The Mill on the Floss
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This novel offers a profound exploration of the tension between individual passion and societal duty, with richly drawn characters and a deeply moving conclusion.
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Book Summary
The Mill on the Floss follows siblings Tom and Maggie Tulliver as they navigate family duty, social expectations, and personal desires in 19th-century England. Their bond is tested by Maggie's passionate nature and Tom's rigid morality, culminating in a tragic flood that forces a final, devastating reconciliation.
The novel begins with Mr. Tulliver deciding to send his son Tom to school, hoping to elevate the family's status. Maggie, intelligent and impulsive, chafes against the gender restrictions of her time. Tom, practical and dutiful, becomes the family's moral anchor after Mr. Tulliver's pride leads to financial ruin and his death. Maggie forms a forbidden friendship with Philip Wakem, son of the lawyer who ruined her father, and later becomes entangled with Stephen Guest, her cousin Lucy's fiancé. In a moment of weakness, Maggie elopes with Stephen but returns, choosing duty over passion. The community shuns her, and Tom rejects her. After a devastating flood, Maggie rows to the mill to save Tom, and they drown in a final embrace, reconciled. The novel ends with their shared tomb, a testament to their enduring bond.
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Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
Maggie Tulliver
Maggie Tulliver grows up clever, impulsive, and starved for approval in a family that prizes her brother's plodding respectability over her restless mind. At the charity bazaar she knits and sells with downcast grace while Stephen Guest circles her and old Wakem buys politely, every small courtesy charged with old quarrels and new attractions. Her need to be loved and her inability to be ordinary drive the book's central ache.
Tom Tulliver
Sent to King's Lorton to be made a gentleman, Tom finds Latin, elocution, and bashfulness a misery after the easy triumphs of Mr. Jacobs's academy. He clings to a boy's dream of becoming a substantial man like his father, riding, hunting, and commanding respect. His rigid sense of fairness and family name will make him both Maggie's protector and her harshest judge.
Mr. Tulliver
Mr. Tulliver is a man of active Hotspur temper, sober but quick to boil, who farms by instinct and litigates by stubbornness. His long lawsuit against Wakem drains the mill and darkens his household, yet he dreams of Tom's education as the family's redemption. His pride, his flashes of triumphant rage, and his tenderness toward Maggie shape the catastrophe that falls on Dorlcote.
Philip Wakem
Philip Wakem is the lawyer's son, physically deformed and inwardly refined, drawn to Maggie's mind and warmth from childhood. He moves quietly through St. Ogg's, avoiding crowds, buying up what others reject, and nursing a love that the Tulliver name makes dangerous. His friendship with Maggie becomes the novel's tenderest and most forbidden bond.
Stephen Guest
Stephen Guest is a privileged young man in St. Ogg's, admired for his looks, his fortune, and his easy way with everyone. At the bazaar he flirts with Lucy, buys nothing from Maggie, and wears a scarlet fez with the confidence of a man who carries all before him. His charm and his weakness for the woman he cannot rightly have set the novel's most painful temptation in motion.
Mrs. Tulliver
Mrs. Tulliver is a soft, fussing woman who measures love in household order and dreads the disgrace of debt almost as much as the loss of her possessions. As the mill's fortunes sink, she is scolded by her own servant and reduced to fetching in the drying clothes herself. Her helpless tenderness and her small vanities make the family's decline feel intimate and domestic.
Social Class and Respectability
The novel explores the rigid social hierarchy of 19th-century provincial England, where family reputation, financial standing, and adherence to conventional morality determine one's place in society, as seen in the Dodsons' pride in their respectability and the Tullivers' downfall.
Family Obligation and Conflict
Family ties are central to the narrative, with characters torn between duty to kin and personal desires, exemplified by Tom's harsh judgment of Maggie, the aunts' interference, and the burden of the Tulliver family debt.
Gender Roles and Limitations
Maggie's struggles highlight the restrictive expectations placed on women, who are judged for their intellect, passion, and independence, while men like Tom are expected to be practical and self-reliant, leading to double standards in morality and opportunity.
Passion vs. Duty
The conflict between intense personal feelings and moral or social obligations drives the plot, particularly in Maggie's relationship with Stephen Guest, where she grapples with her love and the duty to Lucy and her family.
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