Christmas Day with George Eliot

Postage stamp. Great Britain. Queen Elizabeth II. 1980. Famous Authoresses. George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss.

Christmas Day can be a celebration constructed year by year according to inner desire and individual memory. Like a nativity set where the main cast, Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus are carefully stage managed into central positions in the crib, so too planned festivities may be set according to our wishful self. And if last year’s Christmas Day was not quite perfection, a king may accidentally have suffered back breakage so now in place of his red robe is a large hole (as happened with one of my childhood pieces) then he is newly situated so his back merges into an appropriately sized stone. Defects of any sort can be disguised, overlooked, ignored. The endeavour to create a Christmas Day luncheon that is flawless may involve all sorts of conscious or unconscious subterfuge. This year there will surely be more care so that the tinsel, the crackers, the best tablecloth speak of not just perfection but human happiness to the full.

In her novel The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot depicts and then subverts such a view born from a Victorian idealisation of Christmas.  After his first term at school, feeling discouraged and diminished, Tom Tulliver returns home for Christmas. George Eliot details a scene which is picture perfect to the very best old-fashioned English Christmas Card: ‘Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and colour with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.’

But look closer at the scene and there is a hint of melancholy: ‘there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.’ Such ‘sorrow’ born by the cold is excused as ‘old Christmas’ devising a way to bring families together around the warm hearth, ‘to prepare a sweet imprisonment that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred.’ Yet, the narrator goes on, poverty also exists, and some people have no warm hearth, cannot afford a hearty meal. However, the reason for this is known only to Christmas’ own father, whose name is Time. And Time, she tells us, ‘still hides that secret in his own mighty, slow-beating heart.’ Nothing more is said, but the acknowledgement is significant. The picture-perfect Christmas exists only in the mind.

Everything this Christmas for young Tom is in place as in the past, ‘the red berries were just as abundant on the holly’ and the ‘singing under the windows just after midnight’, and the ‘plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as ever’. Tom’s own efforts to be realistic in all things remains, and he reminds his sister Maggie who hears the midnight chant as ‘supernatural singing’, that they were simply ‘old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the church choir.’

But something new begins to oppress Tom Tulliver. His enjoyment of nuts and wine is distracted by his father’s irritation. As the Christmas meal and its leisure progresses so does his father’s anger and defiance increase.  Recently a neighbour living further up the river has begun to limit the irrigation of water to his father’s Mill.  This exploitation becomes the pivot for the main events in the subsequent action of the novel, but here Tom’s consciousness is newly awakened to the fact that ‘that there were rascally enemies in the world, and that the business of grown-up life could hardly be conducted without a good deal of quarrelling.’

The Mill on the Floss was one of George Eliot’s early novels, published in 1860 when she was 41.  Her perceptions of our human foibles are, even at this stage, astute and often entertaining. Her prose can be sharp and witty, assessing human character with outrageous fun. But she is equally compassionate. All her characters, even Mr Wakem the solicitor who represents the lawsuit against Mr Tulliver’s fight to restore his due water supply, is rescued from being the devil that Tulliver accuses him to be by his sensitivity to his own son, Philip’s physical deformity and love for Maggie. No character is written off or found irredeemable. Even when tragedy descends.

Christmas is not a fixed ideal, but as George Eliot knows, it is like life itself always in process and change. Its festivities invite us to be open to hear the many discordant tones of life, as well as harmonious. The birth of Christ in a manger in a simple barn, is not a comfortable or ideal birth setting for any child, much as we may try to decorate it with golden tinsel and sparkly angels. It is a setting which ought to disturb and unsettle. Just as quarrels with our neighbour or family member unsettle us, so too the knowledge that there are many who cannot afford the luxury of a Christmas meal or be with family and friends, who are lonely, broken, or terrorised in war zones ought to be discomforting. This awareness and acknowledgement are part of the meaning of Christmas. And, like Tom Tulliver over his Christmas meal, we may not be able to do anything more than keep this awareness at the edge of our own perception.

Every Christmas, Christ is born into a new setting.  A barn, a family living room, on the streets or in a squat, this setting is birth of the grace and compassion of God’s love for all creation, all humanity.  The essence of the nativity is in the heat and longing of God’s love which flows into time and abides in a world that is not perfect. I am glad that a broken King in my childhood nativity set taught me this, and authors like George Eliot illustrate it too. In places of pain and suffering, there is also glory and surprise.