An Analysis Of George Eliot's The Mill On The Floss

George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss is a semi-autobiographical novel that traces the development of Maggie Tulliver, a character who finds herself caught in a web of conflict with her family and community as a result of both circumstance and her unique and spirited disposition. The narrative casts Maggie as a tragic heroin as she struggles between impulse and duty to define herself as an individual as “at one time [she] takes pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another [she] have not solution to resist a thing that [she] knows to be wrong” (393). Maggie finds herself a member of a society in which reputation, respectability, and tradition are paramount; values which shape many of the

For example, Mrs. Tulliver “could not help thinking that her case was a hard one, since it appeared that other people thought it hard” (96). This same concept partly influences Mr. Wakem to purchase Dorlcote Mill and hire Mr. Tulliver as his servant, actions that would not have been carried out had Wakem not been confident in his position in society. The narrator explains that if Mr. Tulliver had “seriously injured or thwarted the attorney” he would become “a special object of [Wakem’s] vindictiveness” (251). It is the public’s opinion of Wakem as “a man who had made a large fortune, had a handsome house among the trees at Tofton, and decidedly the finest stock of port-wine in the neighborhood of St. Oggs,” (251) that makes Tulliver incapable of posing such a threat to Wakem; Tulliver’s opinion is of little consequence to him as he is aware of his good standing in the community. Wakem’s knowledge of the public’s opinion of himself dictates the fact that “Tulliver…could be no obstruction to him; on the contrary, he was a poor devil whom the lawyer had defeated several times” (253). Therefore, Wakem seeks to “humiliate [Tulliver] by [his] own benevolent action” (252): the putting up of Tulliver as a servant at Dorlcote Mill. It can therefore be inferred that if Wakem had not known of his respectability in the eyes of the public and the world’s

In fact, the narrator comments directly on this difference by stating that the world’s wife “judges others according to results; how else? – not knowing the process by which results are arrived at” (490). The novelist, on the other hand, is concerned with both the process and the end result throughout the book, a fact which enables her to fully develop the characters and craft the plot. Because of this discrepancy between the views of the world’s wife and her own, the novelist adopts a critical opinion of the world’s wife, mockingly portraying her as a fickle and judgmental creature who uses the pretense of preserving the traditional mores of society “to make [her] conscience perfectly easy in doing what satisfied [her] own egoism – thinking and speaking the worst of Maggie Tulliver, and turning [her] back on her”