GEORGE ELIOT

The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss

Introduction

The most tragic novel by George Eliot, this story is also her most autobiographical. Published after her highly successful first novel, Adam Bede (1859), Mill on the Floss proved to be another great success, helping to establish Eliot's reputation as an important novelist.

Discussion

The Mill on the Floss is certainly, the poignant novel of the two. Although both fictions have as their setting the Warwickshire background that Eliot remembered from her childhood, The Mill on the Floss is less genially picturesque and more concerned with psychological truth. Adam Bede concludes with a happy marriage for Adam and Dinah, probably contrary to the author's best artistic judgment. Tom and Maggie Tulliver, however, die in the flood, their fate unmitigated by sentimentality (Hardy, 2006). Indeed, much of the novel's power derives from the consistent play of tragic forces that appear early, and unify the whole work.

As a boy, Tom entrusts his pet rabbits to his sister Maggie's care. She is preoccupied and allows the creatures to die. Despite her tearful protestations, Tom upbraids her bitterly but finally forgives her. This childhood pattern of close sibling affection, deep hurt and estrangement, and reconciliation determine the structural pattern of the novel. Although Henry James admired the design of The Mill on the Floss, he criticized the conclusion for its melodrama. As a matter of fact, the conclusion is implicit in the story from the beginning. The flood that carries the brother and sister to their doom is not an accidental catastrophe. Rather, it is symbolic of the tide that sweeps two passionate souls away divided in conflict yet united by the closest bonds of affection.

Tom Tulliver, like his father, has a tenacious will that is not always under control of his reason. Even as a child, fierce although honorably competitive. He is slow to forgive injury. Robust and vigorous, he despises weakness in others. As a youth, he insults Philip Wakem by drawing attention to the boy's physical disability. When Maggie demeans, as Tom mistakenly believes, the good name of the Tulliver family through her foreshortened “elopement” with Stephen Guest, he scorns her as a pariah (Draper, 1977). Nevertheless, his tempestuous nature is also capable of generosity. To redeem his father's good name and restore Dorlcote Mill to the family, he disciplines himself to work purposefully. To this end, he sacrifices his high spirits and love of strenuous excitement, indeed any opportunities for courtship and marriage. He dies as he had lived and labored the provider of the Tulliver family.

Maggie, many of whose sprightly qualities are drawn from Eliot's memories of her own childhood, is psychologically the complex character. Whereas Tom is sturdily masculine, Maggie is sensitive, introspective, and tenderly feminine. Quick to tears, to the modern reader perhaps too effusive in her emotions, she cannot control her sensibilities, just as her brother cannot keep his temper. As a youngster, she has the qualities of a tomboy. She is energetic and, unlike the typical Victorian girl, ...