Week 8: Mill on the Floss, the thick present, and queer environments

I have started writing my paper for Victorian Media and the Novel. I want to start with Nancy Armstrong commentary about The Mill on the Floss because I'm thinking about the text through a queer and anthropocentric lens to understand Maggie's rejection of the hetero-linear trajectory laid out for her by her St. Ogg's society as a willing choice in "staying with the trouble"; her stuck-ness is, I argue, a different orientation and mode of existence; she is no longer oriented toward the future, but rather within the present, a present that remains even after she has died, in the queer beside of The Red Deeps, which has been critically overlooked as possessing much significance in the novel. I argue for the ways in which she willingly develops an interdependent relationship with her natural environment that proliferates or makes visible her "longing for a full life." The Red Deeps, which literally runs along beside Dorlcote Mill, St. Ogg's and her hetero-linear trajectory becomes a refuge that Maggie can temporarily step into and off of her hetero-linear path, and exist in her unfinished mode, building queer kinship ties and not worry about her society. Significantly, The Red Deeps remains a queer beside even when Maggie is not there or even when Maggie has died. It is structurally--spatio/temporally--an elongated present that simply awaits its human catalyst (whose trace remains beyond markers of her life and death)...much like the Lincolnshire bogwoman geologist Charles Lyell discusses in The Principles of Geology. The Red Deeps exists on a slant bank and bears the marks of an old stone quarry that has slowly been overgrown with vegetation.

Armstrong has this to say about The Mill on the Floss: "The heroine experiences this force as a “stronger presence that seemed to bear her along without any act of her own will, like the added self which comes with the sudden exalting influence of a strong tonic.”16 Against her will, this “stronger presence” pulls Maggie Tulliver into the same category with all the other potentially homeless women who pile up across the century from Austen to Eliot—wherever there is moral judgment to be made or psychological depth to be teased into consciousness" (539). Armstrong suggests Maggie has no will of her own and I actually argue that she willingly chooses to be stuck in the present as means of not opposing or conflicting with the future-oriented St. Ogg's (what you do in the present relates to a series of points along a linear path--womanhood, marriage, children, etc) but rather as a new way of engaging the present because she cannot have the future she wants. Rather than a death drive, it manifests in a longing that transcends her corporeal form and in leaving us as readers wanting/hoping that it is Maggie who has been narrating the novel even though this is an impossibility, she continues on, always unfinished, but ever-present. Her present saturates the text and we stay with Maggie even beyond her death--that longing as an excess that exceeds time. The only way it can ossify is through her contact with The Red Deeps.

Here are three critical works I'm looking at:

Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ, vol. 12, no. 4, 2006, pp. 543-574.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. Duke UP, 2015.

Luciano, Dana and Mel Y. Chen. “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” GLQ, vol. 21, no. 23, 2015, pp. 182-207.

Here is my tentative thesis:

I argue that Maggie’s interdependent encounter with The Red Deeps puts her into contact with her mode of being as that of a living bog woman: a longing characterized as a “thick present.” Maggie roots herself in that “thick present” beyond The Red Deeps as her actions from here on out seem to be even more overtly shaped by a simultaneous refusal of the hetero-linear patriarchy and a longing for death. Understanding Maggie’s mode of existence in this way enables readers to not only see her existence as beside and separate from that hetero-linear patriarchy; but, even more radically, to imagine her present existence without relying on those terminologies in the first place.

Here are my opening pages, thus far: 

In his 1833 Principles of Geology, Charles Lyell conveys a peculiar eco-temporal phenomenon of the fleshly body:

In June, 1747, the body of a woman was found six feet deep, in a peat-moor in the Isle of Axholm, in Lincolnshire[1]. The antique sandals on her feet afforded evidence of her having been buried there for many ages: yet her nails, hair, and skin, are described as having shown hardly any marks of decay (722)

Lyell describes how the woman’s physical body seems to transcend time—being both “antique” and only recently dead, as if she has remained, quite literally, bogged down in the present. Her body, found six feet deep, remains protected and preserved in situ, under thick layers of peat, natural vegetation; the peat becomes a naturally occurring temporal refuge. In this way, the body becomes protected by the “thick present” of the peat moss (Haraway 1). The word “refuge” comes from the middle French, refuge for “protector,” ecopormorphising the peat moss. Rather than simply a shield, or shelter, the peat moss as protector takes on human qualities as it interacts with, and contaminates her body causing her body to take on some of the conditional characteristics of the surrounding environment—acidic water, low temperatures and a lack of oxygen. The preservation of this thick present also depends on the body no longer being presently alive. Rather than be juxtaposed, “the categories of human/nonhuman rub on, and against each other, generating friction and leakage,” and cause the woman to be both present and not alive; dead, yet unfinished; intact as human, but physically altered; the woman’s body always there, here, and yonder (Luciano 186). Though she shows “hardly any marks of decay,” the environment bears and carries her trace across time.  

            Lincolnshire, with all its marsh, fen, embankments and flooding, is the perfect place for a woman to get stuck. I do not mean to suggest that Lincolnshire is the most ideal place to be stuck as a woman, but rather, if a woman wants to root herself to the earth and not move, particularly forward, she really could do no better than Lincolnshire. Perhaps it is no surprise then that George Eliot sets her novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860) and its own sort of living bog woman, Maggie Tulliver in such precarious grounds. Unlike Lyell’s bog woman, Maggie is never physically stuck in place, per se. Instead, she moves along in her provincial life but never progresses on the hetero-linear trajectory outlined for her by her social environment at St. Ogg’s. She finds love, but refuses to marry Philip Wakem, yet continues to share a friendship with him anyway; she finds love again with Stephen Guest, her cousin Lucy’s courter, and runs away with him, but refuses to save social face, rejecting elopement. As a child, she cuts her hair, determined to destroy the future possibility of ringlets, of womanhood, of her mother’s expectations. At every point on the path set out for her, Maggie resists womanhood and marriage, those expected, proper feminine familial duties. Yet the future, like those ringlets, grows back and returns in sight. Maggie chooses to look down, up, and around, but not ahead, to only stay with her troubles.[2] When she refuses to look ahead, she finds herself willingly stuck beside[3] Dorlcote Mill, in her own refuge, the often critically overlooked Red Deeps.

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[1] Charles Lyell, in Principles of Geology, describes Lincolnshire, where George Eliot sets The Mill on the Floss, as a “maritime district”:

that “consists chiefly of lands that lie below the level of the sea, being protected by embankments. Some of the fens were embanked and drained by the Romans; but after their departure the sea returned, large tracts were covered with beds of silt, containing marine shells, now again converted into productive lands. Many dreadful catastrophes are recorded by incursions of the sea, whereby several parishes have been at different times overwhelmed (305)

[2] This is a play on Haraway’s concept of “staying with the trouble” which “does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (1).

[3] Eve Sedgwick, in Touching Feeling, points out the importance of the preposition “beside” as a different form of orientation that “permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object” (8). The beside becomes a tool for widening the division between past/future, making spatiotemporal room for the present.