Analogous Parallels between Protagonist and River Imagery in The Mill on the Floss

 

George Eliot is one of the most accomplished writers of Britain’s Victorian sagas. Her novel The Mill on the Floss is a Morality driven text which initiates with a generational drama between Tullivers and Dodsons. Eliot has drawn assimilation between the drifting flow of the river and the moral degeneration faced by Maggie in the novel, “The Mill on the Floss”. This conception of downfall is pre-dominant in the novel and creates a cord between the aspect of nature i.e. river and the tragic protagonist. Eco-criticism is a study that involves the relationship encompassed by humans and environmental factors in a bounded, intertwined system of ecology. The river is a part of ecology’s natural features that resonate with Maggie’s sensations on various levels such as emotional, physical, and social. It prescribes the conflict in the moral paradigms of the character, the probable downfall, the tensions in sentiments towards men around her, and the drifting passivity which enrolls her as an infidel woman.
 The symbolic drifting of the river inculcated in the novel by Eliot alludes to the upcoming devaluation of Maggie’s chastity in society. Apart from the imagery of the river used as a module to explicate the internal psychological dilemmas and physical degradations, it further sets a vision for the redemptive purgation of the sinful deeds of the protagonist. This cathartic envisioning of the river is foreshadowed many times in the course of the novel. One such example of this is Mrs. Tulliver’s utterance:
 “Maggie, Maggie ... where's the use o' my telling you to keep away from the water? You'll tumble in and be drowned someday, an' then you'll be sorry you didn't do as mother told you” (Eliot 13)
Motherhood is actually a guiding force and in literary discourses often dissected as synonymous with land, culture, values, and traditionalism. Implying this same idea with Mrs. Tulliver’s statement, it can be conferred that this dialogue acts as a warning for the looming tragedy of Maggie in terms of physical and moral degeneration as a punishment for not adhering to cultural values. E. A. Baker postulates that an eventual flood acts as a "melodramatic contrivance”. The psychological turmoil of Maggie is often exclaimed through the terminologies of floods, rivers, and drowning to intensify the internal conflicts while her speech and feelings are a synecdoche of ‘floodmarks and river depths’.
“Maggie's destiny, then, is at present hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river” (Eliot 203)
  The above-mentioned quote carries immense magnitude by creating a connection between the destiny of Maggie and the river which certainly demonstrates the depth, harshness, floods, and devastation. River’s drifting course is the same downfall trajectory encountered in Maggie’s social repute as a fallen woman after her elopement with Stephen, a voyage with him started with an innocent intent but both carried away with the fluid continuum of river manifesting their spiritual deterioration and downfall. As Freud puts it that dreams being a part of the subconscious are intricately connected with conscious repressive desires. Thus, the dreams of Philip and Maggie reiterating the following lines i.e. “Maggie was slipping down a glistening, green, slimy channel of a waterfall” (Eliot 242) and “They began to sink” (Eliot 309) respectively decodes the influence of river on the fall of character.
   In a nutshell, the river serves to perform various forms of literary genius of Eliot. It not only replicates the sensations of Maggie but predicts the tragic ending as well portraying the hegemonic hold of nature on human entities through an Ecocritical lens. The ploy of the river employed by Eliot purges Maggie’s sins to expiate her retribution and redeem her sins.