Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 35

Indeed, despite a commitment to social reform, Eliot’s novel seems afraid of any real historical changechange. More precisely, The Mill on the Floss is pervaded by a fear of the epochal changechanges that, in the course of the nineteenth century, were transforming the nature of family and home:

By 1860, when George Eliot’s novel first appeared, industrializationindustrialization had transformed the nation [… T]he construction of railroads and other kinds of infrastructure had caused the razing of entire neighborhoods and a concentration of population in a small number of districts. The contrast between overcrowded, unhealthy urban centers and the open country, which represented the ideal of EnglandEngland, fostered sentimental longings for older, traditional ways of life. The competitive spirit fostered by the industrial system was viewed as infiltrating private lives, corrupting common feelings by aspirations to advance one’s own status, even at the risk of abandoning domestic responsibilitiesresponsibility. […] In a work force that was moving from villages to cities, following employment opportunities as they developed, kinship ties had become tenuous, even to the point of giving way to more advantageous commercial connections. (Kilroy 119)

By the mid-VictorianVictorian period, which “marks the beginning of the greatest migrationmigration of peoples in history” (HobsbawmHobsbawm, Eric, Age of Capital 193; see also ManningManning, Patrick 149), the ties to the place where one had grown up – the childhoodchildhood home so central to The Mill on the Floss – had lost much of their former meaning. There may therefore be something escapist about the fact that the novel is set in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the notion of immovable roots perhaps seemed less problematic than it did in 1860, when Eliot’s novel was published.127 Moreover, Deirdre David points out that Maggie possesses qualities that align her with the “pre-industrial era” (603), and this lends symbolicalsymbolical significance to the fact that she and her brother Tom are killed by a piece of “machinery” carried towards them by the novel’s apocalyptic flood (421; see also FisherFisher, Philip 521, Kreisel 99–100). Just when it seems that the old values of kinship and belonging have been reaffirmed, just when brother and sister are finally reunited, a machine – that most widely recognized symbolsymbol of the industrial age – kills off the two characters who, in their different and conflicting ways, refused to relinquish the ancestral home.

The novel’s nostalgicnostalgia longing for stable roots is thus only one of the ways in which The Mill on the Floss expresses deep misgivings about the extent to which the changechanges of the nineteenth century can be seen as progressprogress rather than as destructive forces. Similar worries about a newly emerging, rootless society were to remain a concern in English fiction well into the early twentieth century, as we can see in E.M. ForsterForster, E.M.’s Howards End (1910). In ForsterForster, E.M.’s novel, the narrator fears that the course of modern societal development will eventually reduce humanity “again to a nomadic horde” (154; ch. 17):

LondonLondon was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilizationcivilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectaclespectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task! (256–257; ch. 31)

The age of urbanizationurban society and mass-migrationmigration, in this view, constitutes not progressprogress, but a kind of regressionregression to a more primitive, nomadic past. In such a ‘nomadic age,’ where the home is no longer rooted in a specific place, “Love” – or, as Maggie would put it, “the wayward choice of […] passion” (381; bk. 6, ch. 14) – may remain the only binding force in people’s lives.

This fear of an uprooted, nomadic civilizationcivilization in fact also pervades little Maggie’s escapeescape to the gypsiesgypsies, which soon turns into an experience of almost gothic terror:

Her ideas about the gypsiesgypsies had undergone a rapid modification in the last five minutes. From having considered them very respectful companions, amenable to instruction, she had begun to think that they meant perhaps to kill her as soon as it was dark, and cut up her bodybody for gradual cooking; the suspicion crossed her that the fierce-eyed old man was in fact the Devil, who might drop that transparent disguise at any moment, and turn either into the grinning blacksmith, or else a fiery-eyed monster with dragon’s wings. (95; bk. 1, ch. 11)

On the one hand, Deborah Epstein NordNord, Deborah Epstein is surely right in insisting that Maggie’s excessiveexcess hopes and fears in this episode must be read as ironically exposing her childish “myopia and delusions” (16). On the other hand, it would be difficult to argue that Eliot’s novel secretly propagates the gypsiesgypsies’ nomadic way of life as a desirable alternative to the Tullivers’ respectablerespectability, settled existence. Rather, the narrative emphasizes the gypsies’ comparative povertypoverty (“We’ve got no tea nor butter”; 93; bk. 1, ch. 9), suggesting that one ought, perhaps, to pity, but certainly not emulate such a ‘rootless’ existence.

Similarly, The Mill on the Floss foregrounds the threats of rootlessness and nomadismnomadism in Maggie’s relationship to Stephen Guest. For Maggie, abandoning her family and her home communitycommunity to elope with Stephen would mean “for ever [to] sink and wander vaguely, driven by uncertain impulse” (382; bk. 6, ch. 14). Even Stephen’s last name in fact emphasizes that Maggie cannot expect to find a stable home with him, for a ‘guest’ is, by definition, a person who is not staying in his or her own home, but only ever in someone else’s. Moreover, Stephen is the prospective heir of Guest & Co., “a great mill-owning, ship-owning business […], with a banking concern attached” (54; bk. 1, ch. 7), and thus a proponent of the very industrial-capitalistcapitalist order that threatens to erode the ideal of home that Maggie (and, arguably, Eliot’s novel) desperately tries to uphold.128 Put more abstractly, the novel confronts Maggie with the choice between, on the one hand, a negative, personal kind of freedomfreedom from interference by the home communitycommunity (i.e. asserting her right to be with Stephen, over and against the wishes of relativesrelatives, friends, etc.), and, on the other, the positive freedom of belonging to a communitycommunity and participating in its daily life (i.e. remaining accepted and included).129