Going home means I always wind up rereading some book I loved when I was younger. I remember picking up The Mill on the Floss the summer we moved to Long Island. I was about to enter 7th grade, knew nobody in town, except for the 6 year-old boy who lived with his grandparents next door.
We went to the beach a lot that summer. The house was always dusted with sand. With little to do, and the sudden freedom of a bedroom somewhat removed from the rest of the house, I stole cigarettes from my parents and chain-smoked them late at night. They made me dizzy, languorous. I would listen to the breeze from the bay as it swept through the trees.
It was a humid summer, long. I remember my floorboards became uneven from the moisture in the air. Or maybe it was something to do with the plumbing.
I read all 535 pages of the book in three days, completely absorbed, rarely moving from the couch. I swallowed up the tumultuous novel, its pain, its heroine. Maggie Tulliver suffered from very familiar childhood anxieties and guilts. Early in the novel, she cuts her own hair, with the help of her brother, Tom. Her reasons were different from mine, but I recognized “the satisfaction of making a pair of shears meet through a duly resisting mass of hair.” I loved Maggie’s weaknesses, her determination to be good, her conviction that she wasn’t.
Anyway, I still do:
“Oh, it is difficult - life is very difficult! It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us - the ties that have made others dependent on us - and would cut them in two…Many things are difficult and dark to me, but I see one thing quite clearly: that I must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural, but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned. Don’t urge me; help me, help me, because I love you.”
I tried for years to read more George Eliot, but couldn’t seem to give any of her other books the same attention I gave The Mill on the Floss. I finally read Middlemarch last winter. While it shares (perhaps even exceeds) the complex portrayal of betrayal and renunciation of Eliot’s earlier novel, I think Maggie’s childhood portrait still speaks more to me.
Maybe it’s because Middlemarch deals more with marriage, or perhaps it’s the religious and political tones of the novel. The Mill on the Floss seems somehow more intimate, more familiar. It is the story of a family, of a girl and her brother. A century and a half later, it is still just that.
Tags: Books · George Eliot · Literature · Long Island · Remembered · Siblings · The Mill on the Floss2 Comments
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I love Georgey!