Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 27

While MelvilleMelville, Herman’s Moby-Dick explores oceans of transcendental homelessnesstranscendental homelessness, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) dutifully attends to the home and the hearth.99 The novel is set in the English provinces of the late 1820s to 1830s and focuses on the lives of the Tulliver family, owners of Dorlcote Mill on the banks of the Ripple, a small tributary to the river Floss.100 The Tullivers have lived here “for generations” (217; bk. 3, ch. 9), and on one level The Mill on the Floss is about the family’s relation to the physical place that, for them, signifies home. At the same time, the novel focuses on the Tullivers’ relationships to their relativesrelatives, and to the larger communitycommunity of St. Ogg’s. More specifically, the text examines the interdependence between home as a physical place and home as a complex network of social relations, as well as the factors that may enhance or diminish one’s sense of home. These factors include classclass and gender stereotypesstereotypes, and the latter make it especially difficult for Maggie, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Tulliver, to maintain a sense of true belonging.

Importantly, the novel’s exploration of social prejudice is paralleled by a searching critique of literary conventionsconventions, styles, and genres – including the BildungsromanBildungsroman (or novel of formation), the use of ironyirony and nostalgianostalgia, and the vicissitudes of tragic theory in its Aristotelian form. In relating such stylistic and generic inquiries to the material problems of home and belonging, Eliot’s novel suggests that literary culture ought not be imagined as a rarefied aestheticaesthetic realm that can be understood in isolationisolation from ideological and political struggles. The novel thus rejects any clear-cut separation between social and discursive modes of dispossession. Highlighting instead that discoursediscourse itself is a material product of social relations, The Mill on the Floss intimates that the quest for a just and inclusive society depends, at least in part, on a communitycommunity’s repertoire of fictions of home. In doing so, it focuses less on the problem of transcendental homelessnesstranscendental homelessness, and more on the role of societal forces in determining the limits of our freedomfreedom to belong.