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115 q Chapter 5 Intercrossing, Interbreeding, and The Mill on the Floss The nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be developed by allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the process of development is going on, until that perfect ripeness of the seed which carries with it a life independent of the root. —Marian Evans, “The Natural History of German Life,” 1856 Stronger than the death that does not divide them, matched in affective intensity only by Heathcliff’s quite literal ambition to come between Edgar and Catherine Linton in the grave, the tie between Maggie and Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss provides supreme testimony to the persistence of the first-family bond in the nineteenthcentury English tradition. Having renounced her cousin Lucy’s fiancé on the ground that there can be no conception of duty,no moral compass by which to steer, “if the past is not to bind us,” Maggie returns to the fold of the sibling dyad.1 Recalling the force of the claim in Mansfield Park that “children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits” have an attachment to one another that “no subsequent connections can supply” and evoking “the intense affection” of the Brontë siblings, Tom and Maggie sink together into a final embrace foreshadowed in the novel’s very first sentence, an embrace that is almost inevitably read as transgressive. Referring specifically to The Mill on the Floss, Tony Tanner writes that “there are cases when the bourgeois novel avoids adultery only by permitting and even pursuing something that is very close to incest”;more boldly,William A. Cohen comments that The Mill on the Floss is “as fully perverse a work as one could desire,” offering “a range of alternatives to the marriage plot” that includes not only incest and adultery, but also homoeroticism.2 As for the latter, the epigraph that doubles as Tom and Maggie’s epitaph invokes 116 FAMILY LIKENESS both the brother-sister bond and, more explicitly, the loving tie of Jonathan and David—friends,soldiers,and brothers(-in-law).3 Although Cohen reads the allusion as “[eliding] the distinctively female character of Maggie’s misfortunes ,” we might understand it instead as reinforcing the conception of a love that refuses both gendered and sexual difference in its preference for sameness, “the identification of brother and sister” that Gillian Beer links to the Antigone—as significant a text for George Eliot as it was for Virginia Woolf—in which “love, duty, kinship, passion and death” all commingle.4 As I have been arguing, such bonds, such intensities, far from being some marked deviation from a nineteenth-century English “exogamous” norm, themselves constituted a significant norm in their own right. When we use the imprecise yet ideologically loaded term incestuous to characterize them, we fail to register the difference of the past; the aura of the unnatural that incest evokes is so strong that any casual use of the term tends to block rather than promote further analysis. Moreover, for middle-class Victorians, it is certainly arguable that the rejection of family likeness—broadly construed in Brontëan terms as affinity—in favor of the different,the other,or the strange is the truly aberrant or unnatural. Even when nineteenth-century intellectuals began to question the wisdom of preferences for the familiar under the influence of the nascent sciences of heredity, they did so suspiciously, weighing the risks of sheltering difference at home, in the broader society, and in the empire. It is in pursuit of understanding the emergent discourse around the promise and perils of mixture that this chapter focuses not on first-family sibling erotics but on the biological making of second-family ties that came to preoccupy some very eminent Victorians after midcentury. Like her contemporary Charles Darwin and her partner George Henry Lewes, Eliot, too, pursued the meanings of family likeness,of inheritance,and of the historical/ cultural/biological production of difference. These intellectuals all sought answers to questions of origin, influence, and descent. In Eliot’s case, as in Darwin’s,such questions no doubt had biographical determinants:Mary Ann Evans effected her flight from the family, famously aborted by Maggie Tulliver , only after the demise of her father and at the cost of the familial death inflicted by her brother’s long, disapproving silence at her liaison with the married Lewes. Along with so many of George...

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