DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Review of The Mill on the Floss on The BBC in 1978

Authors

Catherine Brown

Date of this Version

2011

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 42 (2011)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

The 2010 London conference on The Mill on the Floss was designedly conscious of its distance in time from its subject - this distance being measurable by a round number. It was as important to keep in mind, however, the distance between the novel's composition and its setting. As it happens, this was the same as that between the conference and the 1978 BBC TV adaptation of the novel on which this paper reflects. For Eliot, the temporal setting corresponded to her childhood, as it would have done for some of her readers, and as will also be true of 1978 for some readers of this article. For others 1978 corresponds to a period of adulthood, whilst for others it precedes consciousness. This variable inevitably affects viewers' responses to the serial: those in whose adulthood it was made will have a wider and deeper empirical understanding of its context than anyone else - but it will also be wider and deeper than Eliot's own understanding of the period in which her novel is set. Eliot's acute consciousness of this distance may have been inflected by her anxiety about underestimating the otherness of a period which she did not see with mature eyes. By contrast, our own awareness of our distance in time from the serial is likely to be relatively dull, since the program-makers were doing their best to efface their presence and present. They also did their best to efface the distance between 1860 and the 1820s - as a result of which audiences are encouraged to soar over both 1978 and 1860 to land in the 1820s, where they are invited to relax in their modern sofas and feel at home. Although 1978 was on the threshold of the take-off decade for English costume dramas, British audiences had already begun to be accustomed to the preceding century, in the eighteen teens of War and Peace (BBC, dir. David Conroy, 1972), the eighteen-forties of Vanity Fair (BBC, dir. David Giles, 1967), and the eighteen-seventies of Anna Karenina (British Lion Films, dir. Julien Duvivier, 1948).

This o’erleaping of the time in which artistic creation actually occurred is only made possible - insofar as it is - by the excision of Eliot's narrator. This narrator keeps the readers of 1860 constantly aware of their distance from the events narrated, partly in order to invite and indulge, and rather more in order to satirize, a self-satisfied amusement at the 1820s equivalent of flares and large sideburns in male fashion. In The Mill it is female fashions which are the targets: Mrs. Glegg's use of fuzzy curled fronts on weekdays in order to save her glossy curled front for Sundays is merely ridiculed, whereas when Maggie submits 'to have the abundant black locks plaited into a coronet on the summit of her head, after the pitiable fashion of those antiquated times', a similar kind of ridicule is parodied (p. 294). Either way, Eliot's younger readers, and such readers as Eliot imagined she might have in the future, are educated in what the fashions of those times actually were, and reminded of the past's nature as a place in which things are differently done.