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Intelligence as Deception: The Mill on the Floss

1965; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 4-Part1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/460932

1938-1530

George Levine,

Political Theory and Influence

With only small exceptions, The Mill on the Floss can be seen as adequately representative of even the most mature of George Eliot's art—morally energetic yet unsentimentally perceptive about the meaning of experience. Like all of her works, it is thoroughly coherent and gains its coherence from a unified vision. But the vision, here as elsewhere, is, I would argue, incomplete. There were elements in experience, that is, which she was never fully able to assimilate and which, as was true of most of the major Victorian writers, she was genuinely unable to see. She pushed the boundaries of Victorian experience as far as any of her contemporaries and moved to the brink from which one can observe the modern sensibility, but inevitably she pulled back.