I’m happy that APS Together is offering another group read with Yiyun Li. I enjoyed Charles Dickens’ Bleak House so much last November. As the nights grow long, it seems natural to dive into another weighty Victorian novel.
The Mill on the Floss tells the story of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, a sibling pair whose father is a miller. According to her father, Maggie can read “almost as well as the parson,” takes after his side of the family, and is “too [a}cute for a woman.” Tom is more like his mother, and “hasn’t got the right sort o’ brains for a smart fellow.” Nevertheless, it’s Tom who’s slated to further his education.
I was stunned by nine-year-old Maggie’s character. I met her on page when she was reading in a corner of the room and her parents are talking to a male guest charged with finding an appropriate school for Tom. When asked, she describes an illustration—”a dreadful picture” of medieval witch-hunting, when women were thown into water and those who floated were considered witches and executed and those who drowned were innocent, but dead. She had been readingThe History of the Devil, by Daniel Defoe, “not quite the right book for a little girl.”
In a later episode, after quarrelling with Tom, she seeks refuge in her home’s attic and pulls out a fetish doll, which she damages to vent her frustrations.
Spirited, feminist, and instinctively powerful. That’s Maggie. Eliot warns readers in chapter four that sometimes in adulthood things change. The smart, lively girl becomes a passive woman. The boy who struggles to learn to read becomes a man who dominates the household. Sigh. No, please not this for Maggie! I’m already fond of her passionate nature and deep awareness of injustice.