halfway check-in: the mill on the floss

I have a number of thoughts saved up from the holiday weekend – I got a good bit of reading done and have about a dozen posts in mind about Tom’s schooling in general and Phillip in particular – but I’m moving in on the final push of studying for the GRE and my mind is…

Well, given that I felt the need to take a five hour break between the above and this, I think my mind is melted, is what it is.  So, instead of something thoughtful about the trouble with physiognomy, Tom’s education, capitalism, or Mrs. Pullet’s probable anxiety disorder, I am going to do a midpoint bullet list of thoughts:

• I kept thinking that I was going to write a post on how I didn’t like Tom.  The first, I guess, third of the book, my go-to list of potential topics always included “on why I already hate Tom Tulliver.”  (It eventually transitioned into “on why I hate Tom Tulliver” before disappearing entirely.)  But I kept shelving it because my reasons for hating Tom weren’t particularly interesting, even to me.  Oh, well, he’s mean to Maggie and I like Maggie.  Can’t like Tom, I guess.  What made me change my mind?  Eliot’s brilliant decision to make the second volume less about Maggie and all about Tom.  Finally seeing him made him more real to me and made me understand his character and, yes, why he is sometimes mean to Maggie.  (I think the Mrs. Moss/Mr. Tulliver relationship is probably some kind of foreshadowing of Maggie and Tom.  I don’t know what to make of it yet, though.)
• Outside of the immediate Tulliver family, I am not terribly interested in anyone aside from Mrs Pullet, Phillip, Lucy (I want to know her better!), and Mrs Glegg (but only insofar as I would like to understand her meanness as well).  Which, I suppose, is to say that I’m not terribly interested in Mrs Tulliver’s brothers-in-law.
• I still find myself loving Eliot’s style.  It’s clever without feeling as though she is announcing how clever she is.  It’s comfortable while still being, again, clever and asking the reader to remain alert.  She’s gentle with her characters while still allowing for their human faults.  (Not to get back on the Austen vs Eliot thing but I imagine that may be a common theme as Austen is so fresh in my mind – compare Eliot’s treatment of Mrs Tulliver or even Mrs Glegg or Pullet with Austen’s treatment of Mrs Bennet or Mrs Dashwood or any number of her others Mrs-es.)  Some turns of phrase are truly beautiful, some insights into humanity feel like a conversation with an old friend.  Don’t tell Austen or Charlotte Bronte, but Eliot may be the 19th century literary love of my life.  (She may, however, have been too fond of the word “alacrity.”)
• I still want to know more about education only, now, I want to know more about the law too.
• This book is breaking my heart.  I just can’t quite comprehend how we (humanity) can allow for the sufferings that the Tullivers go through.  Their destitution all seems so preventable and the Dobson reaction is just so typical and so, so misguided.  (The Mosses have to give money to the Tullivers… because the Mosses are already poor too?  Because the well-t0-do shouldn’t have to share?  What?)
• I love reading this on a Kindle because the weight and size of the book disappears.  I’ll jump to a footnote and realize I’ve read 250 pages and just be amazed.  I imagine this will become even more interesting/of a benefit when I get to the really hefty ones.  (Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, I’m looking at you.)

The Failed Gypsy Queen: On race, identity, and being a problem

Holy. Gypsies. Batman.

I am not equipped to write this post.  At all.  Feminist analysis on the basis of race or nationality is not really my strong suit on a good day as I tend to stumble over my own white, United States citizen privilege.  Add that to the fact that much of what I know about Romani culture is from Disney’s “Hercules,” that Wikipedia entry, and the analytical work I’ve read on Jenny Calendar from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”  (Note: stuff on Jenny is quite limited – as is stuff on the numerous race issues that show had – but this essay is truly amazing, as is all of his other analytical essays on Buffy/Angel.  I reread it before posting this.  Further noting that all of his essays are beyond spoilery, so.)  So I am feeling beyond inadequate in posting this but something needs to be said about that time Maggie ran away to join the gypsies because, wow.  Holy gypsies, Batman.

A final note: I am only just beyond this incident in terms of my own reading and, as before, I can not even pretend to predict why Eliot chose to include this scene or what purpose it serves in the overarching narrative of the novel.  As such, I suspect that I will return to the issue when I do know, as I can only say so much about the implications without knowing where it fits in the broader framework.  This will be a close reading of that particular passage/chapter with some inferences made as to larger importance/meaning.

The first element of the interpretation of this scene is to return to the question of why Maggie is a problem.  She’s a girl who is rambunctious (her brother is similarly tempered but much less of a problem), her hair won’t stay in curls (she is, again, insufficiently feminine because she doesn’t fit into beauty standards), she is not enough of a Dobson, and now most importantly, she is brown.

She has a dark complexion.  She is frequently measured up against her cousin Lucy who is fair and sweet and clean and good.  Maggie is not sweet or clean or good and that is reflected in her outward coloring.  In true Victorian physiognomic fashion, Maggie’s exterior is as dark and unkempt as her interior.  (I use the word “Victorian” unproblematically here because I am referring to the time of publishing – 1860, safely ensconced within the Victorian era.)

Because of all of these reasons, but mostly because of her skin and hair (because Tom is very young and probably does not fully understand that it is Maggie’s lack of sweetness or goodness that he is also ultimately referencing), Tom taunts her with the assertion that she ought to join the gypsies.

Maggie is a problem because she does not fit the idea of white femininity (and, furthermore, white female beauty) that she ought to.  Within her family, Maggie is a gypsy and a wench (her father’s term of endearment for her).

The second element of interpretation is to ask why Maggie finally snaps and runs away.  (This is ultimately quite similar to asking why she cuts her hair.  Unlike Tom, who always runs away, Maggie responds to threats of punishment from her parents – here, the way external forces are trying to put her in the white, female beauty box and how they deal with her failures respecting that – by staying in one place.  When she cuts off her hair, she refuses to even come downstairs for tea.  Maggie freezes or becomes immobile when threatened.  This is common enough that Tom has no doubt that they will find Maggie in more or less exactly the place she was left – by the river.

So why, this time, does she run?

When Maggie cut her hair, she was taking out her frustration with prescriptive white, female beauty on her own body.  She was, in a way, punishing her own body for failing – she stayed for more because she had, in some ways, already hurt herself more than any outside force could further hurt her.  She’d recognized her own failings and given herself enough punishment.

But this time, it was about Lucy.  Lucy, again, is the external embodiment of all that Maggie can’t quite seem to achieve or be.  When Maggie finally hits the point where she can no longer tolerate Tom’s celebration of Lucy’s goodness, Maggie shoves her adversary into the mud.  In this move, she ruins Lucy’s cleanness, her purity, her light complexion.  As tears stream down Lucy’s face, she is no longer quite sweet, either.  But what Maggie hasn’t managed to spoil, even temporarily, is Lucy’s goodness.  Maggie has only held a light to her own badness.  She can’t seem to fix the problem by further damaging herself – by cutting her hair – OR by damaging others – by shoving Lucy into the mud.  She is now faced with an unsolvable problem – herself – and the threat of even more, constant punishment.  So Maggie runs.

(It is worthwhile to note that Eliot, in the title of the chapter, suggests that Maggie is running away from her “shadow.”  That can either be read as Maggie’s own darkness, the thing she can’t escape from, or Lucy’s brightness, the thing that appears in the sunlight and that Maggie can’t quite touch or integrate into herself.  Either way, this is consistent with the above interpretation.)

The big interpretive question is: what does Maggie expect to gain from running to the gypsies, in particular?

Maggie sees herself, very specifically, becoming their queen.  She anticipates that she will be taken in by them and they will be grateful.  She will be able to teach them all that she has learned from her books and she will be, finally, worshiped as she is meant to be.  Maggie imagines that this is her fairy tale – this is where she will find her place of belonging, where people appreciate her.  Beyond that, she anticipates that she will colonize her fairy tale in true paternalistic fashion – she will make the gypsies more educated and, by virtue, more white and they will give her their resources.

The most interesting thing about this expectation is that she still does not identify with the gypsies, despite being constantly asked to believe that she is one.  She expects that they will automatically recognize and respect her whiteness, even though the white world does not.

The problem, for Maggie, ultimately comes when she finds that she doesn’t fit in there, either.  Not as a gypsy, and not as a white colonizer.  She cannot lower herself to eating their food and they have no interest in hearing about her books.  She is not one of them and she cannot make them one of her.  She must, again, remove herself from this situation.  Maggie uses her failed experience with the gypsies to prove to herself that she does, in fact, belong with and in the white world.

The problems with this are multiple.  First, Maggie’s entire experience rests on the assumption that she is better than or above an entire group of people – especially one that she does not even know and has never before experienced.  Second, Maggie’s experience is truly an experience of failed colonialism – she wants to use the people she thinks that she is better than.  Maggie, for all intents and purposes, is using another culture to find her place in her own.

The biggest problem with all of this is that we are never really asked to question the darkness or the badness of the gypsies.  In fact, we can’t challenge this because we need their unchallenged impurity to prove that, when Maggie doesn’t fit, she doesn’t fit in with that.  Her assumption of betterness is proven, rather than challenged.

Through this scene, to complicate matters, we see that Maggie is a problem merely within the scope of her own limited white world.  She doesn’t fit with gypsy culture but she is not a problem within it – she never contemplates, even for a moment, morphing herself to fit with them; they must change to fit with her.  Maggie is white and not of the lowest classes.  She has a stable home (that is, she has a home to run away from) and knows her lineage (so much so that she wants to escape it).  Maggie benefits from her privilege in the broader world – the reader gets the sense that she is driven home and generally respected within the gypsy community because they, too, understand her privilege.  (And, thus, know the trouble that could come to them by somehow harming her.)  Even at their own camp, Maggie isn’t the problem – they are.

And the most unfortunate part out of all of this?  That it all just remains a plot device.

It could’ve been worse – the gypsies could’ve been absolute monsters.  Eliot treats the gypsies as people, as characters.  (We even get to see a little bit of individualized personality.)  They’re merely different from Maggie and the Tullivers (and the Dobsons etc), is all.  But, the problem is, they’re not merely different from Maggie.  Maggie is a part of the system that systematically oppresses them and she further exploits that by running away to them.  And we’re never once asked to question that system or that exploitation.

Cutting off your hair to spite your mother: Maggie’s rebellion and how and why it failed/will probably continue to fail

I have a feeling that this ‘blog is going to be a great mess of posts that I would never, ever in a million years turn in in essay form.  In part because this is about reflections not really so much with the critical engagement.  But, mostly, it’s because I’m going to be writing a ton about books that I haven’t finished.  So, my opinions might be different once I do so.  This is going to be one of those posts.

I have managed to make a fairly significant chunk in The Mill on the Floss so far.  Not a huge chunk, but definitely a chunk – I’m about seven chapters in.  I’m just at the part where all of Mrs. Tulliver’s sisters come over and everything goes to hell and quickly.  I’m posting because I want to talk about the scene in the midst of all the guest-related commotion where Maggie cuts her hair.

I have a huge weakness for scenes where a woman character tries to seriously alter her hair.  It’s one of my favorite kinds of character development (or, unraveling, as the case usually is).  There’s a scene of hair alteration in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth that I am positively obsessed with – I will give critical analyses of that scene (particularly based on identity) for hours, if you let me.  It’s as though Eliot predicted exactly what I love to read about and wrote this scene exactly for me.  (I’m not that self-centered, promise.)

Maggie’s hair is, as the free indirect discourse of Mrs. Tulliver indicates, distinctly her father’s – no Dobson would have hair like that.  Mrs. Tulliver believes that Maggie is such a trouble to her because she takes after her father.  The hair that wont hold its curls is yet another symptom of this genetic failing.  Contrarily, Mr. Tulliver is fond of Maggie – he wants his wife to go easy on her.  The hair is, again, a symbol of the connection between father and daughter.

Part of what makes this so interesting is that Maggie decides to chop off her hair, perhaps severing that tie symbolically and literally, when she is feeling the pressure of her mother’s family.  She is not enough of a Dobson for them and thus decides to literally rid herself of some of the evidence of that.  But, interestingly, Maggie is consciously thinking about how this will actually line her up with her father, against her mother’s family:

Maggie felt an unexpected pang.  She had thought beforehand chiefly of her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it and something also of the triumph she should have over her mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action: she didn’t want her hair to look pretty – that was out of the question – she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl and not find fault with it. (location 1644, kindle oxford edition)

Maggie wants to be freed from the constraints her mother has placed upon her – the constraints of being pretty.  She wants to be clever – her father values cleverness in Tom and she wants to be valued in the same way.  Maggie does not see a way to be both beautiful and clever so she decides to completely give up on being beautiful in favor of her cleverness.  She chops off her femininity in favor of the kind of masculinity that Tom is encouraged to pursue (even though he, of course, doesn’t want that kind of masculinity for himself).

This bind is not uncommon.  The beautiful and the sublime – they’re not supposed to exist in the same person or being at the same time.  Mrs. Tulliver is continually trying to place Maggie in the box of the beautiful because that is the box for women in Victorian society.  Maggie wants to be clever, she wants to be sublime.  She continually rejects that box.  I don’t know how the novel unfolds even beyond that scene (I don’t even think the Tulliver’s have been able to fully grasp Maggie’s decision yet) but I don’t think this is going to work out well for Maggie.  I don’t think Eliot is going to punish her but I think society will.  Maggie does not fit the role of woman – she doesn’t even look like one anymore.  Society does not have much regard for that.

(And, of course, we’re told a lot by the immediate aftermath.  Tom laughs – Maggie holds a lot of regard for Tom.  Maggie immediately regrets her decision.  Maggie is already being punished by the external judgment of others.  She has already lost.  Instead of ridding herself of the judgment based on being beautiful, she is getting it even more.  And is still bothered by it.  Tom’s reaction was not part of her plan.)

One final thought: the bind between beauty and intelligence is not uncommon and I think the rejection might not be as well.  Women must have always been fighting against that.  But I find it interesting that Maggie chooses to rebel against that bind by rejecting her own body – she alters her self, her person, her appearance to thumb her nose at what she is being asked to be.  I don’t know that it’s necessarily cutting off her nose to spite her face but it’s the kind of internalization that I think is distinctly powerless  (and perhaps even feminine) in this case.

first impressions: the mill on the floss

Last night, I started reading the Oxford edition of The Mill on the Floss on my Kindle.  (I went with the Oxford edition despite the million free versions available both online and for the Kindle in particular, I love the footnotes.  And the opportunity to read the introduction if I ever change my mind about never, ever reading scholarly introductions.  Fun fact, on my first day of college, a professor suggested we never do that for her class – and by “suggested” I mean to undersell the deep distrust of scholarly introductions that she instilled in me that day.  I haven’t looked back since.)

I am only two chapters in and already have some thoughts.

• I like Maggie.  Quite a lot, actually.  Granted, she’s not done much yet but ruin her curls and talk about the devil and witchcraft but that is more than enough to steal my heart.
• I’ve no idea how British education systems work/worked or, for that matter, will work in the future.  What’s the deal with sending a kid to a clergyman?  Do governesses only educate girls?  Do clergymen only educate boys?  (Based on my readings of Charlotte Bronte, the latter seems more likely than the former.)  I have the sense that this is a politically charged issue, but am not quite sure how.  I’ve got some reading ahead of me on this topic, I think.
• This version has a double space between paragraphs.  Makes for fast page turning, for whatever that is worth.
• I find Eliot’s style to be quite cozy.  She’s funny in ways that I think many find Austen to be (where others found Austen funny, I mostly just find her mean – I love Austen, just not when she’s being funny).  She seems more honest than forced.
• On the other hand, I still find her dialect-in-text style to be, honestly, not my favorite.  (Except it does amuse me that, in reading it, I will find myself hearing an American Southern accent – maybe not REALLY Southern, Tennessee or so but definitely, distinctly American.  I wonder if I’m completely alone in that experience.  Possibly, if not probably.)  I, again, don’t know anything about the politics of it but it makes me uneasy because it seems, in my cultural context, to be a way of making fun of people who speak outside the norm.  I might want to look into this one as well.
• I like Maggie.  I don’t know yet how I feel about anyone else.

This Isn’t Her Novel: Hetty Sorrel’s place in the narrative and religion of Adam Bede

I am revisiting Adam Bede.  Not, of course, in the sense that I am rereading it, but in the sense that I am thinking about it.  Deeply.  And, in thinking about the novel, I have been thinking about Hetty Sorrel – the title character that wasn’t.

The thing about Hetty, for me, is that this could have been her book.

When I think of Adam Bede, as I often have this past year, I think of Hetty.  I think of her looking into her mirror in her room, I think of her journey by post (I especially thought of this whenever this method of transportation was mentioned in a Jane Austen novel), I think of her tragedy.

Without giving too much away, particularly with regard to that last point, I think Hetty represents a character that was corrupted by beauty – by her own beauty.  She wasn’t so much a corrupter (although others, namely Adam, were mislead by that same beauty) and she wasn’t necessarily corrupted by an outside person (she was already fundamentally wrong when she met Arthur).

I think this beauty and this corruption (and the way in which they were tied) is interesting in part because Hetty is never really able to recover from it.  In the end, Adam and Hetty both interact with Dinah.  Hetty is forgiven but I believe it is Adam who is ultimately saved.  His is the story that doesn’t end in tragedy (although it begins and middles with it) – hers is (although it didn’t have to be).  Adam’s ending, as Adam is the title character, saves Adam Bede from itself being a tragedy.  Hetty falls from grace (although, perhaps my point is more that she didn’t necessarily fall, she just didn’t save herself or let herself be saved*), Adam, in all the religious language that this entails, ascends.

And this is what the reader is left with.  Not what happened to Hetty (or what Hetty did?) but Adam’s (quite literal) baptism:

“Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.  The yearning memories, the bitter regret, the agnoized sympathy, the struggling appeals to the Invisible Right – all the intense emotions which had filled the days and nights of the past week, and were compressing themselves again like an eager crwod into the hours of this single morning, made Adam look back on allt he previous years as if they had been a dim, sleepy, existence, and he had only now awaked to full consciousness.  It seemed to him as if he had always before thought it a light thing that men should suffer; as if all that he had himself endured, and called sorrow before, was only a moment’s stroke that never left a bruise.  Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and pity.” (Google-able here)

But what does any of this amount to?  This is not Hetty’s book – Hetty’s book is a tragedy.  Hetty and her beauty are merely plot devices – the things that push Adam to his baptism.  He is able to be virtuous because he rejects the pretty woman.

That all sounds very Wollstonecraftian – all the stuff about women and decorations and virtue.  If I were going to argue that Eliot is making some sort of argument about the role of women through her book – and I am totally NOT going to argue that, probably ever – she would probably be making some sort of Wollstonecraftian argument about women being virtuous and rational.  Dinah is both of those things and Dinah is our real heroine.  And Dinah is not beautiful and she is not consumed by beauty.

Dinah is better than Hetty, right?

Maybe.  But this is where, for me, things stop being so Wollstonecraftian.  Eliot never seems to come down harshly on Hetty and, for that matter, neither do any of her characters.  Hetty is, in fact, forgiven.

We’re not even supposed to come down too harshly on Arthur.  Or even the society that set this up.  The word used is “sorrow.”  (See above.  Also: anguish, awe, pity, etc.)  This book is not judgmental.

The religion that works for Adam is the religion that, perhaps, didn’t get to Hetty in time.  Or, perhaps, isn’t something that would work for her (because she’s a woman, because she’s already been corrupted by her beauty?) at all.  Hetty isn’t able to be saved – not by Irwin, and not by Dinah.  There is no place for her in the religious community.

And there’s no place for her in this narrative.  Hetty isn’t a heroine – the heroine dies or marries the hero.

Somehow, George Eliot managed to write an entire novel about a woman that the hero and heroine merely knew.  (To make an analogy, it would be like Austen writing Pride and Prejudice about Charlotte Lucas.)  Chilling.

*This word “saves” is particularly interesting for Hetty.  She is, in terms of plot, “saved” from death.  But it is it this that, perhaps, ultimately prevents her religious salvation – she is not allowed to die, forgiven.  I think this ending is actually particularly clever – Hetty’s plotline is interrupted, just when she’s about to pay penance, perhaps yet again by the same man.