Thinking through animacies, ecological assemblages, and nonproductivity in Mill on the Floss

Chen's article really helped me work through a huge chunk of my paper this week. Rather than describe, I'll just include the chunk I wrote with the footnotes and language Chen gave me. Basically, I wanted a way to suggest how Maggie's mode of being resists hetero-linear trajectories by refusing to move along that path. Animacy helped me to suggest that a different way of categorizing objects/beings is happening within the Red Deeps (a forest location with a no longer in use stone quarry) that is not based of life/death as well as describing how the integrity of objects (bodies, things and modes of production) do not maintain singularity, but can connect in an assemblage-like fashion. Basically the non-productive, thick present way of being that constitutes the Red Deeps is something that rubs off on Maggie, which gives her a new way of engagement (non-engagement) with the hetero-linear trajectory her society has laid out for her. Because she has become a part of this ecological assemblage of the Red Deeps, she can mobilize that mode of existence outside of the Red Deeps--showing how this mentality characterizes her behavior after her time there; that's the next part I want to write.

The stone-quarry of the Red Deeps is mentioned only one time. Though critically overlooked, the Red Deeps and its stone-quarry offer Maggie a queer spatio-temporal site removed from her hetero-linear struggle towards womanhood at Dorlcote Mill and St. Ogg’s society at large. Stone quarry sites do not run at odds with or in resistance to those paths that are well-walked and in repeated use. They are most likely to be positioned along, beside a valley or hill.[1] The Red Deeps and its stone quarry run along the left side of Dorlcote Mill:

To a spot that lay beyond what was called the “Hill”—an insignificant rise of ground crowned by trees, lying along the side of the road which ran by the gates of Dorlcote Mill. Insignificant I call it, because in height it was hardly more than a bank…just where this line of bank sloped down again to the level, a by-road turned off and led to the other side of the rise, where it was broken into very capricious hollows and mounds by the working of 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 (316)

The narrator attempts to dismiss the area of the Red Deeps. She minimizes the size of the hill as “it was hardly more than a bank” and repeatedly ties the small-scale to a lack of significance. She does not rhetorically do what she says. The narrator’s description sprawls beyond the m-dash attached to “Hill,” extending and elongating her verbal topography as if extending and elongating the Red Deeps. But, if she does not extend the Red Deeps in actual size, then what? Eve Sedgwick points to how spacious the beside is, as it “comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping and other relations” (8). The beside represents temporal spaciousness, that is, an expansion and elongation of the present. The beside neither establishes beginnings or endings nor are those temporal bookends ever in sight. Without a concrete “finish line,” the Red Deeps remains nonproductive but animated.  

The Red Deeps offers the necessary topography and ecological materials for assembling a living bog woman; it the fosters the thick present—animated, but nonproductive—by blurring distinctions between living and nonliving materials and reframing such distinctions as interdependent animacies.[2] Though the Red Deeps contains a stone-quarry, it is exhausted, “so long exhausted” that vegetation has started to return (Eliot 318). The mode of producing stone has fallen into repose, no longer able to be a means of production, but is not dead. What I mean is, the quarry’s very existence has become part of a new ecology, has given way to the “brambles and trees,” and the “stretch of grass which a few sheep kept close nibbled,” which organizes the Red Deeps by its relationship between animate (the vegetation) and inanimate (the stone quarry) parts (Eliot 316). A previously productive stone-quarry can result in “the total destruction of the existing ecosystem,” and once fallen into nonproductivity, such a quarry’s proximity to other sources of flora and fauna, can result in an “interesting vegetation assemblage” (Gunn 169). To describe an assemblage[3] as the product of nonproductivity breaks down the internal integrity of and between corporeal bodies, and natural and manufactured things, revealing that the categories of life and death do not organize the Red Deeps and that the language of animacies comes closest to describing its processes. The stone quarry's inanimacy then, is not a permanent modality and can be called into animation with the right contact, with the right mingling of materials. The stone quarry does not merely exist on the land--distinct and disparate--crumbling and eroding away, but actually transforms the Red Deeps’ ecological, structural integrity, becoming interrelated to it. One can see this breakdown in integrity not just between the quarry’s proximity to the vegetation of the Red Deeps, but also between the Red Deeps and Maggie herself.

The spatio-temporal site of the Red Deeps does not require engagement with modes of heterosexual production to be a member, but rather by its refusal to frame modes of being in terms of production, and by extension, futurity. As she lingers within the Red Deeps, Maggie leisurely ingests “the free air” and “with her dark colouring and jet crown surmounting her tall figure, she seems to have a sort of kinship with the grand Scotch firs, at which she is looking up as if she loved them well” (Eliot 317). Maggie’s contact with the Red Deeps goes beyond simple refuge away from means of social production; her contact is, in fact, skin deep.[4] The narrator colors Maggie as a character who has the looks and ultimately the feel, of having been quickly contaminated by the Red Deeps and its taxonomy of animacies and present-ness. From ingesting the air of the Red Deeps and her seeming physical similarities with the Scotch firs, a sort of kinship and loving affect emerges towards beings—the Scotch firs and Philip Wakem—that do not belong to her biological or familial clan. Maggie develops and animates these relationships that, presumably, outside of the Red Deeps, would be required to remain inanimate or be properly scripted in terms of heterosexual production.

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[1] “Hillside and valley-side quarries are favored by the quarrying industry because it is easier and cheaper to quarry horizontally rather than downwards” (170) J. Gunn Bailey & D. Bailey: Limestone quarrying and quarry reclamation in Britain; Environmental Geology (1993) 21: 167-172

[2] Instead of asking ‘“who is alive, or dead,”’ Chen argues that we can ask ‘“what is animate, or inanimate, or less animate”’ (280).

[3] Donna Haraway describes ecological assemblages as animated: “critters interpenetrate one another, loop around and through one another, eat each other, get indigestion, and partially digest and partially assimilate one another” (58).

[4] Chen disagrees with Sara Ahmed’s point about phenomenological objects maintaining distinct and disparate integrities: “Yes, she is talking mainly about the perception of integrity, but my contention here is that percepts are to some degree bypassed, for instance, by the air itself. Standing before you, I ingest you. There is nothing fanciful about this. I am ingesting your exhaled air, your sloughed skin, and the skin of the tables, chairs and carpet in this room” (280).