‘Daylight on the wreck’: The Family in decline

Yonge's investigation of the potential of Familial altruism as the basis for social good is incomplete because of the sheltered social milieu within which it is conducted. In The Mill on the Floss, a novel thematically permeated by economic and social friction, George Eliot undertakes a more rigorous exploration of the same theme. She examines the tension between individual will and communal bonds – between the notion of the human subject as rational agent of self-regarding choice on the one hand, and as constituted by given material and emotional relationships on the other – with particular regard to an identifiable debate about what the family really is or should be.

The clannishness of the Dodsons is the besieged and etiolated remnant of the spirit of the traditional Family. Judith Lowder Newton has noted that the ‘Dodson creed’ ‘confers status upon the production and the producers of domestic goods …a vestige from another time, when the comfortable middle-class family was an economic unit and when women of the middle ranks had greater status as persons making visible contributions to the subsistence and income of the family’. The Dodsons put great store by their own ‘particular ways of bleaching the linen, of making the cowslip wine, curing the hams and keeping the bottled gooseberries; so that no daughter of that house could be indifferent to the privilege of having been born a Dodson’ (MF, I:vi:38).