Sonderdrucke aus der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
MONIKA FLUDERNIK
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy
Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative in
The Mill on The Floss
Originalbeitrag erschienen in:
REAL 8 (1991/92), S. 157 - 182
157
MONIKA FLUDERNIK
Subversive irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy
Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative in
The Mill On The Floss*
One of the most perceptive comments on the narrative in George Eliot's
The Mill on the Floss has been proffered by Mary Jacobus, who notes that
the language of the novel may be found to ironize the maxims it begets and
circulates) Jacobus takes this as a starting point for a feminist analysis of
Research for this article was made possible in part by the Fonds zur Rirderung der
wissenschaftlichen Forschung, who awarded me an Erwin SchrOdinger grant to do research
at Harvard in 198711988. I also wish to thank the National Humanities Center, Research
Triangle Park, North Carolina, for the use of their facilities during my final rewriting of the
present paper. In particular, I wish to thank Karen Carroll and Linda Morgan for their expert
typing of the m nuscript.
1 "For all its healing of division, The Mill on the Floss uncovers the divide between the language
or maxims of the dominant culture and the language itself which undoes them. In life, at any
rate, they remain divided — indeed, death may be the price of unity — and feminist criticism
might be said to install itself in the gap' (Mary Jacobus, "The Question of Language: Men of
Maxims and The Mill on the Floss,' Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 207-22; 213). The Mill on the
Floss has received much recent attention from feminist critics. Unless they are specifically
quoted below I would here like to mention the following noteworthy scholarship: Nina
Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 1982; Gillian Beer, George Eliot, London: Harvester, 1986; Carol Christ, "Aggression
and Providential Death in George Eliot's Fiction," Novel 9 (Winter 1976): 130-40; Margaret
Anne Doody, 'George Eliot and the Eigteenth Century Novel," Nineteenth Century Fiction
35.1 (1980): 260-91; Janet H. Freeman, "Authority in The Mill on the Floss," Philological
Quarterly 56 (1977): 374-88; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Wbman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, New Haven:
Yale UP, 1979; Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's
Fiction," PMLA 96 (1981): 36-48; Dianne F. Sadoff, "George Eliot: The Law and the
Father,* in: Harold Bloom, ed., George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss," New York: Chelsea
House, 1988; Elaine Showalter, "The Greening of Sister George," Nineteenth Century
Fiction 35.1 (1980): 292-311; and Christine Sutphin, "Feminine Passivity and Rebellion in
Four Novels by George Eliot," Texas Studies in Language and Literature 29.3 (1987): 342-63.
I have used the following more general studies of George Eliot: C. C. Barfoot, "Life Divided,
Death Undivided in The Mill on the Floss," in: J. Bakker, J. A. Verleun, and J.v.d.
Vriesenarde, eds., Essays on English and American Literature and a Sheaf of Poems. Offered
to Did Wilkinson on the occasion of his retirement from the Chair of English Literature in
the University of Groningen (= Costerus. N. S., 63), Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987, 81-99; John
P. Bushnell, "M•*e Tulliver's 'Stored-Up Force': A Re-Reading of The Mill on the Floss,"
Studies in the Novel 16.4 (1984): 378-95; James Diedrick, "The 'Grotesque Body'?
Physiology in The Mill on the Floss, " Mosaic 21.4 (1988): 27-44; R.P. Draper, ed., George
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Monika Fludernik
the novel, demonstrating how the society of St. Ogg's condemns Maggie's
privileged access to language as unreliable and incorrect, since for them
clichés and dead metaphors have replaced the truth of linguistic expression.
In these pages I want to take Jacobus's statement more literally still and
document its radical nature on the basis of a stylistic and narratological
analysis of the novel, the results of which will suggest an even more
trenchant critique of society's values and norms in those passages of the
novel that employ the narrative technique called reflectorization.
The present study focusses on what Stanzel in 1977 termed the
"reflectorization of the authorial narrator. "2 The device has not received
any attention in the English-speaking world and, because of the relative
Eliot "The Mill on the Floss" and "Silas Mamer": A Casebook, London: Macmillan, 1977;
Laura Comes Emery, George Eliot's Creative Conflict: The Other Side of Silence, Berkeley:
U of California P, 1976; Herbert Foltinek, George Eliot (= Ertrage der Forschung, 182),
Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982; John Hagan, "A Reinterpretation of
The Mill on the Floss," PMLA 87 (1972), 53-63; Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot.
A Study in Form, London: Athlone, 1959; and Barbara Hardy, ed., Critical Essays on George
Eliot, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970; Gerard Joseph, 'The Antigone as Cultural
Touchstone: Matthew Arnold, Hegel, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf; and Margaret Drabble, "
PM LA 96(1981): 22-35; F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition. George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph
Conrad, London: Chatto & Windus, 1948; George Levine, "George Eliot's Hypothesis of
Reality," Nineteenth Century Fiction 35.1 (1980): 1-28; and his "Intelligence as Deception:
The Mill on the Floss," PMLA 80 (1966): 402-409; Jane McDonnell, "'Perfect Goodness' or
'The Wider Life': The Mill on the Floss as Bildungsroman, " Genre 15 (Winter 1982): 379-402;
John P. McGowan, "The Turn of George Eliot's Realism," Nineteenth Century Fiction 35.1
(1980): 171-92; Kerry McSweeney, "The Ending of The Mill on the Floss," English Studies in
Canada 12 (1986): 55-68; Darrell Mansell, Jr., "George Eliot's Conception of Tragedy,"
Nineteenth Century Fiction 22(1968): 155-171; Jill Matus, "Proxy and Proximity: Metonymic
Signing," Univ. of Toronto Quarterly 58.2 (1988): 305-26; K.M. Newton, George Eliot:
Romantic Humanist: A Study of Philosophical Structure of her Novels, London: Macmillan
1981; and her "The Role of the Narrator in George Eliot's Novels," Nineteenth Century
Fiction 35.1 (1980); Ronald Schleifer, "Irony and the Literary Past: On The Concept of Irony
and The Mill on the Floss," in: Ronald Schleifer and Robert Markley, eds., Kierkegaard and
Literature: Irony, Repetition and Criticism, Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1984, 183-216;
Bruno Schultze, "Textbriichigkeit und isthetisches Urteil: Zur Interpretationsproblematik
von George Eliots The Mill on the Floss," in: Hans Freitag and Peter Huehn, eds.,
Literarische Ansichten der Wirklichkeit. Studien zur Wirklichkeitskonstitution
englischsprachiger Literatur. To Honour Johannes Kleinstiick (= AAF 12), Frankfurt: Lang,
1980: 209-30; Werner Schafer, Komik in den Romanen George Eliots (= Bochumer
Anglistische Studien, 19), Amsterdam: Griiner, 1985; Philip M. Weinstein, The Semantics of
Desire: Changing Models of Identity from Dickens to Joyce, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
1984; and Joseph Wiesenfarth, 'Legend in The Mill on the Floss," Texas Studies in Language
and Literature 18(1976): 21-41.
2 The term reflectorization derives from the term "reflector character" for a figural
consciousness in the Stanzelian schema. In a figural narrative situation, events are presented
from the perspective of a character (or several in succession), who then function(s) as (a)
"reflector(s)" of ongoing events. For readers familiar only with Genette's typology, the
equivalent Genettian term would be internal focalization within heterodiegetic narrative.
(Note, however, that Stanzel's figural narrative situation can also accommodate
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative
159
brevity of its presentation, has not been much noted even in the German
literature. How can one describe this phenomenon? In passages of
reflectorization the authorial narrator adopts a character's point of view,
renouncing an external ('omniscient') corrective to it. In a sense, this
almost provides the impression of the character narrating the story as if he
or she had suddenly slipped into the function of the narrator and was now
continuing the narrative from his or her perspective. In a generally comprehensible vocabulary one might perhaps describe reflectorization as the
subversion of the reliability of the authorial narrator, or as an undermining
of his aloofness from the world of fiction. This subversion particularly
takes its origin in the consciousness and perspective of (a) fictional
character(s). Reflectorization is an 'authorial' device on account of both its
vocabulary and distanced tone. Passages of reflectorization seem to adhere
to the narrator's omniscience because they presuppose a knowledge of the
fictional world as a whole and of the characters' background. On the other
hand, reflectorization blends narratorial description and background
information with the portrayal of the character's thoughts and impulses,
frequently rendered in free indirect discourse. Reflectorization does not
break with the authorial mode; indeed, it is a device occurring specifically
within the authorial3 narrative situation, presupposing what is commonly
termed omniscience. 4
Let us now look at a typical example and illustrate its workings.
Mrs Glegg had both a front and a back parlour in her excellent home at St Ogg's,
so that she had two points of view from which she could observe the weakness of
her fellow beings, and reinforce her thankfulness for her own exceptional
strength of mind. From her front windows she could look down the Tofton
Road, leading out of St Ogg's, and note the growing tendency to "gadding about"
in the wives of men not retired from business, together with a practice of wearing
homodiegetic reflectors.) Passages of reflectorization frequently have an "atmosphere" of
figural narrative and indeed predominantly contain free indirect discourse. See F.K. Stanzel.
"Die Personalisierung des Erzahla.ktes im Ulysses," in: Therese Fischer-Seidel, ed., James
Joyce ›Ulysses,.. Neuere deutsche Aufsiitze, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977, 284-308, and A
Theory of Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984: 168-84.
3 I.e., hetereocliegetic narrative with zero-focalization.
4 Reflectorization is also fully compatible with a figural mode. In such contexts, although there
is no distancing authorial voice, the figural perspective is transcended by quasi-authorial
omniscience which cannot be attributed to any of the characters in the story. Examples of
such empathetic, rather than ironic, reflectorization are to be found, for instance, in the short
fiction of D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. Stanzel mentions this phenomenon (A
Theory, p. 172), but it has as yet received far too little attention. Examples of such (figural)
texts would be Mansfield's "At the Bay," Lawrence's "England, My England," or Fay
Weldon's "Weekend.'
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Monika Fludemik
woven cotton stockings, which opened a dreary prospect for the coming
generation; and from her back windows she could look down the pleasant
garden and orchard which stretched to the river, and observe the folly of Mr
Glegg in spending his time among "them flowers and vegetables." For Mr
Glegg, having retired from active business as a woolstapler, for the purpose of
enjoying himself through the rest of his life, had found this last occupation so
much more severe than his business, that he had been driven into amateur hard
labour as a dissipation, and habitually relaxed by doing the work of two
ordinary gardeners. The economizing of a gardener's wages might perhaps have
induced Mrs Glegg to wink at this folly, if it were possible for a healthy female
mind even to simulate respect for a husband's hobby. But it is well known that
this conjugal complacency belongs only to the weaker portion of the sex, who
are scarcely alive to the responsibilities of a wife as a constituted check on her
husband's pleasures, which are hardly ever of a rational or commendable kind.
(I, xii, 105) 5
Now, in one sense this is straightforward narration. The subject of this
paragraph is Mrs. Glegg's house, the view it opens to her both on the town
and on her husband in the garden, and from this perspective arise the
habitual opinions and thoughts that Mrs. Glegg evinces when she views
either side. The description is consistently distanced — Mrs. Glegg is
presented from the outside, as it were. The narrator informs us of the layout of the house and of Mrs. Glegg's view from his omniscient perspective.
However, he does not criticize or evaluate Mrs. Glegg, but thoroughly
espouses Mrs. Glegg's mind-set and opinions, adopting the kind of
vocabulary she might have used herself to present her own views and
supplementing this with a diction too elavated to be Mrs. Glegg's but
tending in the same evaluative direction as her own.
Thus it would be Mrs. Glegg's opinion that her house was excellent (a
term hardly applicable from the perspective of a neutral or objective
authorial narrator), and the objects of her view from the front parlour are
not neutrally — the wives of St. Ogg's chatting, but — first in Mrs. Glegg's
order of perception — their moral weaknesses. It is furthermore apparent
that the explanation of the advantages of such a view on St. Ogg's — the
"reinforcement" of Mrs. Glegg's thankfulness for her own exceptional
strength of mind — could derive from no other source than Mrs. Glegg's
self-complacency in her own moral excellency. In the subsequent sentence
5 All references are to The Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, ed. Gordon S.
Haight, Oxford: Clarendon 1980, and I provide book and chapter numbers for easy reference
to other editions.
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative 161
we are given some particulars for the evaluation that had preceded these
details, with a direct quotation from Mrs. Glegg ("gadding about"), and
another excursion into her conclusions drawn from the sight of woven
cotton stockings — a remark disclosing her mental prediction of impeding
disaster. Mrs. Glegg's view out the back windows then lights on her garden
and orchard (Both "pleasant" — another self-congratulatory item), and on
her husband, whose prime characteristic in her eyes is his folly. The
narrator's brief summary of how Mr. Glegg came to do the gardening is
heavily derogatory, taking Mrs. Glegg's point of view. The reader,
however, will no doubt surmise from circumstantial evidence that it was
not folly but flight from Mrs. Glegg's parlour that might have prompted
such "dissipation." The narrative then continues with another disguised
slur on Mrs. Glegg's character, emphasizing that stinginess alone is
responsible for her partial tolerance of her husband's hobby, and the
passage ends with some comments on proper wifely attitudes, views which
are explicity shared by Mrs. Glegg and in fact seem to derive from her. The
passage smacks of a rendering of her own arguments and thus of free
indirect discourse, though it stays well within the constraints of the
narrative's vocabulary and syntax.' The general impression is therefore one
of Mrs. Glegg, empowered by authorial distance and linguistic expertise to
present to us a fair view of her own maxims of respectability.
There is no doubt in the reader's mind that the above paragraph is a
sarcastic indictment of Mrs. Glegg's values. This is signalled by a number
of inconsistencies and discrepancies which reveal inner contradictions and
duplicities. We have mentioned the departure from ordinary rules of
perception, putting the evaluation of the object before its apprehension. To
consider gardening, a harmless occupation if ever there was one, a
"dissipation" which is neither "rational" nor "commendable," or to
associate doom with a point of fashion — the wearing of "woven cotton
stockings" is clearly exaggerated, demonstrating the typical stylistic (and
mental) excess in the narrative of Mill which has been so masterfully
analyzed by Jonathan Arac. 7 Another obvious discrepancy exists between
6 There are no syntactic markers of free indirect discourse such as exclamations, root
transformations, characters' deixis or progressive tenses. Note that we have the present tense
for gnomic statements rather than a "transposed" past of free indirect discourse.
7 See Jonathan Arac, "Rhetoric and Realism in 19th Century Fiction. Hyperbole in The Mill on
the Floss," ELH 46 (1979): 673-92. This excess is frequently "naturalized" to manageable
proportions by explaining it as a consequence of George Eliot's psyche and its
unacknowledged strains and tensions. See also Rosemary Mundhenk, "Patterns of
Irresolution in Eliot's The Mill on the Floss," INT 13.1 (1983): 20-30.
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Monika Fludernik
Mrs. Glegg's view and what one usually associates with genuine Christian
behaviour and morals. The religious element is invoked by the terms
"weakness," "fellowbeings," "thankfulness" and by the mention of the
subject of meek wifely submission and respect for one's husband, concepts
that are of course signally repudiated by Mrs. Glegg. Not that Mill endorses
the Christian pattern of wifely subjection indeed, Mrs. Tulliver comes out
very badly for belonging to the meek of the earth. However, in the context,
Mrs. Glegg's view decidedly clash with received opinion and point to a lack
of affection and love — attributes decidedly alien to Mrs. Glegg's mind
throughout the novel. The ironic reading is additionally signalled by stylistic
discrepancies between the terms used and the objects signified, such as Mr.
Glegg's "relaxing into hard labour," or the "simulating" of respect (not
having it but simulating it) for one's partner in marriage. That wifely duty
might consist in thwarting one's husband's pleasure, and the identification of
"winking" at one's husband's folly with "conjugal complacency," are
additional examples. Beyond the immediate factual incongruities such
collocations introduce a note of linguistic-semantic disparity.
A further hint of irony within the passage derives from the use of terms
which are wonderfully appropriate to Mrs. Glegg's own behaviour in
contexts in which these expressions refer to Mrs. Glegg's injurious opinion
of others. One such word is "complacency" — a term eminently suited to
describe Mrs. Glegg's self-congratulatory views but which is used in the
narrative (and, implicitly, by her) to cast aspersions on submissive wives.
Another such key word is "weakness." The real subject of the passage are
Mrs. Glegg's failings; yet weakness is the very flaw she self-righteously
insists on pointing out in the community of St. Ogg's. Although Matthew
vii: 3 is not specifically alluded to, Mrs. Glegg presents a typical example of
'beholding the mote in one's brother's eyes, but considering not the beam
that it is one's own.'
The book as a whole can also be invoked as additional evidence for the
incriminatory nature of the portrayal of individual characters. Mrs.
Glegg's various shortcomings surface in innumerable other scenes and
descriptions, most undeniably and straightforwardly from her actions and
words as the narrative records them. A good example of such a
corroborative passage occurs towards the end of the same chapter, where
we learn of Mrs. Glegg's secret inducements for making peace with her
husband. Her reasonings, which we are proffered with all appearance of
approbation by the narrator, demonstrate Mrs. Glegg to measure her love
in relation to her husband's financial arrangements in his will, that is to say
in accordance with her prospects for the accruing to her of both interest and
neighbourly respect consequent on Mr. Glegg's testamentary dispositions.
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative 163
I have taken pains to discuss the various kinds of irony in the text,
without as yet taking into account the general cultural presuppositions
(about the "reasonable" and "commendable" behaviour between partners
in marriage, for instance) on which one's judgement of Mrs. Glegg is likely
to rely. The particular finesse of the passage is that it entirely refrains from
labelling Mrs. Glegg as a shrew and a hypocrite, or from judging her from
whatever morally "superior" standpoint. We are, instead, given an
exposition of Mrs. Glegg's moralism in actu, that is in the act of judging,
and are inevitably led to pronounce judgement on her on account of her
behaviour. Thus, ironically, Mrs. Glegg gives herself away by performing
her most cherished duty — that of judging others. Now, this singular
constraint on the part of a narrative that — as we have seen — elsewhere
indulges in frequent narratorial "intrusions" requires some explanation.
And here a narratological explication of the novel as a whole can help to
provide some indications as to the underlying logic of this tactful silence.
The narrative of Mill is peculiar, initially, on account of its opening
chapter and the kind of peripheral first-person narrator 8 that appears in it.
Most critics have condemned the intrusive nature of this narrator, although
W.J.Harvey 9 finds it aesthetically pleasing, since these reminiscences allow
the narrator to conjoin past and present on a personal note." One might
add that the sentimental and nostalgic note struck at the very beginning of
the novel anticipates Maggie's evaluation of her own childhood, which as
has been noted frequently" seems to be a series of disappointments and
agonies over Tom's lack of feeling rather than a golden age of mutual love
8 See Stanzel, A Theory, pp. 204-209.
9 See W.J. Harvey, The Art of George Eliot. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969.
10 The initial chapter is also discussed at some length by Barbara Hardy, Particularities:
Readings in George Eliot, London: Peter Owen, 1982, P. 13; Margaret Harris, "The Narrator
of The Mill on the Floss," Sydney Studies in English 4.3 (1978): 32-46; Carl D. Malmgren,
"Reading Authorial Narration: The example of The Mill on the Floss," Poetics Today 7.3
(1986): 471-94; and Graham Martin, 'The Mill on the Floss and The [sic] Unreliable
Narrator,* in Anne Smith, ed., George Eliot: Centenary Essays and an Unpublished
Manuscript, London: Barnes & Noble, 1980: 40-41. Other narratological discussions are to
be found in Beer, op. cit; Rosemary Clark-Beattie, "Middlemarch's Dialogic Style," The
Journal of Narrative Technique 15.3 (1985): 199-218; Herbert Foltinek, "George Eliot und
der unwissende Erzihler," GRM 33 (1983): 167-78; Graver, op. cit. ; Hardy, op. cit.; W.J.
Harvey, "George Eliot and the Omniscient Author Convention," Nineteenth Century
Fiction 13 (1958-59): 81-108; Karl Kroeber, Styles in Fictional Structure: The Art of Jane
Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971; Karen B.
Mann, The Language that Makes George Eliot's Fiction, Baltimore MD: johns Hopkins UP,
1983; and K.M. Newton, 'The Role of the Narrator in George Eliot's Novels"./NT 3 (1973):
97-107.
11 See, for instance, Margaret Homans,"Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters'
Instruction," Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 230-32, and, more generally, Martin, op. cit,
pp. 43-44.
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Monika Fludernik
and understanding between brother and sister. The narrator's estimation of
the past is equally inappropriate, since the story he 12 is going to relate does
not at all warrant the nostalgic sentiment for good old times; there is no
warning note of impeding disaster. (The flood imagery as such is not
sufficiently foregrounded to act as a prefiguration of the novel's ending.)
On the other hand, both Maggie and the narrator are correct in their view
of the past, since its positive sides were undeniably there at one point or
another. There is frequent mention of Maggie's bliss in the actual or
remembered company of Tom," but happiness does not lend itself to
description and, like desire, needs to be a blank and a lack around which
activity is generated." The narrator's view of the past as a resting point for
the mind — note the physical parallel with the narrator resting his arms on
the stone parapet of the bridge (I, i, 8) — is proffered as the ground from
which the narrative springs: memory is a "myth-making faculty."
The beginning of Book I, however, merits an even closer look, formally,
since what is frequently considered to be the author's semiautobiographical prelude to the story displays some interesting ontological
inconsistencies. It will therefore be expedient to enumerate the properties
of this narrator as displayed in I, i and to contrast them with what we learn
of the narrator later in the novel.
12 On the use of the pronoun he for the narrator, see below.
13 Compare, for example, I, v, 44 (the fish catching scene). Whereas Maggie receives
unconditional love from her father, happiness with Tom is precarious, come by undeserved,
no sooner had than lost again. For a shrewd reading of this scene see Homans, op. cit., p. 231.
14 "But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about
her: her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the
happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.' (VI, iii, 338)
15 See Nina Auerbach, "The Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie Tulliver," Nineteenth
Century Fiction 30 (1975 76): 167. This dialectic notion of the past surfaces first of all in
Maggie's story, where her attempted recuperation of past restfulness and bliss is accompanied
by an intricate web of anticipatory and retrospective echoes that, beyond the obvious changes
that have inevitably occurred, establish a viable continuity between her present and past.
Moreover, the narrator's philosophical and historical asides are also full of the relation
between the past and the present. Not only are there frequent mentions of changes that have
occurred between Maggie's youth and the narrator's "now;" there is also a decided
preoccupation with changes before the status quo of Maggie's past. The narratorial distance
from the events of the story surfaces in numerous comparisons of the mill, the town and the
Floss before and after the flood, as well as remarks on the now superseded modes of life then
current in St. Ogg's. Likewise, the past is already shown to be an unsatisfactory state of
affairs that has lapsed from its former glory. The narrator's in persona appearance at the
beginning of the novel has thus a more than superficial formal and material justification and
cannot be "explained away" as a mere "intrusion of the author." It announces the themes of
memory and history, and of the loss of innocence. Additionally, the idealized and dream-like
quality of the past apostrophized at the outset of Mill recurs as an important strand in the
narrative to follow.
-
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative 165
At the beginning of I, i we are provided with a sustained description of
the landscape narrowing down to Dorlcote Mill and eventually to Maggie
and Tom's dog Yap. This description starts in what seems to be an objective
tone, but soon acquires a perspective from the introduction of deictic 16
expressions and the use of emotive syntax, and, finally, a first-person
pronoun — italicized for the reader's convenience: "this February sun;"
"How lovely the little river is with its dark, changing wavelets!;" "It seems
to me [...] while / wander along the bank." This immediately puts the
narrator on the scene in physical shape, wandering along the banks of the
Floss, but the impression is presently skewed by "I remember those large
dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge." (This is first recognized as
an oddity: is there a temporal distance from the events? does the narrator
remember earlier events?) The bridge surfaces as existing within the
physical presence of the narrator, who now leans his arms on the
"cold stone of this bridge" (8) and muses about the river and the waggon
plus horses going by, and finally about "that little girl." However, the
situation, once it has been elaborated (narrator viewing Dorlcote Mill from
the bridge on a February afternoon), is immediately snatched away from
the reader when the narrator discloses it to have been a day-dream in which
he remembered — this now confirms earlier intimations — the February
afternoon "many years ago" when he was standing at Doricote Mill. The
chapter ends with an additional turn of the screw:
Before I dozed off, I was going to tell you what Mr. and Mrs. Tulliver were
talking about, as they sat by the bright fire in the left-hand parlour on that very
afternoon I have been dreaming of. (8)
The present narrative — as it is set out from I, ii onwards —, this implies, is
what the narrator was going to relate in his dream, and it is not at all clear
whether the narrator's remembrance (and hence actual past) comprises a
visit to Dorkote Mill and a view of Maggie, or whether this is not indeed,
as the projected act of narration itself, a dream within a dream.
The problem is compounded by the narrator's ontological attributes.
Within the dream, the narrator's past self clearly has a series of feelings and
emotions which are rendered from what I would take to be a figural (past
self) point of view. The whole dream sequence is notable for its use of the
present tense, which is here employed descriptively in one of its
16 I.e., expressions presupposing a speaker or center of consciousness, from whose spatiotemporal perspective events seem to be described. Deictic expressions include here, this, or
now See Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, Coral Gables: U of Miami P,
1971: 218-19.
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Monika Fludernik
characteristic uses. 17 In any other situation "I wander" or "as I look" or "I
am in love with moistness" (7) would be unthinkable propositions. One
does not talk about what one is currently doing, or analyze one's feelings
and perceptions at the exact moment that one is experiencing them. Hence
the sentiments here described need to be a recollective "psychonarration"" of those evinced by the narrator's past self.
And this is Dorlcote Mill. I must stand a minute or two here on the bridge and
look at it, though the clouds are threatening, and it is far on in the afternoon. (7)
We have here a clear case of character's past consciousness: this is what the
narrator is perceiving and saying to himself at this point. Later on, the
narrator's description likewise needs to refer to a past state of mind
presented from a later perspective, since one cannot plausibly be in love
with moistness and envious of ducks except in a (later) metaphorical
evaluation of one's (earlier) mute feelings:
As I look at the full stream, the vivid grass, the delicate bright green powder
softening the outline of the great trunks and branches that gleam from under the
bare purple boughs, I am in love with moistness, and envy the white ducks that
are dipping their heads far into the water here among the withes, unmindful of
the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above. (7)
Most of the following description with its emotive tone, syntax and
vocabulary can indeed be qualified as narrated perception, Banfield's "nonreflective consciousness": 19
And now there is the thunder of the huge covered waggon coming home with
sacks of grain. [...] See [Imperative!] how they stretch their shoulders [...] Now
they are on the bridge, and down they go [...] (8; my emphases)
17 Stanzel (ATheory,ch. 2) aligns the present tense in descriptions, summaries, chapter headings
and other characteristic uses with the zero degree of narratorial mediation. The descriptive
use of the historical present which allows the action to freeze and be presented as a still-life
has been described by Christian Paul Casparis, Tense Without Time: The Present Tense in
Narration (= Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten 84), Berne: Francke, 1975.
18 See Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in
Fiction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1978. This is equivalent to Stanzel's 'thought report"
(Ge danken-Bericht).
19 This phenomenon occurs frequently when the narrative describes the perception of a
character through whose mind the narrative is filtered, hence the name "narrated perception."
Chatman uses "free indirect perception," since such passages often develop into a free
indirect discourse rendering of the character's consciousness of what he or she is perceiving.
See Seymour Chatrnan, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca
NY: Cornell UP, 1978: 203-206. Banfield's non-reflective consciousness is discussed in
chapter 5 of Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences:Narration and Representation in Fiction,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. It subsumes both narrated perception and Cohn's
psycho-narration.
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative 167
Note also "that honest waggoner," "that little girl", "that queer white
cur." Without sliding off into a technical discussion of free indirect
discourse (or of Banfield's model) one can here note those very signals of a
figural consciousness that indicate the presence of free indirect discourse,
psycho-narration (description of consciousness) or narrated perception.
The whole paragraph provides a description of the narrator's turmoil of
sentiments, emphasized in addition by the narrator's imperatives "See how
they stretch... Look at their..." and the emotive "down they go." These
imperatives are instances of free indirect discourse, as is "I must stand a
minute or two here [...]."
What we have here, then, needs to be considered a typical example of
figural or reflectoral narrative according to Stanzel — the portrayal of the
story through the consciousness and perspective of a character, here the
narrator's past dream self, so to speak. That this should be so disguised is
due primarily to the use of the present tense — a tense entirely appropriate
to the subject matter, a dream. Only close attention to the text reveals most
of this passage to be a rendering of consciousness and thus within the
confines of figural representation. What deserves particular attention in
this set-up, however, is the narrator's faculty for seeing into other people's
minds. This faculty is at first one of imputation or guessing: "perhaps he
[the dog] is jealous;" but with the waggoner it transcends the limits of mere
speculation:
That honest waggoner is thinking of his dinner, getting sadly dry in the oven at
this late hour; but he will not touch it till he has fed his horses, — the strong,
submissive, meek-eyed beasts, who, I fancy, are looking mild reproach at him
from between their blinkers, that he should crack his whip at them in that awful
manner, as if they needed that hint! (8; my emphases)
How could the personified narrator know what the waggoner is thinking
or that his dinner is getting dry at his home, or of his resolve to postpone
dinner until after he has fed his horses? And what are we to make of the
narrator's invention of thought for these very horses, slyly set off by an "I
fancy" but nearly as preposterous as in the case of Yap?
As the next step up we get what the narrator explicity announces he is
withholding from us: the conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Tulliver —
clearly beyond the pale of the narrator's past self who can espy only the fire
through the window of the mill. Yet we get this conversation at the
beginning of chapter two, fully recorded, and this is the beginning of the
novel itself. The novel, one needs to note, includes not only page-length
word-by-word accounts of ongoing conversations but also sustained
renderings of figural consciousness. Thus the omniscient tendencies that
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Monika Fludernik
the dream narrator of I, i already manifested in his description of the
waggoner and his horses acquire full scope in the story he was going to tell
and which we get in spite of his disclaimer.
What all this amounts to — and here I come to the major significance of
the device of the dream narrator of I, i is Eliot's attempt to provide a
"realistic" justification for the omniscient narrator convention, pretending
that the narrative is a mere fireside dream by a none too well defined
authorial "I." On a realistic plane, this narrator exists only as a person
dreaming in his armchair, and indeed not as a narrator at all. The position
in an armchair beside the fireplace suggests that of the prospective reader,
the narratee, so that the illusion is of the narrator and the narratee together
reading the same book, a dream resurrected from the narrator's
unconscious. A dream, moreover, that has the same properties as the
memory of one's youth so frequently apostrophized in the novel.
It is noteworthy that this personalized narrator of the preface disappears
with only one proper resurrection in I, v, and a half-hearted one in I,
102:
But older even than this old hall is perhaps the bit of wall now built into the
belfry of the parish church, and said to be a remnant of the original chapel
dedicated to St. Ogg, the patron saint of this ancient town, of whose history I
possess several manuscript versions. (102)
Like the pervasive authorial commentary that compares the antiquated
time of St. Ogg's with our own days, this brief resurrection of an embodied
narrator primarily serves to vouchsafe the historical veracity of the legend
of St. Ogg's as a textual (and fictional) entity. The novel does not have more
verisimilitude than the legend, but both are here accredited with the
insignia of historical truth. If I have called this a "half-hearted"resurrection
of the narrator, it is because the possession of documents attributes a
physical existence to the narrator but in no way existentially links him to
the events recounted. On the contrary, qua historian, the narrator is
explicity cut off from the past he tries to recapture. The second resurrection
of the embodied narrator also foregrounds the distance between the time of
narration and the time of the narrative. The embodiment suggests a framenarrator rather than a narrator involved in the events of the story, and the
passage duly resumes a note of omniscient gnomic commentary by its
return to the plural pronouns us and our:
The wood I walk in on this mild May day [...] These familiar flowers, these wellremembered bird-notes, [...] — such things as these are the mother tongue of our
imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable
associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative 169
the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint
perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the
far-off years, which still live in us and, transform our perception into love. (I, i,
36) (emphasis added)
The time reference is here merely gratuitous except to recall to the reader
that it does not coincide with the chronology of the story, where it
presently becomes "easter week" (I, vi, 45). 20 The narrator then seems to be
referring here to his present self — as in front of the fireplace — and if he is
telling us this story at all, he is telling it orally, walking and talking rather
than sitting at his desk. The scene also epitomizes the constitution of
nostalgia for childhood as something triggered by the contemplation of
nature with its recurrent process of regeneration. The myth of childhood,
as we have seen, indeed emerges as a fantasy derived from only fleeting
awarenesses during one's actual experience of adolescence, and it is thus
only secondarily and precariously based on memory — a neat parallel to the
narrator's own relation to the story here told.
It is maybe at this point that I should briefly clarify and defend my use of
the third person pronoun he rather than she or it for MM. The putative sex
of the narrator, in so far as he is personalized, has received some attention
from Barbara Hardy and Suzanne Graver. 21 Hardy documents the fact that
in her early work Eliot construed sexually ambiguous narrators, and she
quotes one passage from Mill in which the narrator's "us" is supposedly
male (I, vii, 57: "We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny
bare legs above our little socks ..."), thus balancing out the feminine
associations in other parts of the novel. There are pervasive hints of "female"
interests and reactions in the book, such as the sentimental effusions of the
narrator in I, i or the knowledge of, and interest in, fashion. Graver even
notes that "references to 'refined' ladies or women appear throughout
Mill," but does not quote any instances. 22 All explicit gender references that
I have discovered are male, and they are all general or specific addresses to
the narratee. It is, however, a matter of some dispute whether the narratee
needs to coincide with the narrator in terms of sex, since addresses to
several specific narratees can co-occur. In Hardy's earlier example passage,
the our has more evidential stringency to include the narrator than do the
20 The latest possible date for Easter by the new calendar is April 25. See H. Grotefend,
Taschenbuch der Zeitrechnung des deutschen Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, Hahnsche
Buchhandlun.g, 1971.
21 See Hardy, Peculiarities, pp. 131-140, and Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A
Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form, Berkeley: U of California P, 1984: 284-86.
22 See Graver, op. cit., p. 284, n. 11.
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Monika Fludernik
descriptions of the narratee given in her other examples in VI, iv, 347 ("
a touch of human experience which I flatter myself will come to the bosoms
of not a few substantial or distinguished men who were once... cherishing
very large hopes in very small lodgings") or II, iv, 154 ("you must be an
exceptionally wise man, who ... never ... threw yourself in a martial
attitude ... "). In the following two quotations the you is generalized to an
extent that it almost approaches an us — though not quite:
A boy's sheepishness is by no means a sign of overmastering reverence; and while
you are making encouraging advances to him under the idea that he is
overwhelmed by a sense of your age and wisdom, ten to one he is thinking you
extremely queer. The only consolation I can suggest to you is, that the Greek
boys probably thought the same of Aristotle. It is only when you have mastered
a restive horse, or thrashed a drayman, or have got a gun in your hand, that these
shy juniors feel you to be a truly admirable and enviable character. (I, ix, 80)
English sunshine is dubious; bonnets are never quite secure; and if you sit down
on the grass, it may lead to catarrhs. But the rain is to be depended on. You
gallop through it in a mackintosh, and presently find yourself in the seat you like
best a little above or a little below the one on which your goddess sits [...I (VI,
vii, 359-360)
The narratee is clearly male in these two passages, and the "you" is used in
a general sense of identification with the narratee's perspective. The second
quotation is more ambiguous since it starts with female associations
("bonnets") but then appends a note on men's views of women. The fact of
having a male narratee does not at all invalidate the view that the moral
thrust of Mill is clearly against male values. The sympathies of the narrator
are obviously for Maggie and her fate as a woman. Since Thackeray and
Dickens frequently address female narratees, one could in fact argue that
narrator and narratee would most typically be of opposite sexes. In any
case, the importance of the question appears much exaggerated, since in
Mill human weaknesses are described in women as well as men, and are
chastised by the narrator accordingly. On the basis of these considerations
I have kept the masculine pronoun for the narrator as the neutral unmarked
anaphor, particularly because the neuter it would interfere with the clear
evocation of a human being, whose opinions and feelings as well as physical
presence in the frame-narrative receive such considerable emphasis in the
text.
I have taken an inordinate amount of space to insist on the peculiarities of
the first chapter of Mill. The point is an important one, however. By
introducing a personalized narrator, who regards Maggie's world with
sympathy, Eliot establishes a basis of trust that greatly facilitates the
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative 171
communicative process between narrator and narratee. 23 This common
basis, evoked again and again later in the narrative by the narrator's
frequent addresses to the narratee and by his generalizing narrative
comments, helps to guide the reader through the story, providing a level of
understanding on which narrator and narratee can find themselves in
agreement. A most typical instance of such an elegiac and poetic narrational
effusion is the following passage:
Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing
that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their
lives. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in
it — if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring
that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the
grass {...] — the same redbreasts that we used to call "God's birds," because they
did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony
where everything is known, and loved because it is known? (1, v, 36)
Such passages show the narrator at his most trustworthy, and they typically
include the narratee in employing the first person plural pronouns: we, our,
us. 24 Martin correctly identifies such commentary as belonging to the
dream narrator of Book I, chapter 1, and Niinning stresses its importance
for the level of author-reader communication.
This generalizing kind of commentary is, however, contrasted with
utterances of the ironic narrator, who radically subverts opinions
supposedly held by the narratee. This ironical narrator is pervasive in the
text, and it is he who is responsible for the strand of dead-pan irony that
also surfaces in reflectorization. Contrary to Niinning, 25 I find such irony
frequently in those passages that address the narratee by using you, as in the
following argument with the narratee about Mr. Riley:
Besides, a man with the milk of human kindness in him can scarcely abstain from
doing a good-natured action, and one cannot be good-natured all round. Nature
herself occasionally quarters an inconvenient parasite on an animal towards
23 See Ansgar Nanning, Grundziige eines kommunikationstheoretischen Modells der
erahlerischen Verminlung: Die Funktionen der Erziihlinstanz in den Romanen George
Eliots (= Horizonte, 2), Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1990.
24 Compare Graver in her commentary on the "emphasis" passage (IV, iii, 289): "When the
attack is most severe, the narrator substitutes vague noun phrases ('good society,' 'national
life') and indefinite pronouns ('one,"it,"some') for the more directly implicating personal
pronouns, restricting the 'you' to the trivial but morally neutral act of inquiring 'into the
stuffing of your couch,' and reserving 'us' and 'ourselves' for the sympathy needed when
'human looks are hard upon us,' or for calling forth an 'active love for what is not ourselves.'"
(op. cit., p. 285) This moves in the correct direction, although it does not do justice to the
irony of some of the addresses to the narratee.
25 Nanning, op. cit., pp. 178-79.
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Monika Fludemik
whom she has otherwise no ill-will. What then? We admire her care for the
parasite. If Mr. Riley had shrunk from giving a recommendation that was not
based on valid evidence, he would not have helped Mr. Stelling to a paying pupil,
and that would not have been so well for the reverend gentleman. Consider, too,
that all the pleasant little dim ideas and complacencies — of standing well with
Timpson, of dispensing advice when he was asked for it, of impressing his friend
Tulliver with additional respect, of saying something, and saying it emphatically,
with other inappreciably minute ingredients that went along with the warm
hearth and the brandy-and-water to make up Mr. Riley's consciousness on this
occasion would have been a mere blank. (I, iii, 23-24)
This is, of course, tongue in cheek. Mr. Riley's self-complacency serves as
the butt of the narrator's irony, an irony which is equally levelled at the
narratee, who might concur in Riley's views on how to keep one's face. It
is this unsettling feature of the narrative that most accounts for its
subversive effect — for the language undermining the maxims, as Mary
Jacobus puts it. Nowhere in this passage does the narrator openly accuse
Mr. Riley. On the contrary, he pleads his case with the narratee, pretending
to defend human weakness against the high moral strictures of the narratee.
In this, the narrator repeats the ingratiating strategy which we earlier noted
in the narrator's defence of his history of unfashionable families. He
apologizes for a choice of subject that clashes with the narratee's
expectations of lofty demeanour as in romance and tragedy, and — at the
same time — justifies this choice by his excuses for the people of the lower
classes, destined to attract the displeasure of his refined readers. The irony,
one notes, works both ways, condemning Riley as well as the reader. 26
More typically, however, the narrator's ironic commentary takes the
description of a character and his or her thoughts as a departure point for
his satire, as in the following:
I have often wondered whether those early Madonnas of Raphael, with the
blond faces and somewhat stupid expression, kept their placidity undisturbed
when their strong-limbed, strong-willed boys got a little too old to do without
clothing. I think they must have been given to feeble remonstrance, getting more
and more peevish as it became more and more ineffectual. (I, ii, 13)
In such passages the narrator frequently voices his own personal opinions,
using the first person pronoun, judges other characters, or addresses the
narratee (sometimes using the second person pronoun, sometimes an
imperative). The Narrator then speaks for himself as personalized (but not
26 The duplicitous effect of irony in Mill has also been commented on by Malmgren, op. cit,
p. 482, n. 12.
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative 173
embodied) narrator, rather than in the more philosophical "spirit of
narration." Comments offered in such "personal" passages do not readily
fall in with a "general truth" in the conventional sense of the term. Their
truth-value is a matter of dispute, since the narrator does not set out to
convince the reader of a given (philosophical or moral) state of affairs, but
instead indulges in some very personal evaluations and associations on the
basis of the plot. As with Mrs. Tulliver's comparison to a water-fowl (I, vii,
49), imagery plays an important role in such commentary. Its function is to
be suggestive rather than precise, and the narrator's refusal to be pinned
down to a definite propositional statement can be regarded as one of the
many moves by the dead-pan satirist to cover his own tracks, and keep the
reader in a state of wary suspense.
So far we have noted that the narrative in Mill contains passages by an
embodied narrator (in the frame and with two brief resurrections) as well as
two kinds of authorial narrator — a generalizing trustworthy narrator, who
establishes an emotional rapport with the narratee, and an ironic, and
frequently 'dead-pan' narrator, who pretends to concur with the views of
the fictional characters while at the same time exposing them more radically
than moral diatribe could have done. The narrative in Mill derives its most
unsettling effect from this sustained quality of dead-pan satire, or "false
testimony," as Graver calls it. Another typical example of such false
testimony is the following description of Tom Tulliver in his childhood:
In very tender years, when he [Tom Tulliver] still wore a lace border under his
out-door cap, he was often observed peeping through the bars of a gate and
making minatory gestures with his small forefingers while he scolded the sheep
with an inarticulate burr, intended to strike terror into their astonished minds;
indicating, thus early, that desire for mastery over the inferior animals, wild and
domestic, including cockchafers, neighbours' dogs, and small sisters, which in
all ages has been an attribute of so much promise for the fortunes of our race.
(I, ix, 80)
The narrator here seems to endorse society's reverence for the machomentality. No explicit rejection of Tom's behaviour is provided, nor does
the last sentence explicitly distance itself from the views it propounds. It is,
on the contrary, by detailing the circumstances of Tom's feats of manly
courage that the narrative introduces the germ of deconstruction that will
unmask the cowardice and indirection of sanctioned masculine behaviour
and identify it as, simply, bullying. Thus, in naming the objects of Tom's
"mastery," it exposes the true enormity of "received opinion," which ranks
"small sisters" with the "inferior animals" and takes these to be worthy
objects of male crusading. Childish misdemeanour seems here to have been
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Monika Fludernik
raised to the level of the exercise of moral authority — or so the narrative
suggests. Tom is, of course, well on the way towards acquiring the
necessary moral mind-set for making himself acceptable within these
norms. Note also how the narrative resorts to a philosophic-scientific
register ("minatory," "inarticulate," "inferior animals," "attribute") to
cloak the very trivial nature of the circumstances in question, imbuing these
maxims with a venerable, though quite inapplicable, literary authority.
Consider, additionally, the interesting collocation of Tom behind the bars
of the gate and the inarticulate burr he utters. On a linguistic level this
seems to suggest that Tom himself is one of the sheep confined in the pen
and reduced to bleating and shaking his forefinger as a way of releasing his
aggressions. 27
Whereas in dead-pan narrative it is the narrator's commentary that seems
to propound views that we as readers recognize to be implicitly satirized
and disavowed by the general direction of the irony in Mill on the Floss, the
narrative in passages of reflectorization openly and transparently takes
sides with the society that it sets out to indict, condemning it by
relinquishing speech to the moralists of society, who then duly expose
themselves by their very (speech) acts. The narrator in Mill can thus be
characterized as prevailingly ironic: there is a discrepancy between what
the narrator says, and what we infer to be his true meaning, a meaning
generated by a perlocutionary speech act or by an open violation of
Gricean maxims, as it were. 28
These incongruities alone, however, do not fully resolve the question,
since once the reader has recognized the ironic mode — she is able to
interpret the text from a purely ironic perspective, replacing each statement
of the narrative with an incriminating subtext. The truly unsettling effect of
Mill, however, derives from the simultaneous presence of trustworthy and
dead-pan narrational commentary. Martin has called this a simultaneous
presence of reliable and unreliable narrative. If we take the narrator to be
conscious of his satiric impact, unreliability is perhaps to be avoided as a
technical term. Martin sees the implied author colluding with the reader
behind the back of a narrator who seriously shares, say, Riley's views and
is the dupe of the author. Hence Martin has problems correlating a "serious"
and trustworthy side of the narrator with his naively self-complacent
27 This point was suggested to me by Dr. Brigitte Tranker, whom I particularly wish to thank
for her insightful comments on an early version of this paper.
28 Cf. John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1969, and H. Grice, "Logic and Conversation,* in P. Cole and J.L. Morgan,
eds., Speech Acts (= Syntax and Semantics, 3), New York: Academic Press, 1975: 41-58.
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative 175
character. If one concedes ironic self-awareness to the narrator, practically
erasing the differences between narrator and implied author, the split
becomes more manageable and can be discussed in terms of conscious
rhetorical strategy.
Nevertheless the incongruity between the serious and the dead-pan
karrator of Mill remains a disturbing feature, and it is an incongruity that
becomes particularly critical in the treatment of the heroine, Maggie. Here
narratology can be of help to define what is at issue in the rift between irony
and sympathy in Mill. A narratological analysis of the novel demonstrates
that the rift in the text is a result of Eliot's attempt to combine an authorial
with a figural mode of narration without eventually resolving the question
of how to balance irony and sympathy in such a set-up.
On the one hand the narrator frequently uses free indirect discourse to
convey, sympathetically, Maggie's turmoils and feelings, whereas other
characters and the world at large are treated in an ironical fashion,
frequently employing "dissonant" free indirect discourse. Dissonant and
consonant" presentation are thus found side by side in a combination that
violates received fictional norms. A personalized authorial narrator, such as
the one we encounter in Mill, is barred from a typical figural narrative
situation, particularly if he is a narrator that interferes with the illusion of
"direct presentation of figural consciousness" (or "mediation by a reflector
character"). On the other hand, sustained passages of empathetic
(consonant) free indirect discourse are unthinkable in highly distanced and
ironical authorial narrative (prototype: Tom Jones). Of course, figural and
authorial presentations regularly co-occur in many novels. Thackeray,
Dickens and Trollope, for instance, frequently give us brief views of their
character's thoughts in a figural mode, while at the same time employing a
distinctly authorial frame. However, and this is the significant factor for
Mill, extended alternations require either a neutral authorial voice, or a
sympathetic portrayal of the characters (as in Hardy's work, or in Henry
James). One cannot have a highly distanced authorial narrator, who
severely judges the characters, and at the same time a sustained presentation
of fictional consciousness in a figural mode (which tends to be sympathetic
even to less exemplary heroes and heroines)." We have, thus, not only a
29 See Cohn, op. cit.
30 There are, however, interesting exceptions to this rule, which derive their interest from their
juxtaposition of figural (consonant) presentation with highly dissonant authorial
commentary (on other characters). George Eliot seems to delight in this kind of manoeuver,
although the device is much less noteworthy in say, Middlernarch, where dead-pan satire is
not used as consistently as in Mill. In Le Rouge et le noir, too, the ambiguity of the narrator's
relation to Julien derives from the alternation of consonant and dissonant figural presentation
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Monika Fludernik
clash between two kinds of authorial commentary, but, additionally, a
juxtaposition of figural and authorial presentation of the characters. In
order to illustrate this foregrounded tension between a pronounced
authorial and a pronounced figural presentation, in which empathy and
irony clash at both levels, I will here briefly quote some typical passages
dealing with Maggie and discuss them. From there I will go on to show how
the device of reflectorization helps to tide over the most flagrant
inconsistencies between the authorial and the figural modes and can thus be
considered as a key to the technical structures of the narrative as a whole.
Maggie provides a good example of how the split or incongruity sits at
the very heart of the novel, in the presentation of the heroine. Our heroine
is no doubt portrayed in a very indulgent fashion throughout the narrative,
and even ironical portrayals of her never attain to the degree of causticity
directed at such characters as Mrs. Glegg, Tom, or Mr. Tulliver. It is clear
that Eliot is creating sympathy for her heroine, by contrasting her with
Lucy and with her mother, both of whom are exposed as contemptible and
weak. Authorial commentary on Maggie reflects the warring tendencies in
her character, her naivety, intelligence, and imagination as well as her
impulsiveness, lack of control and of forethought.
Poor Maggie! She was so unused to society that she could take nothing as a
matter of course, and had never in her life spoken from the lips merely, so that
she must necessarily appear absurd to more experienced ladies, from the
excessive feeling she was apt to throw into very trivial incidents. (VI, ii, 331)
From what you know of her you will not be surprised that she threw some
exaggeration and willfulness, some pride and impetuosity even into her selfrenunciation; her own life was still a drama for her, in which she demanded of
herself that her part should be played with intensity. And so it came to pass that
(the latter mostly through ironic passages of free indirect discourse), and from the lucid
exposition of Julien's unflattering motives. There is also the case of Meredith, whose Egoist is
an exercise in multi-layered irony, and Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice." The latter has a
truly unreliable narrator (because he seriously propounds opinions that the text implicity
repudiates), but the narrator himself shifts from an endorsement of Aschenbach to severe
criticism of him, with the figural presentation of Aschenbach's experiences (which is
necessarily engaging the reader on his behalf) alternating with the narrator's caustic
condemnation of these feelings. The story, incidentally, uses a good deal of figuralization at
the very beginning of the narrative, when the narrator completely identifies with
Aschenbach, although these passages are tinged by heavy irony, since they give us the
narrator's pompous language rather than a real inside view of the protagonist. On the
narrator's unreliability see Dorrit Cohn, "The Second Author of 'Der Tod in Venedig"," in:
Benjamin Bennett, Anton Kaes, and William J. Lillyman eds., Probleme der Moderne:
Studien zur deutschen Literatur von Nietzsche his Brecht. Festschrift fir Walter Sokel,
Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1983: 223-45.
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative 177
she often lost the spirit of humility by being excessive in the outward act; she often
strove after too high a flight and came down with her poor little half-fledged wings
dabbled in the mud.[...] That is the path we all like when we set out on our
abandonment of egoism — the path of martyrdom and endurance, where the palmbranches grow, rather than the steep highway of tolerance, just allowance, and selfblame, where there are no leafy honours to be gathered and worn. (IV, iii, 255-256)
Clearly, this is much less caustic than any of the remarks on Tom quoted
earlier, but it does criticize Maggie. Such criticism is, however, significantly
mitigated by the generalizing comment sympathetic to our common
weaknesses. Unlike Mr. Riley, Mr. Tulliver, or Mrs. Glegg, Maggie is not
completely exposed to ridicule. The metaphor that describes the
disappointment of her aspirations ("poor little half-fledged wings") marks
an emotional involvement on the part of the narrator, and the generalizing
remarks touch on the human inclination to prefer the glamour of dramatic
tragedy to the inconspicuous toil of a life conducted on the basis of
Christian standards. Such failure is less contemptible than are mere complacency, vanity, or greed the "sins" for which the Dodson clan and other
minor characters are castigated. The reason for the lesser seriousness of
Maggie's failings is, of course, also due to her belief in ideals, of which none
of the minor characters are capable, ideals that make her yearn for a
sacrifice of herself. Maggie certainly cannot be accused of the common
kind of egotism, which is the butt of the novel's satire in its dead-pan mode.
Maggie's actual thoughts are mostly rendered in consonant free indirect
discourse or consonant psycho-narration, and the large majority of these
are entirely sympathetic to her perspective. Only a few passages employ
the technique of reflectorization, and these are much less caustic than other
4
such passages, and they tend to be followed by explicit commentary by the
narrator, excusing Maggie's foolishness and ignorance:
The slanting sunlight fell kindly upon them [the gypsies], and the scene was
really very pretty and comfortable, Maggie thought, only she hoped they would
soon set out the tea-cups. Everything would be quite charming when she had
taught the gypsies to use a washing-basin, and to feel an interest in books. It was
a little confusing, though, that the young woman began to speak to the old one
in a language which Maggie did not understand, while the tall girl, who was
feeding the donkey, sat up and stared at her without offering any salutation.
(I, xi, 95)
Maggie Tulliver, you perceive, was by no means that well-trained, wellinformed young person that a small female of eight or nine necessarily is in these
days. [...] She could have informed you that there was such a word as
"polygamy," and being so acquainted with "polysyllable," she had deduced the
conclusion that "poly" meant "many;" but she had had no idea that gypsies were
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not well-supplied with groceries, and her thoughts generally were the oddest
mixture of clear-eyed acumen and blind dreams. (I, xi, 98)
The irony here, again, cuts both ways, ridiculing the supposed superiority of
the reader's generation while explicitly apostrophizing it, and implying a
severe criticism of the lack of proper schooling that has brought Maggie to
such an impasse. Maggie herself, however, is not left to the mercy of the
narratee's inferences, who might have condemned her as shallow and illbehaved, and might have expected her to deserve due punishment for her
wayward behaviour. The narrator's authoritative meaning of Maggie's folly
is, on the contrary, explicity named, and in a way that sympathetically complements and mitigates the satire enacted in the most incriminatory passages.
This takes me to a final point about the narrative structure that deserves
emphasis. Although the narrative's general gnomic statements are split
between reliable and sarcastic, judgements about Maggie (in contrast to
judgements about other people, and in contrast to presentations of her
consciousness) are always trustworthy whether they praise her, criticize her
or are neutral. The characters are in fact grouped along a scale of
diminishing narrational candour and sympathy, with Philip receiving some
of the same leniency as Maggie. Maggie as the heroine thus occupies a
central and mediating position between the irreconcilable opposites of
narratorial sarcasm and objective, reliable explication.
Now, what is the function of reflectorization in this schema? There are
several splits in the narrative of Mill. On the one hand, the narrator's own
commentary on events and the opinions he voices can be either trustworthy
or tongue-in-cheek (what I have called "dead-pan" narrative). In the
presentation of individual characters, only Maggie is described in an
entirely trustworthy manner, with Philip's shortcomings, like her own,
excused and mitigated by narratorial reflection on them. Other characters,
however, are implicitly criticized by the use of incriminating evidence
treacherously hidden in seemingly objective or even congratulatory
passages of reflectorization. My contention, therefore, is that the use of
reflectorization attempts to homogenize the narrative between the poles of
irony versus empathy and dead-pan commentary versus the narrative of
general truths. Reflectorization allows reliable authorial commentary to
guide the reader's judgement of Maggie, but refrains from indicting those
that give themselves away through their own actions and speech. It is thus
clearly a useful device of ambiguous mediation between the two narrative
modes of authorial and figural presentation. In passages of reflectorization
the split at the heart of the narrative becomes functional, in combining a
seemingly sympathetic portrayal with the implied crticism (as in dead-pan
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative 179
satire). The incongruities in the formal presentation as a whole therefore
seem to be partially mitigated and resolved by this padding with
intermediate passages of ambiguous narration (reflectorization).
A second strategy is the thematic prominence given to metaphor, style and
language in Mill. Indeed, Mary Jacobus's divide between the language of Mill
and the maxims that it generates is not only closely linked to the workings of
dead-pan narrative, but also crucially relies on the linguistic self-awareness
of the text. Inconsistencies are numerous, even on the level of mere
vocabulary and reference. Words employed in naming objects are frequently
incommensurate with what is being named or described, and the narrative
either flaunts an "epic" style (or "elevated" rhetoric) when dealing with the
commonplace and insignificant, or indulges in deliberately deflating or
derogatory vocabulary and imagery when treating of supposedly lofty and
serious subjects. This feature could easily be disposed of as George Eliot's
debt to, among others, the mock-epic tradition. Yet such inconsistencies
between topic and diction point to more serious intentions on the part of the
narrator. A good example of elevated rhetoric in the service of the trivial is
the following passage, in which Bob Jakin's no doubt very prosaic and
somewhat ridiculous feelings — ridiculous, that is, from the lofty point of
view of the adult moralizing narrator are rendered in an idiom appropriate
to chivalric romance rather than to the quotidian nullities under discussion.
Here Bob flung the knife as far as he could after Tom's retreating footsteps but it
produced no effect, except the sense in Bob's mind that there was a terrible void
in his lot, now that knife was gone.
He stood still till Tom had passed through the gate and disappeared behind the
hedge. The knife would do no good on the ground there — it wouldn't vex Tom,
and pride and resentment was a feeble passion in Bob's mind compared with the
love of a pocket-knife. His very fingers sent entreating thrills that he would go and
clutch that familiar rough buck's horn handle, which they had so often grasped
for mere affection as it lay idle in his pocket. And there were two blades, and they
had just been sharpened! What is life without a pochet-knife to him who has once
tasted a higher existence? No: to throw the handle after the hatchet is a
comprehensible act of desperation, but to throw one's pocket-knife after an
implacable friend is clearly in every sense a hyperbole, or throwing beyond the
mark. So Bob shuffled back to the spot where the beloved knife lay in the dirt, and
felt quite a new pleasure in clutching it again after the temporary separation, in
opening one blade after the other, and feeling their edge with his well-hardened
thumb. Poor Bob! he was not sensitive on the point of honour — not a chivalrous
character. That fine moral aroma would not have been thought much of by the
public opinion of Kennel Yard, which was the very focus or heart of Bob's world,
even if it could have made itself perceptible there; yet, for all that, he was not
utterly a sneak and a thief, as our friend Tom had hastily decided. (I, vi, 46)
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Bob's practical reasoning and moral dilemma can be glimpsed through the
learned prose, which applies chivalric standards to events which, in this
high realm of heroic or romantic plot, have but negligible status, yet at the
same time deflates these chivalric norms by ridiculing them, evoking them
in conjunction with the grossly inappropriate, the "low."
The opposite kind of ironization takes place when supposedly
trustworthy and straight comments are proffered in the language of
proverbs and images of everyday life that are quite inapplicable to the
apparent level of discussion:
With sister Glegg in this humour, there was a cheerful prospect for the day. Mrs.
Tulliver never went the length of quarrelling with her, any more than a waterfowl that puts out its leg in a deprecating manner can be said to quarrel with a boy
who throws stones. (I, vii, 49)
A more extended example of such stylistic undercutting is the passage in
which Mr. Stelling's metaphors of the ploughing of minds are transformed
by the narrator into a discourse on stomachs (II, i, 123). In this passage the
narrator discusses the workings of his style, and — in a tongue-in-cheek
fashion — concludes "that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except
by saying it is something else."
These stylistic effects of irony all depend on the consummate use of
metaphor, and Eliot's metaphorical slant has indeed been the subject of
numerous studies of her work, especially by J. Hillis Miller. 31 I cannot deal
with this important issue here, except by noting the pivotal nature of
inappropriate diction, which is most frequently bound up with the use of a
metaphor or metonymy. Calling a spade a spade, in Eliot's linguistic
evocation of the world, is as elusive an achievement as pure realism.
Both versions of ironic language, stylistic undercutting as well as
"hyperbole," undermine whatever the narrative is signifying, foregrounding the signifier level so that it interferes with realistic reference. In
one case this is done by the inappropriate diction or register, in the other by
the odd choice of the subject of comparison, or the vehicle of the metaphor.
Such tactics may appear superficial, designed to defamiliarize the obvious
and provide some strain of merriment for the reader. With the background
of structural incongruities in the narrative that we have illustrated
31 See J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George
Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy (= University of Notre Dame Ward-Phillips Lecture in English
Language and Literature, 2), Notre Dame IN: U of Notre Dame P. 1968; and J. Hillis Miller,
"The Two Rhetorics: George Eliot's Bestiary," in: George Douglas Atkins, and Michael L.
Johnson, eds., Writing and Reading Differently, Lawrence KA: UP of Kansas, 1985.
Subversive Irony: Reflectorization, Trustworthy Narration and Dead-Pan Narrative
181
above, more serious intentions can be proposed. By inverting
the relation between the heroic and the commonplace, erasing the
antonymy by conflating and exchanging the terms of the opposition, the
narrative puts into rhetorical practice the avowed purpose of the novel:
namely, to portray the heroism of people ordinarily considered beyond,
i.e. below, the pale of literary significance. 32 To present the commonplace
additionally requires much empathy or sympathy, as well as discrimination
of a moral brand. One could therefore adduce some very general motives
for the narrator's desire to irretrievably entangle irony and empathy. Mill is
a novel that attempts to criticize society as well as to portray
sympathetically the predicament of one individual oppressed by societal
constraints. There is a tragic clash between these two objectives, and the
tragedy in the book derives its full force in equal measure from the
unrelenting nature of the circumstances in which the heroine is placed and
from her own serious flaws of character. This double-pronged approach to
the main problem of the novel requires a double perspective. On the one
hand we have the authorial stance, relentless in its implicit criticism of the
society with which Maggie is at odds; on the other, an external but
sympathetic close-up on Maggie's shortcomings, supplemented by figural
presentation, that will strengthen the reader's sympathy for her. From
these two ends of the scale the two-fold narrative situation both authorial
and figural — becomes explicable, as does the intrinsic rift of irony versus
sympathy within both of these realms.
Maggie is foolish, and she allows herself to commit more grievous sins
than do any of the other characters so heavily arraigned by the narrator's
caustic pen. (A possible exception is Mr. Tulliver.) In particular, Maggie
offends against the deity called "Respectability," and against the wisdom of
maxims as represented by the pillars of society. Now it is the narrator's
avowed purpose to unthrone society's naive belief in the efficacy of pat
moral solutions. This emerges quite explicity from VII, ii, 438, where the
"mysterious complexity of our life" is said to elude the maxims and
formulas of human wisdom; and such a stance is also hinted at in the
narrator's comment on Mrs. Tulliver's motherly embrace, which reverses
Maggie's repudiation by Tom: "More helpful than all wisdom is one draught
of simple human pity that will not forsake us" (VII, i, 427). Such love and
understanding, which we need in order to supplement our human wisdom,
is signally provided in the narrative's figural perspective, in its sympathetic
portrayal of Maggie's consciousness. The narrative needs to avoid a
32 Such is, of course, already in the purpose of Adam Bede and "Amos Barton," and in Mill Eliot
also moves beyond this concern to more historical and philosophical objectives.
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consistent authorial moralization of the fictional universe, for indulging in
it would have meant to bank on maxims rather than understanding. In
employing dead-pan satire and reflectorization, in turning "unreliable,"
the narrative thus iconically enacts what it implicitly propounds — it
sympathizes with erring humanity and refrains from clear-cut
incontrovertible moral judgement.