Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 31

Both Tom and Maggie’s stories thus focus on the problem of inadequate educationeducation. While Tom only reluctantly reconciles “himself to the idea that his schoolschool-time was to be prolonged and that he was not to be brought up to his father’s business” (111; bk. 2, ch. 1), Maggie would be thrilled at the opportunity to stay at Reverend Stelling’s. However, the boy Tom has to stay where he is, while Maggie, because she is a girl, is sent to “Miss Firniss’s boarding school in the ancient town of Laceham on the Floss” (154; bk. 2, ch. 7). The place name “Laceham” provides us with some clues as to the kind of schoolingschool Maggie can expect there: not geometry or Latin, but weaving decorative cloth (‘lace’ and ‘hem’). Significantly, the narrator tells us virtually nothing about Maggie’s time at Miss Firniss’s boarding school – a gap in the story that highlights how irrelevant this type of schoolingschool is for Maggie in terms of BildungBildung (i.e. the development of one’s innate potential).110 Jane McDonnellMcDonnell, Jane notes that unsatisfactory education is in fact a common theme in the BildungsromanBildungsroman, and we could therefore conclude that The Mill on the Floss simply forms part of a larger movement for educational reform, leading to a system of schoolingschool that would allow each individual, irrespective of gender, fully to develop his or her potential for true Bildung.

The story of Philip Wakem intimates, however, that changes in educational policy alone are not sufficient. We have seen that The Mill on the Floss incorporates two related but different Bildungsromane: the ‘female’ story of Maggie, and the ‘male’ story of her increasingly one-dimensional brother Tom. To these two plots, which explore the social inadequacies of institutionalized educationeducation, the story of Philip’s development adds a third narrative, one that is crucial for the novel’s critique of the inherent problems of the ideal of BildungBildung. Importantly, Maggie herself adheres to such a classical ideal of wide-ranging and ‘well-rounded’ intellectual formation, insisting that it is “a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent.” Philip, however, believes himself “cursed with susceptibility in every direction,” implying that the sheer breadth of his interests merely serves to dilute and disperse his intellectual faculties (266; bk. 5, ch. 3). Moreover, though Philip may be the intellectually most well-rounded individual in Eliot’s novel, his physical “deformitydeformation” marks him as an outsider and makes it impossible for him to feel at home in the communitycommunity of St. Ogg’s (277; bk. 5, ch. 5). In other words, in the case of lawyerlawyers Wakem’s son at least, wide-ranging Bildung does not automatically lead either to personal fulfillment or to social success.

It is significant in this context that Philip does not suffer from a congenital ‘deformitydeformation.’ The fact that Philip’s hump is due to an accident (134; bk. 2, ch. 3) rules out any suspicion, on the part of the readership, that Eliot might have intended Philip as an example of the fearful consequences of hereditaryheredity degenerationdegeneration. Such racialist fears, though not yet widespread in 1860, were nevertheless growing amongst Eliot’s contemporaries (Pick 178–179). If Philip had been born a ‘deformed creature,’ then it would be possible to interpret his failure to succeed in life as a kind of biological or eugenic inevitability. The purely contingentcontingent nature of Philip’s ‘deformitydeformation,’ in contrast, highlights the inherent limits of the notion of selfself-determinationself-determination that lies at the core of ideals of BildungBildung, for if one’s ability to reach an ideal depends just as much on accident as on one’s innate potential, then perhaps the ideal itself is in need of qualification. Put bluntly, we can say that through the story of Philip, Eliot’s novel explores to what extent ‘deformitydeformation’ can render Bildung (in the sense of successful formation) difficult if not impossible. The Mill on the Floss thus complements the twin-narrative of Maggie and Tom’s inadequate Bildung with what we may call Philip’s ‘novel of deformationdeformation.’ In each of these three cases, the mental or spiritual ideal of Bildung is qualified by the problem of embodied existence: sexual difference with Maggie and Tom, and physical disabilitydisability in the case of Philip. In short, Eliot’s novel critiques, or at least questions, Bildung’s lofty idealismidealism with a sober reminder of bodily limitationslimitations.

In addition, the notion of selfself-determinationself-determination is circumscribed in The Mill on the Floss by the lasting impact of one’s past and, more specifically, one’s experiences as a child. We have already seen that the prejudices of relativesrelatives and teachers affect, and in many ways stunt, the development of both Maggie and Tom. Similarly, Philip’s accident took place when he was still an infant, which means that he grew up with the experience of seeing people shrink from him “only because he was deformed” (247; bk. 5, ch. 1). Moreover, in a passage worth quoting at length, Eliot’s narrator argues explicitly that one’s childhoodchildhood sets the boundariesboundaries and borders of self-determinationdetermination:

[Tom experienced] the happinesshappiness of seeing the bright light in the parlor at home […]; the happiness of passing from the cold air to the warmth and the kisses and the smiles of that familiarfamiliarity hearth, where the pattern of the rug and the grate and the fire-irons were “first ideas” that it was no more possible to criticise than the solidity and extension of matter. There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the laborlabor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better and better in our surroundings the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute, or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreignforeigners brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us, if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things; if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory. (127; bk. 2, ch. 1)

The narrator here suggests that, as childrenchildren, we are not required to lead a selfself-determinedself-determination existence – we do not yet know “the laborlabor of choice” – and therefore we feel perfectly at ease in the “early home.” To strive after “something better and better” may be in one sense what makes us human, but there is also an undercurrent of violenceviolence to this ideal of implacable progressprogress, which for the narrator tends to hinge on a racistracistm distinction between the supposedly progressive “British man” and the backward, primitive, “foreignforeigners brute.” Countering such destructive fantasies of boundless (self-)invention and improvement, the narrator emphasizes that we can never entirely determine ourselves because our affections and convictions have “deep immovable roots” – roots not in blood or soil, but “in memory.” 111

Both MarxMarx, Karl and FreudFreud, Sigmund would, of course, agree that complete selfself-determinationself-determination is in fact an illusion, and that the explanation for this lies in one’s past. MarxMarx, Karl stated his case most famously in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” published in 1852 (only a few years earlier than Eliot’s novel):

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited. Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmarenightmare on the brain of the living. (32)112

While it is possible at any point in time for men – and women – to choose their course of action, MarxMarx, Karl emphasizes that they can never select freely the context of that particular choice. And, importantly, one of these contexts that lies entirely beyond our range of choice is the early childhoodchildhood home: the place and the communitycommunity where we grow up, and which can never be ‘selfself-selected.’ In a dialecticaldialectic view of history, the ‘starting point’ called home necessarily remains part of everything that follows, albeit in what HegelHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich would call a ‘sublated’ form (in German, aufgehoben: the point of origin is at the same time canceled, kept in store, and lifted to a higher level; see J. HillisMiller, J. Hillis Miller 28). Likewise, Sigmund FreudFreud, Sigmund argues that the past establishes the limits of self-determinationself-determination. Beyond these limits, FreudFreud, Sigmund suggests, lies the realm of the unconscious, which is shaped crucially by our childhood experiences, and which makes it impossible for us ever to attain complete mastery over ourselves.

Like FreudFreud, Sigmund and MarxMarx, Karl, The Mill on the Floss is hostile to postmodernpostmodernism dreams of infinitely malleable, fluidfluidity identities – but not necessarily in a conservative or reactionary sense. Postmodern dreams of boundless selfself-fashioning appear problematic, for instance, in the light of recent findings regarding the long-term effects of malnutrition in the fetal stage and during childhoodchildhood, which not only impair individuals’ health, cognitivecognition and cognitive abilities, and laborlabor productivity over the course of their lives, but which also heighten the chance that such individuals will lack the necessary resourcesresources to take sufficient care of their childrenchildren: “It is therefore in no way fanciful to see the influence of the health and welfare of grandparents in the bodies of their grandchildren and the effect may be even longer lasting” (Floud et al. 37). Our own life is thus shaped by the lives of our ancestors – and not in the sense of ancestral spirits or fateful heredityheredity, but in terms of the contingentcontingent yet long-lasting effects of detrimental living standards. Moreover, as Terry EagletonEagleton, Terry maintains, changechange and flexibility are not inherently progressive or oppositional qualities:

A faith in plurality, plasticity, dismantling, destabilizing, the power of endless selfself-invention – all this, while undoubtedly radical in some contexts, also smacks of a distinctly Western culture and an advanced capitalistcapitalist world. […] Capitalism may be upbraided for many defects, but a lack of dynamism is hardly one of them. (Sweet Violence xi)113

We may quite rightly insist that identity is neither simply given nor eternally fixed. At the same time, however, there would also be something callous about telling someone like Mr. Tulliver that his “clinging affection for the old home as […] part of himself” (217; bk. 3, ch. 9) is merely an instance of reactionary nostalgianostalgia.

Indeed, as Terry EagletonEagleton, Terry points out elsewhere, the idea that unstableinstability identities are always subversivesubversion and thus desirable is a claim “which it would be interesting to test out among the socially dumped and disregarded” (After Theory 16). Philip FisherFisher, Philip’s remark that a “break in continuity is the death of what is meant by the selfself in The Mill on the Floss” has to be seen precisely in this context (522), for without a certain amount of material stabilitystability, it becomes extremely difficult to sustain a reasonably stable sense of self. Mr. Tulliver’s attachment to the past may thus have much to do with an underlying sense of economic insecurity – at least according to Eliot’s narrator, who contrasts the old miller’s fear “that the country could never again be what it used to be” with the optimism of Mr. Deane, who is “attached to a firm of which the returns were on the increase,” and who “naturally took a more lively view of the present” (64; bk. 1, ch. 7). If, in short, The Mill on the Floss insists perhaps too much on the importance of “immovable roots,” we should not forget that it does so against a backdrop (or at least the fear) of material dispossession that, in turn, highlights the fragility of the place we call home.