Capitalist and Gift-Exchange Economies

IN CAPITALISM, loans are a type of investment, made from capital. According to the theory, capital is a stock of the products of former labor. It is labor fixed and embodied in forms capable of being stored or accumulated. So says John Stuart Mill in The Principles of Political Economy (2: 55), and in Capital Karl Marx gives graphic imagery for the “embodiment” of labor as capital that can be stored or accumulated (109, and see Mill 2: 48). Whether in products, money, or literally embodied human capital of productive power in reserve (see Mill 2: 49), accumulation derives from saving. Capital is the result of saving, says Mill (2: 68); it is increased by parsimony, says Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1: 337). To save is to give up, to go without. As such it involves pain, the pain of foregone pleasures of consumption. Here I will instance a corollary in Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population applying Smithean economic theory to sexual matters. Malthus presses the idea of “moral restraint,” meaning sexual giving up or going without. But the pain of privation is not to be justified in itself but only as it serves ultimate gain in a theory that, above all, validates self-interest, value-in-use, utility, meaning pleasure. Thus Smith pronounces consumption to be the sole end of production, and he calls every man rich or poor according to his ability to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of life (2: 660, 1: 47, 2: 660, and see Mill 1: 44–45, 3: 456). Likewise Malthus acknowledges the pleasures of passion (146–47), and by his lights consummation is not to be indefinitely foregone, as consumption is not. That means delay of marriage to limit family size for reasons allied to those for parsimony and saving. There is to be ultimate advantage reaped in more prosperous, happier married life. Just so, mere restraint in the form of hoarding is not enough for the capitalist. There must be investment for capital to function as capital (Mill 2: 73–74), and this means a giving up or going without to get more back, always in service to consumption. Past labor power, embodied, stored up, joins with the present power of labor for new production. With capital investment, consumption resumes. In the short term workers consume the capital that pays them to work, and in the longer term the capitalist enjoys profitable return for present giving up or going without. The capitalist receives this return because he or she invests in productive labor, distinguished in the theory from unproductive labor (Mill 2: 45–54). What is produced must be goods of utility to consumers for these goods to sell and keep the worker on the payroll, the capitalist in profit. By this capitalist rationale, consumers are to be gainers, too.

In the whole scheme, each self is theorized to have its interests, these being as important for any one person as for any other. In this sense the theory supports equality of persons. It follows that clear contracts and accounting are called for in capitalist exchanges. Each party is to be able to recognize its self-interest at any given moment and to secure the terms for tracking and realizing it over time. This is very much to the point for interest-bearing loans.

Economies of gift exchange are decidedly pre-capitalist, indeed archaic, as set forth in Marcel Mauss's classic study of The Gift. At the same time, Mauss and other theorists like Pierre Bourdieu acknowledge some continuity of formerly widespread economies of the gift only partially overlaid by newer capitalism. As Mauss makes clear in discussing aboriginal tribes and their practices of potlatch, such older economies are characteristically aristocratic and associated with hierarchical social structures (63). By the same token, they are characteristically male-dominated. Mauss tells us that women, as well as children, wealth, feasts, rituals, entertainments, and courtesies frequently are the gifts (3–4). This contrasts with theoretical equality of persons in capitalism.

Like capital, the gift depends on accumulation, accomplished by giving up, going without–by saving. But the accumulation is not to be invested–loaned. It is to be given away. The giving up and going without of saving leads to a next step of sacrifice in the rendered-up gift. The gift is to display disinterested generosity rather than calculated self-interest in expectation of investment return, like return on a loan.

However, Mauss, Bourdieu, and others stress that interest is, in fact, at work in the display of disinterestedness in gift-giving. Lavish giving attaches prestige, rank, and credit, what Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, to the giver, creating an obligation in the receiver to give back gifts of even greater worth at a later point, and to remain under obligation during the interim. During that period the gift-receiver remains in a subordinate position in a hierarchy, perhaps never to rise above that state if falling short in ability to return the gift in full measure and good time. While self-interest is crucially involved in the system, it is also crucial that the gift-giver cannot contract to secure and set a date for receiving a return on the gift because that return itself, to provide the receiver release from humbling obligation, must allow for display of a free spirit of giving that answers and exceeds the one that prompted it.

In one of Bourdieu's examples, clansmen, recipients of largess from their family head and patron, are retained in a not sharply delimited obligation to perform services at a later time. Of particular importance is their obligation to provide labor at harvest time. Meanwhile they give back by a ritual visiting the fields. This is unproductive labor from a capitalist perspective. While the system has its material economic rationale, the rationalization is not maximal, for it does not distinguish unproductive from productive labor nor maximize the latter for the benefit of consumption all around (116–19).

Besides exemplifying an element of material economic interest in gift-giving, Bourdieu's example illustrates an element of inefficiency or waste in the form of unproductive labor. The example also illustrates the role of what Mauss calls “formal pretense and social deception” (1) and Bourdieu calls “sincere fiction” or “misrecognition” in a gift economy (112, 118). That is, the system masks the economic by casting the initial patronage as freely and selflessly given and the payback likewise, especially as it largely takes the form of ritual performance rather than harvest work of evident material benefit, so displacing from recognition the functioning of gift exchange in a self-interested economic scheme.

So economies of the gift eschew sharply distinguishing between free giving and giving that creates obligation, but capitalism aims to do so, by strict accounting. But economics, like other social relations, evolves with overlays of practices and mentalities. Bourdieu is very apt at illustrating uneasy moments when different economic systems are revealed and when what was misrecognized in terms of one comes into recognition in terms of another. He gives the example of a (mid-twentieth century) North African mason who has learned new practices in Europe and scandalizes his traditional employers back home by requesting cash added to his wages in lieu of the gift of a free lunch.

There are such uneasy moments that reveal the hitherto unheeded distinction between economies in The Mill on the Floss. Eliot depicts economies of the gift still persistent alongside newer capitalism. In her novel different classes and both sexes participate in gift-exchange, but it is in giving to women, in women's receiving, and in their obligation to make return that she shows the greatest persistence of the older economy. This tallies with David Cheal's study of gift-exchange as this is still found in predominantly capitalist (here latter twentieth-century Canadian) culture. He observes the marked prominence of women as receivers and givers of gifts. In The Mill on the Floss gift exchange and capitalism are at odds in ways that tend to escape notice, and the trouble at the line between them is most liable to turn tragic in exchanges between the sexes.

Mr. Tulliver's Tragedy: Misrecognizing Loans and Gifts

ELIOT SAYS AN INSIGNIFICANT MILLER may be a tragic figure and be likened to Oedipus, in a manner similar to her casting Maggie's problems, even when she is just a little girl, in terms of tragedy. Eliot alludes to Hamlet to make the wry point that her young protagonists might not have done so badly, as Hamlet might not, if their respective fathers had lived to a good old age (353; ch. 45). This draws us to consider Mr. Tulliver's tragedy as one leading to Maggie's and Tom's. And Mr. Tulliver's ruin is financial. So…let's get to an audit.

What we find is that Mr. Tulliver doesn't keep his accounts very well, for in some sense he doesn't know how much capital he has at his disposal, how much is saved compared to owed. Tom, like others in the town of St. Ogg's, has perceived Mr. Tulliver to be a man with money in reserve, owner of farm land and a mill for flour and malt, able to afford an expensive education for his son, to hire lawyers to protect his water rights for the mill, and to live well. Mr. Tulliver, however, may be said to suffer from misrecognition, from category confusion, in money matters, seen in his discrepant accounting between gifts and loans. One notable instance appears in the confusion after his death about whether the 300 pounds he provided to help his sister Mrs. Moss was given or lent.

There are other instances of confusion. Mr. Tulliver has inherited “his own mill” and land and lived at a rate of outlay proportioned to what he considers his own capital, leaving out of account the 1000 pound dowry owing to his sister at the time of her marriage. To pay this, he has been obliged to take out a 2000 pound mortgage. The small hold this has on his attention shows in his almost forgetting about it between the half-yearly calls for payment. Mr. Tulliver operates by a gender-based presumption of ownership, rather like young Tom's when he says to Maggie, “I've got a great deal more money than you, because I'm a boy” (31; ch. 5). True, Mr. Tulliver's equity in the property must be worth more than the 1000 pounds that goes to his sister. But he acts as if her receipt of capital does not exactly subtract from his. Rather, the demand on him is for good nature and willingness to give her help, at his discretion (she having married an unsuccessful farmer, while the pair has eight children). Help means a loan to Mr. Moss on Mrs. Moss's behalf. When financially pressed himself, Mr. Tulliver determines to call in his money. But he does not end up doing so because he discovers that in his mind, if not on paper, the loan is more properly a gift. This actually remains vague to him, for the loan only gets definitely recognized as a gift after Mr. Tulliver's death, when his family figures out what he must have intended and destroys the promissory note.

With regard to a sister, Mr. Tulliver retains a notion of gift-giving, of taking care of her, because he is thinking of his own daughter, Maggie, and wants Tom, in turn, to take care of his sister. Such reflections bring a moment of recognition to Mr. Tulliver, economically. But Eliot shows the usual subconsciousness or intermittency of his thinking on the matter and his unresolved confusion of economic categories. By his peculiar reckoning, he both has and does not have the 300 pounds of the loan/gift. I would say the same for his having and not having the 1000 pounds of the all-but-forgotten mortgage that funded his sister's dowry. Because Mr. Tulliver customarily feels better off than he is, he lives well. He sends Tom to Mr. Stelling's school at a cost of some 100 pounds and threatens to go to law against Dix over water, and does go to law against Pivart, braving the formidable legal adversary Wakem. He stands surety for a 250 pound loan to Mr. Riley, putting up personal household property his wife brought into the marriage. He owes 50 pounds that the hired man Luke put into his business. There is the 2000 pound mortgage. Plus there is a loan of 500 pounds from his sister-in-law Mrs. Glegg.

Mr. Tulliver particularly resents criticism of his money management coming from Mrs. Glegg. He rebels against feeling beholden to her for the loan. Money from his sister-in-law to him is not like money from him to his sister. There is discussion at the family dinner table of its status as a loan, not gift, for it bears interest. This shows the likeness yet difference between forms of money transfer. But Mr. Tulliver again blurs the distinction, especially where gender is involved. The money feels to him too much like a favor, bothering him more than the mortgage that doesn't put him under obligation to a sister-in-law. As gift theory tells us, gift or favor implies hierarchy and subordinates the receiver so long as he has not made return, or can't, or not soon or generously enough. It is harder to delimit the time frame and scale of obligation for a gift than a loan and harder to liquidate the obligation. Mr. Tulliver balks at feeling “beholden” not only to Mrs. Glegg but to a whole Dodson family of sisters, “a whole litter of women” (66; ch. 8). He wants to feel he takes “no gift or favour” (172; ch. 21) from that quarter. It is precisely this episode that occasions Eliot's passage on the tragedy that may befall an ordinary miller.

Vis-à-vis sisters Mr. Tulliver is especially prone to operate on principles of gift-exchange. He compromises his solvency by misrecognizing gift as loan to his sister and loan as gift from his sister-in-law. He pays in Mrs. Glegg's money, gets a less flexible creditor, and ultimately, when he loses his court case and must pay costs,²

His greatest desire is to be able to pay his creditors off. This shows him shifting to alternative capitalist principles. But he becomes ensnared in the economy of the gift. He is least able to clear the account precisely where he receives most favor. The favor is from Wakem, the new owner of the mill, who allows Mr. Tulliver to remain living there. Here we see gift-giving between men in a relation of advantage and disadvantage, rather than between the sexes. This is not the only time Eliot associates the two sorts of gift exchange. Wakem's explicit intention is to exercise charity as a means to humiliate a man who has been loud-mouthed against him. Though with Tom's aid Mr. Tulliver has begun to look forward to a day when he might settle his debts, he can conceive of no such settlement with the lawyer, his overbearing patron. He dies of his resentment. He suffers his fatal stroke attacking Wakem. Eliot ends Mr. Tulliver's tragedy with overt violence over gift patronage between men in a social hierarchy, but the tragedy's source, and its repercussions, trace to relations of gift and favor involving women.

Lending and Borrowing: Mrs. Glegg, Bob, and Tom

IN THE MATTER OF THE LOAN, Mrs. Glegg keeps her eye on self-interest and interest payable and hardly thinks like a sister. She thinks like her husband, who holds “no opinion of transactions where folks do things for nothing” (277; ch. 34). She doesn't like to “give” anything but advice (a witticism from Mr. Tulliver 63; ch. 7). She doesn't fancy her husband's giving away her money, either, as she charges him with doing in an interchange concerning financing for Tom's schemes to restore the family fortunes. Mrs. Glegg came by her money by bequest from her father and certainly likes to think of it as her own. She has saved and invested it as capital to accumulate more capital. Her sisters, on the other hand, only express satisfaction in personal ownership when it comes to the china and linens they brought with them when they married. They have no capitalist visions of building up more from what they have. Legally speaking, Mrs. Tulliver has no actual grasp on such possessions, as we see when her husband disposes of them as he sees fit in his own financing. By the same token Mrs. Glegg's capital is only hers by the generosity of her husband, given the period of the novel–years before the 1882 Married Women's Property Act that empowered wives to possess property and enter into contracts–to save, borrow, invest, lend. That is why Mrs. Glegg refers resentfully to being “let” keep her money by her husband and sharply reminds him how mean it would look to take back a gift, should he decide on outlay of funds he only “pretended to leave at my own disposal” (187; ch. 23).

Mrs. Glegg goes against the gender norm in her society. For all their sparring, the Gleggs actually get on very well because they mostly see eye to eye economically. Mr. Glegg enjoys his comfortable retirement from business, cultivates his garden, and considers his wife a paragon, though she can be so adamant in holding her own. As her sister says, Mrs. Glegg sees into men's business. She is a far more consistent capitalist than her brother-in-law.

She saves. Indeed, she hoards when she sequesters valuable silk gowns in the clothes-chest from which they emerge later, in order of antiquity, to be worn spotted with mold. This is not in the full sense a capitalist practice for the accumulation only loses value over time rather than increasing it by going forth to be consumed by laborers who create new goods by productive labor, to the benefit of themselves, the investor, and the consumer. Mrs. Glegg does better with her capital when she loans it out at interest. She likes to get her 5%, even from her problem brother-in-law; so she does not call her money in. She is pleased to earn a high rate of 6–7% on an unsecured loan to Tom when he begins to invest in Laceham textile goods to be peddled by Bob Jakin and shipped out for foreign sale.

Critics seldom talk about the chapters on business featuring Mrs. Glegg.³

But, of course, success eludes Tom, as it does his sister, and the second-generation Tullivers, like the first, come to grief. Mr. Tulliver came to grief between economies. His children seek recovery according to economic principles that initially seem not so entirely different but ultimately stand in conflict. Tom, as capitalist, has a strong appetite for pleasure and looks forward to living well someday but meanwhile faces privation and exercises abstinence and self-denial to save (272; ch. 34, 427; ch. 54). Saving means giving up, going without. In this he compares to Maggie, who has a “hunger of the heart” (34; ch. 5) for many things, but faces privation and exercises abstinence and self-denial. She too gives up, goes without. But not like any capitalist.

Philip

FOR PURPOSES OF FURTHER COMMENTARY on Maggie and Tom it is worth turning attention here to their friend Philip Waken. In the symbolism of the novel Eliot employs an elaborate figural doubling, and Philip often serves as a stand-in for one sibling or the other. Eliot brings sister and brother into near likeness to set a mark for measuring how far they also diverge from each other.

Philip doubles Maggie through the lameness that gives him psychological experiences of disadvantage, privation, and painful abstinence, so that he is repeatedly called “like a girl” (152; ch. 17, 370; ch. 46, 375; ch. 47). Also, as a cripple he has not been raised to business, again being “like a girl” (370; ch. 46). But in a different manner he doubles Tom. During schooldays he is the surrogate brother who cares for Maggie when her actual brother doesn't. Through a yet more complex configuration, the doubling with the sister allows for another sort of doubling with the brother. At least in the short term Tom is brought together with Maggie by being brought together with Philip in disadvantage. While with Mr. Stelling, the hearty Tom suffers an injury to his foot that makes him share Philip's experience of lameness. The two are quite close during this period. And this disability serves to symbolize a more general experience of privation and abstinence Tom undergoes at school, where his poor performance as a student undermines his usual boyish self-assurance so that he feels more than ever in his life before “like a girl” (124, 125; ch. 14). This makes him rather generous. He even “sacrifices” a treasure of some percussion-caps in a gift to the schoolmaster's little girl to amuse her and make her his playfellow, as he misses Maggie. But Tom, when he is grown, does not remain close to a feminine position and its mentality. Thus to face his hard times, Tom makes “sacrifices” according to capitalist economics of saving (for lending/borrowing/investing) but not, like a girl, according to gift exchange.

Gift-Giving: St. Ogg, Philip, Tom, and Maggie

IN THE NOVEL'S SYMBOLISM the legend of St. Ogg is of great significance. Philip figures here again, along with Tom and Maggie. St. Ogg, namesake for the town, is the saintly boatman who ventures onto the water even in flood time, and multiple allusions to his legend foreshadow the flood that ends The Mill on the Floss. In my perspective St. Ogg's is a legend about giving.

St. Ogg meets needs whatever they are. He gives one what one wants not as due or desert but freely as favor, charity, or gift. The legend tells how St. Ogg satisfies a woman's craving to be rowed with her child across the river though the wind and water are very high. This is unwise; in fact, men say it is a “foolish” desire. St. Ogg does not deny the folly but overlooks it to satisfy “the heart's need.” In the legend this produces a miracle of salvation and a vision of the woman with her child as the Blessed Virgin to serve as an image of hope in future times of flood (102–03; ch. 12). Eliot emphasizes the pure gift in St. Ogg's action by making the claim for receiving it so weak and doubtful. The saint gives the woman more than she should ask for according to the judgment of ordinary discretion. He bestows a lavish favor. The woman has the river-crossing coming to her because she wants it and a boatman is there to provide it. Or so she presumes.

St. Ogg makes an important appearance in a dream of Maggie's which also features Philip and Tom (412–13; ch. 53). The dream pictures St. Ogg in a boat with the Virgin on the wide water. The images change, and Maggie sees Philip and Lucy as boatman and Virgin, and then Philip's image as St. Ogg turns into Tom's image as St. Ogg. From a boat carrying herself and her lover Stephen, Maggie calls and stretches out her hands to Tom/Ogg, who rows past without looking. The meaning I take is that Philip/Ogg can only offer Maggie so much of what she ultimately wants from her brother/Ogg. And what she wants is very much–like the gift of the saint. Tom doesn't have that much to give. And Maggie's own wanting sinks her. In the dream her movement to reach out to Tom/Ogg is what overturns her boat. She feels herself going down.

The dream foreshadows the novel's ending in which Maggie reaches out to her beloved, estranged brother. Wanting to be given very much, one must also give very much. At the risk of her life she rows out to Tom on the flooded Floss. Now she is the saint, she is the gift-giver. This is at the same time that she is also the woman with “heart's need”–for gifts of admiration and love–with what Eliot calls a “peremptory” and one might uncharitably call an unwise or “foolishly” peremptory “hunger of the heart.” Hers is a “hungry nature” with “illimitable wants.” She wants “too much.” She longs for “indulgence” from people like those she's read of in books who would be “delighted to do things that made one happy” (338; ch. 42, 286; ch. 35, 269; ch. 33, 205; ch. 25).

At one point Eliot casts a skeptical light on Maggie's relation to the saint through Philip's jibe about her “selling her soul to that ghostly boatman” (403; ch. 52). She and Tom do have a final moment when their childish bond is reaffirmed, but Maggie does not survive the flood nor save her brother. Their drowning suggests not salvation but a heavy cost and perhaps a judgment on a devil's bargain in looking for gifts from St. Ogg.

Gift-Giving: Mr. Tulliver, Maggie, and Tom

MAGGIE HAS BEEN POSITIONED in large part by her sex to be receiver and giver of gifts. When she was a little girl, her father “took her part” (60; ch. 7) no matter what (covering all and sundry misdemeanors from letting Tom's rabbits die and cutting off her hair to pushing cousin Lucy into the mud and running away from home). Mr. Tulliver's attitude reflects his half-recognized special conception of economic relations with girl or woman. He is to take care of Maggie, just as he is to take care of his sister through the loan that is more truly a gift, and (as Mr. Tulliver would have it) just as Tom is to take care of his sister.

Maggie as a girl is positioned to give gifts as well as receive them, and to make sure that Tom as a boy gets more than his share in return. An example is the great jam-puff exchange. Here Maggie is described as full of enjoyment of her part of the puff. Tom has to watch her finish eating it after his part is already devoured. Tom shifts in his mind from one economics of equal and fair division with no gift or favor to another based on the presumption that he should be rewarded for a fairness that has been, in fact, a generous gift on his part–he should be given the jammier portion because he did not demand it. Thus he considers Maggie greedy for not being correspondingly generous. Eliot remarks that by this reasoning Maggie falls short in “sacrifice.” Maggie laments, too late, that she would have been glad for Tom to have had what he wanted if this would have made him pleased with her and won his favor. She, too, shifts in her mind to the economics of gift exchange.

Gift-Giving: Tom and Bob

THIS EPISODE IS DIRECTLY FOLLOWED by another like it. The two illustrate how class difference works something like gender difference in positioning people economically. Eliot describes a boyhood tussle over money and a gift between Tom and Bob. Tom declares himself winner of a coin toss based on a charge that Bob has cheated, and he uses physical force to back up his status as “master” and to claim the half penny. He won't just take the coin but makes Bob give it to him. Then when Bob angrily throws it down, Tom doesn't pick it up but lets it lie. It becomes a tribute spurned, leaving him in mastery. This is especially the case because Bob has been shown up as failing in generosity–he did not help Tom be the winner he thinks he should be. Tom, on the other hand, has previously demonstrated generosity by giving Bob a knife. Bob tries to give the knife back, but Tom won't take it. Again Tom prevails as the giver of a gift that has not yet been matched or exceeded in return. Bob doesn't have the fortitude to actually give up the knife and go without it. After throwing it away he returns to retrieve it. He fails in the self-sacrifice that links to generosity in the economics of gift exchange. The power dynamics of social hierarchy are brilliantly displayed here. Bob is not quits as he would be upon capitalist principles. He is not quits as Mr. Tulliver and Tom seek to be with their creditors after the bankruptcy, by paying off loans with due interest. He is not quits as Mr. Tulliver is not in suffering under a sense of patronage from Wakem which he cannot pay off.

At other points Bob is a gift-giver as he has been a receiver. In the early days of Maggie's and Tom's poverty, he presents Maggie with books and offers Tom money. Characteristically, the sister accepts, the brother doesn't. Tom says, “I don't want to take anything from anybody, but to work my own way” (211; ch. 26). In the course of the novel master and man shift largely from gift to capitalist relations, whereby Tom and Bob are partners in selling Laceham goods. Bob remains ready to offer special help, but Tom, like the Gleggs, fends off any imputation of being in receipt of favor. They won't let Bob sacrifice himself for them. They insist on his having his percentage. Tom moves relations with Bob onto the same principles he prefers for his relations with his aunts and uncles. Whereas Maggie thinks the family should be generous in their financial aid, Tom doesn't want to be beholden to them. These examples show that the gift economy that persists to an extent in class relations is more likely to do so in gender relations.

The Economy of Human Life versus The Imitation of Christ

MAGGIE RECEIVES INSTRUCTION in the economy of the gift beyond what she learned in the jam-puff episode from her gift-book from Bob, The Imitation of Christ by St. Thomas à Kempis. À Kempis's little book may be set off against another of Bob's gift-books to mark once again the category difference between economies. The gift-book Maggie does not prefer is entitled The Economy of Human Life.

The Economy of Human Life is a once-popular advice book cast as a letter dated 1749 from Pekin and purporting to offer a translation of an ancient Indian manuscript.⁴

À Kempis's Imitation of Christ is Maggie's preference. This too is an advice book, of course better known and greater as a text, while easily enough made to yield simple maxims. There is appeal to the feminine in such Christian doctrine, though The Imitation of Christ speaks in as masculine a language as The Economy of Human Life, for instance, calling upon the faithful “manfully” to bear the cross (87). Maggie learns of suffering, sorrow, humility, resignation of self-love, renunciation, and self-mortification. Happiness is to be found nowhere in this world without turning to God, so that worldly desires and ambitions, the needs of the body, riches, and material things and pleasures are to be given up. “Despise…every temptation to please others or yourself” (137–38). Even human love is of scant importance. Affections are to be mortified, and one should be ready to “forego all human companionship” (148). À Kempis's program for monastic self-discipline suggests chastity, or erotic self-denial, along with every other kind.

À Kempis's principles belong with those of gift exchange, for all things, even love, even life, are to be foregone, given up, given away, given back, in return for Christ's sacrifice, which is His gift of grace and gives salvation. The magnitude of His giving up demands return without limit: “you must give all for All” (130).

Maggie's Tragedy: Giving All for All

BASED ON A CHRISTIAN AND FEMININE ECONOMY of the gift Maggie chooses first erotic sacrifice, then sacrifice of life itself. Eliot's novel struck readers of its time as highly charged in the description of Maggie's and Stephen's physical desire.⁵

Yet, of course, Maggie reverses course and Eliot shows how close to unwise or “foolish” this is, for all the admirable fervor and courage of her choice to give up her lover and return home. Here Maggie compares to the woman who craved to be ferried by St. Ogg on high water though men advised against it. Eliot submits such action to very mixed judgment.

There would be some betrayal of Lucy had Maggie chosen to stay with Stephen, given the prior courtship between her cousin and her lover, but their understanding is described as having been rather conventional and shallow and never formally declared, and Lucy proves capable of forgiveness. Stephen insists that the true love is between himself and Maggie and that their happiness is just as important as other people's. By the same token he insists that their unhappiness is just as important. With Maggie's return, unhappiness is assured all around. With regard to Maggie's sense of duty to return for Philip's sake, many details indicate that no real passion or strong obligation binds Maggie here to make disappointing Philip a betrayal. He ultimately says so himself. Maggie actually agrees with Tom that marriage would be “out of the question” (340; ch. 42) to the son of the family enemy Wakem. She has been half relieved, in fact, to have this family opposition to a relationship that she herself does not desire at a sexual level (306; ch. 37). To please Tom and to be loved by him is her deepest wish, for him, like their father, to take her part, to be indulgent, to be her St. Ogg and give her what her heart craves. Her oldest memory is of the two of them together on the banks of the Floss.

There is exquisite irony in Maggie's leaving Stephen to return to St. Ogg's for Philip's sake since Tom objects to Philip for at least partly compelling reasons, making loyalty to Philip disloyalty to Tom. But there is another irony that makes a return to Philip into a return to Tom. After all, since schooldays Philip has functioned in one of his figurations as surrogate brother. Strengthening this symbolism is Philip as St. Ogg shape-changing to become Tom as St. Ogg in Maggie's dream. This dream is the immediate spur for Maggie's resolution to go back home. There she becomes a would-be St. Ogg herself, rowing out on floodwaters on a charitable mission to her brother.

Bear in mind again the complicated symbolism that makes Philip double Maggie, double Tom, and double St. Ogg. Philip is like Maggie in being like a girl. He is like Tom in being like a brother. He is like Tom when Tom is like Maggie in being like a girl. He is like Tom when Tom is like St. Ogg. He is like Maggie when she is like Tom and she, too, is like St. Ogg. And in yet one more doubling, he is like Tom and Maggie in not being like St. Ogg, not a bestower of great gifts, not a savior.

Philip is not so very saintly and generous. He is a very important proponent in the novel of self-interest and seeking out the pleasures one can. That is why he actively, even aggressively, insinuatingly, and rather unscrupulously pursues Maggie. He involves her in clandestine meetings that she is not sure are right and encourages a sense of obligation to him on her part beyond what is justified by her childish promises. He has a hunger to “snatch an offered joy.” Eliot does not condemn this but expresses rueful understanding. “Do not think too hardly of Philip” (290–91; ch. 35). She takes an ironic tone about the common expectation that disadvantaged people will have unusual virtues and forego wanting what may be hard for them to get. She denies that disadvantages are good for people in this sense. They remain disadvantages and are more likely to produce distortions than transcendence of self-interest.

Philip is the one who teases Maggie about something devilish rather than saintly in a pact with St. Ogg. Just so, as anti-St. Ogg, he is the great critic of the lessons Maggie draws from St. Thomas à Kempis. He calls her system of renunciation and self-sacrifice cowardly negation, escape from pain, induced stupefaction, self-deception, not real resignation. He decries such “narrow asceticism” as a perversion, a mutilation, a “long suicide” (288–89; ch. 35, 363; ch. 46, 269; ch. 33).

Another more minor character interprets Maggie's case in a similar manner. This is Dr. Kenn, a voice of mature, calm, if cool, benevolence. He is not one of the “men of maxims,” exponents of merely conventional thinking. Yet would he stand so far apart from all who distinguish folly from wisdom in the legend of St. Ogg? He admires Maggie's efforts to do what is best by coming home. But he pretty much judges that she has done the opposite. The best resolution for her–or, in a Smith/Malthus/Mill-style calculation the least evil–would not be to stay in St. Ogg's but to go away and take a job at a distance and in due course of time satisfy her passion and marry Stephen (436–38; ch. 55). These actions would involve some privation, for Maggie dislikes being a teacher and doesn't want to leave her birthplace and the people of her past. Yet she would be making a living by her pains and might find her way in the end to happiness and prosperity in marriage back in town.

Eliot makes it clear that the world and the world's wife would come around to accept a marriage between Maggie and Stephen, whatever moral lapses preceded it. Then too, Mrs. Glegg doesn't reject Maggie, but backs her. She launches a campaign to combat tales against her niece's reputation. She also has resources and makes a point of keeping Maggie in her will to maintain her “life-long regard to equity in money matters” (439; ch. 56). Surely Stephen as a husband would be far less likely to pain Tom than Philip would. Neither Lucy nor Philip holds out in condemning Maggie. But none of these indicators of accommodation catches Maggie's imagination. She does not choose qualified privations for the sake of qualified prospects of happiness.

She knows how much people want because she knows how much she wants, and wanting so much she cannot bear to think of anyone's getting less than all. She cannot bear to think that her pleasure should come at the cost of others' pain, nor that her pleasure must be less than complete because of this. She refuses to tally up costs with benefits to work out net advantage, to recognize that giving one man his dinner may mean taking away another man's breakfast (192; ch. 23). This is a saying of Mr. Glegg's apropos of clarifying the debt situation left so confused by Mr. Tulliver's financial misrecognition and misaccounting. There is a similarity between Maggie's thinking and her father's, even though he engages in money matters that seem remote from her concern. But I believe we observe the similarity in observing that the daughter, like the father–though in his case only sometimes–does not think like a political economist.

Mr. Tulliver's and Maggie's–and Tom's–tragedies interrelate. Mr. Tulliver is confused about how much he has, how much savings or capital he has at his disposal, when it comes to the imperative to give to a sister and not to receive from a sister-in-law. He treats the loan/gift to Mrs. Moss as if it were off the account, not involving a subtraction somewhere else, nor cost to anyone, and, accordingly, he spurns making up the difference by anything that seems to him like a gift/loan from Mrs. Glegg. He gives generously to his daughter, taking her part no matter what, and wants his son, too, to take care of his sister by gift. By his discrepant accounting he loses his capital and leaves his daughter no gift or bequest at all. Or rather, he leaves her only her acculturation to an economy of the gift. This is even though for himself at the end of his life he would like nothing better than to move back to capitalist economics by paying off loans, and he dies lashing out against humbling patronage. One who looks to receive “heart's need” however unwise because she needs it, to receive full satisfaction of the “hunger of the heart,” to receive All, must “give all for All.” She must return the gift unstintingly, without recognition of cost, at whatever sacrifice. This is what Maggie does.

She has fully learned the lesson of sacrifice that was only half-learned in jam-puff days. In the final pages of The Mill on the Floss comes the flood foreshadowed by the legend of St. Ogg, augmented in meaning by on-going symbolism of St. Ogg/Philip/Tom/Maggie and yet another allusion to St. Thomas à Kempis–Maggie murmurs words from à Kempis that merge with the sounds of wind and rain. There is repeated suggestion that Maggie is passing into a “transition of death” as she rows out on the water to find Tom (455; ch. 58). Eliot uses terms of economics to describe Maggie's undertaking, and she does so to describe it as one that will prove fatal, which it does for both sister and brother: “More and more strongly [her] energies seemed to come and put themselves forth, as if her life were a stored-up force that was being spent in this hour, unneeded for any future” (456; ch. 58). This casts Maggie's energy or life-force as a saved or stored-up accumulation. Indeed, political economy conceives of capital as a saved or stored-up energy, a force of human labor, which is then expended to sustain, augment, and reap a benefit to present labor. So Maggie rows with almost superhuman effort. But for Maggie, as not for the capitalist, all is to be spent till all is gone, dispensing with expectation that labor be productive labor and promise profitable return on investment.

Between Economies

MY COMMENTARY JOINS the critical debate concerning themes of egoism and sympathy, self and self-sacrifice, in George Eliot, especially in their bearing for women, and the critical debate concerning how to take the drastic, even perhaps overstrained, tragic ending of The Mill on the Floss.⁶

More recent critics incorporate attention to socioeconomic conditions and class into feminist approaches. Susan Fraiman and Judith Lowder Newton consider Tom's story as well as Maggie's and identify it with a narrative of rising in the world representative of advancing capitalism. Fraiman believes Eliot presents this capitalist story to its discredit in Tom (49) and as a story that is generically male and at odds with a female story of development, thereby producing a kind of narrative catastrophe of storylines at crosspurposes at novel's end. Newton believes Eliot presents the capitalist rise of Tom and other male characters as one that “spells trouble for women” (141). She finds that it is capitalist society driving Maggie to a bad end and making things worse for women, and that the novel offers a “criticism of bourgeois society” (157). Margaret Homans likewise finds new political economic developments and the rise of the middle class to be forces dangerous to women. This is not because women are left out of bourgeois economics but because they help advance it. She sees something deplorable in Maggie's enjoyment of the luxuries of the prosperous Deane household and her falling in love with the upwardly mobile son of Guest and Co. In this reading, Maggie demonstrates the role of women to contribute as consumers to the rising wealth of the nation and the rising power of the middle class as they lend cover to bourgeois class self-interest by their apparent removal from economic motives.⁷

Joshua Esty, too, sees the river as a bearer of capitalist modernity, and, as such, a bearer of death (113). For Esty, it is not only Maggie as a woman who is swept away by a new socioeconomics, but Tom, too. In his reading, Maggie and Tom are like Mr. Tulliver and like the whole way of life of St. Ogg's–all sharers in a premodern yeoman-class mentality, all casualties of capitalist developments.⁸

It is certainly true that Eliot shows liabilities involved in economic transition. I stress differential positionings by class and sex, and, with these, dangerous misrecognitions and discrepant accountings. But I don't think the novel shows precapitalist economics to be the preferable, the more viable alternative–for women, or men. I don't think it disavows Mrs. Glegg and her head for business.⁹

Indeed, The Mill on the Floss depicts a society in process of rapid economic change. St. Ogg's is an old market town with stepped-up current business. It exports wool and cheeses, imports fir, probably Baltic, and Russian flaxseed. Mr. Tulliver mills presumably English wheat and malt, while the town has profitable oil-mills milling foreign flaxseed for linseed oil. No doubt this, like the timber, serves shipbuilding and port and warehouse construction in support of commerce. There is coal on the ships, and Tom gets sent by Guest and Co. on business to smoky Newcastle. Steam comes to St. Ogg's in the course of the novel. Tom shares with Mr. Deane the idea of bringing steam power to Dorlcote Mill, and Maggie and Stephen board a steamboat. According to Mr. Deane, there is expanding population, boosting prospects for trade and investment. Such expansion helps explain why upriver farmers are engineering new dams to irrigate more farmland, producing the problems for Mr. Tulliver's mill that he is so ill able to meet by his habits of economic thinking, his accounting. Smart up-to-date shops, some with plate-glass windows, compete with old-fashioned peddling like Bob's. Bob is not actually so behind the times as he sells Laceham goods including machine-made cotton net (West Surrey College of Arts & Design 68). He also begins merchandising to profitable foreign markets. And he partners in this with his former master in a revised, less hierarchical and patronizing class relation based on capitalist rather than gift-exchange economics. The floating mass of machinery that sinks Tom and Maggie has broken away from a wharf. It represents long-important if growing commerce as much as new-era industrialism and, being wooden, not the latest in high-tech metallurgical machining. But we should expect older and newer technologies, like older and newer economic practices and mentalities, to co-exist, however incongruously, during a time of change.

I call to mind George Eliot's remark concerning possibilities for “railways, steamships, and electric telegraphs, which are demonstrating the interdependence of all human interests.” She does not repudiate but salutes a dynamic “making self-interest a duct for sympathy” (“Influence of Rationalism” 404). I call to mind Ruskin's description of The Mill on the Floss as the work of a “common railroad-station novelist,” oriented to modernity and written for readers “behind the counter” and inhabiting new brick suburbs of manufacturing towns (Carroll 167).¹⁰