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The Wit of Biblical Allusion in The Mill on the Floss

T . S. Eliot’s famous dictum about the difference between poet and person applies neatly in one respect to George Eliot, or Mary Ann Evans. Electing a nom de plume, though it can have many motives, signifies the elector’s conscious sense of great difference. The aspect of this consciousness of difference I will explore here concerns Eliot’s persistent habit, long after her apostasy, of producing narratives that seem to be exemplars of Protestant orthodoxy. A particularly critical feature of that orthodoxy—evident not only in Eliot but everywhere in Victorian fiction—will be my theme: scriptural allusion. My emphasis will, however, be on Eliot’s seeming orthodoxy. She deploys biblical allusion deftly to allow a double reading of her text as orthodox or apostate. A fine instance is the close of The Mill on the Floss, which pointedly quotes 2 Samuel 1:23.This rhetorical flourish seems to bid us gloss Maggie Tulliver’s life through the dark glass of scripture. To tease out some of the implications of Eliot’s gesture requires the full context of the close of David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan: