Unstable Entanglements at the Provincial Port

In the opening paragraph, Eliot's narrator describes the hydrographic basis for the novel's estuarial form, situating St. Ogg's within sailing distance of the wider world, but well inland across the Lincolnshire fens from the actual source of the tide:

Of course, the “impetuous embrace” of the first sentence presages the “embrace never to be parted” that Maggie and Tom Tulliver share in their death at the novel's end (542). But before we actually meet either Maggie or Tom, we come to know the novel's first embrace as one between “the broadening Floss” and “the sea,” between “its [the Floss's] passage” and “the loving tide” of the sea. That is, not only is the novel about an embrace between “Boy and Girl,” as the novel's first volume is titled, but also in a primary sense about the specific entanglements of different aspects of the local environment—specifically, different types of water and the forces that move those waters. The narrator adds an economic aspect to ecological entanglement when, in the next sentence, the port's mercantile activities occasion the blurring together of water and land. This process occurs in discrete stages. First, the merchants’ ships “are borne along to the town of St. Ogg's, which shows its aged, fluted red roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the river brink,” the narrator's eye moving down from the broad descriptive view from roof to gable and then from hill to bank, each pairing associating the topographical (“red roofs” and “low wooded hill”) with the maritime (“broad gables of its wharves” and “river brink,” respectively). Subsequently, in the sentence's last clause, this blending occurs on the surface of the river itself. With the surface made reflective by the “transient glance of this February sun,” the red roofs and wooded hills “ting[e]” the blue water with a “soft purple hue.” This mixing takes place on the surface of the water that is reflective only seasonally—the “transient glance” attributed to the particular month of winter light—suggesting that the types of land-water entanglement in St. Ogg's are subject to periodic change in the conditions of the water itself. In this first moment of hydrographic description before the advent of human presence in the novel, the narrator depicts the environment structurally central to the novel in the opening passage's most richly evocative language, prioritizing from the outset the hydrographic grounding of the novel's ecological vision over the mercantile function it also serves.

In the midst of this scene is the raw material of rural development. Brought to St. Ogg's by the “mighty tide,” traders’ ships come “laden with the fresh-scented fir-planks, with rounded sacks of oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter of coal”: that is, lumber, flaxseed, and fuel, three resources crucial to the operations of Guest & Co. and the construction of Mr. Pivart's irritation works upstream from Dorlcote Mill. Before introducing the resource-laden ships, though, the narrator describes the origins of those ships: the sea. In Eliot's original manuscript, “the sea” was instead “Northern Sea,” the body of water off the east coast of Britain between the island and northern Europe (551n.9a). Later, the provenance of the linseed is identified as Russian (126). As the narrator presents the area's mercantile activities in visually arresting terms (that “dark glitter of coal” especially), it becomes clear that the hydrographic situation of St. Ogg's will also be a primary staging area of the conflict between global capitalism and rural ecology.

It is common for criticism of The Mill on the Floss to discuss this opening especially in terms of its potential for foreshadowing. An exemplary reading by Jules Law, for instance, connects the “impetuous embrace” of the first sentence with the “seed” of the resource trio to cannily claim that in the opening “[t]he proleptic overlapping of the novel's sexual, social, and economic narratives of destruction is accomplished through the dominant, ubiquitous figure of water.”Footnote ¹³ Another reading discusses several real-life rivers in the Midlands and the East of England, and suggests that the Floss's tidal nature mirrors the River Trent's propensity to flood twice a year.Footnote ¹⁴ These compelling readings add substantially to our understanding of rural development and tidal cycles, respectively, and do much to situate the ending and the flood in relevant contexts. While building on the substantial research of approaches like these, I want to disentangle the progression of our criticism from that of the novel's plot. From the perspective of its local ecology, the novel's narrative embraces from its first sentences the instability brought to St. Ogg's by the developmental pressure of international markets. To that end, the spatial and temporal situating of St. Ogg's begun in the novel's opening paragraph becomes the foundation for the novel's estuarial form. If Griffiths and Kreisel's ascription of “radical openness to the world and the complex vectors of its interactions” to Middlemarch’s “web of life” can be viewed as the positive side of open ecology, my analysis of The Mill on the Floss represents the darker side of that coin.Footnote ¹⁵ This isn't because the flood kills Tom and Maggie at the novel's end. Rather, it is because in Eliot's earlier novel the primary ecological space—the estuary—provides a model of relationality in the natural world (interflowing saline and freshwater), but in its social instantiation this constant intermingling makes both environmental and human interactions fundamentally unstable. The poison pill is the global capital regimes whose three nautical emissaries glide into the novel at its outset bearing commodities that prefigure development projects which spur anthropogenic change.

By situating a port on estuarial waters, Eliot encodes hydrographic instability into The Mill on the Floss from the novel's very first sentences. As mentioned, estuaries did not occupy as prominent a place in the cultural imagination as other spaces where geography, the social, and globalization and imperialism interact (such as cities or the sea). The estuarial feature that caught the eye of Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology was the potential for rapid geologic change, especially among estuaries on the English east coast. This is because “there is not a large body of river-water” in the region, and, combined with powerful, volatile winds from the North Sea (referred to as the “German Ocean” in Lyell), the pace of erosion and, crucially, the potentials for flooding as well as sea and riverbed change increase dramatically.Footnote ¹⁶ Lyell's broad evocations of estuarial regions’ volatility stands in contrast to the less unpredictable mode of Victorian natural histories—including G. H. Lewes's own Sea-Side Studies (published two years before Eliot's novel), which does not discuss estuaries at significant length.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite the low profile of estuaries in Victorian thought, the ecology of The Mill on the Floss reflects the instability Lyell ascribes to estuarial zones, only with a broader water table, and which first manifests socially long before it does environmentally. Eschewing the eroding sands of the Severn or Medway estuaries, as in Lyell, Eliot shifts this instability onto the novel's communal relations, especially the tumult of Maggie's courtship and the fragmentation of the Tulliver family. The St. Ogg's estuary is where the social world of the novel gains the relational changeability of the aquatic entanglement dynamics beneath the surface: nearly everyone in St. Ogg's is drawn into interrelation with everyone else, though communal ties shift as often as the tide goes out. Under the pressure of global trade, the openness of this system's interlacing of the natural world with social affairs shoots Eliot's estuarial form through with communal upheaval. Rather than rend the novel apart, these relational vicissitudes become naturalized into the narrative language. We can see this in the novel's very first sentence, which is replete with the rhetoric of fast embraces and strong affect: as “the broadening Floss hurries on […] to the sea,” that same sea “rush[es] to meet it,” the hurrying of the current “check[ed]” by the “loving tide,” later the “mighty tide,” the “impetuous embrace” of current and tide, of fresh and saline waters at one of the novelistic sites where provincial ecology can most clearly be seen structuring novelistic narrative.

The port at St. Ogg's is provincial in how it feels at once distanced from (but inexorably related to) the currents of the ocean that connect it to global marketplaces while also seeming rooted in its own sense of time and place. Josephine McDonagh's recent work on the novelistic provincial in the mid-nineteenth century—which she defines as a sense of being entrenched in a place that is always aware of its remove from other places—resonates with Eliot's novel, where spatial awareness implies connection and detachment in equivalent measure.Footnote ¹⁸ While neither McDonagh's sense of distance nor John Plotz's “semi-detach[ment]” or “portab[ility]” concepts evoke temporal distance that would support a more typical conception of provincial timelessness (an ideal hewed to by Mr. Tulliver), they both deny that the spatial distancing inherent in provincial locales entails isolation from the wider world.Footnote ¹⁹ In The Mill on the Floss, this sense of spatiotemporal rootedness combined with the proximate distancing from the North Sea grounds the interweaving of the natural and the social that takes place at the St. Ogg's estuary. The internationalism of the area's North Sea exposure may seem alien to such a remote, rural area, but as McDonagh claims, the novelistic provincial is typified by its relation to global power centers, not urban ones. “[T]he provincial in the mid-nineteenth century is not the subordinate partner of a metropolitan/provincial binary,” she writes, “but rather is a term that is rooted from its beginning in emerging global networks.”Footnote ²⁰ In Eliot's novel, this implication in global networks is already well underway. The characters in the novel exacerbate the instability inherent in estuarial entanglements due to their inability to apprehend the full geographic scale of attachments in which the novel's waters implicate them. As we will see subsequently, the misapprehension of the nature of water in the novel becomes a consistent catalyst of ecological change.

“You Can't Pick It up with a Pitchfork”

Though The Mill on the Floss is well remembered for the tragedy of Maggie and Tom's all-too-late reconciliation, Mr. Tulliver is an earlier victim of the novel's harsh logic, which punishes those who misunderstand the extent of water's role in the novel's open ecology. The Tulliver patriarch understands the river in terms of a classical conception of provincial timelessness and spatial parochialism, and this misunderstanding of the river as static—and thereby unaffected hydrographically or economically by its oceanic exchanges—costs him his claim to its waters. His misunderstanding, in its implication in the loss of Dorlcote Mill as well as in his family's fracturing and eventual destruction, provides a useful object lesson in how estuarial form operates in the world of the novel.

Early in book 2 of Eliot's novel, Mr. Tulliver discusses the extent of his entitlements to the river with his extended family. Mr. Pivart, a newcomer to the area, has purchased land upstream from Dorlcote Mill that he plans to irrigate. The concern, as the narrator phrases it, is that upstream irrigation “either were or would be or were bound to be (on the principle that water was water) an infringement on Mr. Tulliver's legitimate share of water-power” (163). Mr. Tulliver had previously enlisted his lawyer acquaintance Mr. Wakem to bully Dix, another upstream neighbor, into abandoning less extensive irrigation plans. “Law was a sort of cock-fight in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs,” the narrator writes of Mr. Tulliver's view of the arbitration process governing water rights (164). “Dorlcote Mill's been in our family a hundred year and better, and nobody ever heard of a Pivart meddling with the river,” Mr. Tulliver himself says to Mrs. Moss, his sister. “But I'll Pivart him!” (163, emphasis in original).

The twisting of his neighbor's own name into a hex resonates with the narrator's free-indirect uptake of Mr. Tulliver's repeated tautology, “water's water.” Early in the novel, the narrator characterizes the dispute as having been “a tangled business somehow, for all it seemed—look at it one way—as plain as water's water,” later repeated as “the principle that water was water” as Mr. Tulliver holds forth to his family (18, 163). The narrator repeats Tulliver's tautology first preceded by that arch aside (“—look at it one way—”) to cast aspersion on the idea's “plainness” and, a second time, in a parenthesis, as though the narrator is ascribing the tautology to Tulliver's earlier statement. Couching Tulliver's fallacies in this way creates distance between the broken idea and the narrator's sympathetic eye to Tulliver's well-meaning but naïve stewardship of his family's claim to the Floss. According to Jordan Brower, these aquatic tautologies refer to Mr. Tulliver's “natural riparian rights,” and though his ideas are logical fallacies, he nonetheless would likely have had the legal upper hand had the law of the day been followed to the letter.Footnote ²¹ Of course, these riparian rights aren't followed to the letter. The “cock-fight” of the law instead dispossesses Mr. Tulliver of his property, and the water he seems to know so well eventually destroys the mill and his family. The Tulliver patriarch understands water rights as a closed system: because he owns a mill downstream, he by law dictates what upstream residents can and cannot have. Rather, as a feature of St. Ogg's’ ecology, water is an open resource, a part of communal dealings just like neighborly relations, courtship, and civic responsibility. Mr. Tulliver's misunderstanding of his own area's ecology sets neighbor against neighbor and first makes him and his family vulnerable to losing the ancestral mill he is trying to protect.

Two of Mr. Tulliver's gravest misunderstandings reveal themselves when he employs his aquatic tautology in an elaboration of his view of St. Ogg's’ ecology. Around the table with his extended family, he exclaims to his sister and her husband:

In an immediate sense, Mr. Tulliver is right about one thing: “Pivart's erigation and nonsense won't stop my wheel.” The mill does keep turning until the flood destroys it. But this statement more damningly reveals a lack of knowledge of irrigation methods, or at least a refusal to open up his understanding of the agricultural works next door, and speaks therefore to his constrained ecological perspective. Paying attention only to his corner of the Ripple, Mr. Tulliver fails to fully grasp the estuarial nature of his ancestral region. Further, Mr. Tulliver's concern that the mill might stop reveals a telling preconception about the functioning of waterways. By linking the construction of irrigation canals—that is, the anthropogenic creation of additional miles of usable water—to the reduction of the amount of available water for him and his neighbors—the “injury” the irrigation canals threaten to do him—Mr. Tulliver appraises water as a precious natural resource with a finite supply, subject to a kind of scarcity generally attributed to resources extracted from the earth, such as gold or silver. When he refers to Pivart's irrigation canals as “dykes,” Mr. Tulliver uses the original Old English sense of the word, referring to a narrow ditch.Footnote ²² These upstream projects, to Mr. Tulliver, fundamentally misunderstand what water is in the St. Ogg's area. By feeding a farm that might grow wheat that you can “pick […] up with a pitchfork,” irrigation's removal of water from the river disqualifies that water from being seen as water at all. Water, according to Mr. Tulliver, must follow its own unidirectional current in order to register in his folk understanding of how this precious resource can be allotted.

Because he can only apprehend the importance of the Ripple to Dorlcote Mill, Mr. Tulliver has a unidirectional conception of flow—the Ripple's current running into the Floss—and fails to understand the open hydrography of St. Ogg's and its environs. In his voicing of his aquatic tautology, Tulliver characterizes his own viewpoint as “straight forrard,” which resonates with his blinkered ecological understanding: “It's plain enough what's the rights and the wrongs of water, if you look at it straight forrard; for a river's a river” (164). By naming the body of water, Mr. Tulliver not only misidentifies the Ripple, calling it a river instead of a tributary, but also doubles down on his view of water as static, like a kind of property protected by generational custom rather than deed and title and law.Footnote ²³ But the inheritance of resource rights is a closed, unidirectional system. Eliot's estuarial form brings different social and natural forces into interrelation, and Mr. Tulliver's resistance to the openness of that ecological model marks him as outmoded. His commitment to a unidirectional understanding of water blinds him to the estuarial nature of the area's hydrography that, long before the flood, attracts those agents of change which wrest his family's mill from his grasp.

These concerns about water rights and one-way currents ignore the other powerful aquatic force in the area: the tide. To the extent that Mr. Tulliver's understanding of water is fatally flawed, his failure—and even his family's generational failure—to recognize the area's water as characterized by estuarial flow and mixture is the most fatal of those flaws. In addition to the fact that St. Ogg's’ maritime exposure draws the capital of ecological speculators like Pivart and the Guest family to the area, the tension at the heart of Mr. Tulliver's position is fundamentally caused by the collision of two different kinds of water powered by two different kinds of flow, both of which are described in the novel's opening sentences: river water “hurrie[d]” by “a lively current,” and seawater “rushing” with “the loving tide” (9). The current's and the tide's rapid interflowing is reproduced in the legal clash between Mr. Tulliver and Mr. Pivart. The former's outmoded understanding of the water blinds him to the real ecological damage done by those who do understand the economic potential of the long stretches of navigable waterways on either side of the port. Throughout the novel, the estuarial wells up from the novel's formal ecology into its social world. From the Tulliver and Guest families’ interchanges throughout the novel, including Maggie and Stephen's ill-fated courtship, to the provincial attachments to outdated ways of life being set against the modernization represented by global trade, the novel is replete with instances of entanglements turned to social disasters by the fundamental misapprehension of the scale of the geographic networks in which the estuary's waters are implicated.

Water wreaks destructive havoc on communal relations, from the Tulliver family's destruction during the flood to the tide's crucial role in the disastrous turn taken by Maggie and Stephen's journey down an inland waterway. Estuarial form's persistent social manifestation is, I think, what makes the novel's plot so troublingly sententious: on a repeat reading, nearly anything seems like a candidate to explain the meaning behind the flood. But reading water as an open structure instead of a plot device allows us to see the novel's estuarial hydrography as a collection of ecological boundary conditions (the edge effects of intersecting flows) running into a combined edge ecology, one implicated from the novel's first lines in the social and environmental upheavals occasioned by the economic systems that drive trade and development through and around St. Ogg's. The ability to move goods inland through freshwater transportation and shipping lanes is as crucial to the port's value to global trade as its maritime exposure. But as I will discuss subsequently, as we journey upriver from the port, we also move closer to the boundaries of ecological form, where distance from town occasions the wholesale breakdown of the social order. Recognizing these multiple valences of Eliot's estuarial form thereby leads us to an ecological suggestion for the flood's cause that takes Mr. Tulliver's understanding of water as a scarce resource and turns it on its head.

What if Mr. Tulliver is not downstream at all and is instead peritidal? Whereas the more familiar term “intertidal” refers to a coastal area covered at high tide, “peritidal” indicates a wider hydrography encompassing areas both permanently covered by the tide and also areas typically above the high-water mark. The highest and furthest inland areas of peritidal zones are situated “somewhat above [the] highest storm or spring tides.”Footnote ²⁴ Taking into account that the flood at the novel's end is meant to be especially severe and, as I discuss below, is strictly speaking not caused by a storm but rather by a biannual tidal pattern, Mr. Tulliver's position would indeed seem to be peritidal: within the tidal basin, but on its edges. Though estuaries did not occupy a prominent place in the Victorian imagination, the exception was the Thames Estuary (perhaps most memorably depicted at the beginning of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness). The nineteenth-century literary evocation of that estuary and its adjacent coastline, according to Len Platt, followed a tradition beginning in the seventeenth century of associating the Thames and its flow to the sea with London and its metropolitan status as the center of the British Empire.Footnote ²⁵ While also evoking international realms, Eliot's provincial estuary does not point solely outward. Rather, the St. Ogg's estuary negotiates between the wider world and agrarian rootedness.

Eliot's novel performs this negotiation by attending to the different types of flow associated with the Floss and the North Sea, extensively describing the hydrography in which these flows intermingle and delineating the consequences of estuarial ecology for communal life in St. Ogg's. From the outset, Eliot delineates the inland current and tidal patterns of the area around St. Ogg's and Dorlcote Mill, patterns that are characteristic specifically of estuaries. According to coastal environmental specialist Terry R. Healy, “Central to the concept [of an estuary] is that estuaries are the tidal mouths of rivers.” Healy settles on “tidal river” as a term to describe the freshwater half of an estuary and the effects its sea exposure has on its flow and water level.Footnote ²⁶ This description typifies the St. Ogg's hydrography from the very beginning of Eliot's novel. Recall the novel's first sentence: “A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace.” Here, at the tidal mouth of a river, the sea meets the current at the site of an estuary, well within the rising and falling tide. The narrator subsequently broadens the perspective to move us to the edges of the tidal zone: “Far away on each hand stretch the rich pastures and the patches of dark earth, made ready for the seed of broad-leaved green crops, or touched already with the tint of the tender-bladed autumn-sown corn” (9). As the view of the area broadens, the seasonality of agriculture is drawn closer to the movement of the estuary's conjoined flows. Within sight of but somewhat distanced from the site of aquatic entanglement, the narrator introduces the Ripple and Dorlcote Mill, expanding the water table and adding a nontidal freshwater element to the scene: “Just by the red-roofed town the tributary Ripple flows with a lively current into the Floss.” Significantly, this is the only time that “current” is used in the novel to refer directly to the movement of freshwater until the flood in the dénouement. (The novel intermediately uses “current” to refer to strong emotion and at times metaphorically uses aquatic imagery to convey the vicissitudes of sentiment.)Footnote ²⁷ After the narrator cuts into the scene—“I remember those large dipping willows … I remember the stone bridge”—the mill that is close to the Floss, but not strictly speaking on the Floss, is named: “And this is Dorlcote Mill” (9). The narrator's movement outward from the port to the mill tracks a shift from estuarial to riparian hydrodynamics. This shift adds an ecological valence to the physical remove of Dorlcote Mill from the river Floss and the St. Ogg's estuary into which the Floss flows. Mr. Tulliver's peritidal mill and the Ripple, to which he lays his riparian claim, are directly adjacent to the tide and the maritime exposure it provides, and yet he cannot see the oceanic waters flowing into town. His inability or unwillingness to see the town as a port with significance to global trade, along with his lack of concern with the development of Pivart's irrigation works and the shipping and development projects of Guest & Co, blind him to the ecological changes in and injection of outside capital into the region his family has called home for generations. Because the area's hydrography is estuarial rather than unidirectional, the face of St. Ogg's social world changes, and so do the rules of the “cock-fight” of the law, causing him to lose his lawsuit and the mill. In essence, he commits the most basic mistake about the ocean: don't turn your back on the tide.

This reading is not meant to unduly skewer Mr. Tulliver for not having a coastal geologist's understanding of tidal cycles commensurate with his understanding of the cycles of the wheat harvest. Rather, Eliot analogizes the seasonality of agriculture with the seasonality of the particular flood pattern of the river on which she modeled the Floss. As Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley, and Howard Thomas claim, “The Mill on the Floss is as much a tidal novel as it is an arable one,” adopting “[t]he Floss's status as a tidal river” as the primary lens through which they view their inquiry. While Archer, Turley, and Thomas view the tidal-and-arable dynamic more thematically than formally, they go to great lengths to demonstrate Eliot's extensive research into Lincolnshire's tidal hydrography. According to the authors, Eliot traveled to Gainsborough to observe a “tidal bore,” the biannual event where the river rises by around one and a half meters.Footnote ²⁸ The historical name for this is the “Aegir,” though Eliot uses the Old English spelling “Eagre” in a morning reverie that references Tom and Maggie's collective knowledge of the event:

The long sentence that constitutes this passage is characterized by an uneasy combination of conditional speculation (“they would always live together and be fond of each other”) and a subordinated, generalized past tense (“Tom was always seeing the water-rats, while Maggie gathered the purple plumy tops of the reeds”). Though sandwiched between two em dashes, the periodic flood (“the awful Eagre”) is one of the only parts of the reverie not couched in an uncertain conditional tense. By naming the Eagre, Eliot's narrator presents local flooding as an integral part of the folk knowledge of local residents.Footnote ²⁹

In this reverie, the narrator mixes Maggie's and Tom's consciousnesseses together, like two types of interflowing waters. Despite this intermixing, the two characters retain their individual perspectives: Maggie picks aesthetically pleasing reed tops while Tom casts his eyes downward to the aquatic fauna. Thus, the two perspectives are subtly differentiated while still intermixed, like the saline and the fresh waters of the estuary. In the sentence following the reverie's evocation of the Eagre—the only such mention of this named flood in the novel—Tom's and Maggie's conjoined thoughts link a sense of the global to the evocation of the estuarial. The reference to the Eagre is one of the only times before the ending when the novel references variances in the water level, and even here, only the surface level changes; no reference is made to the water itself as having depth. In The Mill on the Floss, both the townspeople and external interlopers interact primarily with the water's surface, further revealing how the ecology's openness is closed off from many of the characters in the novel, even those whose aquatic knowledge surpasses Mr. Tulliver's. Neither Tom nor Maggie, nor Pivart nor Stephen Guest, appear to have any sense of water as an ecological element with depth, or one that reconfigures social relations by changing the face of the community. Rather, both the long-tenured townspeople and the well-moneyed businessmen only see the closure of extent and power when they see the port's waters. The depth of the water not only makes the flood that much more powerful and lethal; it also enables the area's navigability by those resource-bearing ships at the beginning of the novel that presage the presence and, furthermore, the endurance of Mr. Pivart, Stephen Guest, and their cohort of contemporary businessmen that thrive in “these days of rapid money-getting, when lavishness comes close on the back of want” (130). Guest & Co. apprehend the ecology incompletely, but not with the same degree of closure as Mr. Tulliver. Unlike Maggie and Tom's father, the corporation is able to see how the entanglement of the saline and the fresh can enable St. Ogg's to reach global marketplaces through the combined oceanic and inland extent of its shipping capacity. In order to fully apprehend how waterways open the ecology of St. Ogg's to catastrophic fragmentation, we must trace where exactly the estuarial flows lead once the oceanic tide has taken us inland.

The economic forces behind ecological change in St. Ogg's seek a kind of stability that the port or even rivers might promise but that the estuary cannot provide. Along with pointing to Eliot's distaste for the international capitalism that seeks to make the Tullivers’ way of life obsolete (Guest & Co. wishes to buy Dorlcote Mill and retrofit it to extract oil from Russian linseed), this tension between ecological change effected by external capital and the novel's perpetually interflowing waters stages a confrontation between the novel's two narrative modes: in the former, corporate-funded rural development drives the novel to its tragic ending; and in the latter, the one emphasized here, the entanglement of estuarial form promotes an antiteleological openness to periodic return, to the states of collapse and chaos that inflect ecological life. In her powerful analysis of water flow and energy systems in The Mill on the Floss, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller claims that the characters’ inability to fully comprehend the energy systems drawn from their surroundings testifies to the limits of individual consciousness of ecological time. “Humans are ill-equipped to understand the longer temporal arcs of the energy systems they use,” Miller writes, and after the flood at the novel's end, when “Eliot's narrator is poised between the future and the past,” the novel demands that an ideal reader also inhabit these multiple temporalities.Footnote ³⁰ While Miller is more focused on temporality than I am, her analysis provides a compelling account of the structural intersections that escape the notice of its characters and, extending her point, further elude the unidirectional mode of reading that derives meaning only from the fact of the flood itself. The estuarial form of Eliot's novel narratively encompasses both the friction between the time horizons of bodies of water (long) and human action (short) as well as the flood's potential for cyclical return.

“The Marks of the Past Rending”

Estuaries are interesting not only because they entangle but because they lead to two different places. While Eliot is invested in the maritime exposure of her provincial port, ultimately her novel is an inland novel. Therefore, a discussion of the estuary necessitates following ship traffic from the North Sea, through the port, and farther inland through shipping lanes as the ships take goods to market. According to Kreisel, the flood that wells up from these waterways “is an end to both the ‘economic’ and ‘romantic’ plots,” and the novel's voyages inland begin anticipating the dénouement as they bring economics and romance closer together (however unfortunate these voyages turn out).Footnote ³¹ As economists tell us, economics is all about the allocation of scarce resources, and if The Mill on the Floss has an idea of what a scarce resource is, it isn't a precious metal, and neither is it linseed, coal, nor flax. Rather, the most precious resource in the novel is the inland navigability of the peritidal and upstream waterways that connect the seaborne ships and their cargoes with larger markets in Britain. When coal, linseed, and timber make their way inland from the North Sea, the ability of ships to bear these commodities farther into the Midlands depends on the depth, width, and extent of inland waterways that can be repurposed into shipping lanes. But voyages inland are also dangerous. As distance from the St. Ogg's estuary increases, social bonds loosen and the ability to rely on the rules by which the St. Ogg's community typically operates is attenuated. Though estuarial entanglement has its own perils, its enfolding of characters into communal relations protects them from the boundary conditions they encounter out in the wide inland world.

This is where Mr. Tulliver's idea of “a river's a river” comes back around with an improbable insight into what, exactly, these businessmen are doing in the mill owner's corner of the English countryside. His concern that Mr. Pivart's irrigation system would lessen the amount of water available for Dorlcote Mill misjudges the sheer amount of water in a robust river system in the first place, as discussed above. Though Mr. Tulliver appears to have a valid legal complaint with Mr. Pivart in terms of his downstream water rights, he likely does not have a valid hydrographic one. What actually does threaten the area's ecology is the vast extent of the system of inland shipping and recreation pathways and canals used and maintained by businesses like Guest & Co. In other words, the water rights Mr. Tulliver cares about are not the same ones Guest & Co. cares about; while the former wants to maintain a certain level of downstream flow, the latter is interested in shipping and transportation pathways to facilitate moving goods farther inland. Because these waterways are deep enough to be navigable, the water table in this area is high, and therefore the volume of tidal waters the estuary must contend with—and is unable to—during the flood is so heavy that the deluge becomes a catastrophe and washes the mill and the plot away. Just as the Lincolnshire that Eliot toured showed her tidal rivers she could adapt into the Floss, so did her native Warwickshire feature many of these shipping canals that she could adapt into the Guest & Co. network.

Images of these canals and the “glitter of coal” that could be carried on them were instilled in Eliot from an early age. Eliot's father, Robert Evans, managed the properties of the aristocratic Newdigates, and in a recent critical biography of the writer, Nancy Henry describes the canals within the Newdigate estate itself that connected the property's coal-mining operations to a vast canal system throughout England:

Eliot's interest in connecting the rural with the global emanates from the primary ecological feature of The Mill on the Floss. The ships at the novel's opening represent, in Henry's formulation, the “connect[ion] […] with the rest of the world” on the maritime side of the estuary. In order to widen this network of provincial connections, Eliot establishes commercial relationships to the rest of Britain along the novel's inland shipping lanes. It is not enough for Guest & Co. to simply receive the linseed from Russia for extraction at their oil mills. The oil must then be moved via a secondary connection to markets within Britain. According to Andreas Malm, the English Midlands and coastal Scotland in the 1820s and ’30s saw vast experimentation in the development of inland waterways to increase water power for mill owners. Eliot's novel looks back on this very period and imagines how provincial ecology would change if, instead of prioritizing the production capacity of mills, provincial developers had realized that water-powered mills would soon be superseded by mills powered by steam engines—fired by that glittering coal—and thus shipping and transportation capacity was inland water's true value and its danger.Footnote ³³ In this way, Guest & Co.’s plans to wrest Dorlcote Mill from Mr. Tulliver and transform it into one of their oil mills is but one instantiation of a much broader program of anthropogenic changes forced on the Lincolnshire countryside by this and other agents of global capital.

Shipping waterways surface at a crucial moment in the narrative: during Maggie's inland voyage with Stephen Guest, which turns into an abduction and a marriage proposal made to a woman under duress. The narrator describes Stephen rowing the pair inland: “They glided rapidly along, to Stephen's rowing, helped by the backward-flowing tide” (484). Unlike the Floss flowing toward the estuary and the sea—or even the small but enthusiastic Ripple contributing to it—the flow of this inland waterway takes them farther away from St. Ogg's and therefore away from the ecological context of their meeting and initial courtship. Though the chapter title is “Borne Along by the Tide,” the narrator specifies that Maggie and Stephen are borne along by a “backward-flowing tide” (477, 484). By navigating along this third, unnatural tide, moving unidirectionally away from St. Ogg's, Stephen closes the pair off from the openness of the St. Ogg's ecology. Removed from her home community's interpenetration with the natural world, Maggie is that much more vulnerable, and as the day stretches into night and the vessel moves farther inland, the voyage becomes more disastrous. Stephen flags down a wind-powered Dutch shipping vessel that takes them to a town uninvitingly named Mudport, from where they return to St. Ogg's. Stephen recalls that “the steamer to Mudport” had previously passed them, suggesting that even though he is the scion of the area's most famous incarnation of global capitalism, the local coal-powered aquatic industry sees him and Maggie as insignificant (488).

Before the rescue becomes necessary, Stephen professes that his goal is to take the two of them to Torby and then to Scotland via York to be married, presumably at Gretna Green (485). Stephen and Maggie's ability to travel north, away from the sea and against natural tides, testifies to the shipping system's extent and the effacement of conscious decision-making both from the scene of the voyage-turned-abduction and from the flow of the water itself. According to Hensley, Stephen and Maggie's voyage “is the crisis point in the novel's historical plot, where the old language of force and of possession has come into irresolvable conflict with the new voluntarist idiom of consent, of equal relations among sovereign agents.”Footnote ³⁴ Far from the novel's predominant ecological situation where the Floss and the North Sea meet, a one-way trip to an irresolvable crisis becomes possible, a crisis only abated by returning to the openness of the estuarial scene. The crisis of the flood, by contrast, passes when the water level returns to normal (according to seasonal rather than tidal cyclicality). Hensley's comparison of “consent” and “equal relations” refers to the contrast between Maggie's strong protestations against Stephen's coercion and physical force—“‘Let me go!’ she said, in an agitated tone, flashing an indignant look at him, and trying to get her hands free. ‘You have wanted to deprive me of any choice’” (486)—and Stephen's suspect insistence that they are not, in fact, conscious actors:

Maggie listens intently but is not fooled by any of this. Stephen's account of his actions and their situation is untrustworthy, to say the least—a frustrated attempt to hijack the language of entanglement for his nefarious ends—though he does semi-accurately describe the currents underlying the physical movements of their boats. “See how the tide is carrying us out,” he says. “It will carry us on to Torby.” His description of the “backward-flowing tide” as “carrying us out” implies that the tide will carry them farther “out” into a larger body of water. This is not strictly true (except in whatever dubious, metaphorical sense he may mean as regards his imagined future with Maggie), as the waterway does not promise to widen or empty into a lake, but it does promise to take them farther inland, from Torby to York to Scotland. As the shipping lane's ability to escape the force of the Floss's tide and provide access to these northern destinations becomes apparent, Eliot begins to pepper Stephen's speech with the estuarial language of enmeshment: the “wretched entanglement” of their situation and Stephen's desire to bind themselves to each other “so that only death can part us.” Like many passages, this locution presages the final “embrace never to be parted.” In this specific location, Stephen's failed attempt to validate the bad faith of his marriage proposal by invoking “entanglement” demonstrates how the open-ecological rhetoric operative around the estuary is nullified outside of the intertidal zone. There is, after all, no community for either of them to be entangled with.

In other words, the openness of Eliot's estuarial form has its limits. Even as viewing St. Ogg's from the perspective of the water opens up the novel to a more capacious view of its ecology, it also circumscribes the limits of where in the British countryside that ecological model functions. Once Maggie returns to St. Ogg's, the only way to reconcile her with her furious brother is to entangle them in death forever (the actual “embrace never to be parted”). What matters to me about their death in the flood is not the cause but rather Eliot's depiction of their resting place. Maggie and Tom are buried in a defunct mining operation known as the Red Deeps, located among “the pleasant fields […] bounded by the murmuring Ripple” on which Dorlcote Mill was situated and since overgrown into a classic pastoral ruin: “an exhausted stone-quarry—so long exhausted that both mounds and hollows were now clothed with brambles and trees, and here and there by a stretch of grass which a few sheep kept close-nibbled” (309–10). Earlier in the novel, Maggie makes her rendezvous with Philip Wakem here against her family's wishes—even though she thinks of him fondly but not entirely romantically. The classical pastoralism of the quarry and Maggie's meeting a man she holds dear strongly presages the novel's ending—not the flood, but the postdiluvian conclusion, in which “Nature repairs her ravages—but not all” (543). Maggie and Tom are buried “among the trees of the Red Deeps, where the buried joy seemed still to hover” (544). In this conclusion, trading operations have resumed, as the “wharves and warehouses on the Floss were busy again, with echoes of eager voices, with hopeful lading and unlading,” suggesting that the port and inland shipping network survive the flood or are rebuilt (543). The details of the burial site and the shipping network's continued operation are linked for Eliot. The Coventry Canal, on which Eliot likely based the St. Ogg's waterways, had a branch that served the quarry at Griff Hollows, the model for the Red Deeps. That branch is no longer operable, having gone extinct like the Red Deeps itself.Footnote ³⁵

Burying an entangled brother and sister, “two bodies that were found in close embrace,” in a single grave in a defunct quarry reverses the process of extracting stone—or glittering coal—from the ground (543). While the bodies from prior geologic ages have turned into those rocks valued by international commerce, ones that might one day find themselves on ships passing through one estuary or another, the burial starts this process over. In so doing, Tom and Maggie have traversed time scales across three levels of ecological cyclicality, from a diurnal cycle (the tide), to the biannual (the flood), to the geologic (their interment). It would, however, be a misapprehension of the present St. Ogg's ecology to say that the siblings return to the Red Deeps only to be extracted in a distant geologic age. At St. Ogg's, no extraction actually takes place, just refinement at the mill and transit through the port. By enabling the trade in fossil fuel but not actually participating in that trade, Eliot's community straddles a line between engagement with global trade and rural isolation. In standing by while the beginnings of globalization and anthropogenic climate disaster take shape around them—that is, by failing to fully commit to what McDonagh would define as nineteenth-century provincialism: linking the rural with the global—St. Ogg's fails to adapt estuarial entanglement to grapple with the ongoing catastrophe of the present. The forces of the market return just as the waters go down—though most of the Tulliver family does not survive, the “eager voices” and their “hopeful lading and unlading” do—and the ecological scars endure for years.

If, according to McDonagh's argument, the novelistic provincialism of the mid-nineteenth century was characterized by an awareness of “emerging global networks,” then The Mill on the Floss provides an interesting test case. When the novel appears in 1860, as the midcentury is just reaching its tail end, its setting looks back to around the late 1820s or early 1830s, that not-quite-early-nineteenth-century, not-quite-Victorian era when a sense of “global networks” was indeed still “emerging.” As such critics of globalization as Tanya Agathocleous and Bruce Robbins would point out, the internationalization of the marketplace, especially in the early to mid-nineteenth century, stood in uneasy relation to discourses of imperialism—with their destabilizing tendency toward armed conflict—and of cosmopolitanism—with its potential pretensions toward a unifying universalism giving cover to global capitalism.Footnote ³⁶ By failing to adapt to its globally situated status, St. Ogg's is unprepared for the modern condition of recurring ecological catastrophe. As Jed Esty argues, developing a sense of one's place on the world-historical stage is the primary demarcation between “premodern St. Ogg's” and the region's accession to nineteenth-century modernity.Footnote ³⁷ By setting estuarial entanglement at the ecological heart of the novel, Eliot tests how far outward the negotiations between different types of open relationality—connection to the wider world but local isolation; modern for the era of its setting but historical in the time of its composition—can go. In their failure to attain a more open understanding, the characters of The Mill on the Floss commit themselves to a premodern St. Ogg's despite their living in modern times. The friction between those time scales speaks to global capital's alienation of the local residents from their environment and from one another, all but ensuring the recurrence of future ecological catastrophes.

The outburst of violence at the novel's end erases characters (Maggie and Tom) and buildings (Dorlcote Mill) that do not further the “hopeful lading and unlading” of these waning decades of what Imre Szeman would call “steam capitalism.”Footnote ³⁸ Nixon has famously called ecological change that adversely affects the poor “slow violence,” but the violence of the flood obviously comes very quickly.Footnote ³⁹ The most damaging violence in The Mill on the Floss is one that comes, if not slowly, then at least both regularly and unpredictably: the recurrence of ecological catastrophe at an unspecified interval. Accordingly, Eliot describes the aftermath with a weary perspective that suggests the townspeople will see this sight again: “Nature repairs her ravages—but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again—the parted hills are left scarred: if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair” (543). The uncertainty of whose eyes are dwelling on the past casts the communal memory of the catastrophe as partial and therefore mutable. As a part of the ecological form centered on the estuary, the St. Oggs's community is drawn into the chaos that results when linkages between natural and social systems fray.

Reading the novel from the perspective of its water does more than just raise the visibility of a peculiar aquatic feature in St. Ogg's. Rather, reading the novel hydrographically shows how the entanglement of different kinds of water flow and social life opens up the novel's ecology to those harsh boundary conditions that accompany rural development and environmental catastrophe. In the Anthropocene, literary-critical reading practices should cast a skeptical eye toward narratives that present a single upheaval as its endpoint. How the ecology bears those “marks of […] past rending” and how those marks are remembered matter more than the event itself. If The Mill on the Floss has a tragic element, it is the knowledge that the St. Ogg's estuary will, some years from the end of the novel, see its interflowing waters rise up over its banks again.