Note 62 to Chapter 6 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
It is not altogether clear which statue Eliot had in mind when she wrote: "A woman's arm touched the soul of a great sculptor two thousand years ago, so that he wrought an image of it for the Parthenon which moves us still as it clasps lovingly the time-worn marble of a headless trunk. Maggie's was such an arm as that. . ." (VI, 10:274-75). The likeliest candidate among the Elgin Marbles is the left arm of the leftmost figure in the Demeter-and-Persephone group; see The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. 387n. But Eliot may have been thinking instead of another arm which she had seen in the Griechischer Saal of the Neues Museum at Berlin in 1854-55 and described in "Recollections of Berlin" as follows: "The backs of a male and female figure, the latter with her lovely arm round the neck of her companion -- these were our favourites, and made everything else seem mean or lifeless in comparison." Eliot seems wrongly to have thought that this "male and female figure" was one of the Parthenon sculptures, copies of which stood in the same room. I have not been able to identify the statue she was recalling.
Last modified 20 September 2000