Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 36

Maggie’s conflictconflict cannot be solved within the realistrealism parameters of the English BildungsromaBildungsromann, and accordingly The Mill on the Floss ultimately abandons the world of realismrealism for the realm of tragic wish-fulfillmentwish-fulfillment and dreamlike dissolution. The prototypical Bildungsroman tells the story of someone who, after leaving home, manages to reconcile his or her own desires with the demands of society – someone who finds a place in the world, albeit at the cost of compromisecompromise. Whenever such a (more or less harmonious) homecoming becomes entirely impossible, we approach the tragic realm of ‘unbelonging’ that is characterized by a breakdown of both the social and the transcendental order. As Terry EagletonEagleton, Terry points out, this tragic realm tends to be associated with “virile warriors and immolated virgins”; it confronts us with scapegoatscapegoat figures who incarnate “the inner contradictionscontradiction of the social ordersocial order” and thus symbolize an entire society’s failure in their own defeat (Sweet Violence ix and 280).

This idea that inner, hidden contradictionscontradiction are exposed in tragedytragedy also explains why Andrew Bennet and Nicholas RoyleRoyle, Nicholas associate the tragic as such with psychoanalyticpsychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism theory: both make the unconscious public (109). FreudFreud, Sigmund himself famously argued that the interpretation of dreamsdreams is “the royal road to a knowledgeknowledge of the unconscious” (Five Lectures 33), and the fact that the tragic catastrophe in Eliot’s novel constitutes a departure from realismrealism into a land of semi-incestuousincest, death-driven wish-fulfillmentwish-fulfillment is thus merely a more than usually striking example of the secret affinity between tragedy, dreams, and the unconscious.130

Importantly, in The Mill on the Floss the critical exploration of tragedytragedy and other literary concepts is linked explicitly to the novel’s thematic focus on home and dispossession. For instance, in a chapter entitled “What Had Happened at Home,” the narrator describes Mr. Tulliver’s lossloss of Dorlcote Mill, his beloved home, as a “tragedy” both for himself and for the family (as well as the servantsservants and domestics) who depend on him (162–163 and 212; bk. 3, ch. 1 and 8). Similarly, as we have seen, the narrator believes that fashionable ironyirony thrives only in the comfortable homes of the privileged who depend, for their comfort, on those who suffer from want and dispossession. Even the novel’s concern with popular romancesromance, where the dark-haired heroine must always end unhappily, is in fact directly related to the events in Maggie’s own home, for both her parents and other relativesrelatives echo these prejudices in their misgivings about Maggie’s ‘gypsy-like’ dark hair. Literary conventionsconventions and stereotypesstereotypes thus reinforce, and perhaps also create, social prejudices that, in turn, have real repercussions in domestic life. In short, we can say that The Mill on the Floss relates all its three major literary critical concerns – the critique of tragedy, of irony, and of popular romancesromance – to problems of domesticity, home, and belonging, and thus to key themes of the BildungsromanBildungsroman.

In doing so, Eliot’s novel presents a vision of home – that supposedly safe and private space – as permeated and shaped by fundamentally public forces. It also presents home as a genderedgendering space owned by patriarchs who see the world mainly in terms of propertyproperty relations. Reverend Stelling’s decision to teach, for instance, is not based on any desiredesire on his part to contribute to the progressprogress of civilizationcivilization; he simply needs the money to finance his and his wife’s rather expensive lifestyle (113; bk. 2, ch. 1). Moreover, we have seen that Mr. Tulliver only decides to send Tom to a tutor because he wants to prevent the son from becoming his rival by one day claiming the mill as his own. Similarly, Mr. Tulliver fears that Maggie’s intelligence lowers her value as a marriageable commoditycommodity. Like Lawyer Wakem, Mr. Tulliver thus (at least occasionally) regards women as a piece of property, which suggests that belonging, for women, all to often means being owned by the male head of the householdhousehold, rather than feeling at home in the family or the wider communitycommunity.

Even Stephen Guest, who in many ways is the proponent of a younger, more ‘advanced’ generation of men, has no doubts that a woman’s role in life is defined through and by her relation to men. For instance, in the scene where we first meet Stephen, he asks Maggie’s cousin Lucy to “sing the whole duty of woman” from Handel’s The Creation (297; bk. 6, ch. 1), and is thus immediately associated with a view of women in terms of their duty to men – a view sanctioned by official religious discoursediscourse. In a later scene, Stephen angrily “bursts forth” that a bazaar organized by the women of St. Ogg’s takes “young ladies from the duties of the domestic hearth”:

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out. If this goes on much longer, the bonds of society will be dissolved. (327; bk. 6, ch. 6)

The Father, the Teacher, the Lawyer, the Preacher, and even the young Capitalist thus all agree that belonging, for women, has little to do with a sense of ease, emotional attachment to people and places, or a modicum of controlcontrol over their own lives. Consequently, it is not difficult to understand why Maggie urgently wishes for an occupation that would allow her to “get my own bread and be independent” (e.g. 402; bk. 7, ch. 2) – that would, in Virginia WoolfWoolf, Virginia’s terms, allow her to have a room of her own.

What makes matters even more difficult for Maggie is that, despite the injusticesinjustice of a patriarchalpatriarchy society, there is much about her home to lovelove and cherish: her father can be affectionate (as in the treatment of his sister, Mrs. Moss; 64–72; bk. 1, ch. 7) and often takes Maggie’s side when others berate her; her mother may not really understand her, but always tries to protect her from harm; and Maggie is treated with genuine kindness not only by Philip, but also by Tom’s boyhood friend Bob, who helps the Tullivers after they lose their mill (bk. 3, ch. 6), and who even takes Maggie into his home when most people in St. Ogg’s treat her as an outcast because of her ‘failed’ elopement with Stephen Guest (bk. 7, ch. 1). In spite of patriarchalpatriarchy injusticeinjustice, home thus means more to Maggie than merely pain and restriction; it also holds the promise of fulfillment, intimacy, and kindness – the positive freedomfreedom that comes from belonging to others, as opposed to a negative libertyliberty that is defined through the absenceabsence of interference. It is true, of course, that the image of a carefree childhoodchildhood, a time when Maggie and her brother “clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together” (422; bk. 7, ch. 5), is a nostalgicnostalgia idealizationidealization. But it is also true that such moments of harmonyharmony do, at times, occur in The Mill on the Floss (as when Tom, at one point, tries to console little Maggie by kissing her and offering her a piece of cake – 34; bk. 1, ch. 5) – at least before Mr. Tulliver’s embittered command of revengerevenge thwarts the impulse toward forgivenessforgiveness that characterized Tom in his younger years. At the end of Eliot’s novel, Maggie must choose between this imperfect, but familiarfamiliarity home, and the vague promise of a ‘nomadic’ future with Stephen. It is very well possible that returning home is the wrong choice for Maggie (EagletonEagleton, Terry, The English Novel 178), but this is in some ways beside the point, for the real tragedytragedy is that she is forced by circumstances to make the choice at all.

One may, then, justifiably criticize The Mill on the Floss for its failure to see that one can, in fact, feel perfectly at home in a nomadic existence – whether it is a way of life inherited from one’s forebears (as in the case of the gypsiesgypsies), or whether it is freely chosen (as in the case of contemporary upper-classclass nomadsnomads who enjoy shuttling back and forth between the world’s metropolitan centers). Yet Eliot’s novel rightly emphasizes that nomadismnomadism is not a matter of positive, free choice for everyone. It is, as we have seen, not that for Maggie, who refuses the seductively modern choice of a ‘rootless’ existence and opts instead for a ‘pre-modern’ adherence to the familiarfamiliarity home. It is not necessarily so for the childrenchildren of today’s transnationaltransnational eliteelite, some of whom, according to recent studies, feel that they do not really belong anywhere (e.g. BluntBlunt, Alyson and DowlingDowling, Robyn 218–219). And nomadic existence is certainly not a free choice for those who suffer what J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. SmithSmith, Sandra E. refer to as domicidedomicide: “the deliberate destruction of home by human agency” (12). In nineteenth-century BritainBritain, it was still possible to imagine that those who abandoned their homes did so freely, although for the poor this ‘freedomfreedom’ in fact often consisted in a desperate attempt to avoid economic hardship or even famine, as was the case in IrelandIreland during the 1840s (Daunton 47; Harvie 506).131 The first half of the twentieth century, however, would come to be dominated by the more directly enforced mass migrations precipitated by genocidalgenocide, total war (ManningManning, Patrick 164). From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, in short, the threat of homelessnesshomelessness and exileexile became an increasingly real prospect for Europeans (as it had long been for the colonized and the enslaved). It is against this backdrop that we should read both the great VictorianVictorian domestic tragedytragedy of The Mill on the Floss as well as the masterpieces of Modernist fiction – including Virginia WoolfWoolf, Virginia’s Mrs. Dalloway.