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Accordingly, we should read the novel’s generally nostalgicnostalgia mood not exclusively as a form of sentimental indulgence, but also as an implicit critique of social injusticeinjustice and thus as a potential basis for resistanceresistance. The nostalgicnostalgia mood of The Mill on the Floss is established in the very first chapter, through the narrator’s dreamy remembrances of how Dorlcote Mill and its surroundings “looked one February morning many years ago” (8; bk. 1, ch. 1; see BoumelhaBoumelha, Penny 20):

Just by the red-roofed town the tributary Ripple flows with a lively current into the Floss. How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf and loving. I remember those large dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge. (7; bk. 1, ch. 1)

This is not the detached, analytic tone one would expect from a “Study of Provincial Life” – the subtitle of Eliot’s later novel Middlemarch – but the nostalgicnostalgia voice of a narrator who longs for a time “when joys were vivid” (127; bk. 2, ch. 1). Instead of dismissing such nostalgicnostalgia longings as sentimental, Kimberley K. SmithSmith, Kimberley K. emphasizes their potential “as a mode of resistanceresistance” (523). SmithSmith, Kimberley K. shows that the term nostalgianostalgia, which was coined in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johan Hofer to denote a potentially fatal condition of homesicknesshomesickness, underwent a process of radical redefinition (509–510):

[N]ostalgia evolved from a disease into an emotion […]. The concept broadened and complicated: Once defined simply as a desiredesire to return home, to a specific place, nostalgianostalgia was gradually being conceptualized as a longing to return to a former time – and usually a time that was only imagined to be better. (512; original emphasis)

Eventually, SmithSmith, Kimberley K. continues, nostalgianostalgia was reduced to a sometimes painful, occasionally pleasant, but in either case unreliable, private emotion that is inevitably unrelated to any real political harm (519). For SmithSmith, Kimberley K., such a view of nostalgia mirrors a progressivist distrust towards any form of resistanceresistance to changechange, and is therefore “integral to the emotional regime of industrial capitalismcapitalism” (522) – for if those who resist changechange are always and everywhere ‘merely being nostalgicnostalgia,’ then their political objections can be conveniently disregarded.114

Accordingly, when reading the conclusion of The Mill on the Floss, we must not simply dismiss the novel’s tone as nostalgicnostalgia, but instead examine how such nostalgianostalgia contributes to the text’s critique of BildungBildung and the genregenre of the BildungsromanBildungsroman. The key for doing this lies in the problem of mourningmourning, which according to Franco MorettiMoretti, Franco can have no more than episodic significance in the classical Bildungsroman because it “does not contribute to Bildung” (“The Comfort of Civilization” 132). Indicating a refusal to let go of the past, mourning constitutes an obstacle to the protagonist’s smooth, evolutionary development – and, implicitly, to his or her ‘progressprogress.’ Accordingly, while in the final chapter of The Mill on the Floss Eliot’s narrator at first seems to argue that time has the power to heal all wounds, it soon becomes clear that this is not in fact the case:

Nature repairs her ravages – repairs them with her sunshine, and with human laborlabor. The desolation wrought by that flood had left little visible trace on the face of the earth, five years after. […]

Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair. (422; “Conclusion”)

The Mill on the Floss does not, then, end on a confident note of progressprogress, but with the image of two men – Philip and Stephen – who continue to visit Maggie’s grave, feeling “that their keenest joy and keenest sorrow were for ever buried there” (422; “Conclusion”). As Susan Meyer points out, the novel’s nostalgianostalgia “exerts a more memorable and stronger force than the energyenergy of its forward movement” (131); the smooth river of progress finds itself checked by an indelible longing for the past. Only by forgetting the past can we hopehope to avoid mourningmourning and nostalgia. However, since our identities must, for Eliot’s narrator, have immovable roots in memory, to forget or deny the past would be tantamount to surrendering one’s selfself – the very self so cherished by advocates of BildungBildung.

This is not to suggest that nostalgianostalgia ought to become a privileged discoursediscourse in our relation to the past. We should, however, be aware that to dismiss nostalgia out of hand means to surrender a potent resource for social critique. Nostalgia is, first and foremost, an experience of homelessnesshomelessness, and as such an indication of discontent with the present:

[W]e should recognize that remembering positive aspects of the past does not necessarily indicate a desiredesire to return there. Remembering the past should instead be seen as a way to express valid desires and concerns about the present – in particular, about its relationship (or lack of relationship) to the past. (SmithSmith, Kimberley K. 523; original emphasis)

Nostalgia expresses desires and values that, in themselves, are neither necessarily sentimental nor illegitimate; after all, one reason for shying away from examining the past is, as Eliot’s narrator puts it, that “mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side” (207; bk. 3, ch. 7) – i.e. one’s own. To dismiss any kind of longing for the past as ‘mere nostalgianostalgia’ may thus encourage, in both others and ourselves, an unwarranted sense of “ironicirony detachment” from both past injusticeinjustice and present harm (SmithSmith, Kimberley K. 515).115

In The Mill on the Floss, ironicirony detachment is in fact quite explicitly portrayed as a privilegeprivilege that the dispossessed cannot afford. In a lengthy passage that is itself supremely ironicirony (Raymond WilliamsWilliams, Raymond 172), Eliot’s narrator satirizes the beliefbelief that using ironyirony implies a lofty transcendencetranscendence of one’s limited, subjective point of view:

In writing the history of unfashionable families, one is apt to fall into a tone of emphasis which is very far from being the tone of good society, where principles and beliefs are not only of an extremely moderatemoderation kind, but are always presupposed, no subjects being eligible but such as can be touched with a light and graceful ironyirony. But then good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner-engagements six weeks deep, its opera and its faëry ball-rooms; rides off its ennui on thoroughbred horses; […] gets its sciencescience done by Faraday, and its religionreligion by the superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses – how should it have time or need for beliefbelief and emphasis? But good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive productionproduction; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, […] or else, spread over sheepwalks, and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the clayey or chalky corn-lands […]. This wide national life is based entirely on emphasis – the emphasis of want, which urges it into all the activities necessary for the maintenance of good society and light irony; it spends its heavy years often in a chill, uncarpeted fashion, amidst family discord unsoftened by long corridors. (238; bk. 4, ch. 3)

Irony, the narrator insists, is not an ideologically neutral device, but suffused with implicit value-judgmentsjudgment; an “unsoftened” hut is far less hospitable to “light ironyirony” than a comfortable, wealthywealth home furnished with “velvet carpets.” Indeed, given the depthdepth of social injusticeinjustice (“deafening factories,” “the emphasis of want”), good society’s well-tempered beliefs appear curiously exorbitant (or “extremely moderatemoderation,” in the narrator’s elegantly oxymoronic phrase). Accordingly, it would be a profound mistake to think that holding strong beliefs necessarily indicates blind fanaticism, whereas a properly ironicirony distance goes hand in hand with intellectual subtlety and independence.116

In addition, the narrator’s argument also challenges the idea that ironyirony is necessarily subversivesubversion, for it is difficult to imagine that the tone of “good society” constitutes a counter-hegemonichegemony discoursediscourse. The narrator’s point is thus not far from an observation Franco MorettiMoretti, Franco makes when noting irony’s centrality in the history of the modern novel. How, MorettiMoretti, Franco wonders, could a stylistic device that has enjoyed almost unrivalled dominance in novelistic aesthetics simultaneously constitute a grave threat to the social ordersocial order (Way of the World 97)? Rather than seeing the device as subversivesubversion, we should regard irony as a stylistic correlative to what MorettiMoretti, Franco posits as the great theme and political disposition of the BildungsromanBildungsroman: compromisecompromise (Way of the World 10). This becomes more readily apparent if we examine MorettiMoretti, Franco’s definition of compromise: “We can speak of compromise when conflicting principles have indeed reached an accord, but without having lost their diversity. They remain heterogeneous, and the agreement intrinsically precarious” (Way of the World 69). In agreement, but only precariously so – unified, yet remaining heterogeneous: it is a definition of compromise, but also a perfectly good description of how irony manages momentarily to unite fundamentally irreconcilable meanings: what Catherine Gallagher calls a characteristically modern “spirit of ‘ironicirony’ assent” (347).

Admittedly, The Mill on the Floss’s critique of ironyirony is complicated by the fact that its narrator at the same time employs the device. There is irony, for instance, in the narrator’s description of the “fashionably drest [sic] female in griefgrief” as a “striking example of the complexitycomplexity introduced into the emotionsemotions by a high state of civilizationcivilization” (48; bk. 1, ch. 7). There is irony, too, in the narrator’s attitude towards little Maggie, who, after running away from home to join the gypsiesgypsies, mistakenly believes that she was really “gaining great influence over them,” and that the gypsies would want her to become their queen (92; bk. 1, ch. 11). And there is irony, to give a third and final example, in the narrator’s comments on the supposedly staggering backwardness of the past depicted in the novel:

All this, you remember, happened in those dark ages when there were no schoolsschool of design; before schoolmasters were invariably men of scrupulous integrity, and before the clergy were all men of enlarged minds and varied culture. In those less favored days, it is no fable that there were other clergymen besides Mr. Stelling who had narrow intellects and large wants, and whose income, by a logical confusion to which Fortune, being a female as well as blindfold, is peculiarly liable, was proportioned not to their wants but to their intellect, with which income has clearly no inherent relation. (139–140; bk. 2, ch. 4)

The surfacesurface meaning of the passage is that the narrator’s present is superior to the past, yet the idea that nowadays all schoolmasters are upright men, and all members of the clergy persons of enlarged minds and varied culture, is transparently excessiveexcess and, therefore, highly suspicious.117 Moreover, if taken at face value, the link made in the passage between “female” and “logical confusion” would sit uneasily with the novel’s general gender politics. In short, there is good reason to believe that the narrator’s comments are not in fact intended to praise the present, but instead to ridicule those who subscribe to an overly optimistic progressivism.

And yet, it is important to recognize that ironicirony distance towards a particular ideologyideology is not in fact the same as repudiating it. We have already examined some reasons why ironyirony is not necessarily subversivesubversion, and Slavoy ŽižekŽižek, Slavoj even suggests that “ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical with it” (The Plague of Fantasies 27). Accordingly, we might read The Mill on the Floss’s use of irony as evidence of just how firmly the novel is committed to the liberal ideology of progressprogress from which it ostensibly distances itself. After all, the narrator states quite clearly that sufferingsuffering simply “belongs to every historical advance of mankind” (223; bk. 4, ch. 1; emphasis added). Suffering is, in other words, regrettable – but also an inevitable aspect of progress, which itself remains eminently desirable. Moreover, even according to the narrator’s own theory of irony, the novel’s use of the device would in fact mark The Mill on the Floss as yet another product of that ‘good society’ that depends on exploitationexploitation and widespread want. From either perspective, the novel seems curiously at odds with itself: satirizing the very ‘good society’ from which it has itself emerged, and embracing an idea of progress that, at the same time, it critiques through its pervasive mood of nostalgianostalgia.

Crucially, however, there is one respect in which Eliot’s novel increasingly abandons the respectablerespectability stance of ironicirony distance, namely in relation to its protagonist, Maggie. We have already seen that, when still a child, Maggie at times serves as the butt of the narrator’s ironyirony. However, as the novel’s heroine matures, the narrator identifies more and more uncompromisingly with her spiritual and emotional plight. Indeed, for F.R. LeavisLeavis, F.R. it is precisely this lack of ironicirony distance towards Maggie’s soulful yearnings that constitute the one great flaw of The Mill on the Floss:

There is nothing against George Eliot’s presenting this immaturity with tender sympathy; but we ask, and ought to ask, of a great novelist something more. ‘Sympathy and understanding’ is the common formula of praise, but understanding, in any strict sense, is just what she doesn’t show. To understand immaturity would be to ‘place’ it, with however subtle an implication, by relating it to mature experience. (485)

For LeavisLeavis, F.R., Eliot’s novel of educationeducation remains scandalously immature because it does not moderatemoderation its protagonist’s emotional intensity through properly ironicirony distance. In a similar vein, Virginia WoolfWoolf, Virginia complains that the narrator’s humor “controls” Maggie only as long as she is still a child, whereas this superior ironicirony poise is lost as the novel’s protagonist matures – and it is this that separates it from Middlemarch, which WoolfWoolf, Virginia has famously called “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” (“George Eliot” 168–169). What upsets both LeavisLeavis, F.R. and WoolfWoolf, Virginia, in short, is that the narrator of The Mill on the Floss progressively – or, to their mind, regressively – abandons the mature tone of ‘good society,’ opting instead for a very unfashionable, emphatic identification with the adolescent heroine’s struggle.

However, before analyzing in more detail some vital components of Maggie’s struggle, we should perhaps rephrase the argument up to this point in terms of two different levels of critique: the mimetic or referential, and the literary or intertextualintertextuality. On the one hand, we have seen that The Mill on the Floss constitutes a far-reaching critique of VictorianVictorian gender normsgender norms and their adverse effects on women and, at least to some extent, on men as well. As this kind of critique is linked to the state of affairs in the real world, we may – for lack of a better term – call it mimetic or referential. Eliot’s novel highlights symbolically the extent to which Victorian gender normsnorms are sustained by central pillars of the bourgeoisbourgeois order: fathers (Mr. Tulliver), preachers and educators (Reverend Stelling), as well as lawyers (Wakem). Importantly, the novel does not depict these patriarchs as a monolithic and unified front of oppressionoppression; rather, the text depicts them as engaged in deep conflictconflict but nevertheless agreeing on one key issue: the inferiority of women as intellectually limited commodities that belong to the head of the family. The novel thus also portrays the family home as an institution that is deeply implicated in the reproductionreproduction of social injusticeinjustice, even as it acknowledges the deep bonds of affection between father and daughter, or sister and brother. Moreover, like so many a BildungsromanBildungsroman, it exposes important flaws in the educational system, and as such advocates social changechange.

Such referential critique is, however, complemented in the novel by what we might term literary or intertextualintertextuality critique. This includes, for instance, the way in which The Mill on the Floss challenges some key tenets of the BildungsromanBildungsroman as a genregenre by refusing to focus on Stephen Guest and instead juxtaposing three unsuccessful plots of formation: Maggie’s, Tom’s, and Philip’s, none of whom will find a true home in this world. In combining these three plots, the text highlights the limits to selfself-determinationself-determination, and thus qualifies an overly optimistic conception of human agencyagency inherent to classical ideals of BildungBildung. Moreover, the novel questions the political innocenceinnocence of ironyirony as a stylistic device, and to some extent at least rejects what it portrays as a classclass-based stance. The strongest expression of this incomplete but significant repudiation is the narrator’s increasing rejection of ironicirony distance from Maggie, which has led critics to accuse Eliot’s novel as a whole of unseemly immaturity. Similar accusations could be leveled against the narrator’s nostalgicnostalgia tone, if one were to analyze nostalgianostalgia as merely a regressiveregression yearning for an idealizedidealization childhoodchildhood home. However, the novel cautions us against such a simplistic assessment of the nostalgicnostalgia impulse, and instead pits it against a narrative of implacable progressprogress in order to highlight the latter’s emotional as well as social costs. If this last point threatens to collapse the distinction between referential and intertextualintertextuality critique, then this is not a coincidence, but instead one of the novel’s key arguments: that social critique ought not limit itself to what we might call the world’s content, but must also pay attention to its style and its discursive arrangements of oppressionoppression. To put things somewhat differently: one’s lossloss of home may derive from material deprivation or from one’s lack of a proper place in the symbolic order – and, not infrequently, from a combination of the two.