DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Enter the Aunts....

Authors

Kathryn Hughes

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

My title is taken from Chapter 7 of 'Book First' of The Mill on the Floss which describes the moment we first meet Aunts Glegg, Pullet and Deane in all their bustling, sharp-tongued, comic glory. The full title of the chapter is 'Enter the Aunts and Uncles' and the three redoubtable Dodson sisters are indeed accompanied by their husbands, the Uncles, as they descend upon Dorlcote Mill for a family summit about their nephew Tom Tulliver's education. Yet while Messrs Glegg, Pullet and Deane subsequently play their individual parts in the unfolding of the novel's plot, it is the Aunts who at this point elbow their menfolk out of the way and bustle to the front of the stage. With their brisk opinions on everything from the inadvisability of going to law to the design of teapot spouts, the three redoubtable women form a choric commentary on the unfolding action. (Tom's 'eddication', of course, provides a starting point for one of the novel's main plot strands as well as one of its key themes - the varying capacities and social roles of men and women in the early nineteenth century.)

If proof were needed of the lasting impact of the Dodson Aunts on the reader, you have only to look at the way in which they have dominated subsequent film and television adaptations of the novel throughout the twentieth century. Typically played by leading character actresses of the day, including Athene Seyler and Martita Hunt (1937), and Barbara Hicks (1978) and Joanna David and Jessica Turner (1997) the Aunts continue to occupy an imaginative space in the British cultural imagination that is out of all proportion to the actual volume they occupy in either Eliot's original text or in subsequent scripted versions.

Given the Aunts' impact both at the time (contemporary critics often picked out the Dodsons for special mention) and since, you might assume that literary sleuths had long since tracked down documentary details about the historical women on whom they were modelled. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. For while the publication of Eliot's first two books, Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, provoked a posse of biographical detectives into matching up characters to their real life counterparts, no such frenzy greeted The Mill on the Floss.3 By early 1860 the revelation that 'George Eliot' was actually Marian Evans, the common law wife of G. H. Lewes, was circulating widely in the novelist's native Midlands, as well as in London where she now made her home. With this central mystery solved, it no longer seemed rewarding or even relevant to comb through her latest novel looking for real world correspondences. (Such reticence was, of course, not to last: once Eliot was dead her biographers, from Mathilde Blind onwards, insisted on conflating details of Maggie Tulliver's childhood with that of Mary Ann Evans.4 We are still dealing with the damaging consequences of that elision today.)