The Mill on the Floss

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**The Mill on the Floss**
Author	George Eliot
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. - New York
Released	1860
Media Type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	NA

The Mill on the Floss is a novel by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), first published in three volumes in 1860.

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The novel retails the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, a brother and sister growing up on the fictional river Floss near the fictional village of St. Oggs, evidently in the 1820’s, after the Napoleonic Wars but prior to the first Reform Bill (1832). The novel spans a period of 10-15 years, from Tom and Maggie’s childhood up until their deaths in a flood on the Floss. The book is loosely autobiographical, reflecting the disgrace that George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) herself had while in a relationship with a married man.

Maggie Tulliver holds the central role in the book, as both her relationship with her older brother Tom, and her romantic relationships with Philip Wakem, a hunchbacked, but sensitive and intellectual, friend, and with Stephen Guest, a vivacious young socialite in St. Oggs and fiance of Maggie’s cousin Lucy Deane, constitute the most significant narrative threads.

Tom and Maggie have an uneven bond in childhood, which continues throughout the novel; Maggie, with her sensitive nature, reveres her older brother Tom, while his treatment of her varies from tolerance to indifference to contempt. His pragmatic and narrow nature clashes with Maggie’s idealism and fervor for experience. Various family crises, such as bankruptcy, the premature death of Mr. Tulliver, and Mr. Tulliver’s rancorous relationship with Philip Wakem’s father, a lawyer to whom he loses the mill, intensify Tom and Maggie’s differences. Tom takes up his duty to help his father repay his debts, and leaves his desultory schooling to enter on a life of business with zeal and, eventually, some success. Meanwhile Maggie languishes in the impoverished Tulliver home, her intellectual aptitude wasted in her socially isolated state. She passes through a period of intense spirituality during which she renounces the world, spurred by Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ.

This renunciation is tested by a renewed friendship with Philip Wakem, with whom she had developed an affinity while he was a fellow pupil with Tom. Against the wishes of Tom and her father, who despise the Wakems, Maggie meets Philip over a course of months for long walks through the woods. The romantic basis of their relationship is ambiguous; Philip is so crippled as to elicit Maggie’s pity as much as her affection, yet Maggie’s isolation inclines her towards Philip, even as a lover, because intercourse with his cultured mind relieves that isolation and appears to answer something in Maggie that Tom, for instance, may never perceive, much less appreciate. Philip and Maggie’s attraction is in any case moot because of the family antipathy, although Philip coaxes a pledge of love, of sorts, from Maggie. But when Tom discovers her walks, she must renounce Philip, and with him her hopes of experiencing the broader, more cultured world he represents.

Several more years pass, during which Mr. Tulliver dies. Lucy Deane invites Maggie to come and stay with her, and experience the life of cultured leisure that Lucy enjoys. This includes long hours conversing and playing music with her fiance, Stephen Guest, a prominent St. Oggs resident. Stephen and Maggie, against their rational judgments, become attracted to each other. The complication is further compounded by Philip Wakem’s friendship with Lucy and Stephen; he and Maggie are reintroduced, and Philip’s love for her is rekindled, while Maggie, no longer isolated, enjoys the clandestine attentions of Stephen Guest, putting her past professions for Philip in question. In the event, Stephen and Maggie, though they try to forswear each other, allow themselves to elope, almost by accident – Lucy conspires to throw Philip and Maggie together on a short rowing trip down the Floss, but when Stephen unwittingly takes a sick Philip’s place, and Maggie and Stephen find themselves floating down the river, negligent of the distance they’ve covered, he proposes they board a passing steamer to the next substantial city, Mudport, and be married. Maggie struggles between her love for Stephen and her duties to Philip and Lucy, contracted as it were in her past, when she was poor and isolated, and dependent on either of them for what good her life contained. Upon arrival in Mudport she rejects Stephen, and makes her way back to St. Oggs, where she lives for a brief period as an outcast, Stephen having fled to Europe. Both Lucy and Philip forgive her, she in a moving reunion, he in an eloquent letter.

Maggie’s brief exile ends when the river floods, in what may be considered a deus ex machina ending. Having struggled through the waters in a boat to find Tom at the old mill, she sets out with him to rescue Lucy Deane and her family. In a brief, tender moment, the brother and sister appear to be reconciled from all past differences. When their boat capsizes, the two drown in an apparent embrace, thus giving the book its epigraph, “In death they were not divided.”

Like other of George Eliot’s novels, The Mill on the Floss articulates the tension between circumstances and the spiritual energies of individuals struggling against those circumstances. A certain determinism is at play throughout the novel, from Mr. Tulliver’s grossly imprudent inability to keep himself from “going to law,” and thereby losing his patrimony and bankrupting his family, to the series of events which sets Maggie and Stephen on their way to eloping. Individuals, such as Mr. Tulliver, are presented as unable to determine their own course rationally, or forces, be it the drift of the river or the force of a flood, are presented as determining the courses of individuals for them. On the other hand, Maggie’s ultimate choice not to marry Stephen, and to suffer both the privation of his love and the ignominy of their botched elopement is a triumph of free will.