4Although the three stories of Scenes of Clerical Life are mainly concerned with the life of clergymen, in the last one, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, we find an unexpected and brief reference to the story of a fallen woman. Mr Tryan the clergyman tries to comfort Janet Dempster, who seems to have lost all hope and tries to forget her misery through drink, because she is a victim of her husband’s violence. Then Mr Tryan confesses that he too once experienced absolute despair, when he realized that he had caused the ruin of Lucy, a young girl he had seduced during his college years:

• 6 George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857–58, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, ed. David Lodge (Harmondswort (...)

‘At college I had an attachment to a lovely girl of seventeen; she was very much below my own station in life, and I never contemplated marrying her; but I induced her to leave her father’s house. I did not mean to forsake her when I left college, and I quieted all scruples of conscience by promising myself that I would always take care of poor Lucy. But on my return from a vacation spent in travelling, I found that Lucy was gone—gone away with a gentleman, her neighbours said.’6

6The story of Lucy remains a mere sketch, in which the fallen woman is not even given a true identity, apart from her Christian name suggesting light and purity, and we know little about her. George Eliot’s treatment of the theme remains highly conventional, for we have the usual pattern of the seduction of an innocent girl by a gentleman, followed by neglect, prostitution and death. Yet, there is something original and interesting in this particular case: Lucy’s tragic fate has aroused a terrible sense of guilt in Tryan and led him to realize the full extent of his own responsibility. Because Lucy’s story is told by him, and followed by his own comments, the reader becomes aware of the part played by men in the seduction and fall of women. Edgar Tryan sees himself as a sinner and Lucy as his victim. The only way for him, now, to atone for his terrible sin is to try and redeem other victims.

7The story of Molly Farren, another fallen woman who plays a part in Silas Marner, is different from Lucy’s. Once again, we have the usual association between common girl and gentleman, for Molly is a mere barmaid who is involved with Godfrey Cass, the Squire’s eldest son and heir, and has even borne him a child. Yet the link between Godfrey and Molly is of a special nature: they are secretly married, although Godfrey dreads to acknowledge the fact, because it would prevent him from marrying Nancy Lammeter, a pretty young heiress.

8His secret marriage is particularly degrading: not only is Molly a barmaid, a fact which has dark moral connotations, but she drinks and she is even an opium addict. Her story remains too sketchy for the reader to decide whether these vices are the consequences of her seduction or not, however. At any rate, Godfrey’s responsibility in this marriage is perhaps less substantial than it seems, for the narrator suggests that it was at least partially the result of a trap laid by his jealous younger brother Dunstan, who dreamed of becoming the Squire’s heir in the event of Godfrey’s disinheritance:

• 8 George Eliot, Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe, 1861, ed. Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, (...)

It was an ugly story of low passion, delusion, and waking from delusion, which needs not to be dragged from the privacy of Godfrey’s bitter memory. He had long known that the delusion was partly due to a trap laid for him by Dunstan, who saw in his brother’s degrading marriage the means of gratifying at once his jealous hate and his cupidity.8

9When Molly dies in the snow near Silas Marner’s cottage, after she has taken an overdose of laudanum, she is found wearing a wedding-ring, but people prefer to believe that she could well be an unmarried mother, whose child must be cared for by the parish. Indeed Godfrey does not acknowledge her as his wife, nor does he acknowledge his daughter, then a mere toddler who does not seem to know him as her father.

10Unlike Lucy’s death, Molly’s cannot be interpreted as the sacrifice of an innocent, for we don’t know to what extent Godfrey is really responsible for Molly’s fall and moral degradation. Yet he is not fully exonerated: he behaves like a coward when he fails to acknowledge either wife or daughter. What is more, although he wins Nancy Lammeter, he suffers terrible retribution sixteen years later, when he remains childless and his daughter Eppie refuses to be adopted by him. The only link between Molly’s story and Lucy’s is that George Eliot suggests that women’s fall and men’s responsibility are somehow always correlated.

11This idea is clearly emphasized in Adam Bede, George Eliot’s first full-length novel, in which the theme of a woman’s fall is given special significance. Here we find Hetty Sorrel, a mere country girl, the niece of farmers, who is seduced by the young Squire, Arthur Donnithorne, mainly because she dreams of becoming a lady, instead of working on a farm. This seems to be a traditional pattern which crops up in Victorian fiction, from the story of Little Emily, the heroine of Dickens’s David Copperfield, who dreams of becoming a lady and is seduced by Steerforth, a gentleman, to that of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles in which Tess, the daughter of a poor foolish villager who learns that he is the descendant of the aristocratic family of the D’Urbervilles, is seduced by Alec D’Urberville, a gentleman.

12When Adam Bede, a mere carpenter and the hero of the novel, realizes that his friend the young Squire has played with the feelings of his sweetheart Hetty, to whom he is almost engaged, he is shocked because he understands that Arthur never meant anything serious with her, and certainly never considered making her his wife. Despite his great respect for the gentry, he tells Arthur that he scorns his behaviour:

• 9 George Eliot, Adam Bede, 1859, ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) 27: 345.

‘No, it’ll not be soon forgot, as you’ve come in between her and me, when she might ha’ loved me—it’ll not soon be forgot, as you’ve robbed me o’ my happiness, while I thought you was my best friend, and a noble-minded man, as I was proud to work for. And you’ve been kissing her, and meaning nothing, have you? And I never kissed her i’ my life, but I’d ha’ worked hard for years for the right to kiss her. And you make light of it. You think little o’ doing what may damage other folks, so as you get your bit o’ trifling, as means nothing.’9

13Hetty’s tragic fate has dreadful consequences for many other characters. It seems to affect all those who are close to her—Adam, Arthur and her friends the Poysers. And yet, although she often arouses the narrator’s pity, particularly when she experiences all the hardships of her ‘journey in hope’ and her ‘journey in despair’, when she runs after Arthur with the terrible secret of her pregnancy and fails to find him, she never seems to deserve the narrator’s full sympathy. Indeed, in spite of her suffering, Hetty remains selfish and callous. Ultimately, it seems that the whole rhetoric of the novel is against her, for, once she is delivered of her baby, she is no longer seen as a fallen woman deserving pity, but as a child-murderer. Thus Hetty is closer to a Medea than to a repentant Magdalen and her crime makes her almost inhuman.

17In her next novel, The Mill on the Floss, there is no such restraint, for when she was writing it in 1859, George Eliot had to drop her incognito and her true personality was revealed. After that she was free to give vent to her own feelings and support the cause of the fallen woman more openly. This she did all the more freely as, in spite of appearances which suggest that Maggie has compromised herself and lost her virginity, she is not actually a fallen woman but ‘a pure woman’, more literally so than Hardy’s Tess.

18Admittedly she takes great risks when she accepts to go boating with Stephen Guest, who is almost formally engaged to her cousin Lucy. She is ‘borne along by the tide’, which symbolizes the power of her own desire for Stephen. Yet, although she seems to yield to Stephen’s love and his wish to marry her, although she does elope with him, she pulls up at the last minute and decides to go back home—knowing perfectly well that her behaviour will be branded as sinful by public opinion.

19In the new social and economic context of the Industrial Revolution, we find the same traditional relationship between a gentleman (for Stephen happens to be the only son of a banker-industrialist) and a girl of low degree (for Maggie is the daughter of a bankrupt mill-owner)—the gentleman taking advantage of his higher social position, as usual.

• 14 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860, ed. Gordon S. Haight with an introduction by Dinah Birch (...)

Public opinion, in these cases, is always of the feminine gender—not the world, but the world’s wife . . . and the world’s wife, with that fine instinct which is given her for the preservation of Society, saw at once that Miss Tulliver’s conduct had been of the most aggravated kind. Could anything be more detestable? A girl so much indebted to her friends—whose mother as well as herself had received so much kindness from the Deanes—to lay the design of winning a young man’s affections away from her own cousin, who had behaved like a sister to her! Winning his affections? That was not the phrase for such a girl as Miss Tulliver: it would have been more correct to say that she had been actuated by mere unwomanly boldness and unbridled passion. There was always something questionable about her . . . To the world’s wife there had always been something in Miss Tulliver’s very physique that a refined instinct felt to be prophetic of harm. As for poor Mr Stephen Guest, he was rather pitiable than otherwise: a young man of five-and-twenty is not to be too severely judged in these cases—he is really very much at the mercy of a designing bold girl. And it was clear that he had given way in spite of himself: he had shaken her off as soon as he could; indeed, their having parted so soon looked very black indeed—for her.14

21This remarkable piece of satire is a clear condemnation of public opinion ruled by instinct rather than observation, common sense and rationality. It is also a condemnation of the double standard, which always crushes women and exonerates men.

22Maggie is even rejected by her brother Tom who turns her out of the mill, the traditional home of the Tullivers. Yet, although she is suspected of being a fallen woman, she is not a complete outcast, for her mother takes her side; quite surprisingly her Aunt Glegg is ready to give her shelter; and she eventually finds refuge in the house of her faithful friend Bob Jakin, who treats her with great respect, letting her hold in her arms his new-born baby, a girl named after her.

23And at the end of the novel, George Eliot fully justifies Maggie by making her play the part of the Virgin in the legend of St Ogg, when she tries to help the victims of the flood and to rescue her brother Tom.

24What is implied both in Bob Jakin’s respectful attitude towards her and in Maggie’s ‘epiphany’ during the flood is that she is indeed a virgin, that she has kept her purity, and therefore that her condemnation by public opinion (‘the world’s wife’) is completely groundless. Thus we come to realize that the novel ends with the sacrifice of a truly pure and innocent victim.

25If we compare this new and unexpected treatment of the fallen woman in this last novel with its more conventional treatment in Adam Bede and its two brief occurrences in Scenes of Clerical Life and Silas Marner, we realize the originality of The Mill on the Floss in this respect. Here we find George Eliot’s most committed defence of the condition of the fallen woman.

26It is true that in all cases she consistently insists on men’s rather than women’s responsibility. Yet here she goes even further, not only with a clear condemnation of the double standard but with a strong protest against the unfair treatment of fallen women by public opinion. Her protest sounds all the more convincing as Maggie is not actually a fallen woman, in spite of appearances.

27It might be argued that her defence is less bold than Elizabeth Gaskell’s defence of the heroine of Ruth, a novel which she had published a few years earlier in 1853, for Gaskell’s character is indeed an unmarried mother who has been seduced and forsaken. Maggie’s defence, based on the character’s genuine purity, has its own moral and artistic justification, however. And if we remember that The Mill on the Floss is partly an autobiographical novel, we can also read it as George Eliot’s attempt at self-justification, meant for Victorian public opinion, which was then only too prone to condemn her on account of her own unorthodox relationship with George Henry Lewes.