Not merely a newly acquired entity within
the Red Deeps assemblage, described, made, and animated by others, Maggie actually
animates the thick present herself, into
a mode of hetero-linear refusal through her authorization of The Pirate’s Minna Troil as a bog woman
role model. While reading, Maggie wants “to avenge Rebecca and Flora MacIvor,
and Minna and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones” (Eliot 348). By consulting
Walter Scott’s The Pirate (1822) and
denying its linear wholeness, Maggie authorizes incompleteness as a modality
not just for Minna, but for herself. When she first encounters Philip Wakem, he
happily offers the second volume of The
Pirate so that she can finally get on with finishing it. However, Maggie
refuses: “O, I began that once; I read to where Minna is walking with
Cleveland, and I could never get to read the rest” (Eliot 323). Rather than
finish the novel and accept whatever ending Scott chooses for Minna, Maggie
simply stops reading.[1] I argue that Maggie’s refusal to finish The Pirate is a queer-feminist form of
serial engagement. Maggie’s choice to stop reading, offers a means of refusing
the tropic narratives of women like her. By maintaining the scene of Minna and
Cleveland walking by the rough sea, the story remains indefinitely in the
present and incomplete—Cleveland never dies and Minna never refuses her passion
and imagination for a long life of familial duty and “saintly renunciation”
(Lovesey 323). In refusing to follow the rules and read the novel in its
entirety—from beginning to end, Maggie co-opts Scott’s narrative and instead
authorizes her own bog woman blueprint.
On this blueprint, Maggie not only refuses
to authorize the development of Scott’s ending but also re-locates happiness in
the present, offering up her own definition of what bog woman happiness looks
like. Without finishing the novel, Maggie easily anticipates the ending for a
woman after her own bog: “I went on with it in my own head, and I made several
endings; but they were all unhappy, I could never make a happy ending out of
that beginning” (Eliot 323). Each time she attempts her own
ending for Minna, “they were all unhappy,” presumably because they could not
and did not maintain that present and unfinished image of Minna and Cleveland
walking together. Now let’s do what Maggie could not do. Let’s use her lens as
a feminist methodology—one in which happiness is defined by Minna, and her in
media res relationship with Cleveland—to read Scott’s ending of The Pirate:
The
high-minded and imaginative Minna, she, gifted with
such depth of feeling and enthusiasm, yet doomed to see both blighted in early
youth, because, with the inexperience of a disposition equally romantic and
ignorant, she had built the fabric of her happiness on a quicksand instead of a
rock,—was she, could she be happy? Reader, she was happy. (Scott 335)
Minna does not maintain her “depth of feeling and enthusiasm,”
those original qualities that characterize her, through the end of the novel.
The narrator ends this point with the firm, declarative, “she was happy” as an attempt to convince us,
the reader, that in spite of building
“her happiness on quicksand” he is certain of Minna’s final condition as happy
and alone, with her beloved dead. With Maggie’s methodology in mind, I do not
buy his reading of Minna. The
narrator makes a moralistic call for the environmental material Minna should
have used to build her happiness: stone. Stone is something secure and stable.
It is not sticky. It does not latch onto, change, or transform, compared to
quicksand, an unstable and thick compound of sand and water.
Lo and behold then, Minna
emerges from the thickness, a Maggie-authorized bog woman whose mode of
existence establishes a blueprint for Maggie’s own feminist methodology. Minna’s
happiness materializes as a boggy compound that causes one to be stuck and
unable to move forward, putting Minna, metaphorically, in an interdependent
relationship with her quicksand happiness: one characterized by sympoiesis.[2] To
define Minna in a sympoietic relationship with her quicksand happiness suggests
that those properties of quicksand—to stay stuck and to stay present—are ones
attached to Minna and extend her and from her, rather than from the narrator
or her hetero-patriarchal society’s moralistic judgments. Through Maggie’s
lens, Minna’s happiness is not
“saintly renunciation,” but the non-ending Maggie authorizes for her, allowing
Minna to stay with her “feeling and enthusiasm” and with Cleveland near the
rough sea. Maggie’s reading of Minna becomes the ultimate blueprint for her own
life. Maggie builds a feminist methodology for resisting her hetero-linear
society through the act of reading novels without finishing them. Her boggy
lens re-locates happiness in the unfinished and incomplete present, within
Minna, and by extension, within herself.
Much like her engagement with Minna and The Pirate, Maggie does not simply
devolve into a mode of stasis, of nonprogression, and nonproductivity—she does
not merely fall in repose, but actively and willfully refuses to produce and/or
produce properly as a woman in St. Ogg’s society. Of course Maggie cannot camp
out forever with the Scotch firs, the stone quarry, and Philip Wakem.
Eventually she must leave the Red Deeps. And she does. Tom bans her secret
meetings with Philip Wakem, and the Red Deeps themselves seem to almost retreat
and disappear entirely from the novel, except for the carrier, Maggie. She
seems fine. No itch or rash or irritation, yet, Maggie remains affected and I would argue,
metaphorically infected by her
contact with the Red Deeps’ thick present. She is a living bog woman, uprooted
from the Red Deeps and planted firmly in the ground of the hetero-linear
trajectory that St. Oggs and Dorlcote Mill portend. In a sentence later omitted
from publication, Eliot’s narrator aptly frames Maggie as an unbounded subject:
“a girl of no startling appearance, and who will never be a Sappho or Madame
Roland or anything else that the world takes wide note of, may still hold
forces within her as the living
plant-seed does, which will make a way for themselves, often in a
shattering, violent matter” (Eliot 262; my emphasis). In this way, the transplant
metaphor is made real. Maggie gains an ecological multiplicity as a “living
plant-seed”; it’s dispersal, and by extension, Maggie’s own, recalls the
languages of sympoiesis, assemblage, and animacy previously associated only
with the Red Deeps.
Maggie’s re-entrance into St. Ogg’s
society then no longer makes sense within heteropatriarchal terminology and
relational organizations. Without Maggie’s living bog woman methodology
incubated within the Red Deeps, readers cannot come to understand her
relationships with Philip Wakem and Stephen Guest. In other words, these
relationships, read through the language of the heteropatriarchy come to be
understood as scandalous, while read through the language of ecological assemblages
and animacies come to no longer be understood as dependent.[3] When Tom releases Maggie
from her promise to not see Philip Wakem, he explains why: “while my father was
living, I felt bound to use the utmost power over you…But now I must leave you
to your own choice. You wish to be independent; you told me so after my father’s
death. My opinion is not changed. If you think of Philip as a lover again, you
must give up me” (Eliot 400). Tom attempts to use heteropatriarchal language to
not only define Maggie’s relationship with Philip but also to separately threaten
her relationship with himself. Though he suggests Maggie desires to be “independent,”
he re-locates Maggie’s dependency elsewhere—not on himself, but on Philip, “as
a lover,” thus maintaining her within her proper social placement. Yet, Maggie
no longer interacts within this heteropatriarchal economy of exchange—of a
progression towards male dependency. Her relationship with Philip never seems to get anywhere: as Stephen
Guest points out for confirmation, “You are engaged to Philip Wakem,” Maggie
responds in a different register: “I consider myself engaged to him—I don’t mean
to marry any one else” (Eliot 452). Rather than simply confirm Stephen’s point
in the affirmative, she qualifies it in a way that indefinitely prolongs
completion of the marital process. As readers know, Maggie never marries Philip
or Stephen. By remaining engaged but never married, she never completes the
heterosexual process that defines gendered relations. Instead, Maggie’s answer
collapses distinctions between the heteropatriarchal categories of “engagement”
and “marriage,” resulting in those categories as no longer disparate, singular,
and linear. Within her living bog woman
methodology, Philip comes to exist in relation to Maggie in an entirely new
way. Not a brother, husband or friend, but as an indefinitely present lover/nonlover,
a category of no means within the organizing principles of heteronormative
re/production and yet a category very legible within Maggie’s new language of
assemblage.
[1] As an
illustrative anecdote, over the past year in serial television, the trope,
“bury your gays” went viral. The trope defines the common practice of
unnecessarily killing queer characters more often than white, hetero, cis
characters. Although not a new trope, new ways of resisting the trope have also
surfaced, including simply refusing to continue to watch. By refusing to watch
these deaths, I argue that viewers are able to maintain a living present for
queer characters the show. See, Williams: “How Kids On The Internet Are
Rejecting The ‘Bury Your Gays’ Trope.”
[2] Donna Haraway describes sympoiesis as ‘“making with.”
Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or
self-organizing…Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and
extends it” (58).
[3]The anonymous
writer of “Women and Children in America” in the 1867 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine infers that “nothing
in the world—at least to the male eye—equals in pleasantness the face and form of
a bashful virtuous woman, looking up to a man for support and guidance,” and
that nothing is more disagreeable than a woman who is “too ignorant…to accept
the place that properly belongs to her in the social system” (82-23). Contemporary
readers can understand that Rather than a social system then, Maggie now
belongs to an ecological assemblage and any attempt to organize her within
those previous terms of heteropatriarchal dependence no longer make sense.
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