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The Mill on the Floss tells the story of Maggie Tulliver, the daughter of a miller in Victorian England, and reflects the values of society. This was a male-dominated society (though ruled by a woman, Queen Victoria) where women were treated as second-class citizens, expected to marry and remain at home unless they chose a respectable profession such as teaching. Sexual relations before or outside marriage were taboo, and women would more than likely be forced to leave their family home if such relations were discovered rather than bring shame on the family.
As Mr. Stelling, the schoolteacher, proclaims, “Girls can be quite clever, but their cleverness is shallow. They will never understand anything that needs really careful thought” (David, 2000).
Maggie’s first attempt at heroism is an attempt to secure the heroic independence and leadership possessed by her brother Tom. She does so through a rejection of femininity, which is also a failed attempt to own the status granted to masculine Tom. Eliot sets up Maggie’s early childhood as the juxtaposition of the experience of Maggie with that of her brother. Maggie looks up to Tom; this is evident in her frequent expressions of love for her older sibling. Tom’s responses to her unconstrained protestations of love are often cold and standoffish. Therefore, Maggie yearns for Tom’s respect. That she gives this respect such great importance betrays her desire to become Tom’s equal.
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Maggie wants to be an economic contender like Tom but is disallowed this form of achievement because of prejudice against women and the economic structure of society, which influence her father’s actions in regards to her education.
Mr. Tulliver’s dual support of Maggie’s symbolic masculinity and of her cleverness, however, is incomplete. He doesn’t believe that she should be educated. He recognizes her potential but ultimately rejects it as inappropriate because she is a girl. He reasons that an educated woman is an economic liability and therefore does not allow her to cultivate her heroic potential as an intellectual. Mr. Tulliver’s opinion on the matter is partly justified by economic considerations. He feels that educating Tom will make his son more successful, while an over-cute woman’s no better nor a long-tailed sheep –she’ll fetch none the higher price for that.
Eliot subtly reveals the fact that women are evidently absent from history. It also implies the struggles and difficulties that a woman has to go through in her progressive life. As teenagers, we both feel unsure about our future, and the pressure around us seems to become heavier each day, especially when we are facing our parents’ censures. With their judgments of our behaviors and thoughts repeating around us day by day, our own opinions seem to be washed away. This shows the teens’ need for emotional and spiritual support, which many parents neglected to give their children. When we were young, we were living in a world that has not been polluted. As we grow older, more and more of the adults’ world’s phoniness, superficiality, and animosity reveal to us. However, we have two choices either get used to it or spend the rest of our lives denying the truth.
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“The other main themes of the novel are pride and loyalty. Mr. Tulliver’s pride eventually leads to his death. Maggie’s loyalty to Lucy forces her to leave her house and tell Stephen that she will never marry him (though eventually her love for him proves too ng), and her loyalty to Tom makes her rebuff Philip’s advances. Tom forces Lucy to her loyalty to her family above the love he thinks she feels for Philip (David, 2000)”.
Maggie develops a new vision of heroism, discovering new kinds of power that she might have. Phillip becomes her ideal of heroic accomplishment. In learning with and from Phillip, who is willing to take her seriously, Maggie will become different from Tom. She has discovered an arena in which she can shine. Through difference from Tom, Maggie hopes to become someone extraordinary. Maggie is bright and yearns to be scholarly, but her family won’t pay for her education or encourage her to learn independently. Phillip alone takes an interest in her learning and forms an intimate if the pedagogical relationship with her. Phillip finds learning vital because he has gained a status as a scholar in his family, as in life.
Pride, arrogance, moral blindness, and narcissism are endemic among humans, especially humans who occupy positions of power, either in society or in the family. But when we entered systematically into a sensibility that is alien to us, and when we become interested in another person because he is interesting, not because he is privileged or great, there is a possibility that in the end, we will be a degree less self-centered than we were at the beginning, that we would be a degree more able to see the world as another sees it. And there is the possibility that we will be able to reason about our own emotions. When we learned to see others, we will be trained in thinking about the world in many, sometimes conflicting ways. Perched on the cusp between the particular and the general, between expertise and common sense (Smiley, 2007), our relationship with others impacted our lives that will create the kind of life we dealt with.
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The Mill on the Floss is concerned with the lives of ordinary people. It’s descriptions of childhood, rural life, and the complexities of relationships (David, 2000). The Claim of the Past upon Present Identity.
In the novel, the past holds a cumulative presence and has a determining effect upon characters who are open to its influence. Maggie holds the memory of her childhood sacred, and her connection to that time comes to affects her future behavior. Here, the past is not something to be escaped, nor is it something that will rise again to threaten, but it is instead an inherent part of Maggie’s (and her father’s) character, making fidelity to it a necessity. The depths of Maggie’s childhood emotions are nearly unbearable to her because she has no past of conquered troubles to look back upon with which to put her present situation in perspective. At present, everything seems to tend toward the relaxation of ties—toward the substitution of wayward choice for the adherence to the obligation which has its roots in the past.” Thus, without recognition of the past with which to form one’s character, one is left only to the whims of the moment and subject to emotional extremes and eventual loneliness.
Maggie attempts to achieve sexual grandeur (rather than masculine or intellectual grandeur, as in the previous examples) in her relationship with Stephen, vying for a position as the female romantic lead. Yet, she is uncomfortable with this role. If Maggie is to become an epic lead, she feels that she must become a moral and noble epic lead. Morality is an essential component of the definition of an epic lead; that Maggie will settle for no less is unsurprising. Therefore, rather than slipping into the role of a deliciously naughty anti-hero, she rejects Stephen. In so doing, Maggie salvages her nobility and morality and becomes a sort of epic lead. Yet her heroism is imperfect because it is self-sacrificing.
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Maggie becomes special because she has become ostracized, she has become the talk of the town, and she is the pariah. Through rejecting the elopement with Stephen and in returning home, Maggie envisions herself as a figure of the unjustly accused, the noble victim. She causes a major change in the life of her town. Her importance as the focal point of the novel is bolstered where her decisions cause a paradigm shift. Yet this newfound power takes the form of predominantly negative attention. Maggie has become special in a negative way, as an exile. Maggie’s self-denial becomes morally injurious to her because she denies herself the very intellectual and artistic experiences that would help her understand her own plight and have pity for the plight of others. The women of St. Ogg’s and, indeed, any community are responsible for the hypocritical judgments of morality.
The novel, then, deals with the themes of gender and the struggles women had to contend with if they were unwilling to follow the path expected of them, namely to be a devoted wife and mother. It addresses the cruelty of social and religious mores that, if not adhered to, had uncompromising results for those who chose or simply found themselves outside of their boundaries.
“I have had feelings to struggle with, but I conquered them. I have had a harder life tha you have had: but I have found my comfort in doing my duty. But I will sanction no such character as yours: the world shall know that I feel the difference between right and wrong.”
Tom’s strict adherence to justice and fairness is revealed in the end to include an underlying vein of self-righteousness. Even Mrs. Tulliver, who always has privileged Tom over Maggie, now feels his lack of compassion and makes up for it herself. Maggie has been experiencing this diminution of freedom, and it affects her desire to learn. As
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fulfilling as books, knowledge, and study with Phillip have been for clever Maggie, they have not changed her status in the family, so she is ready to abandon them. The manner in which Tom asserts his power over Maggie makes it appallingly clear that her attempts to gain status as an intellectual were in vain. Maggie loses faith in this path to heroism. The rivalries between Tom and Phillip for influence over Maggie and as contending peers create tension in Maggie’s stormy psyche, which renders her ready to try something new. Her attempts to become someone special and different through study have failed.
The Mill on the Floss, especially in the first half of the novel, is quite concerned about education and types of knowledge. Tom’s knowledge is practical: “He knew all about worms, and fish, and those things; and what birds were mischievous, and how padlocks opened, and which way the handles of the gates were to be lifted.” This knowledge is tangible and natural—it brings Tom closer association to the world around him. Meanwhile, Maggie’s knowledge is slightly more complicated. Other characters refer to it as “uncanny,” and her imagination and love of books are often depicted as a way for her to escape the world around her or to rise above it.
Part of the tragedy of Maggie and Tom Tulliver is that Tom received the educa-
on that Maggie should have had. Instead of Maggie blossoming, Tom is trapped. When Tom must make a living in the world, he discovers that his bookish education will win him nothing. Tom’s practical knowledge is always depicted as a source of superior
rity for Tom. From his childhood on, Tom has no patience for Maggie’s intellectual curiosity. Eliot remains clear that Maggie’s intellectualism makes her Tom’s superior in this case—”the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.”
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The Mill on the Floss is not a religious novel, but it is highly concerned with a morality that should function among all people and should aspire to a compassionate connection with others through sympathy. Maggie, in her final recreation of the St. Ogg scene during the flood, is vindicated on the grounds of her deep sympathy with others. The opposite of this sympathy within the novel finds the form of variations of egoism. Tom has not the capability of sympathizing with Maggie. He is aligned with the narrow, self-serving ethic of the rising entrepreneur. Maggie’s self-denial becomes morally injurious to her because she denies herself the very intellectual and artistic experiences that would help her understand her own plight and have pity for the plight of others.
The Mill on the Floss, Tom, and especially Maggie are associated with animal imagery. The imagery is usually of farm-type animals—ponies, dogs, ducks—and usually points to the character’s capacity for affection or non-adherence to social convention. Eliot uses this imagery also to gesture toward the wider relationship between humans and animals that can be especially seen in young children. Thus, when Maggie and Tom reconcile in Chapter IV of Book First, they no longer approximate their behavior to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct themselves in every respect like members of a highly civilized society.
Symbols. The Floss is related most often to Maggie, and the river, with its depth and potential to flood, symbolizes Maggie’s deeply running and unpredictable emotions. The river’s path, nonexistent on maps, is also used to symbolize the unforeseeable path of Maggie’s destiny.
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St. Ogg, the legendary patron saint of the town, was a Floss ferryman. The parable of Ogg rewards the human feeling of pity or sympathy. Maggie has a dream during her night on the boat with Stephen, wherein Tom and Lucy row past them, and Tom is St. Ogg, while Lucy is the Virgin. The dream makes explicit Maggie’s fear of having neglected to sympathize with those whom she hurts during her night with Stephen (and also, perhaps, her fear that they will not sympathize with her in the future). But it is Maggie, finally, who stands for St. Ogg, as she rows down river thinking only of Tom’s safety during the flood in a feat of “almost miraculous, divinely-protected effort.”
The flood also provides the heightened atmosphere of danger and a sense of the power of Nature that is needed to properly put Maggie and Tom’s differences into perspective. Maggie’s heroic feat of strength and selflessness in her rescue of Tom reveals her true character to the stubborn, narrow-minded Tom. Tom has been insisting through the novel that Maggie recognize his right to care for her and dictate her actions, but in the end, it is Maggie who cares for both of them and shows herself capable. The depiction of Maggie’s rescue of Tom recalls the story of St. Ogg’s and evokes the trait of sympathy that lies at the heart of the St. Ogg parable. Maggie’s extreme capacity of feeling for the plight of others is what overcomes Tom’s bitter sense of justice and reunites them.
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Eliot depicts Maggie’s eyes as her most striking feature. Maggie’s eyes are a symbol of the power of emotion she contains—the depth of feeling and hunger for love that make her a tragic character. This unique force of character seems to give her power over others, for better or for worse. Thus, Philip, who will become Maggie’s teacher, in a sense, and first love, notices that her eyes “were full of unsatisfied intelligence, and unsatisfied, beseeching affection.” Bob Jakin, who views Maggie as superior to him and a figure of whom to be in awe, reports that Maggie has “such uncommon eyes, they looked somehow as they made him feel no how.” Finally, Stephen, who will exploit the inner struggle that Maggie has felt for the entire novel, notices that Maggie’s eyes are “full of delicious opposites.”
Maggie, on the whole, in spite of all her scrapes, has a good many happy hours, and is child enough to accept the unintentional stupidities of her family circle as part of the inevitable. She is not conscious of being a misunderstood genius; she only suffers because she has vague aspirations and longings, but does not feel herself to be enslaved or bound to overt revolt. The circle, forming the prose element against which her poetic impulses are to struggle, is drawn with a force and humor which, but for the author’s distinct disavowal, would convince us that it was a study from the life
Its religion was simply blind acceptance of tradition, and its morality adherence to established customs. The religion meant going to church on proper occasions.
It is by her nature, complex, passionate, sensuous, by her sex, intellectualized and spiritualized, that Maggie Tulliver is most important to the reader. That is reached, as it seems, not when she and Tom are drowned together in the flood of the Floss, but when her reason and her conscience are provisionally overborne by her love for Stephen Guest, and she floats with him down a tide and out upon a sea more perilous than any inundation, and saves herself only by a powerful impulse of her will, which is almost a convulsion.
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The fruition of her love would have been a double treason, treason to her cousin Lucy, who was Guest’s betrothed, and treason to Philip Wakem, to whom she was herself pledged; and the sense of this blackened it with guilt, and turned it to despair, even while she yielded and yielded to the love of being loved. Never has an unhappy passion been more faithfully studied in a character with strength enough finally to forbid it; or more subtly felt from that first moment when Maggie begins to rejoice in her beauty because of her love for the man who loves it, till that last moment when she refuses to marry him, and goes back to suffer shame rather than to merit shame. Every step of the way is accurately and firmly traced up to that passage where Stephen Guest comes to ask her to row with him on the river, and from which there seems no retreat.
It is a forced touch where the husband and wife stand together beside the grave of the brother and sister. It is only life that can deal masterfully with problems, and life does not solve them by referring them to another life or by stifling them with happiness. All the more I must own that the heroine’s character, from the sort of undisciplined, imaginative, fascinating little girl we see her at first, into the impassioned, bewildered, self-disciplined woman we see her at last, is masterly. Having given my opinion that her
supreme expression is in her relation to her lover, I have my doubts, or at least my compunctions in behalf of her relation to her brother. Unquestionably the greatest misery of the story appeals to us from her relation to her brother. The adoring dependence, the grieving indignation, the devotion, the revolt, the submission, and the reunion which make up her love for him is such a study of sisterly affection as I should not know where to match.
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The very conditions of her intellectual and emotional superiority involve a moral inferiority to the brute simplicity, the narrow integrity, the heroic truth of the more singly natured man. Maggie saw life more whole than Tom, but that part of it which he saw he discerned with a clearness denied to her large but cloudy vision. It is a great and beautiful story, which one reads with a helpless wonder that such a book should ever be in any wise superseded, or should not constantly keep the attention at least of those fitted to feel its deep and lasting significance.
This “solution,” with which Eliot wraps up Maggie’s problems with her brother, her family, and society, is false, because it depends on Maggie’s death. If Maggie and Tom had lived through the flood, he might have retained his new respect for her, but it’s likely that he would not have. By nature, Maggie simply could never get along with Tom, no matter how self-sacrificing she tried to be; Eliot makes this very clear throughout the novel. Suppose Maggie had lived: what then? Would she have become Tom’s housekeeper, as he had planned when they were children? If so, she would never marry, never have children, and would remain a servant to him for the rest of her life. This was Tom’s dream, but was never hers. She could not marry Philip, or Stephen, and society’s gossip and slander about her character would still remain, even though Stephen has written a letter explaining that she was not guilty of any misde-
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meanor. Victorian society was strict and unforgiving of girls and women who became involved in any scandal; as Eliot notes, even when she became a governess to Dr. Kenn’s children, everyone in town slanders her, despite the knowledge of Stephen’s exonerating letter. As Dr. Kenn tells her, “There is hardly any evidence which will save you from the painful effect of false imputations.” He also advises her that human nature being what it is; people will never believe she is innocent.
Maggie’s story is destined to be tragic: because of her perhaps mistaken love for her brother and her deep regard for her family, she stunts herself. When Maggie dies in the flood, she and her brother are united in a way they haven’t been since childhood. However, it is not an adult connection of equals but a return and regression to a time when they were so young and their experiences so limited that they had no reason to quarrel. What Eliot does not do, and perhaps cannot do, given the society she lived in and her own struggles against slander and gossip, is provide an ending to the story in which Maggie lives through the flood and has a happy and productive life. Throughout the book, Maggie struggles with balancing self-realization and acceptance, but the ending of her story, instead of leading her to a solution of that problem, is a simple regression to a time when these problems did not exist.
The Mill on the Floss is a tragedy of repression and regression (Hagan, 1972); Maggie is responsible for her downfall because she is flawed by her acceptance of the philosophy of renunciation and by a fixation upon her father and brother, both of which fatally pull against her legitimate desire for wider fulfillment. This desire is itself Maggie’s flaw, whereas her acceptance of renunciation and her family devotion are good; thus,
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the main subject of the novel is not her downfall, but her spiritual development, which is climaxed by her two rejections of Stephen and her attempt to rescue Tom from the flood. Maggie’s frustrations and her ultimate defeat sprung from both the fact that she has intense and legitimate desires for a full and rich life which Tom and Tulliver cannot comprehend, and the fact that she is, at the same time, bound to them by an equally legitimate, indeed noble, love which makes her renunciation of those desires morally necessary.
As Maggie approaches adulthood, her spirited temperament brings her into conflict with her family, her community, and her much-loved brother Tom. Still more painfully, she finds her own nature divided between the claims of moral responsibility and her passionate hunger for self-fulfillment (Elliot, 1994-2008)
The greatest contention between impulse and duty which leads the novel into it moral climax made Maggie honors of the obligations of the past she has shared with her brother and renounces the temptation of a different future with Stephen affirms the distinction between animal inclination and human responsibility (Elliot, 2008) Maggie was able to fight back her instinct and remain still in his adherence to the moral values she nurtured.
Works Cited
David, Francis. “The Mill on the Floss”. Penguin Readers Factsheets. Pearson Education Factsheet. 2000. Web.
Elliot, George. “The Mill on the Floss: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, and Contemporary Reactions Criticism (Norton Critical Edition)”. Powell’s Books. 1994-2008. Web.
Hagan, John. “A Reinterpretation of the Mill on the Floss”. PMLA, Vol. 87, No.1, pp. 53-63 1972.
Maitzen, Rohan. “Jane Smiley: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel”. Novel Readings. 2007. Web.
“The Torn Nest is pierced by the Thorns”. The Free Library. Chap. 2. Farlex, Inc. 2008. Web.