The Portrait Of A Whole Personality

George Eliot, a Victorian woman under the pseudonym of a man, has been universally acknowledged as one of the best English women novelists, regarded as two criteria for the measurement of later-coming women novelists together with Charlotte Bronte. Yet The Mill on the Floss, Eliot's masterpiece, never received as much attention as Jane Eyre did, while this autobiographical novel of George Eliot's deserves, indeed, more scholarly focus.The Mill on the Floss, under the microscope of psychoanalysis, affords a whole picture of the interplay of the id, the ego and the superego, the three regions, or forces, defined by Sigmund Freud as the composition of a whole personality: during their childhood, Maggie's overflow of passions and anger, amply evidenced in the pages, denotes the characteristics of the id; while Tom's unbending principle is more like the"morality principle"of the superego, functioning to punish the"guilty"and correct the"wrong."Then Maggie's meeting Philip is a union of two creatures of similar nature, a great reinforcement of the id, which coincides, or brings about, so to speak, the wound, the only one throughout the story, of Tom, the incarnation of the superego. The union is broken soon, and Maggie grows into her adolescence, making the miraculous duckling transformation which indicates also the transition from the id to the ego. Maggie seems to reach the balance between the id and the superego after long strivings, and at this point even her mother used to be querulous about her grows satisfied. Yet the imminent collapse of the family business shall soon crush the momentary balance. Mr. Tulliver, Tom's father, the patriarch of the family fails, and Philip Wakem, Maggie's comrade, comes back to awaken the repressed forces in the heroine. Tom is forced to grow fast to confront the tough situation caused by, on the surface, the fall of his father, and, virtually, the reinforcement of the counter force, the id. Philip is a weak reinforcement, nevertheless. So Maggie is separated from him by Tom. Then comes"the great temptation:"Stephen Guest, the incarnation or externalization of the sexual desires or the like in the id. This way, the superego and the id, both too powerful to be defeated, or repressed, by the other, have to reconcile in the flood, finding a way out in mutual destruction.While the novel affords in itself a vivid portrait of a whole personality, the question"whose personality this might be"arises naturally. In this connection, biographers of George Eliot have elicited innumerable facts about Eliot's life to match the scenes and occurrences in The Mill on the Floss. Then could the whole personality portrayed in the novel match the novelist's personality? That's the ultimate question for this thesis.