George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

This weekend, I finished George Eliot's Mill on the Floss. I've read a lot and am not genuinely surprised by many endings but this one caught me off guard. Not only Maggie's death in the flood, which feels like a death-sentence delivered, but the abrupt and sudden way Eliot delivers the final scenes. Certainly it is forecast, but...I only saw the forecasting in retrospect.

And, Eliot finishing off Maggie at the end seems to me akin to the way horror films often harm, mutilate and kill the promiscous girl. Not that Maggie is promiscous, but clearly she is a person whose passionate nature drives her to impulsive actions destabilizing to the norms of her time? Certainly, Eliot doesn't kill her off to punish her. Instead, it almost seems to be an attempt to punish the reading public of her time. By taking the narrative turn she does at the end, Eliot is asking her public where is a woman like Maggie to go and make a life for herself after what she's done? She's conceding that her powers can't imagine a life forward for a woman like Maggie in the world of which she's part/apart. Maggie's death at Eliot's hands also seems a mercy killing.

Eliot is an outsider. She clearly looks at her fellow men and women and suspects they have been lessened in some manner from their true natures. Their souls have been starved in some fashion and the lives they lead are dreary shadows of the lives of which they are capable. She's never explicit on the forces which have accomplished this de-naturing nor is it ever clear what the world would look like if men and women stayed in closer touch with their imaginative, passionate and feeling natures, as Maggie has.

Feeling and passion are portrayed as natural but potentially dangerous forces, like the river which figures so prominently in the novel. Given this formulation, the question that informs the novel is how does one stay in touch with one's feelings and passion without being destroyed by them. The question is crucial because, for Eliot, to be human is to be passionate and to have strong feelings which enlarge and empower.

Eliot uses the mill of the book's title to serve as a metaphor to elaborate the question of a human being's proper relation to his or her feeling, for achieving a proper relation to the strong natural force of our feelings. By virtue of it's proximity to the river, a strong natural force, the mill is able to harness the power of the river to achieve an essential function. But, being close to the river, in touch with the river is dangerous on those occasions when the river runs "too high." Then, one is liable to be destroyed by the river.

The metaphor is an interesting one. No matter what you do, eventually a season will come when a river runs to high and the mill will suffer by virtue of being a mill and near the river. It isn't really a question of if but when? And, if the mill serves as an emblem of the proper and authentic relation between a human and his or her feeling, it is easy to wonder whether all deep feelers like Maggie, all people who stay near their feelings and harness their power, are eventually going to be doomed eventually when their feelings, like a river, one day achieve an inevitable flood stage.