Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-rnpqb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-28T21:48:25.988Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

BETWEEN ECONOMIES IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS: LOANS VERSUS GIFTS, OR, AUDITING MR. TULLIVER'S ACCOUNTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2005

Kathleen Blake
Kathleen Blake
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

MR. TULLIVER DRAWS LITTLE ATTENTION from critics of The Mill on the Floss compared to his children, Maggie and Tom, and his finances are hardly ever looked at in any detail, just as other sections of George Eliot's novel that concern economics are not. Yet George Eliot says Mr. Tulliver has his tragedy, as do his daughter and son, and it is precisely Mr. Tulliver's money trouble, his bankruptcy, that sets the condition for the troubles of the next generation. I seek to trace a narrative logic for a novel that has seemed to many to strain plot coherence, and I do so by an economic analysis that allows a link to be drawn between such seemingly disparate tragedies as a father's financial ruin and death and his children's drowning, with the sister giving up love then life itself to reclaim her brother's favor, seeking in vain to rescue him from a flood.

Type
EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN TAXONOMIES
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 219 - 237
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

ÀKempis St. Thomas. 1952. The Imitation of Christ. 1503 1st English translation. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price. London: Penguin
Armstrong Nancy. 1987. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP
Auerbach Nina. 1975 “The Power of Hunger, Demonism and Maggie Tulliver.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30: 150– 71.Google Scholar
Blake Kathleen. 2001. “George Eliot: The Critical Heritage.” The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Ed. George Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 202– 25.
Bonaparte Felicia. 1975. Will and Destiny, Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot's Novels. New York: New York UP
Bourdieu Pierre. 1990. “Symbolic Capital.” The Logic of Practice. 1980. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP
Carroll David, ed. 1971. George Eliot: the Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble
Cheal David. 1988. The Gift Economy. London: Routledge
Coovadia Imraan. 2002 “George Eliot's Realism and Adam Smith.” Studies in English Literature 42: 819– 35.Google Scholar
Cottom Daniel. 1987. Social Figures, George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P
David Deirdre. 1987. Intellectual Woman and Victorian Patriarchy, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Ithaca: Cornell UP
Dodsley Robert. 1817. The Economy of Human Life. Attributed to the Earl of Chesterfield as trans. of an Indian ms. within a fictional letter dated 1749. (Dodsley b. 1703 d.1764). Philadelphia: Edward Earle
Eliot George. 1994. Impressions of Theophrastus Such. 1880. Ed. Nancy Henry. London: William Pickering
Eliot George. 1865. “The Influence of Rationalism.” Essays of George Eliot. Ed. Thomas Pinney. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963.
Eliot George. 1980. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. Ed. Gordon Haight. Clarendon ed. of the Works of George Eliot. Oxford: Clarendon
Ermarth Elizabeth. 1974 “Maggie Tulliver's Long Suicide.” Studies in English Literature 14: 587– 601.Google Scholar
Esty Joshua D. 2002. “Nationhood, Adulthood, and the Ruptures of Bildung: Arresting Development in The Mill on the Floss.” The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, New Casebooks. Ed. Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder. Houndsmill: Palgrave, 101– 21.
Fraiman Susan. 2002. “The Mill on the Floss, the Critics, and the Bildungsroman.” The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, New Casebooks. Ed. Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder. Houndsmill: Palgrave, 31– 56.
Gagnier Regenia. 2000. The Insatiability of Human Wants, Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P
Gallagher Catherine. 1985. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, Social Discourse, and Narrative Form 1832–1867. Chicago: U of Chicago P
Gilbert Sandra, and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic, The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP
Graver Suzanne. 1984. George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form. Berkeley: U of California P
Hardy Barbara. 1982. Particularities: Readings in George Eliot. London: Peter Owen
Homans Margaret. 1993 “Dinah's Blush, Maggie's Arm, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in George Eliot's Early Novels.” Victorian Studies 36: 155– 78.Google Scholar
Jacobus Nancy. 1982. “The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss.” Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: U of Chicago P
James Henry. “The Novels of George Eliot.” Atlantic Monthly (Oct. 1866). 1994. The Mill on the Floss. Norton Critical Ed. Ed. Carol Christ. New York: Norton
Knoepfelmacher U. C. 1968. George Eliot's Early Novels. Berkeley: U of California P
Landa José Angél Garcia. 2002. “The Chains of Semiosis: Semiotics, Marxism, and the Female Stereotypes in The Mill on the Floss.” The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, New Casebooks. Ed. Nahem Yousaf and Andrew Maunder. Houndsmill: Palgrave, 73– 100.
Langland Elizabeth. 1995. Nobody's Angels, Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP
Leavis F. R. 1973. The Great Tradition. 1948. New York: New York UP
Lerner Laurence, and John Holstrom, ed. 1966. George Eliot and Her Readers. London: Bodley Head
Levine George, ed. 2001. The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Levine George 1965. “Intelligence as Deception: The Mill on the Floss.” PMLA 80 402– 09.Google Scholar
Malthus Thomas. 1985. An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1798. Ed. Antony Flew. London: Penguin
Marx Karl. 1992. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 1867. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Ed. and intro. C. J. Arthur. London: Lawrence & Wishart
Mauss Marcel. 1967. The Gift, Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. 1925. Trans. Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton
McDonagh Josephine. 2001. “The Early Novels.” The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Ed. George Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 38– 56.
Mill John Stuart. 1848. Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. Collected Works. Vols. 2–3. Ed. John M. Robson, et. al. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1963–.
Miller Nancy K. 1986. “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction.” The New Feminist Criticism, Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago
Newton Judith Lowder. 1981. Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction 1778–1860. Athens: U of Georgia P
Nunokawa Jeff. 1994. The Afterlife of Property, Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP
Otis Laura. “Nineteenth-Century Webs: The Exchange between Literature and Science.” Locating the Victorians Interdisciplinary Conference upon 150th Anniversary of the Great Exhibition and 100th Anniversary of Queen Victoria's Death. Science and Victoria & Albert Museums, London, July 2001.
Paxton Nancy. 1991. George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender. Princeton: Princeton UP
Poovey Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P
Showalter Elaine. 1977. A Literature of their Own, British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP
Smith Adam. 1976. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, W. B. Todd. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon
Stephen Leslie. 1919. George Eliot. 1902. London: Macmillan
Thale Jerome. 1959. The Novels of George Eliot. New York: Columbia UP
Weiss Barbara. 1986. The Hell of the English, Bankruptcy, and the Victorian Novel. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP
West Surrey College of Art & Design and Towner Art Gallery and Museums. 1983. Five Centuries of Lace. Guildford: West Surrey College of Art & Design
Wisdom A. S. 1970. The Law of Rivers and Watercourses. London: Shaw & Sons
Woodmansee Martha, and Mark Osteen, eds. 1999. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London: Routledge
Zlotnick Susan. 1998. Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP