All yielding is attended with a less vivid consciousness than resistance—it is the partial sleep of thought—it is the submergence of our own personality by another. (592)
As she enters adulthood, Maggie confronts the issues of selfishness more directly. Convention tells her that she should seek love, but she is aware that her first choice (Philip) is denied her for unfair but powerful family reasons, and her second choice (Stephen) is denied her for reasonable but controvertible personal reasons.83 The relationships between Maggie and Philip and Stephen are rendered more complex by the sympathetic impulses of Philip and the selfish impulses of Stephen. Other readers have noted that the narrative privileges
Philip’s spiritually attractive qualities at the expense of Stephen’s merely physical beauty. Claude T. Bissell dismisses Stephen as “George Eliot’s schoolgirlish sketches of masculine charm,” and I am unlikely to disagree.84 He never comes across as interesting, and his
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Although I am frustrated by Armstrong’s oversimplification of Maggie’s agency, I find myself agreeing completely with her treatment of Maggie’s effect in the novel. She compares Maggie to the Lacanian version of Poe’s “Purloined Letter” wherein both Maggie and the letter warp the subject relations of all who come into contact with them.
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Armstrong casts the impossibility of Maggie’s love life as a form of class conflict. “Try as she might to be loyal to her father and brother, Maggie Tulliver is inexorably drawn into a sexual relationship with their competitors, historically later versions of ruling-class man” (91). Her argument develops Maggie as a double heroine: both the bad and good subjects that were traditionally split by other novelists into multiple characters.
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physical beauty is a given, rather than something actually described. At the same time, Philip’s deformity seems like an excuse for Maggie. It is unclear that she would be attracted to him if he were not hunchbacked and if he were not forbidden to her by family animosity. Her heart goes out to him partly because of his unavailability.
Maggie’s relationship with Philip follows along the same current as Janet and Tryan in “Janet’s Repentance” and Gwendolen and Daniel in Daniel Deronda. Because he is in many ways an impossible love object, he achieves a close but detached position that allows him to be the same kind of “master sympathist” that Tryan had been for Janet. Both men rescue women from self-despair by showing them a way back to being their better selves. And Philip is like Daniel Deronda with Gwendolen when he embarrasses Maggie into
realizing what she is losing by continuing as she has done. He becomes for Maggie “a sort of outward conscience to her, that she might fly to rescue and strength” (525). This “outward conscience” is a reflection of her better sympathetic self. He is alive to all the repercussions of their friendship. In some ways, Philip is kept in a perpetual childhood by his father, and this childhood both has its selfish tendencies (thinking that he can have Maggie despite the difficulties of the situation) and its sensitivity to others (being aware of Maggie’s
interpretation of their relationship at all points). In his sensitive mode, he is most like what Maggie has been, and so she comes to him to bolster her own right feelings. He tells her that in emerging from emotional seclusion, she is “reviving into [her] real self” (435). It is easy to read into this plot a defense of George Eliot’s own decisions during the time of the Holy War.85 Virginia Woolf read Eliot’s heroines as representations of the author, and she saw the characters who criticize these heroines as targets for the novelist’s anger. “Those who fall
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In the famous letter to her father Robert Evans on February 28, 1842, she claims that religious dogma is “most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness” (Letters I.128).
foul of George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and with good reason; for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar.”86 Philip’s judgment of
Maggie’s asceticism comes across as an authorial intrusion, with Eliot chastising her younger self.
Maggie’s relationship with Philip is fraught with confusion. She uses him primarily as a way of drawing herself out of contemplation because she does not know whether he can ever be available to her as a lover. He gives her books to read, and she begins the slow work of processing all of the information she has gained about herself from years of self-
observation. But even more than all of these, Philip becomes her first real link to a world outside of her family. Each of these aspects of their relationship deserves attention for the ways in which they reveal different aspects of Maggie. At the moment when she emerges from her self-imposed exile from the world, her simplicity of character and Philip’s sympathetic identification with her work to reveal Maggie’s personality more clearly than they are revealed anywhere else in the book except for the narrator’s straightforward (and almost elementarily expository) introduction of her. For example, Maggie tells Philip, “I do always think too much of my own feelings, and not enough of others’” (529). She is
encouraging Philip to correct her and to tell her to stop obsessing over herself and her own motivations. Philip always encourages her to leave off the morbid self-examination, but he is in line with Eliot’s narrator in suggesting that monitoring her feelings is a worthwhile activity as long as it is not a morbid and obsessive impulse.
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Virginia Woolf, “George Eliot,” The Common Reader: First Series, ed., Andrew McNeillie, ed. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984) 168. Woolf continues, “In accounting for her failure, in so far as it was a failure, one recollects that she never wrote a story until she was thirty-seven, and that by the time she was thirty-seven she had come to think of herself with a mixture of pain and something like resentment” (169).
Philip is well situated for the role of confidant and spiritual guide since his status as love object is so ambivalent. In some ways, he is a masculine version of Maggie. The
identification is underscored by the way his hunchback both infantilizes (in the way his father coddles him) and feminizes him (in the way Tom refuses to hit him). He has similar gifts of sympathy to Maggie’s. He was “made polite by his own extreme sensitiveness as well as by his desire to conciliate” (235). Philip’s identification with Maggie pairs the awareness that sympathy is a question of alignment and understanding with an intellectual ability to articulate the continuum between knowledge and understanding. As such, Philip’s explanation to Maggie is a claim against interpretation: “I don’t think any of the strongest effects our natures are susceptible of can ever be explained. We can neither detect the process by which they are arrived at nor the mode in which they act on us” (400). He inhabits both the narrator’s position, telling Maggie that he and Maggie are essentially alike, and the reader’s position, interpreting Maggie’s failure to explain herself to everyone else.
Even if asceticism was a dulling of the spirits for Maggie, it kept her from having to make the difficult decisions which differentiate the necessary selfishness of looking out for her basic emotional needs and the guiltier selfishness of fulfilling her desires. At one point, she contradicts Philip, insisting that when she had religious motivation to abase herself, her “selfish desires were benumbed” (436). The language of repression helps to elucidate Maggie’s betrayal of Lucy and her near-elopement with Stephen. Philip is deformed and unavailable for certain prejudicial reasons, but Stephen is handsome and unavailable for more tempting and legitimate reasons since he is engaged to her cousin. Perhaps the narrator is being coy when she cajoles her reader into believing that Stephen’s mistake is an honest one. “It is clear to you, I hope, that Stephen was not a hypocrite—capable of deliberate
doubleness for a selfish end” (552). Interpretation must run counter to the narrator’s
assurances because the reader suspects that Stephen’s conceitedness overrides his morality. And the reader discovers for certain that hypocritical “doubleness” is certainly in his power when he tricks Maggie during their boat trip.
For his part, Stephen is unconscious of violating Maggie’s better nature. He is not only handsome, he is sterotypically narcissistic in believing that he is the only one who can feel pain. He writes a letter pleading “Maggie! whose pain can have been like mine? Whose injury is like mine?” (647). Stephen is like a child who never left the world where everything would bend to his wishes if he could but rearrange one tiny detail. In this case, that detail is Maggie’s resistance to him. He persists afterwards in thinking that all would have been well if Maggie had run away with him. He feels guilt for hurting Lucy, but he fails to see how fundamentally their mistake has destroyed both Maggie’s credibility and her happiness. But can a reader forgive Maggie, who does know better? Eliot writes that “there was an
unspeakable charm in being told what to do, and having everything decided for her” (592). This selflessness becomes a corrupted form of selfishness for Maggie because it includes both an abdication of responsibility and a dependence on having Stephen do everything for her.87 Maggie quickly becomes aware that she has made a mistake. “The feeling of a few short weeks had hurried her into the sins her nature had most recoiled from—breach of faith and cruel selfishness” (597). Eliot unambiguously identifies Maggie’s greatest fears here as “breach of faith and cruel selfishness.” The horror and the parallelism of that statement make
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J.W. Cross and Gordon Haight insist that George Eliot needed this sort of protection herself and was always tempted to give agency to the men in her life. Haight repeatedly quotes Cross’s assertion of Eliot’s “absolute need of some one person who should be all in all to her, and to whom she should be all in all,” using her brother Isaac, Dr. Brabant, John Chapman, Lewes, and Cross himself as examples (5). Bodenheimer’s rereading of the same evidence provides a more generous and feminist interpretation of these facts.
selfishness as bad as faithlessness when most people would certainly have ranked faithlessness as the greater sin.
Her temporary capitulation to Stephen leads Maggie to a deeper understanding of what she has lost. She realizes what real self-denial is and that asceticism is a very narrow version of it. She thinks, “Philip had been right when he told her that she knew nothing of renunciation: she had thought it was quiet ecstasy; she saw it face to face now—that sad patient living strength which holds the clue of life, and saw that the thorns were for ever pressing on its brow” (597). It is odd that Eliot invokes the christic imagery of the crown of thorns because she is otherwise arriving at an entirely humanistic (as opposed to divine) qualification for morality. Just as when Maggie derived that conceitedness is morally wrong because it ensures happiness for people who do not necessarily deserve it, her awareness of error in cheating Lucy out of happiness is a new discovery and not something which has been forced on her (434).
Maggie continues by explaining to Stephen that “We can only choose whether we will indulge ourselves in the present moment or whether we will renounce that for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us—for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives” (604). This voice is an aspect of the positivistic religion of humanity and is therefore the voice of the soul, rather than the God speaking to a Christian mystic. Maggie has, after all, recently given up following Thomas à Kempis. The scene on the boat when she awakens ashamed and aware of her error is a painful one because the reader is asked to feel the shame with Maggie. She is practically wailing when she says “I feel no excuse for myself—none—I should never . . . have been weak and selfish and hard” (602). The language has returned overtly to a discussion of selfishness. The principal evil in the world
is selfishness which takes happiness from someone else. After this moment, Maggie will also renounce all the chances that self-protectiveness might urge: explaining the mistake, eloping with Stephen, blaming him, or anything else that a weaker or more defensive character might have done. But these non-decisions are also a complete renunciation of the necessary selfishness which would protect Maggie from the doom waiting for her at the end of the novel. She is too focused on the harm she has done to her friends and family. Her sympathetic identification with them makes her too aware of their suffering. She asks, “O god is there any happiness in love that could make me forget their pain” (635). The answer is obvious. For someone like Maggie, nothing but death can make her forget the way she has injured other people, and nothing but death can redeem her from it.88 These realities are enforced by the biblical-scale flood at the end of the book and the amazing final chapter.