Speaking of George Eliot ...
Jul. 30th, 2003 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyDoes anyone else, when they read The Mill on the Floss,
wish that Maggie would fall in love with Philip and spurn Stephen, or is it just me?
wish that Maggie would fall in love with Philip and spurn Stephen, or is it just me?
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-30 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-30 02:05 pm (UTC)*nod nod nod*
*nod nod nod nod*
Ow. Getting dizzy. Must stop nodding.
Les Miserables spoilers--
Date: 2003-07-30 02:24 pm (UTC)Re: Les Miserables spoilers--
Date: 2003-07-30 02:54 pm (UTC)Now, put ten years on Gavroche, and...
Re: Les Miserables spoilers--
Date: 2003-07-30 03:01 pm (UTC)And I meant in a father-daughter kind of thing, you-- you-- filthyminded pervect!
*giggle*
Re: Les Miserables spoilers--
Date: 2003-07-30 03:10 pm (UTC)But in principle I agree. I want Eponine to get the hell out of Dodge, and if she has to walk over Cosette and Marius's bleeding bodies to do it, I'm fine with that.
Re: Les Miserables spoilers--
Date: 2003-07-31 06:21 am (UTC)Guilty as charged.
Re: Les Miserables spoilers--
Date: 2003-07-31 07:25 am (UTC)Okay, here we go. Enjolras and Eponine...
no subject
Date: 2003-07-30 02:54 pm (UTC)1. I want Maggie to find it in herself to quit the emotionally abusive relationship she has with Tom. Tom is never going to love her or respect her (well, okay, maybe Tom does love her: but it's an abusive kind of love that creates an emotional hell for Maggie, and I never read TMotF without wishing that Tom would die, tragically, of one of those Victorian children's illnesses or disasters that happen so often in novels by poorer writers than George Elliot. He could have a lovely deathbed scene, I wouldn't begrudge him that a bit. I just want him dead by the end of Book One, please. But if not dead in fact, I want Maggie to be able to see that she needs to stop caring about what Tom feels about her.
2. I don't give a damn about Stephen Guest or Philip Wakem. Both of them rather annoy me in their relationship with Maggie, though Philip less so than Stephen, who is a selfish git.
3. I want Maggie to escape. I so want Maggie to escape. If she were Lucy Snowe she might do it, but she's not, and she never does.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-30 03:18 pm (UTC)But I find Philip sweet and gentle and intelligent and refreshingly NOT macho, although I realize that Eliot and her contemporaries probably read that more as effeminacy. And I want Maggie, passionately, to be able to see beneath the surface. Stephen may have a beautiful body, but Philip has a beautiful mind. And, why, yes, I do seem to be a bit partisan. I can never care very much for Maggie, because she is so VERY stupid, and I guess my first impulse is always to sympathize and identify with intelligence.
Also, it seems to me rather bitterly ironic that George Eliot, who herself suffered from being stigmatized as plain and whose beloved George Henry Lewes was commonly described as ugly, wasn't able to take the imaginative leap to let Maggie appreciate Philip. Because no matter how hard I try, I know when I read it that Eliot sympathizes with Maggie's choice, and I don't.
I'm not being very coherent. Partly, it's because it's been a long time since I read The Mill on the Floss, so I'm going on my memories of my reactions the last time I read it. I apologize for any inaccuracies or misreadings that have occurred as a result.
***
Arguably, the lesson of the comparison between The Mill on the Floss and Villette is that you have to be crazy to start with before you can escape. It gives you a defense against being MADE crazy before you can get your shit together.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-30 03:52 pm (UTC)When Bob brings Maggie books, I nearly cry: he likes her and admires her, which so damned few of the men in the novel do; he looks up to her because he knows she's smarter and better-read than he is, and he likes her as a person, and he wants to give her something that he thinks she'll like. It's like that scene in Swordspoint when Richard brings Alec the most expensive book he can buy: he's illiterate, but he wants Alec to have a new book and he wants it to be the best. Bob doesn't love Maggie, Maggie doesn't love Bob: but Bob respects her, and it is painful that virtually the only man in the novel who does offer her that ungrudging respect is Bob Wakem.
Maggie isn't sexually attracted to Philip, and she is sexually attracted to Stephen. Stephen isn't in the least suitable - he's a selfish git who never once thinks beyond what he wants. But if Maggie isn't attracted to Philip (and she's not) then Philip isn't a fit partner for her either. I want Maggie to have it all - to have a man who would both respect her and love her and who sexually attracted her. I don't see why she should have to stifle her sexual feelings because the only man who's prepared to let her be her intellectual self is one whom she doesn't find physically attractive.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-30 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-30 04:11 pm (UTC)Maggie is emotionally stupid. I agree, she's not intellectually stupid, but she is so very blind about her own emotions and the emotions of everyone around her that it makes me want to throttle her. It's a sympathetic homicidal urge--I, too, want Maggie to escape--but a homicidal urge nonetheless.
And I agree: Maggie should not have to deny her sexual desires. My objection is one level back, in that I see no reason why Philip Wakem has to be sexually unattractive to her. It's not so much that I want Maggie to choose differently (although I am always screaming, NO, DON'T GO WITH STEPHEN! at that point in the novel) as that I want Eliot to set up her choice differently.
Yes, that means the book would have a happy ending (especially if we could kill Tom off at some convenient moment along the way), but it also means that Eliot's heroine, who complains that dark-haired girls ALWAYS get the short end of the stick, would be unconventional enough to find love with a physically imperfect man. And aside from my personal preference for Philip over Stephen, that's a thematic resonance I would be much happier with.
Yes, I want Eliot to have written a different book, and, no, that wasn't the book she wanted to write. But I find it very frustrating that she bowed to convention there when at so many other points in both her life and her writing she didn't.
Not from the life
Date: 2003-07-31 06:06 am (UTC)(Can't resist an Eliot discussion)
This looks like an example of George Eliot's pattern of doing in her books the opposite of what she did in life. (I've just been reading Kathryn Hughes's biography, so am better up in the minutiae of the life than usual.) She herself was always falling passionately in love with the most bewildering array of men who took an interest in her mind, and the fact of their physical unloveliness (not to mention defects of character) seems to have had no place in the equation at all. Perhaps she thought that this was implausible in fiction?
On Maggie's emotional stupidity, how far is that actually due to her long regime of self-suppression and self-sacrifice, which she, and society as a whole, see as a Good Thing? I.e. I think Eliot wants us to see it as the result of demands on women to put others first, which Maggie, certainly, takes to excessive extremes. Am awful example of the uneducated heart rather than an innate quality?
no subject
Date: 2003-08-03 07:31 pm (UTC)I agree with this, and remember thinking the same when i read it. I found it a painful book throughout. find myself echoing Truepenny's desire for Eliot to have wanted to write the book differently. and yes, we would all be much happier if Tom died slowly and painfully and preferably by at least halfway through the book.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-30 04:33 pm (UTC)