates from interpretation of the flood as a deus ex

machina, to instead assert that the flood is neither unexpected, nor sudden, but a

naturalistic consequence of Maggie’s failure to execute the “self-exile” from St Ogg’s

that is essential to “restore” St Ogg’s to its “former state of social coherency” (Berger

324). This analysis of the flood presumes that the character(s) associated with the desire

that threatens the “social coherency” of the “knowable community” in which the given

text is set must expediently depart from the community, whether “through transportation

or self-exile” (324). Maggie lingers; she defers her own compulsory migration from St

Ogg’s, and obstinately proclaims that she “will not go now” (Eliot 516). Maggie remains

too long in St Ogg’s, and in doing so, prevents the St Ogg’s community’s from re-

establishing “social coherency” (Berger 324). Maggie resolves to withdraw from St

Ogg’s, to become “a lonely wanderer,” she does not leave St Ogg’s immediately

following her final meeting with Dr Kenn (Eliot 533). Even as Stephen plots his return to

St Ogg’s and ensuing re-entry of St Ogg’s elevated society, Maggie is still in St Ogg’s,

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and this is, of course, where Maggie stands when she feels the “startling sensation of

sudden cold about her knees and feet,” the “water flowing under her” (Eliot 536).

To read the flood in this manner is to attribute an animating power to the

environmental landscape of the text. Maggie unwilling to swiftly exit St Ogg’s, the

geography of the text’s setting revolts, quite literally rises up in the form of the flood, to

expel the character who stands in contention with the social community, to perform an

environmental “restoration” of “social coherency” through removal of the problematic

character (Berger 324). By interpreting the flood as a sort of sentient environmental force

that acts to expel, we view the flood as a naturalistic means of preventing Stephen and

Maggie’s respective spatial paths from intersecting upon Stephen’s impending arrival in

St Ogg’s. It is not unreasonable to posit that Maggie might still remain in St Ogg’s at the

very moment that Stephen should reach St Ogg’s, despite her determination to heed Dr

Kenn’s advice, and to consequently depart from St Ogg’s; Maggie, we must remember,

moves languidly, as if to stave off her required self-exile from St Ogg’s with slowness.

The flood is socially corrective: Maggie drowns. That “every man and woman

mentioned in this history [aside from Tom and Maggie] was still living” after the water

recedes validates this project’s interpretation of the flood, for the strength of the current

and the depth of the water would likely—and arbitrarily—claim more lives beyond Tom

and Maggie’s alone (Eliot 543). The remedial nature of the flood resounds in the opening

sentence of The Mill on the Floss’s Conclusion: “Nature repairs her ravages” (543). The

flood is the naturalistic vehicle that “repairs,” and Maggie is “ravage,” personified (543).

The eponymous flood of the text’s title removes Maggie to restore the “social coherency”

that the St Ogg’s community necessitates; the flood is the environmental righting of that

“irrevocable wrong,” whom we know by the name of “Maggie Tulliver.”

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Conclusion

Eliot’s use of the word “wanderer” evokes a line from J.R.R. Tolkein: “Not all

those who wander are lost” (J.R.R. Tolkien line 2). Indeed, in the respective narrative

contexts of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, Hetty, Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen

traverse the fictitious terrain of Hayslope, St Ogg’s, and the bordering landscapes with

distinct narrative purpose, so much so, that the adjective “wanderer” seems almost a

misnomer of sorts—at least for Eliot’s reader. Hetty, Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen are

never lost in the broader schema of Eliot’s process of community reconstitution that

“Mapping the Movement of Desire in George Eliot” examines. From Hetty’s, and

certainly also from Maggie’s perspective, however, the spatial paths that Hetty and

Maggie forge are foreign and frequently unpredictable. Hetty’s mistaken venture to

Stratford-on-Avon instead of Stony Stratford evidences the unfamiliarity of the land that

Hetty walks, as does Maggie’s accidental, unwitting movement further away from St

Ogg’s when she seeks a coach to York on her journey back to St Ogg’s. These fateful

geographic errs certainly cause both Hetty and Maggie to acutely experience their

ignorance of the spaces to which they travel, to feel like wanderers. But in the contrived

social network of Eliot’s “knowable community,” Hetty, Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen

are not and cannot be “lost”: Eliot scripts these characters’ movements away from, and

out of the community in a systematic project of community preservation. In the

argumentative framework of this thesis, there are no wrong routes available to Hetty,

Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen in Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss, for each character’s

jaunt successfully removes the antagonistic character from the fragile sociality of

community.

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The courses that Arthur and Stephen take are comparatively more intentional and

spatially well informed, in terms of a character’s election to follow a geographic

trajectory of movement away from the “knowable [country] community” (Williams 165).

Arthur’s conscious decision to depart from Hayslope for Windsor, and Stephen’s choice

to stay away from St Ogg’s for a period of time following his own scandal jointly reflect

a knowing sense of geographic agency that dispels the aimlessness that the term

“wanderer” connotes. Yet whether these characters fumble with the separate landscapes

that they perambulate or navigate them with a contrasting deftness, as Arthur and Stephen

do, Hetty, Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen’s individual egresses from the separate literary

communities of Hayslope and St Ogg’s are nevertheless movements that are imbued with

narrative significance in the broader context of plot, and in that of sociality and of

community.

Forest Pyle advances the idea that community in George Eliot “always…stands in

need of the suturing that does not so much restore [the community] as make it” (Pyle 21).

Such “suturing,” or as I call it, such re-establishment of social coherency in the

“knowable communities” of Hayslope and St Ogg’s requires the geographic displacement

of the character who threatens the social equilibrium of the community by action—

specifically, desirous action—that has the potential to destabilize the “knowable

community” (21; Williams 165). The “knowable [country] community” is inherently

fragile on account of its small size (165). The intimate social scale of the community

renders the community considerably susceptible to the social shock waves of the behavior

that imperils, or could imperil the equanimity of the tightly knit community. This

“suturing” becomes visible in the respective—and sometimes sprawling—movements of

Hetty, Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen, whose absences afford the “knowable communities”

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of Hayslope and St Ogg’s the chance to recover the social coherency that predated the

characters’ pivotal behavior (Pyle 21). Through Hetty, Arthur, Maggie, and Stephen’s

respective migrations, Eliot’s reader perceives the sort of restoration that Pyle mentions,

as well as Eliot’s peculiar process of community constitution, a curious—and perhaps

even paradoxical—process of community creation perceptible in Adam Bede and The

Mill on the Floss.

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