• Haseeb Sharif• Uzma Bashir

Maggie Tulliver

•Maggie is the very intelligent, very conflicted protagonist of The Mill on the Floss.• When the novel begins, she is young, clever, imaginative, adoring of her brother, and always getting into trouble.• As she grows up, she regularly feels conflicted between acting how her extended family and community would want her to, and following her own desires.• The strong pull of both means she is often indecisive, and though she tries to find peace in renouncing all desire - for education, music, love, literature - in the end this only makes her feelings stronger.• Even when she chooses based on her desire, though, as when she starts to elope with Stephen, she ultimately feels the pull of her family and community too strongly, and can’t bear to follow through on gaining happiness at their expense.

• Tom is Maggie’s older brother by four years. • He is athletic, prideful, obsessed with justice, and

usually rather unforgiving.• He has very little book-smarts but he is practical,

determined, and willing to sacrifice everything to regain his family’s honor.

• His success comes at the expense of real human companionship and his insistence on justice and distrust of Maggie drives a wedge between them until just moments before they both die.

• Mr. Tulliver is Maggie and Tom’s father.• At the beginning of the novel he is the proprietor of

Dorlcote Mill, which has been in his family for generations.

• He is hot-tempered, stubborn, and litigious, although also intelligent, though uneducated, and very generous and loving towards Maggie and his sister, Mrs. Moss.

• He is proud of Maggie’s intelligence, although he isn’t sure what use it will be to a girl.

• He believes that all of his troubles are caused by lawyers, particularly Mr. Wakem, and paying back all of his debts and punishing Mr. Wakem become his two obsessions after he loses everything until the moment he dies.

• Mrs. Tulliver is Maggie and Tom’s mother.• She is a blond, comely woman, who is very simple,

and though she loves her children, she greatly favors Tom and wishes Maggie were blonder and simpler herself.

• She is very proud to be a Dodson and is particularly devastated by the loss of her household goods and furniture when Mr. Tulliver goes bankrupt.

• She shows herself to have more depth than originally expected towards the end of the novel, when she leaves Tom and the mill to live with Maggie in her shame.

• Philip is the son of Mr. Wakem.• Due to an accident in infancy, he is crippled and

though he is very intelligent and talented, he feels bitterness over physical inferiority.

• He is a student with Tom at Mr. Stelling’s, and though he never comes to be good friends with Tom, he is immediately drawn to Maggie and ends up loving her for his whole life.

• Though he is clever, very well educated, and a talented artist, he believes that his breadth of interests and talents mean that he is not particularly talented at any one thing.

• Stephen Gusest: Stephen is handsome and self-assured. Though he cares for Lucy, and for the life they would have together, he falls unexpectedly in love with Maggie, drawn to her strikingly different qualities.

• Mrs. Jane Glegg: Mrs. Tulliver’s oldest sister, Mrs. Glegg is Tom and Maggie’s least favorite relative when they are children.

• Mrs. Gritty Moss: Mrs. Moss is Mr. Tulliver’s sister.

• Dr. Kenn: Kenn is the clergyman of St. Ogg’s.

• Bob Jakin• Bob is a childhood friend of Tom Tulliver’s from a

poorer family, until Tom thinks Bob tried to cheat him and can’t forgive him for it.

• Mr. GleggMr. Glegg is Mrs. Glegg’s husband. He is a retired wool

dealer, and doesn’t take anything very seriously• Mrs. Sophy PulletMrs. Pullet is Mrs. Tulliver’s favorite sister.• Mrs. Susan Deane• Mrs. Deane is Mrs. Tulliver’s sister and Lucy’s

mother.

• Mr. Wakem: Philip’s father, a lawyer enemy of Mr. Tulliver • Aunts and uncles of Maggie and Tom (Mrs. Tulliver’s sisters

and their husbands : Mrs. and Mr. Glegg, Pullet, Deane and Mr. Tulliver’s sister and husband : Mrs. and Mr. Moss)

• -Lucy Dean : Mrs. Dean’s daughter • -Luke : the head miller • -Yap : the Tulliver’s dog• Mr. Pullet:Mr. Pullet is Mrs. Pullet’s husband, a gentleman

farmer

• The novel is set in the English country, in the first nineteenth century.

• The characters move from Dorlcote Mill to the small town of St.Ogg, in the wide plain where the river Floss hurries on.

• Mary Ann Evans wrote “The Mill on the Floss” during the Victorianism, a period characterized by an economic prosperity and a colonial and commercial expansion.

• On the contrary the society showed deep social lacerations. Indeed, after the Industrial Revolution, the difference between rich and poor social classes had increased: to somebody’s accumulation of wealth stood opposite child and female mistreatment, poverty and prostitution.

• Mary Ann Evans hid her name under the alias George Eliot to avoid the diffidence and the prejudices of the hypocrite bourgeoisie of the Victorian age.

• Chapter I - Outside Dorlcote Mill• Chapter II - Mr. Tullier, of Dorlcote Mill, Declares

His Resolution about Tom• Chapter III - Mr. Riley Gives His Advice Concerning

a School for Tom• Chapter IV - Tom is expected• Chapter V - Tom Comes Home• Chapter VI - The Aunts and Uncles Are Coming

• Chapter VII - Enter the Aunts and Uncles• Chapter VIII - Mr. Tulliver Shows His Weaker Side• Chapter IX - To Garum Firs• Chapter X - Maggie Behaves Worse Than She

Expected• Chapter XI - Maggie Tries to Run away from Her

Shadow• Chapter XII - Mr. and Mrs. Glegg at Home• Chapter XIII - Mr. Tulliver Further Entangles the

Skein of Life

• Chapter I - Tom's "First Half"• Chapter II - The Christmas Holidays• Chapter III - The New Schoolfellow• Chapter IV - "The Young Idea"• Chapter V - Maggie's Second Visit• Chapter VI - A Love-Scene• Chapter VII - The Golden Gates Are Passed

• Chapter I - What Had Happened at Home• Chapter II - Mrs. Tulliver's Teraphim, or Household

Gods• Chapter III - The Family Council• Chapter IV - A Vanishing Gleam• Chapter V - Tom Applies His Knife to the Oyster

• Chapter VI -Tending to Refute the Popular Prejudice against the Present of a Pocket-Knife

• Chapter VII - How a Hen Takes to Stratagem• Chapter VIII - Daylight on the Wreck• Chapter IX - An Item Added to the Family Register

• Chapter I - A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet

• Chapter II - The Torn Nest Is Pierced by the Thorns• Chapter III - A Voice from the Past

• Chapter I - In the Red Deeps• Chapter II - Aunt Glegg Learns the Breadth of

Bob's Thumb• Chapter III - The Wavering Balance• Chapter IV - Another Love-Scene• Chapter V - The Cloven Tree• Chapter VI - The Hard-Won Triumph• Chapter VII - A Day of Reckoning

• Chapter I - A Duet in Paradise• Chapter II - First Impressions• Chapter III - Confidential Moments• Chapter IV - Brother and Sister• Chapter V - Showing that Tom Had Opened the

Oyster• Chapter VI - Illustrating the Laws of Attraction• Chapter VII - Philip Re-enters

• Chapter VIII - Wakem in a New Light• Chapter IX - Charity in Full-Dress• Chapter X - The Spell Seems Broken• Chapter XI - In the Lane• Chapter XII - A Family Party• Chapter XIII - Borne Along by the Tide• Chapter XIV - Waking

• Chapter I - The Return to the Mill• Chapter II - St. Ogg's Passes Judgment• Chapter III - Showing That Old Acquaintances Are

Capable of Surprising Us• Chapter IV - Maggie and Lucy• Chapter V - The Final Conflict

• Five years later, St. Ogg’s looks much like it did before the flood, although there are some scars that remain. Besides Maggie and Tom, everyone survived the flood. Both Stephen and Philip still visit Maggie’s tomb; Stephen eventually marries but Philip remains solitary.

• The mill was rebuilt.• Tom and Maggie were buried together and the

narrator tells us that two men often visited their tomb.

• One man had a female companion, years later.• The other man always came by himself.• We can assume this is Stephen with Lucy, and

Philip.• On the tomb, the names of Tom and Maggie were

written along with a line: "In their death they were not divided."

•  Incurious Tom is sent to school, while Maggie is held "uncanny" for her intelligence.

• Mr. Tulliver's pride and inability to adapt to the changing economic world causes him to lose his property in a lawsuit against Lawyer Wakem and eventually die as the result of his fury toward Wakem.

• To Tom's dismay, Maggie becomes secretly close to Wakem's sensitive crippled son, Philip.

•  At the age of nineteen, Maggie visits her cousin Lucy and becomes hopelessly attracted to Lucy's wealthy and polished suitor, Stephen Guest, and he to her.

• Stephen and Maggie are inadvertently left to themselves for a boat ride.

• Stephen rows them further down river than planned and tries to convince Maggie to elope with him.

•  Maggie parts with Stephen, arguing that they each cannot ignore the claims that Lucy and Philip have on them.

• Maggie returns to St. Ogg's several days later and is met with repudiation from the entire town and from Tom.

• Philip and Lucy contact Maggie and forgive her. The Floss floods, and Maggie seizes a boat and rows to the Mill to save Tom.

• Their boat is capsized by floating machinery, Tom and Maggie drown in each other's arms.

The Floss•The Floss is a somewhat difficult symbol to track, as it also exists for realistic effect in the workings of the novel.• On the symbolic level, 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 unforseeable path of Maggie's destiny.

• St. Ogg, the legendary patron saint of the town, was a Floss ferryman.• One night a woman with a child asked to be taken across the river,

but the winds were high and no other boaters would take her. • Only Ogg felt pity for her in her need and took her. When they reached

the other side, her rags turned into robes, and she revealed herself to be the Blessed Virgin.

• The Virgin pronounced Ogg's boat safe to all who rode in it, and she sat always in the prow. 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."

• Eliot depicts Maggie's eyes as her most striking feature.

• All men (including Philip, Bob Jakin, and Stephen) notice her eyes first and become entranced.

• 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.

Characters From “Humble and Rustic Life”•George Eliot, like a lot of other women writers, depended largely upon her own experience. •She kept close to that which she knew intimately—namely the experiences of her girlhood. •It is to this experience and to her life in the English Midlands that she returns again and again for her material. •Although in her later novels, George Eliot does draw characters belonging to the upper class, she derives her strength and recognition from the portrayal of, what Wordsworth calls, characters from “humble and rustic life.”• Wordsworth influenced her profoundly.• She echoes Wordsworth’s interest in rustic life and uses the dialect spoken by the humble rustics to make her portrayal of character more realistic.

• George Eliot looks into the minds of these common people and reveals their thinking, feeling, sufferings and frustrations.

•  Their concern with “the sublime prompting to do the painful right” is illustrated by the story of Maggie Tulliver and is echoed in Romola, Dorothea, Felix Holt and in all her major characters.

• “The writer who could visualise for us the hedonistic Tito; the fine old puritan, Dr. Lyons; the erratic Gwendolen, the steadfast Mary Garth; the commonplace Fred Vincy and the brilliant Lydgate; the rough uncultured Bob Jakin and the polished scholar Casaubon dealing justice to each, fairly appraising their merits and no less keenly exposing their weaknesses, was a writer with no ordinary power of psychological portrayal.

• Nor is she a whit inferior in the subtlety of her method, as is evidenced by the delicate nuances in the characterization of Mary Garth and Rosamund Vincy, and Romola.” 

• Such is her realism in the presentation of character, that after the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life in 1857, her readers of Warwickshire were astonished to find that the characters of the novel were people they had known and who were their neighbours.

• In the Sad Fortunes of Rev. Amos Barton, George Eliot reveals her sympathy for common people by making her hero, a man whose only noticeable quality is that he is superlatively middling. She has sketched the unheroic hero from her memory of the Rev. John Gwyther, Curate of CheverelsColon between the years 1838-41.

• A host of minor characters have been portrayed masterly. • George Eliot has characterized them realistically and “they are seen clearly,

objectively, humorously and inspite of their moral and intellectual deficiencies, with respect and sympathy.”

• George Eliot reveals the individual traits of these spokesmen of the small community of Shepperton.

• Mrs. Hackit, whose character is based on fond recollections of her mother, is a shrewd and good hearted woman. She is a good farmer’s wife and manages the dairy, like Mrs. Evans, successfully. Mr. Hackit is a pleasant gentleman.

• He, like the author’s father, Robert Evans, is “A shrewd, substantial man, whose advice about crops is always worth listening to and who is too well off to want to borrow money.”

• She had been greatly influenced and dominated by her father, and Adam Bede and Caleb Garth are strongly reminiscent of Robert Evans, the upright workman. He, like Adam Bede, was well-known for his trustworthiness, high character and extraordinary strength.

• He had an immense knowledge of plantations, timber and mines. Robert Evans’ excellencies had brought him to the notice of Sir Francis Newdigate and the relationship between her father and his employer is the source of the account of friendship between Adam Bede and Arthur Donnithorne. Regarding the character of Dinah Morris in Adam Bede George Eliot said: “The character of Dinah grew out of my recollections of my aunt who is a very small, black eyed woman, and (as I was told, for I never heard her preach) very vehement in her style of preaching.” This aunt, Mrs.

• Elizabeth Evans, was a Methodist preacher of great saintliness. Like Dinah Morris, she was known for her charity in Derbyshire.

• According to Gey Roslyn, “In the novel the descriptions of Dinah are descriptive also of Elizabeth, the heroine of fact, and the heroine of fiction are alike in walking, talking, dress, occupation and the fortunes of life.”

Loss of Innocence

Loss of innocence is a major theme in The Mill on the Floss. From the beginning of the novel, the narrator makes it clear that there is a strong separation between living in childhood, as Maggie and Tom are doing, and looking back on it, as she is doing.When Mr. Tulliver loses all his assets and his senses, it becomes clear that the divide between child and adult is not necessarily slowly created over time, but that, for Maggie and Tom at least, it is created in a single episode of rending - a loss of innocence. With powerful imagery, Eliot shows Maggie and Tom going “forth together into their new life of sorrow,” “the thorny wilderness,” as “the golden gates of their childhood had forever closed behind them” and they will “never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares” (159). The knowledge of their family’s great hardships to come is “a violent shock” that separates them permanently from their endemic - in comparison, at least - childhood.

• The theme of communal versus individual interests, which could also be called duty versus desire, is of central importance to The Mill on the Floss, and is essentially what drives the plot. Maggie, with her unusual looks, her intellectual prowess, her driving curiosity, and her passionate desires, does not naturally fit into the community of St. Ogg’s at all.

• Her family continually fears what will become of her, she is often misunderstood and almost never taken seriously, and she is certainly never given the praise for her cleverness that she so desires. To fulfill her individual desires, then, is to break out of any role the community is willing to offer her, and so to go against it.

• Renunciation and sacrifice are at the heart of the major actions of Maggie and Tom’s lives.

• After his father’s losses, Tom dedicates his life to repaying his father’s debts, and then to getting the mill back from Mr. Wakem.

• To this end he gives up all socializing so that he won’t be tempted to spend any of the money he makes, and he works so hard that when he gets home every night, he is too tired to even converse with his family.

• He thus essentially sacrifices human interaction to regain his family’s honor.

• Tom and Maggie are cut off from their childhood by their loss of innocence caused by their father’s troubles, but that does not mean the ties created in their childhood are severed.

• The narrator repeatedly makes it clear that “old inferior things” always have a special meaning when you grow up with them, and almost all of her passages describing the mill and the surrounding area are riddled with nostalgic musings.

• The nostalgic frame for the past makes the loss of innocence all the more emotional, for the present can never be as good as the nostalgic past, since even the reality of the past was not as good as one remembers.

• The Mill on the Floss, especially in the first half of the novel, is quite concerned about education and types of knowledge. Much of the early chapters are devoted to laying out the differences between Tom's and Maggie's modes 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 in 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—"The world outside the books was not a happy one, Maggie felt."

• Part of the tragedy of Maggie and Tom Tulliver is that Tom received the education 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: Mr. Deane tells Tom, "The world isn't made of pen, ink, and paper, and if you're to get on in the world, young man, you must know what the world's made of." Tom soon returns and takes advantage of his skills for practical knowledge, making good in the newly entrepreneurial world.

• Tom's practical knowledge is always depicted as a source of superiority for Tom.

• From his childhood on, Tom has no patience for Maggie's intellectual curiosity. The narrowness of Tom's miseducation under Mr. Stelling seems somewhat related to the narrowness of Tom's tolerance for others' modes of knowledge.

• Yet 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."