The Wit of Biblical Allusion in The Mill on the Floss

Abstract

The Wit of Biblical Allusion in The Mill on the Floss Dwight H. Purdy T. S. Eliot's famous dictum about the difference between poet and person applies neatly in one respect to George Eliot, or Mary Ann Evans. Electing a nom de plume, though it can have many motives, signifies the elector's conscious sense of great difference. The aspect of this consciousness of difference I will explore here concerns Eliot's persistent habit, long after her apostasy, of producing narratives that seem to be exemplars of Protestant orthodoxy. A particularly critical feature of that orthodoxy-evident not only in Eliot but everywhere in Victorian fiction-will be my theme: scriptural allusion. My emphasis will, however, be on Eliot's seeming orthodoxy. She deploys biblical allusion deftly to allow a double reading of her text as orthodox or apostate. A fine instance is the close of The Mill on the Floss, which pointedly quotes 2 Samuel 1:23. This rhetorical flourish seems to bid us gloss Maggie Tulliver's life through the dark glass of scripture. To tease out some of the implications of Eliot's gesture requires the full context of the close of David's lament for Saul and Jonathan: Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions. Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!1 If Eliot's quotation implies an analogy, then Saul, perhaps, is to Maggie as Jonathan is to Tom. Maggie's temperamental vacillations, the momentous [End Page 233] consequences of her small failures, and her familial conflicts have equivalents in the Saul narrative. Tom resembles Jonathan in an ironic fashion, sharing his constancy. But the penultimate verse complicates the analogy, suggesting that Maggie may also resemble Jonathan in the intensity of her love for Tom. Thus indeed the two are not divided: they are one. The heavy emphasis on biblical quotation as the last word of the novel suggests an orthodox Protestant veneration for applying the Word to find meaning in apparently random events and implies that Eliot grounds her novel on biblical narrative techniques and ethical assumptions. Eliot, though, is on double business bound, for as this quick first reading of the closing gesture suggests, the irony and wit of some of the biblical allusions and quotations in The Mill on the Floss reveal the spore of her apostasy. From the larger perspective of the migration from the Victorian to the Modern, Eliot's novel manages to look before and after, treating the Bible with equal portions of high seriousness and levity. The Bible is both intensely relevant and marvelously distorted in the world of St. Oggs.2 A single act in the center of the novel exemplifies this paradoxical [End Page 234] status Eliot accords the Bible. Tulliver directs his son to inscribe his curse on lawyer Wakem there: "write, as I don't forgive Wakem, for all that; and for all I'll serve him honest, I wish evil may befall him. Write that."3 Tom writes, and Tulliver adds, "Nowwrite-write as you'll remember what Wakem's done your father, and you'll make him feel it, if ever the day comes. And sign your name Thomas Tulliver" (357). Maggie, of course, objects, and she seems spontaneously to shape her objection by quoting Holy Writ: "'O father, what?' said Maggie, sinking down by his knee, pale and trembling. 'It's wicked to curse and bear malice'" (356). This obscure text from the Apocrypha illustrates how very well Maggie Tulliver and Mary Ann Evans read the Bible: "Remember thy end, and let enmity cease; [remember] corruption and death, and abide in the commandments. Remember...