Maggie’s death and Dorothea’s growth — the sublimation of passion in George Eliot’s novels

Passion has been regarded as one of the shared characteristics of George Eliot’s heroines, but even though it has been heatedly discussed, the implications of passion have not been clearly defined. For instance, John Ruskin once criticizes Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss for her “ungoverned excess of any appetite or passion” (467), and passion here can be understood as powerful feelings. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, comments that these heroines “each has the deep feminine passion for goodness”, but they could not “find what they seek” no matter how hard they tried (482). Passion here surely indicates more than feelings. Gillian Beer argues that passions in George Eliot’s novels cannot be regarded as solely heterosexual affairs, but “vehement human need sustained past the accomplishment of the moment of desire” (86). In fact, I think it is exactly this vehement human need that vitalizes George Eliot’s heroines, and powerful feelings are its most obvious representation. Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch are both equipped with a passionate impulse, but their fates are totally different. George Eliot never gives Maggie the chance to mature. Instead, she only lets her die to evade the struggle between passion and duty, the inherent problem among all of George Eliot’s heroines. Dorothea, however, gains her intellectual and moral growth and sublimates her passion into sympathy. I believe Spinoza’s teaching on passion can shed new light on this issue, but even though Spinoza’s influence on George Eliot has been widely recognized, his particular idea of passion has not been closely examined within George Eliot’s writings. This essay tries to make a little contribution to fill this gap by excavating how George Eliot sublimates passion in the narrative of her heroines’ growths, and how their growths correspond to Spinoza’s idea of passion. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1960471