Between Deafness and Sound: Aurality and the Limits of Sympathy in The Mill on the Floss

In his review of The Mill on the Floss on 19 May 1860 for The Times, E. S. Dallas began by arguing that Eliot\u27s first novel Adam Bede was successful because \u27the temporary delight of listening to a pleasant tale\u27 it gave its readers helped to achieve \u27the permanent good of an increased sympathy with our kind\u27.1 Although the publication of The Mill on the Floss proved, according to Dallas, that \u27George Eliot\u27 was \u27as great as ever\u27, it could not match the triumph of Adam Bede because she was determined not to repeat the idealism of a world that promoted human fellowship by being \u27too good and sugary\u27 (p. 130). Dallas\u27s review is of particular relevance to my essay because of the telling connection it makes between aurality, psychology and sympathy in The Mill on the Floss. The musical tropes that Eliot uses in the novel to advocate social solidarity have, of course, been discussed at length,\u27 as has the breaking down of her ethics of sympathy,3 and her engagement with Victorian debates about the mind: However, less work has been done on the way in which her experimentation with the sensations of tone in her second novel is keyed into her growing disbelief in the social applicability of sympathetic feeling. Reading The Mill on the Floss in the light of its reviews, and Dallas\u27s in particular, this essay will explore the role that aurality plays in its attempt to understand the vicissitudes of modem life through an encounter with the feelings of others. While Adam Bede tries to give the promise of a better future by asking its readers to witness, as if in an Egyptian sorcerer\u27s mirror, \u27far-reaching visions of the past\u27 that they should strive to hold onto, The Mill on the Floss considers what their thoughts and emotion may be capable of, by tempting them to overhear \u27what Mr. and Mrs. Tulliver were talking about, as they sat by the bright fire in the left-hand parlour, on that very afternoon I have been dreaming of\u27.\u27 In a letter of 30 November 1874 to Alexander Main, George Henry Lewes argued that, in contrast to the reader, who \u27brings his views, theories, superstitions to disturb the effect of a proposition\u27 , the listener\u27 seldom brings any prepossession which will disturb the effect of the jest\u27 .6 Casting her readers in the role of listening confidants who need to struggle with their own temptations, Eliot built a different kind of readerly activity into the form of her second novel, which was informed by her concern with sympathetic resonance and the non-conscious mind