The Complete and Incomplete Educations of the Mill on the Floss

THE COMPLETE AND INCOMPLETE EDUCATIONS OF THE MILL ON THE FLOSS by Henry Alley* \ ROCKT MOUNTAIN REVIEW THE COMPLETE AND INCOMPLETE EDUCATIONS OF THE MILL ON THE FLOSS by Henry Alley* Incompletion is a primary theme throughout The Mill on the Floss, where two young lives are cut off before fruition, where the tragedy of a "kingly" miller almost but never quite reaches a majestic finality, where a young and sensitive lover almost wins a young woman, but is held back because of his deformity and his inability to satisfy fully, completely, all of her needs. Even the major representative of the novel's cosmic forces, Nature, never quite sustains the humanity that the personification promises. "Nature repairs her ravages—but not all,"1 the narrator concludes, in a novel whose most controversial moment reawakens selfperception in both hero and heroine, only to have them engulfed in the terrible flood. Many critics have pointed out that the book is a bildungsroman of a dual sort,2 but its central interest lies in the incompletenesses and imbalances of education, both in the broad, psychological sense of the word, and the stricter, more academic sense. Tom Tulliver's growth is a growth into detached narrowness; Maggie's, after various starts, is a growth into overheightened susceptibility; Philip's, while •HENRY ALLEY (born 1945, Seattle, Washington) received his B.A., with honors, from Stanford University and his M. F. A. in Creative Writing and his Ph. D. in Prose Fiction from Cornell University. His work has appeared in such journals as The Virginia Woolf Quarterly, University Review, Webster Review, Cimarron Review, PikestaffPress, and The Midwest Quarterly. He is author of the recently published York Handbook for the Teaching ofCreative Writing and his novel, Through Glass,has been recently published by Iris Press. He has taught literature and creative writing for ten years; at Cornell University, the College of the School of the Ozarks, and the University of Idaho, where he is presently an Assistant Professor of English. He has been an NEH Fellow and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. 1.George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961), p. 457. All references are to this edition. 2.In particular, see Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 94-115. Buckley concludes that "... The Mill on the Floss describes the beginning of a life necessarily still incomplete; and its interest and power lie in the unfolding of that life rather than in the end imposed upon it" (p. 115). The unfolding, however, also involves various forms of incompleteness. 184VOL. 33, NO. 4 (FaU 197·) The MlU on The Floss showing more scholarly promise than the rest, is again a study in a sensitivity that advances too far, eventually immobilizing him. Underlying and structuring these fragmentary or deficient educations is not only Eliot's theory of academic reform,3 but more importantly, her definition of education in the broad sense: a perception of the continuity between past and present, once the major differences have been acknowledged; an extension, therefore, of the sympathies and an active assertion of "patience, discrimination, impartiality" (p. 435, VII, 2) which can distinguish between the deadening claims of the past and its vital ones. One would be tempted to say that, in view of the dramatic texture of the novel, Eliot works by implication and reversal alone; never does she demonstrate her principles positively. And yet if we consider the case of the reader—the long list of addresses and cautionary notes to him, as well as the way his memory is carefully manipulated and redirected—we can discover a carefully wrought educative plan, whereby the reader's imagination and sympathies are brought to flourish within the necessary bounds of detachment, in the sustaining, complete way denied to the characters. The result is the attainment of the wider view, the heroic perception which Eliot was to explore within the novels of education that closed her career, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The education of Tom Tulliver is a good starting point, since Eliot's treatment provides a nearly exact balance of dramatic...