Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 33

It is with these considerations in mind that we must now analyze Maggie’s struggle, as an emotional conflictconflict that arises from her desiredesire to honor past duties and, at the same time, to strive towards future fulfillment; she wishes to develop as a ‘free’ individual without relinquishing the ancestral home that stands in the way of that very development. Maggie’s passionate response – as a young woman who has lost the material security of home (and the social status associated with it) – to the writings of the late-medieval mysticmysticism Thomas à Kempisà Kempis, Thomas needs to be seen in this context. In à Kempisà Kempis, Thomas’s asceticasceticism philosophyphilosophy, Maggie believes to have found a way of resolving the dilemma between individual desire and social limitationslimitations:

[H]ere was a sublimesublime height to be reached without the help of outward things; here was insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within her own soul […]. It flashed through her like the suddenly apprehended solution of a problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasurepleasure […]; and for the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her own desires – of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole. (237; bk. 4, ch. 3)

Maggie finds herself doubly deprived: as a woman refused the benefits of educationeducation, and as a daughter sufferingsuffering from the family’s very material downfall. This explains why the notion of “means entirely within her soul” must seem so appealing, as it involves neither intellectual nor material resourcesresources; it is a matter of the soul, not of the mind or the bodybody. Maggie, in other words, hopes to solve these conflicts by discursively reframing her needs as merely “the gratification of her own desires,” and as insignificant in the larger scheme of things. It is precisely the emphasis of want that leads Maggie to embrace an emphatic beliefbelief, in the hopehope that this will help her recover the “sense of home” that she has been unable to find in the “world outside the books” (194; bk. 3, ch. 5).

Significantly, it is Philip who ends Maggie’s mysticmysticism dream of cheerful resignation by challenging its underlying assumptions about the nature of longing and desiredesire. Ascetics like Thomas à Kempisà Kempis, Thomas assume that desire binds us to a fallen world to which we do not truly belong, and that therefore desire itself is the main obstacle to our quest for a lasting, transcendent home. Philip, however, questions Maggie’s beliefbelief that denying her longings is the path to true belonging:

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. How can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are deadened? I delight in fine pictures; I long to be able to paint such. I strive and strive, and can’t produce what I want. That is pain to me, and always will be pain, until my faculties lose their keenness […]. (246; bk. 5, ch. 1; original emphasis)

Longing may mean sufferingsuffering, Philip admits, but it is also essential to a fulfilling and truly human life. The German philosopher Ludwig FeuerbachFeuerbach, Ludwig, who claims that God is nothing but an outward projectionprojection of humankind’s own essential nature, and whose Das Wesen des Christenthums (The Essence of Christianity) Eliot herself had translated into English in 1854, makes a case very similar to Philip’s:

I feel feeling […] as belonging to my essential being, and, though the source of all sufferings and sorrows, as a glorious, divine power and perfection. What would man be without feeling? It is the musicalmusic power in man. (The Essence of Christianity 63; ch. 5)118

The only way to avoid sufferingsuffering, FeuerbachFeuerbach, Ludwig argues, would be entirely to quench our feelings – that divine, “musicalmusic power in man” which defines what it means to be truly human.

What underlines this philosophical connection is that FeuerbachFeuerbach, Ludwig’s musicalmusic metaphormetaphor repeatedly resurfaces in The Mill on the Floss. For instance, there are echoes of FeuerbachFeuerbach, Ludwig’s metaphor in what Philip says to Maggie shortly after his attack on asceticasceticism selfself-denialdenial:

I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of. Certain strains of musicmusic affect me so strangely; I can never hear them without their changing my whole attitude of mind for a time, and if the effect would last, I might be capable of heroisms. (248; bk. 5, ch. 1; emphasis added)

Like FeuerbachFeuerbach, Ludwig, Philip here associates musicmusic both with our deepest feelings and our most heroic or divine powers.119 Moreover, listening to Philip’s pleas, Maggie herself feels as if “music would swell out, […] persuading her that the wrong lay all in the thoughts and weaknesses of others, and that there was such a thing as futile sacrificesacrifice” (247; bk. 5, ch. 1). Similarly, toward the end of the novel, Philip assures Maggie in a moving letter that she has been, to his affections, “what light, what colour is to my eyes – what music is to the inward ear” (407; bk. 7, ch. 3). The musicalmusic imagery here becomes linked to the appreciation of light and colour, and hence with the “delight in fine pictures” that Philip had mentioned earlier on. In this way, the novel associates desiredesire and longing with a thirst for the beautiful, the good, and the true – with, in short, the classical ideal of BildungBildung as a culture of the selfself that is entirely incompatible with an asceticasceticism philosophyphilosophy of self-denialdenial (BoumelhaBoumelha, Penny 26–27).

Philip thus in one sense (re-)awakens Maggie’s desires for knowledgeknowledge and culture, and we may note in passing that his last name is, tellingly, Wakem (‘wake ’em’). At the same time, however, The Mill on the Floss portrays desiredesire itself as related to that dissolution of the conscious selfself that is characteristic of sleep and dreams. For instance, at one point we find little Maggie, who continually thirsts for the knowledge that can be gained from reading, “dreaming over her book” (15; bk. 1, ch. 3). Similarly, when she later runs off to join a group of gypsiesgypsies, the experience at first seems to her as if “rehearsed in a dream” (91; bk. 1, ch. 11) – and we have seen that the episode as a whole can be read as a version of the Freudian family romancefamily romance. Moreover, romanticromance lovelove and sexual fulfillment, too, are associated with dreams, for the idea that she could ever have a lover seems to Maggie “like a dream – only one of the stories one imagines” (272; bk. 5, ch. 4). Significantly, towards the end of the novel, Maggie must literally wake up from “vivid dreaming” before she can bring herself to decide against an elopement with Stephen Guest (381; bk. 6, ch. 14). Susan J. Rosowsksi’s description of the ‘female BildungsromanBildungsroman’ as typically revolving around a woman’s awakening to limitationslimitations thus proves particularly accurate for The Mill on the Floss, in which Maggie’s dreamlike desires clash, time and again, with the limitations imposed by reality.120

And yet, while this may suggest that the novel attempts to expose the insubstantiality of dreamsdreams by portraying them as the binarybinary oppositions opposite of a realistic outlook on the world, the text in fact explores the complex interrelatedness of the “triple world of Reality, Booksbooks, and Waking Dreams” (225; bk. 4, ch. 2). We have seen, for instance, that booksbooks do inspire some of Maggie’s dreamsdreams and desires. At the same time, however, Maggie is also very well aware of the unrealistic conventionsconventions of popular romancesromance, where the “blond-haired young lady” invariably triumphs over the “dark woman” (270; bk. 5, ch. 4). Northrop Frye’s claim that “romanceromance is nearest of all literary forms to wish-fulfillmentwish-fulfillment and dream” (186) is, therefore, not exactly true for Maggie, who is herself one of those dark women whose desires continually end up thwarted in popular romancesromance. Accordingly, Maggie formulates her dreamsdreams in direct opposition to conventionalconventions romancesromance, voicing the hopehope that she herself might one day be able to avenge all these “dark unhappy” heroines (270; bk. 5, ch. 4). Philip, who is passionately in lovelove with Maggie, teasingly assures her that she could easily win a handsome young man away from a pretty, blond-haired woman such as her cousin, Lucy – and this is, of course, precisely what will happen in Eliot’s novel. Maggie eventually wins Stephen Guest’s love from pretty, blond-haired Lucy and, in this way, fulfills her daydream fantasyfantasy of revengerevenge. In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie’s dreamsdreams and desires thus not only take shape in relation to both everydayeveryday domestic reality and the imaginary worlds described in booksbooks; they also have an uncannyuncanny way of coming true, and of shaping the course of her own life.